I’m pushing thirty. I don’t know where my sister is. My brother has abandoned me. Every large city in America has burned. The house is now some horror of a suburban Jersey tract home that none of us ever lived in. Da’s in his study, hunched over still more drawings. He works away furiously on the one problem I need him to solve. But as always, he can’t solve the ones he cares about. He’s telling me, “There is no such thing as race. Race is only real if you freeze time, if you invent a zero point for your tribe. If you make the past an origin, then you fix the future. Race is a dependent variable. A path, a moving process. We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all.”
He and I can’t possibly be related. No one who knows me or my family could possibly say this. But everyone else who might tell him as much has gone. Mama is dead, Jonah has emigrated, and Ruth is in hiding. It falls to me, my solo job, to remind my father of everything he has forgotten since he was my age, everything bright and obvious he’s broken away from, in the run of mathematical time. His ruined family. What ruined them. The woman he married. Why he married her. The experiment they ran. The odds against him surviving his own experiment.
But I can’t wrap my head around what he is trying to tell me. I bend down and drop my head on his shoulder. My hand goes up to his chest, to hold him back from this irreversible place he already half-inhabits.
He’s on his last bed, before the long one. In a hospital, back in Manhattan, ten minutes by cab from the study that he will never work in anymore. He’s talking to me about multiple worlds. “The universe is an orchestra that, at every interval, splits into two full ensembles, each one continuing on a different piece. As many whole universes as there are notes in this one!”
I need some proof that he’s still in control, there inside the smiling, wasted shell. Some proof that he did not put our entire future on the line—worse, our pasts—on something so tenuous as arithmetic.
“Ha!” Da barks, knocking my head up off his shoulder, startling my hand back into my lap. He’s found something, some disparity overlooked, some hidden term that smoothes all asymmetries. Or just some unbearable abdominal pain.
I wait for a day when there isn’t much suffering, and ask, “Did you ever decide who wins?”
He knows what I mean: mechanics or thermodynamics. Relativity or the quantum. The too big or the too small. The river or the ocean. Flow or standstill. The only problem he’s ever worked on. The one that occupies him, even in these last hours. He tries to grin at me, has to save up his strength for the monosyllable: “When?”
“At the end.”
“Ach! My Yoseph.” His wasted yellow arm tries to cuff my neck, reassuring. “If there is no beginning, how can there be an end?” I will go mad. The planes of his shoulder muscle slide over one another in a concerted churn beyond the reaches of the subtlest equation.
I’ll never get closer to him than now. He looks straight at my need but refuses to comfort or deny. He’s prepared for any outcome. Pleased, even, at the confusion he has created. The bets are all in. The results are unrolled. Somewhere, our future is already real, although we can’t yet know just how real, stuck as we are in the specious present. He shrugs again, his hand in the air, conducting. His eyes laugh at the world’s reel. His look wants to say, How do you want things to come out? What will you do if they don’t?
“A dead finish,” he says. “A photo finish. Down to the wire.”
We live through a chunk of moments as frozen as that photo. He gets no better. Doctors mill about us in a data-seeking daze, clinicians exercising every charm they know, trying to influence the outcome, already run. Da will leave, and I’ll be forever in the dark. This is my one certain prediction. The world will lead me through every available ignorance.
“Do you know what time is?” His voice is so soft, I think I’m making it up. “Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once.”
I reply as he taught me, long ago, the year my voice broke. “You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another.”
AUGUST 1955
Now is a full summer’s end. The boy is fourteen, a shining child with a full, round face. No one in creation exudes more confidence. He walks down the aisle of a long southbound train, a spring in his step that he thinks is everyone’s God-given right. He glances out the slicing window, seeing the whole world strut along in the other direction, peeling away. He has grown up breathing the air of a large northern city. He imagines he’s free.
In the pocket of his natty trousers, he carries a photo from last Christmas: a newly minted teen posing with his radiant mother. In the picture, his hair is cropped, like all boys his age. His snazzy white Christmas shirt, crisp and concert-ready, still bears the traces of its department-store folds. Under the arrow points of crimped collar, a bright new tie pokes out, a golden stripe running down its middle. His face glows, a three-quarter moon with the earth’s shadow just slipping off its right side. His eyes light with confidence, as if he is the ring bearer at a large, loving wedding. All life lies in front of him. His boyish beauty makes him happy, or perhaps his joy makes him beautiful.
His mother, in the black-and-white photo, is in blue. Her dress is rimmed with a white lace collar and ruffled sleeves. A holiday necklace sparkles at her throat. Her hair spills in a hive of curls. Her right hand drapes across her son’s neck, resting on his shoulder. The boy looks deadon into the camera, but the woman smiles off past the photo’s edge, beyond her boy, her soft, reddened lips a little lifted, her eyes sparkling, recalling the holiday surprise she has planned, later that afternoon.
This is the photo that flies along in the wallet in the trousers on the boy as he rushes down the aisle of the passenger train hurtling south. Another print sits in a silver frame on his mother’s dresser back home in the city, her keepsake from that magical Christmas eight months earlier. She has sent the boy off to visit his relatives in Mississippi, a last country vacation before he heads back to school.
By the time the train reaches his destination, the child owns it. Charmed strangers wish him well when he gets off at a tiny Delta town called Money. He steps off the platform into a crowd of boys, his instant friends. He appears to them as another species, a creature from another planet. His clothes, gait, accent: He walks among them full of jokes and boasts, floating on confidence, sharing nothing in the world with his blood relations. Except blood.
His mother has told him to mind his manners, so far from home. But so far from home, he no longer knows what minding manners means. This backwater town is slow and overgrown and easy to astonish. Everywhere he walks along these melting tar roads, he’s the center of a circle of boys, hungry for a performance they didn’t even know existed until his arrival. They call him “Bobo.” They demand a show. Bobo must sing for them, big-time songs, distant, urban kin of their own music they only barely recognize.
They want city tales, the stranger the better. Where I live, Bobo says, everything’s different. We can do anything we want. In my school? Blacks and whites have class together in the same room. Talk to each other, friends. No shitting.
His southern cousins laugh at this crazy-ass foolishness.
Here. Look! Bobo shows them a picture of his school friends, from his wallet, next to the Christmas photo. The Delta laughter crumples in confusion. The picture turns them stony. They can’t know that just this spring, the Supreme Court has declared that such craziness—with all deliberate speed—must become everywhere a fact. They haven’t heard the men who run the state capital in Jackson declare themselves, just this summer, to be proud criminals. For the boys on the dusty, weed-shot street in Money, this news is farther than the moon.
Look here, the boy Bobo says. He points out a girl with the nail of his thumb. Frail, blond, anemic—in a sickly way, almost beautiful. To the boys crowding around the photo, the face is animal, foreign. You could no more speak to such a thing than you could walk through fire. This girl here? Bobo tells his country disciples. This one�
��s my sweetheart.
The nigger’s gone mad. For all that he’s already overhauled their world, his audience can’t believe him. Bobo and this girl of straw: It sasses God. It breaks the damn law of gravity. What kind of city—even up north—is going to let this black boy near enough such a girl long enough to more than mumble an apology?
You a soul-damned liar. You joining on us. You think we all don’t know nothing.
Bobo just laughs. I tell you, this here’s my sweetheart. Who’s going to lie about a thing that nice?
His listeners can’t even sneer. No point even letting this mojo into your ears. The picture, the girl, the word sweetheart taunt like some hopping round of the dirty dozens. Not even the north could truck with such lawlessness. The boy’s got a match in one hand and a fat stick of gunpowder in his mouth. He wants to loose some real evil on them. The others step away from the picture, like it’s dope, pornography, or contraband. Then, like it’s all of those, they circle back for another, longer look.
They stand in the street in front of the tired brick box of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, twenty of them, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. It’s a stale late August Sunday, hotter than human thought and drier than a dust-coated dead mule. The boy and his first cousin have come into town for a snack, taking a break from the long day of church where the boy’s great-uncle preaches. The crowd he draws wants another look. The picture of the white girl passes from hand to hand. Whatever small part of them fears it might be true, they know it’s just another cityboy performance.
You a jiving fool.
Uh-uh. The boy laughs. Nothing like a fool. She look good in this picture? Looks even nicer in life.
Get on gone with you. Truth, now. What’s you doing with a picture of a white girl in your wallet?
And that round, cherubic confidence—all of life in front of him—just grins.
It drives the others wild. You think you something, talking to white women? Let’s see you go inside this store, talk up that Bryant woman who runs it. Ask that white woman what she doing tonight.
The northern boy just smiles his world-beating smile. That’s exactly where he was heading anyway. He nods at these rurals, pushes open the grocery’s screen door, and disappears underneath the DRINK COCA-COLA signs on the white-pine overhang.
The boy is fourteen. The year is 1955. The store’s screen door slaps closed behind him, pure child on a dare. He buys two cents of bubblegum from the white woman. On his way out, he says something to her, two words—“Bye, baby.” Or maybe he whistles: a quick, stolen trophy to bring back to his friends outside, to answer their challenge, prove he’s his own owner. He bolts out the door, but the hilarity he thinks is waiting for him outside skids off into horror. The others just stare at him, begging him to undo what he just did. The crowd disperses, wordless, in all directions.
They come for the boy four days later, after midnight, when time turns inside out and all-powerful force goes dreamlike. They come to the home of Mose Wright, this Emmett’s great-uncle preacher. Two of them, potent, blunt. One is bald and smokes a cigarette. The other has a pressed, thin face that knows only rage and feeding. They wake the old preacher and his wife. They want the boy, the nigger boy from Chicago who did all that talking. The men have guns. The boy is theirs. Nothing in the world will stop them from taking him. They move with clipped authority, beyond the authority of states. The steady work, the cold, damp method of after midnight.
The boy’s great-aunt steps up to plead. He just a child. He ain’t from around here. That boy, he didn’t know nothing. He don’t mean nobody no harm.
The balding one smashes her across the temple with his gun butt. The two whites overpower the old man. They take the boy. This is how things operate. The boy belongs to them.
Bobo—Emmett—is the only one who’s calm. He’s from Chicago, the big city, up north. He did nothing wrong. He isn’t falling for this backwoods intimidation game, these couple of crazy crackers in their summer-stock play, banging around by the only light in which they can pull the performance off. They can’t hurt him. He’s fourteen; he’ll live forever.
The whites march Emmett across the night grass, twisting the child’s arm up behind his back. He tries to straighten, to walk normally. The snub-faced one knees him in the groin and the boy doubles over. He cries out, and the snub-faced one slams his gun down on the boy’s face. The skin above Emmett’s eye opens and rolls back. He puts his hand to the lake of his blood welling there. They tie him like a calf and throw him into the back of their pickup. The snub-faced one drives and the bald one rides in back, his boot pressing on the boy’s skull.
They ride him for hours on the potholed roads, his head banging against the metal truck bed. The boy can’t be properly corrected until he knows how serious a thing he did. They stop to pistol-whip him, beating him from his legs to his shoulders, setting wrongs to right.
Who did you think you were talking to? The question fills with fascination. The questioners have gained confidence all night, as the boy dissolves into a ball of blood and moaning. You blind? You think that woman was some black bitch? The snub-faced one’s eyes come alive under their flaps of turtle skin. That’s my wife, nigger boy. My wife. Not some little trash-black whore.
He savors the words—bitch, trash, whore, nigger, white, wife—punctuating each repeat of the lesson with a blow from his rod. He works meticulously, some stubborn stain of infidelity here he cannot beat out. He strips the boy, smashes him across his bare chest, shoulders, feet, thighs, cock, and balls. Every piece of this rule-breaking flesh must be made to respect his power.
We never had a problem with our niggers till you Chicago vermin come down to rile them up. Don’t you know nothing? Nobody never taught you can from can’t?
The boy has stopped answering. But even his silence defies them. The two men—the husband of the soiled woman and his half brother—work away on the naked body: in the truck, out of the truck, questioning, beating, questioning, patient teachers who’ve started their lecture too late.
You sorry about what you did, boy? Nothing. You ever going to do something so stupid again, the whole of what’s left of your life? More nothing. They look for compliance in his face. But by now, the impish bright oval from the Christmas photo has little face left. The boy’s silence drives the whites into whatever calm technique lies past madness. They poke their barrels into his ears, his mouth, his eyes.
They will tell it all later, to Look magazine, selling their confession for petty cash. They meant only to scare. But the boy’s refusal to feel wrong about anything drives them to their obligation. They throw him back into the flatbed and drive him out to Milam’s farm. They root around in the shed and turn up a heavy cotton-gin fan. Bryant, the snub-faced husband, begins to lift the fan into the truck. His half brother, Milam, stops him.
Roy, what the hell kind of work are you doing there?
Roy Bryant looks down and laughs. You’re right, J. W. I’m going crazy. It’s from not getting a good night’s sleep.
They make the boy pick it up. Bobo, who weighs little more than the fan. Emmett, whom the whites have beaten almost senseless. He staggers from the steel’s dead weight but manages to lift it, unaided, into the truck.
You know what this is for, don’t you, boy?
Still the boy refuses to believe. The drama is too broad, the cotton-gin fan too theatrical. They mean only to torture his imagination, to break him with terror. Yet lifting the heavy machinery is worse than everything he’s suffered until now.
Bryant and Milam make him lie down in the truck, naked, alongside the scrap metal. They drive him back into the woods, down by the Tallahatchie. In those last two miles, the boy lives through all creation. His thoughts collapse; no message can escape him to forgive the living. All law has aligned against him. Fourteen, and condemned to nothing. Even God gives him up.
The night is pitch-dark and filled with stars. They pull the truck far off the road, into a thicket by the river. Even no
w—the whites will tell the magazine that buys their confession—even now, they mean only to administer his due. They threaten to tie the fan around the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire. Bryant talks to him, slowly. You understand now, boy? You see how you’re making us do this?
Till says nothing. He has gone where no human need can reach.
Milam waves over the black water. We’re taking you out there, boy. Unless you tell us you’ve learned how to treat a white woman.
The boy didn’t show the proper remorse, they’ll tell the magazine. He refused to admit he’d done anything wrong.
Milam plays with the bloodied clothes while his half brother delivers the sermon. He wants to see what a black boy wears for underpants. He goes through Till’s pockets. He pulls apart the wallet and finds the picture.
Roy. Milam’s voice is metal. Look at this.
The men pass the photo back and forth, under a flashlight. Some unmeaning artifact. Some change in the fundamental laws. Bryant takes the photo to the riverside and forces it into the boy’s smashed face. How’d you get this, boy?
There’s not enough boy left to answer. The silence triggers another round of battering.
Who’d you steal this from? You better tell us everything. Now.
They might as well demand an answer from the earth they beat him into. Time melts like August road tar. The questions swell, each word unfolding its kernel of violent eternity. They hit him with a monkey wrench. Each blow is forever falling.
Who is this girl? What the fuck you do to her, nigger?
Emmett comes back from a place he shouldn’t have escaped. The house is burned, and it would be no use to him now, even if they let him live. The life they own means nothing to him. Sense has run down to a standstill. But somehow he comes back, finds the concussed brain, the caved-in throat.
The Time of Our Singing Page 13
