The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  “Now I am your prisoner. Because I’ve told you this. Anytime you want to have me …” He draws a finger across his throat and makes a slurping noise. She stops his hand. Don’t even joke. He sits with her a little longer, neither of them going anywhere.

  “Someday?” he says. “You must tell me something back. Something you can not tell anyone.”

  “I already have.”

  Joey turns one. This time, David’s home. The whole family sits down at the piano bench to explore “Happy Birthday,” one hand from each player, with the birthday boy joining in and squealing in delight.

  David is in and out of town the whole summer, gone that first night of August, when police shoot a Negro soldier in uniform over at the Braddock Hotel. Delia has the radio tuned to classical music—the station she uses to put the boys to bed. They don’t go down easily in this wilting heat. They need a fan, the music, and an open window to pacify them. She’s asleep herself, well past 11:00 P.M., when a knock at the door awakens her. She stumbles upright and throws on a robe. The knock grows frantic and a voice spasms on the other side. She pads toward the door in terror, calling out, “Who is it?” Her brain scrabbles up from out of sleep, fleeing some country under occupation. The door starts to open and she screams. The boys wake; Joey begins to cry. “David?” she yells in the dark. “David? Is that you?”

  Her heart revives when she makes out Mrs. Washington, their landlady, even more panicked than Delia. “Oh, Lord, Mrs. Strom. It’s all over. The city’s on fire!”

  Delia calms the woman and brings her into the parlor. But Mrs. Washington won’t sit. If the world is ending, she wants to be vertical. By now, the boys are up and clamped to their mother, wailing. This has some blessing, as it forces Mrs. Washington to compose herself and help comfort them. But whispering, as if to keep it from the boys, she tells Delia, “They’re coming this way. I know it. They’re going to go after the nice houses. Come tear down what we got.”

  No use asking who. Even a sensible answer would be insane. The laws outside have broken down. That’s all they are allowed to know. Delia goes to the front window and pulls back the curtains. A few people mill in the street, shocked, in robes and dressing gowns. Delia starts to pull on a few hurried clothes. Mrs. Washington shouts, “Don’t you go out there! Don’t you leave us.” The boys scramble up, ready to protect her. But another child calls her outdoors, a quieter, more frightened sound. Someone in trouble, a girl whose voice she knows but can’t yet recognize. One voice out of the anarchy, calling her by name, pulling her from safety, and she has no choice.

  Delia steps out, just down to the sidewalk, the same few steps she takes every day. But everything outside the freestone house is wrong. She walks into a wall of heated air, a chorus of sirens going off at all distances, wailing in spectral waves like wounded animals. She looks eastward down the street at a pale orange halo pasted against the sky. A plume rises behind it, toward the south. She hears a murmur like surf, and when her ears attenuate, the sound turns into people shouting.

  Large buildings are on fire. The glow comes from the direction of Sydenham Hospital. Police, fire, and air raid sirens all blare, the first real wartime sounds she’s heard these last twenty months. Harlem’s going up, giving back a taste of everything it’s ever gotten. She asks anyone who stops to answer, but no one knows. Or everyone does, only no two accounts are the same. The police have killed a soldier who was defending his mother, shot him dead in the back. A group of armed defenders have the Twenty-eighth Precinct surrounded. It’s a thousand people. Three thousand. Ten. A gun battle on 136th. A crowd overturning cars, crumpling them with baseball bats. The destruction is moving southward, street by street. No—north. The burning is headed her way.

  She watches as the crowd down her block starts schooling. Even on this street, so far untouched, clumps of mesmerized bystanders turn in tight, frightened circles. Some younger men trot in the direction of the flames, their years of pressed rage now turning them diamond. Others flee toward some dissolving city, west of here. Most stand still, all faith betrayed. The night is a cauldron, the air like fired brick in her mouth, the taste of torched buildings. She spins and looks at their row, sees their house burned to the ground. The image is so real, she knows it has already happened. She adds her voice to the shriek-filled air and runs, not stopping until she’s back inside, the door bolted, her curtains drawn.

  “Away from the windows,” she tells the children. Her calmness astounds her. “Come on, everyone. Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’ll be nicer there.”

  “They’re coming this way,” Mrs. Washington cries. “They’re going to come up here and get the nice places. That’s what they’re after.”

  “Hush. It’s miles away. We’re safe here.” She nurses the lie even as she serves it up. The thing she has seen—her house torched and gutted—is as real in her now as any fixed past. They shouldn’t be cowering here, in this death trap, waiting for the end to come find them. But where else can they go? Harlem is burning.

  The boys aren’t frightened anymore. The night’s a game, a bright breaking of rules. They want lemonade. They want shaved ice. She gets them whatever they ask for. She and Jonah show Mrs. Washington how they sing “My country, ’tis of thee” in two-part harmony, with little Joseph keeping time on an overturned quart pot.

  A quick listen in the front room confirms her fears: The night’s cries are coming nearer. She swears at David for choosing this night to be so far away. She couldn’t reach him now, even if she knew how. Then she remembers, and blesses their luck. His presence here tonight would finish them all.

  “Nothing’s ever gonna change for us.” Mrs. Washington speaks like praying. “This is how it’s always gonna be.”

  “Please, Mrs. Washington. Not in front of the boys.”

  But the boys have curled up, each on his own oval rag rug, cushioned islands on the hardwood sea. Delia keeps vigil, ready to rush them out the back if the crowd reaches their door. All night long, she hears someone out there in the cauldron calling for her. This is how the four of them sit, the tide of violence lapping at the corner of their street, cresting in a fury of helplessness before subsiding just before dawn.

  Morning breaks, silent. The fury of last night has spent itself to change exactly nothing. Delia rises to her feet, bewildered. She walks out to the front room, which is still, astonishingly, there. But she saw it. The house was gone, and now it’s still here, and she doesn’t know how to get from that one certainty back to this other.

  Mrs. Washington draws Delia to her in a wild departing hug. “Bless you. I was dying of fright, and you were here. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

  “Yes,” Delia answers, still dazed. Then: “No! I did nothing.” That’s what must have saved them. Holding still, waiting for judgment to pass over.

  When David returns, two nights later, she tries to tell him. “Were you frightened?” he asks. The weight of foreign words hobbles him so badly, he doesn’t even try for the thing he needs to know.

  “We just sat there, the four of us, waiting. I knew what was going to happen. It all felt decided. Already done. And then …”

  “Then it did not happen.”

  “Then it did not happen.” She gives a soft shake of the head, refusing the evidence. “The house is still here.”

  “Still here. And all of us, still, too.” He takes her in his arms, but their bafflement grows. He asks, “What has caused this riot?” She tells him: a hotel arrest. A soldier trying to keep the police from arresting a woman. “Six people dead? Many buildings burned? All this from one arrest?”

  “David.” She closes her eyes, exhausted. “You can’t know. You simply cannot know.”

  She sees this sting him across the face: a judgment. A rebuke. He tries to follow her—the rational scientist. But he can’t. Can’t know the pressure, millions of lives sharpened to a point, the blade that skewers you every time you try to move. He can’t even start to do the math. It’s something you co
me into, centuries before you’re born. To a white: a drunken woman breaking the law. But to those that the law effaces: the one standing, irrevocable death sentence.

  David takes off his glasses and wipes them. “You say I cannot know. But will our boys?”

  Two days after the riot, the boys have already forgotten. But something in them will remember hiding in the kitchen one night while still too young to know anything. Will they know the riot the way she knows, the way their father cannot? “Yes. They’ll have to. The largest part of them will know.” As if it had parts, this knowledge.

  David looks up at her, pleading for admission. His sons will not be his. Every census will divide them. Every numbering. She watches the world take his slave children away from him to a live burial, an unmarked grave. We do not own ourselves. Always, others run us. His lips press together, bloodless. “Madness. The whole species.” She sits through this diagnosis in silence. Her man is in agony. The agony of his family, lost in bombed Rotterdam. The agony of his family, hiding in the dark in burning Harlem, while he is gone. “Nothing ever changes. The past will run us forever. No forgiveness. We never escape.”

  These words scare her worse than that night’s sirens. It will end her, a blanket condemnation coming from this man, who so needs to believe that time will redeem everyone. And still, she can’t contradict him. Can’t offer him any hideout from forever. She sees the mathematician struggle with the crazed logic that assigns him: colored there, white here. The bird and the fish can build their nest. But the place they build in will blow out from underneath it.

  “Perhaps they do not have four choices after all. These boys of ours.”

  She touches his arm. “Nobody gets even one.”

  “Belonging will kill us.”

  She hides her head from him and cries. He places one hand on her nape, her shoulders, and feels the boulder there. His hand works softly, like water on that rock. Perhaps if humans had the time of erosion. If they could live at the speed of stones. He talks as he rubs her. She doesn’t look up.

  “My father was finished with all of this. ‘Our people. The chosen. The children of God.’ And everyone else: not. Five thousand years was enough. A Jew was not geography, not nation, not language, not even culture. Only common ancestors. He could not be the same as a Jew in Russia or Spain or Palestine, who is different from him in every way that can be different except for being ‘our people.’ He even convinced my mother, whose grandparents died in the pogroms. But here is the funny thing.” Her lips contract involuntarily under his rubbing fingertips. She knows; she knows. He doesn’t need to say. “The funny thing …”

  His parents are chosen anyway.

  She lifts her head to him. She needs to see if he’s still there. “We can be our people.” Renewing their first vow. All its break and remaking. “Just us.”

  “What do we tell these boys?”

  She is bound to him. Will do anything to lift up the man, his solitary race of one. Anything, including lie. So she signs on to her downfall: love. She puts her hand on his nape, sealing the symmetry he began. “We tell them about the future.” The only place bearable.

  A groan breaks out of him. “Which one?”

  “The one we saw.”

  Then he remembers. He takes hold again on nothing, a tree on a rock face, rooted in a spoonful of soil. “Yes. There.” The future that has led them here. The one they make possible. His life’s work must find them such junctures, such turnings. What dimensions don’t yet exist will come into being, bent open by their traveling through them. They can map it slowly, their best-case future. Month by month, child by child. Their sons will be the first ones. Children of the coming age. Charter citizens of the postrace place, both races, no races, race itself: blending unblended, like notes stacked up in a chord.

  America, too, must jump into its own nonexistent future. Nazi transcendence—the latest flare-up of white culture’s world order—forces the country into a general housecleaning. The Tuskegee Airmen, the 758th Tank, the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Marine Corps divisions, and scores of other Negro units are shipped out to all the choke points of the global front. Whatever future this war leaves intact, it will never again be yesterday’s tomorrow.

  Delia gets a letter from Charles in January of 1944. He’s been assigned to the Seacoast Artillery Group.

  We’re starting our first major offensive—a drive across fortified enemy concentrations in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Should we succeed in forming a beachhead and breaking out, we plan to sweep through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona—dangerous territory—and press on to establish a forward perimeter in San Diego. From there, we’ll ship out and meet the Japanese, who ought to be a cakewalk in comparison to the folks down this way.

  He sends another note in mid-February, from Camp Elliott, California:

  Greetings from Tara West … We’ve a ninety-mm gun crew here who can hit a towed target in less than a minute. Show me the white crew that can do better. But last night, when the brass decided to throw us an open-air movie, that same crew, along with the whole Fifty-first, was sent to the back, behind thousands of white boys, who, I suppose, had to keep themselves between us and Norma Shearer so there wouldn’t be any race mingling. (Nothing personal, sister.) Well, we particular marines didn’t much feel like heading back. We wound up getting thrown out all together. The place turned into a free-for-all, with a couple dozen good-sized bucks ending up behind bars. We ship out tomorrow on the Meteor, not an hour too soon, as far as I’m concerned. I’m so ready to leave these shores and try my luck in the savage, uncivilized islands that I can’t begin to tell you. Keep an eye on the home front, Dee. I mean, watch out for it.

  Delia talks to David, in bed that night, before his next trip out west. “Hurry up with that work of yours.” The one quick jump into the future that will save everyone she cares for. The idea forms in her, in that place before idea. She must protect her boys from the present, preserve their unlabeled joy, refuse to say what they are, teach them to sing through every invented limit the human mind ever cowered behind.

  So it feels like a message from space—one night in midyear, spring cracking the crust of a winter grown unbearable, as she bathes Joey in the bassinet and David listens to the New York Philharmonic in the overstuffed chair, his arm around Jonah—when a piece for full orchestra called Manhattan Nocturne seeps through the crystal set into their rented home. The piece is lovely, sonorous, and tinged with anachronism. Singable. She hums along by the end, buzzing the primary theme into a giggling Joey’s belly as if her baby boy’s body were a kazoo.

  She notices the music without really noticing. But the polished announcer’s words afterward hit her like an omen. The composer is a thirteen-year-old girl named Phillipa Duke Schuyler. And if that wasn’t impossible enough, the girl is of mixed race. Delia almost puts a safety pin through her boy, and even then, Joey suffers her. She thinks she misheard, until David wanders slack-jawed into the room. His eyes fill with frightened vindication. “One hundred piano compositions before her twelfth year!”

  Delia looks at her husband, feeling as if they’ve escaped the prison that the laws of a dozen American states would still sentence them to. The girl has an IQ of 185. Played the piano at three and began the concert circuit by the age of eleven. Their boys have an advance scout in this newfound land. The continent exists already, and it’s inhabited.

  The girl’s father is a journalist, her mother a Texas farmer’s daughter. The father has written a meticulous account of his prodigy in the Courier, which Delia tracks down. The principles are simple. Raw milk, wheat germ, and cod-liver oil. Intensive education—a two-parent home schooling scheme of around-the-clock instruction. But the real secret is that old western farming trick of hybrid vigor. The basics of agricultural breeding. Twinrace children—that genius girl proves it—represent a new strain of crossed traits more robust than either of their parental lines. Mr. George Schuyler goes on to claim even more. Sturdy crossbred children are
this country’s only hope, the only way out of centuries of division that will otherwise grow wider with the run of time. Just writing as much would land Mr. Schuyler behind bars in Mississippi, according to a law no older than his daughter. But the words reach Delia like food falling from the desert sky.

  Raw milk and wheat germ, mixed blood, daily doses of music, and the girl has become an angel. Her Manhattan Nocturne for one hundred instruments awes wartime America. Mayor La Guardia even declares a Phillipa Duke Schuyler Day. The sound of the past vanishes at the little girl’s playing. Delia buys copies of all her available sheet music. She leaves the Five Little Piano Pieces, composed at age seven, out on the music rack. Her boys stare, rapt, at the picture of little Phillipa on the cover, seeing something in her that will take them decades to recognize. The pieces are among the first the boys learn—the foundation stone of the new Strom schoolhouse.

  Others have been this way: It makes all the difference in the merciless world. Home lessons begin in earnest. The boys leap through every little melody she sets them. David rolls around on the floor with them, playing games with blocks that only an older, sadder child would suspect to be the basis of set theory. David and Delia even try the wheat germ and cod-liver oil, but the boys aren’t taking.

  “Kein Problem,” David says. “We don’t need one hundred and eighty-five IQ.”

  “True. Anything over one hundred and fifty will do just fine.” In fact, it begins to dawn on Delia that every child who learns to walk and talk has the genius of whole galaxies engineered in them, before hate begins to dull them down.

  It thrives, this school of four, without anyone thinking school. Outside their house, life sends them a sign, confirming their leap of faith. The Supreme Court deals a blow to all-white elections. The Allies land in France and push eastward. The endless war will end, and melting pot America will be the force that ends it. The only question is how soon. No day will be soon enough. For four years, they’ve had no word of David’s parents. His sister and her husband have disappeared, too, most likely lost in Bulgaria when it went under. Month after month, Delia props up her man, telling him in every possible way that silence proves nothing. But finally, gradually, it does. All the messages escaping that continent converge on the same conclusion.