The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Jonah, surprisingly, loved the phrase. He loved the disarray it sowed in the ranks of those good Americans, just minding their own business. He thought of it as guerrilla theater, just as aesthetically unsettling as the best of Webern or Berg. He walked about the apartment brandishing a dark tan golf-gloved fist over his head, shouting, “Mulatto Power! Mulatto Power!” for no one’s benefit but mine.

  And still the year’s music beat on, cheerful, love-crazed, sundrenched for a day. White music went black, stealing funk’s righteous refusal. The Motown sound migrated even to cities whose cores had not recently burned down. At the same time, Monterey sent pop into places even my brother couldn’t ridicule. Jonah brought home the first rock album he ever paid real money for. The Beatles, in high-camp Edwardian military band regalia peeked out from the cover with a cast of dozens, including effigies of their former selves. “You have to hear this.” Jonah parked me under two cantaloupe halves of padded earphones and made me listen to the last cut, its slow, cacophonous orchestral climb to a forte major triad that spread into eternity. “Where do you think they got that idea? Ligeti? Penderecki? Pop ripping off the classics again, just like Tin Pan Alley used to do Rachmaninoff.”

  He made me listen to the whole record, pushing his favorite bits. From English music hall to raga, from sonata quotes to sinkholes of sounds that hadn’t happened yet. “Trippy, huh?” I’d no idea where he learned the word.

  The year split into vapor trails as tangled as those cloud-chamber traceries Da studied. Fashion went mad. Safari dresses, cossack blouses, aviator coats, Victorian velvet, silver metallic vinyl space-age miniskirts, .Nehru jackets, combat boots with fishnet stockings, culottes with capes: a grandiose splintering into all years and places but this one. Fifty thousand people took to the Mall to protest the war, and three-quarters of a million strolled down Fifth Avenue in New York supporting it. Coltrane died and the U.S. government officially recognized the blues by sending Junior Wells on a goodwill tour to Africa. Che Guevara and George Lincoln Rockwell both died violent deaths. Jonah and I lived our days between flower children and nurse slayers, decolonization and defoliants, Twiggy and Tiny Tim, Hair and The Naked Ape.

  We’d be in some hotel room in Montreal or Dallas, watching the news, trying not to drop off the face of the earth, and some story would come on, a space shot or a riot, a love-in or mass strangling, an emperor’s self-coronation or Third World insurgency, and Jonah would shake his head. “Who needs opera, Mule? No wonder the damn thing’s dying. How can opera go head-to-head against this circus?”

  We watched that year’s performance race through its acts, all the while waiting for the Met to call, the call that would be Jonah’s delivery and my death sentence. “They’re nervous that I’ve never really sung over an orchestra.” He decided to plump the vita with whatever symphonic solo appearances he could land. He told a bewildered Mr. Weisman to find him anything, with any body of instrumentalists. “I’ve got volume. You know that.”

  “This isn’t about your volume, son.” Mr. Weisman, whose fifty-year-old daughter had just died of breast cancer, had taken to calling us his sons. “This is about positioning you. Making people hear what it is you do.”

  “I’ll do whatever the audience wants. Why do they need a brand? Can’t they just listen?”

  He couldn’t understand the lead time on finding orchestral jobs. “It takes two years to do anything! Jesus, Joey. A read-through, a dress rehearsal, and a performance. Keep the thing fresh.”

  He picked up a substitution for a flu-stricken tenor who’d been slated to sing Das Lied von der Erde at Interlochen. The conductor couldn’t find anyone else willing to step in on such short notice. Jonah mastered the treacherously craggy tenor songs in under five weeks. “I was born singing this stuff, Joey.” I sat in the audience with the rest of the weeping public. Da came out for the debut. He sat and listened to his son sail drunkenly on the silent winds of outer space and make a mockery of human misery: Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod. Dark is life, is death. A voice that knew nothing but its own fire veered about in wild precision, fueled by a skill equal to the music’s extremes: Was geht mich denn der Frühling an? Laβt mich betrunken sein!—What can springtime mean to me? Let me be drunken!

  People who’d never heard of Jonah’s lieder performances suddenly discovered him. The audience clapped as if they wanted him to come out and do Symphony of a Thousand as an encore. The Detroit Free Press ran that review calling him a “planet-scouting angel.” In truth, they were right. He didn’t live here. His voice was on a long, sweeping search for any part of this backwater galaxy where it might put down for an eon or two.

  Just before Chicago and our Orchestra Hall debut, the disastrous piece in Harper’s appeared, calling him a flunky of the white culture game. Jonah thought his career was over. Orchestra Hall would rescind the engagement when they found out. He couldn’t stop reading me the passage that fingered him: “‘Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.’ That’s me, boy. Big time back-stabber. Cut you and leave you for dead, if I need to.”

  Orchestra Hall didn’t rescind. Despite our preconcert argument about our parents and Emmett Till, and despite a suffocation fit only an hour before the performance, Jonah hit the stage singing—the songs of Schumann, Wolf, and Brahms—and came away to raves.

  The Harper’s accusation chewed him up. He’d been passing, and it had never even occurred to him. All those boys his age, ground down, locked out, threatened, beaten, killed, while he’d been granted the safe passage of lightness. All those men, locked up, held down, digging civilization’s ditches, taking the blows, while he was up onstage spinning florid doilies, making time stand still. He’d read the article and cock his head: could it really be?

  He canceled two weeks of engagements, claiming the flu. Truth was, he was afraid to show his face in public. He no longer knew what that face looked like to his audience. Not that he’d ever much cared how others saw him. Music was that place where look fell away and sightless sound was all. But here was someone insisting the opposite: Music was just what we put on, after we put on ourselves. How a piece sounded to its listeners had everything to do with who was up there making the sounds.

  After a while, Jonah’s horror at the Harper’s piece turned to fascination. It amazed him to think that the article’s writer considered him worth slandering. The attention promoted him to a level of interest he’d never commanded, a player in a drama bigger than any he’d ever starred in. Amazingly talented black man playing the white culture game. Even winning. He turned the formula over and over. Then, in the kind of modulation he excelled in, he threw a little switch in himself. After days of chafing against the label, Jonah decided to revel in it.

  He returned to the concert circuit, now blessed by the condemnation. And when the calls from Mr. Weisman came in, with significant symphonic and choral solo offers among them, Jonah’s about-face seemed borne out. People smelled an opera, and they wanted tickets. Harper’s was going to make him notorious.

  “Thank the Lord God Almighty for the revolution, Mule. The movement’s opening doors. Providing for our people. Gonna get us a call from the President Lincoln Center.” He rubbed my close-cropped head the way I always hated. “Huh, bro? Culture works. Uplift and elevation. Even the black man’s Al Jolson gotta eat.”

  He took to reading the magazine accusation over the telephone to anyone who’d listen. “Where’s your sister when we need her?”

  He knew better than I did. “She’s seen it. I’ll bet you anything.”

  “You think?” He sounded pleased.

  I saw him wondering how to get the article to Lisette Soer, to János Reményi, even to Kimberly Monera, who, in another lifetime, once asked if he was a Moor. I waited for notoriety to change his sound. I couldn’t see how he could get up onstage, week after week, so twisted up, and still manufacture that silk perfection. He sang Beet
hoven’s Ninth, again at short notice, with the Quad Cities Symphony. When the chorale came—that discredited dream of universal brotherhood, the same notes he’d once scribbled, by ear, underneath the photo of the North American nebula we’d hung on our bedroom wall—I half-expected him to open his mouth and turn hideous, to bray a quarter tone sharp, tremulous and imperial, like those pompous Teutonic goose-honk voices we used to ridicule when we were boys.

  Just the reverse. He gave himself over to the classical’s full corruption. Only death, beauty, and artistic pretense were real. Limbered, his notes floated up into a clerestory treading in light. He entered completely into that blackballing country club, the heaven of high art.

  For the second recording, he got it into his head to do a cycle of English songs—Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Drake. Harmondial talked him out of it. The aura of decadent sweetness that clung to his voice left the tunes sounding freakishly pure, like some choirboy who’d gone through every part of puberty except the crucial one.

  The label wanted something darker, to capitalize on Jonah’s controversy. They settled on Schubert’s Winterreise. That was a piece for grown men, to sing when the singer had traveled far enough to describe the journey in full. But no sooner did they suggest the idea than Jonah took it up and sealed it.

  This time, we did the taping in New York. Jonah wanted a harder, more exposed finish. He’d sung many of the individual songs at one time or another. Now he assembled them into a plan that still takes my breath away. Instead of starting out the journey in innocence and ending in bitter passion, he began in a wry romp and ended far off, stripped bare, gazing motionless over the lip of the grave.

  Even now, I can’t listen to the thing straight through. In five days at the end of his twenty-sixth year, my brother jumped into his own future. He posted the message of 1967 forward to a year when he would no longer be able to read it. With total clairvoyance, he sang about where we were headed, things he couldn’t have known as he sang them, things I wouldn’t recognize even now except for his explanation waiting for me, telegraphed from an unfinished past.

  This time out, Jonah had two more years of control. He knew exactly what he needed each note to do within the larger phrase. He heard in his head the precise inflection of each song in the cycle, every nuance. He was a relentless mechanical engineer, bridging life’s winter trip, cabling up the starting block with the finish post in a few sweeping suspension swags and joining the whole into one coherent span. His voice was surer, better worked. We were singing in our own town, heading home each night to a certain bed, before the uncertainties of the next day’s takes. He adored the studio, the sterile glass cubicle sealing him off from outside danger. He loved to sit up in the control booth, listening to himself sing over the monitors, hearing the magnificent stranger he’d been just minutes before.

  He spoke about it during one long break. “You remember that Sputnik signal, ten years ago? What’s this going to sound like, after I’m dead?”

  The day we lived in was sealed. The message of where we were going would never reach us. His tone was so expansive, it felt like the moment to ask. “Did you ever think there was anything strange about the fire?” A dozen years after the fact, and I still couldn’t name it.

  But he needed no more. “Strange? Something unexplained?” He ran both hands backward against his scalp. His dark hair was long enough now to furrow. “Everything’s unexplained, Joey. There are no pointless accidents, if that’s what you mean.”

  I’d lived two decades thinking that skill, discipline, and playing by the rules would bring me safely in. I was the last of us to see it: Safety belonged to those who owned it. Jonah sat sipping springwater with a little lemon. I had wrapped my hands in hot towels, bandaged, as if just injured. I hunched forward, groping for some light in Jonah’s eyes. We’d drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore. Onstage, still, yes; but in another year or two, we’d understand nothing in each other but music. That afternoon, one last time, he thought my thoughts, as if they were his.

  “I used to think about it every night. Joey, I always wanted to ask you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I thought if I asked you, I might make it real.” He massaged his neck, exploring under the ears, scooping up into the chin, working, from the outside, the cords that he lived by. His throat was tan, a color that hid the way he’d come. No one could say, by that one cue alone, just what time had done to him. “Does it matter, Joey? One way or the other?”

  My hands spasmed, scattering the hot towels. “Does it what? Jesus. Of course it matters.” Nothing else did. Murder or accident? Everything we’d thought we were, everything my life meant hung on that fact.

  My brother stuck his fingers into the lemon water and rubbed a trickle into his neck. “Look. Here’s what I think. I’ve thought about this for twelve years.” His voice was gaunt, from somewhere that had never known song. “You want to know what happened. You think that knowing what happened will tell you … what? What the world’s going to do to you. You think that if your mother was killed, if your mother really died by chance … Say it wasn’t some random furnace. Say it had human help. That answers something? That’s not even the start of what you need to know. Why were they after her? Because she was black? Because she was uppity, sang the wrong stuff? Because she crossed the line, married your father? Because she wouldn’t keep her head down? Because she sent her mutant children to private school? Was it a scare tactic, intimidation gone wrong? Did they even know she was home? Maybe they wanted Da. Maybe they were trying for us. Somebody helping to return the country to its original purity. You want to know whether it was a crazy person, some neighborhood committee, some clan from some other neighborhood, twenty blocks north or south. Then you want to know why your father never …”

  He stopped for a breath, but not because he needed one. He could have sailed on forever on that fountain of air.

  “Or say it was the furnace, all by itself. Nobody helping it along, nobody’s historical mission. Why that furnace? Why were we living in that house, and not some other? Don’t they inspect those things, in the good neighborhoods? How would she have died if she’d been living over on some burned-out block between Seventh and Lenox? They’re dying of tetanus up there. They’re dying of flu. Illiteracy. Dying in the backseats of cars when the hospital won’t take them. A woman like Mama dies in this country, at her age—it’s somebody’s fault. What do you need to know? Listen, Joey. Would it change the way you live if they told you all the answers, beyond doubt?”

  I thought of Ruth. I had no answer for Jonah. But he had one for me.

  “You don’t need to know if someone burned her alive. All you need to know is whether someone wanted to. And you know the answer to that one already. You’ve known that one since—what, six? So somebody did what everyone’s thought of doing. Or maybe not. Maybe she died a raceless woman’s death. Maybe furnaces explode. You don’t know, you can’t know, and you’re never going to know. That’s what being black in this country means. You’ll never know anything. When they give you your change and won’t put it in your hand? When they cross the street a block down from you? Maybe they just had to cross the street. All you know for sure is that everyone hates you, hates you for catching them in a lie about everything they’ve ever thought of themselves.”

  He did that head-rolling shoulder heave singers do to loosen themselves. Ready to return to recording, get on with his life. “I got Da talking once. God knows where you were, Joey. I can’t keep track of you all the time. Before they were married, apparently, he listed four possibilities for us, like a logic problem: A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B. He didn’t like the fixed categories. No element of time. What did he know about us? No more than we know about him. Neither of them liked race trumping everything. Wasn’t that how history screwed us in the first place? They both thought family should trump race. That’s who they were. That’s why they raised us how they di
d. Noble experiment. Four choices, all of them fixed. But even fixed things have to move.”

  He stood and put his arms over his head, bent them back behind him and touched his shoulder blades, the sockets of his pruned wings. When I listen to that second disk now, this is how I see him. A glow in his eyes, about to launch into some tune that will mean the end of self.

  “But you know what, Mule? They don’t. Don’t move. White won’t move, and black can’t. Well, white moves when black buys a place in the neighborhood. But beyond that, race is like the pyramids. Older than history and built to outlast it. You know what? Even thinking there are four choices is a joke. In this country, choice isn’t even on the menu.”

  “Ruth’s married a Panther.” This, too, he somehow already knew. Maybe she’d told him when they’d met. All he did was nod. I carried on, stung. “Robert Rider. She’s joined, too.”

  “Good for her. We all need to find our art.”

  I flinched at the word. “She has the police reports. No, I mean for the fire. She and her husband … They’re sure. They say if the—if Mama had been white …”

  “Sure of what? Sure of everything we already knew. Sure of what killed her? You’ll never know. That’s blackness, Mule. Never knowing. That’s how you know who you really are.” He did a horrible little minstrel-show shuffle. Years ago, I might have tried to talk him down, to bring him back from himself. Now I just looked away.

  “If Mama and Da both wanted family more than …” The bile backed up my throat. “Why the hell don’t we even have our family?”