Ruth’s third of the inheritance had been sitting in balanced investments, compounding for more years than her son had lived. It couldn’t match that boy’s compounded experience, but it was a usable sum. I gave her an estimate. Her face did its own skeptical calculation. “We have some, too, Robert and I. And Papap keeps offering—the piece Mama never got. We could get matching funds. There are sources—not many, but they’re there. It’s all Robert wanted. His last sustained plan before … He worked so hard on it, I can see the blueprints.”
I was afraid to ask her to make sense. She started up again, steering me toward the door. “Joseph Strom. How would you like to give your nephew music lessons?”
I pressed back, feeling her hand’s resistance. “Ruth. Don’t even joke. What could I possibly … He’d eat me alive.”
She laughed and shook her head, dragging me on toward the door. “Oh, Kwame’s nothing, baby. Wait until you get a classroom full of ten-year-olds! Wait until little Robert comes up through the ranks.”
That’s how I returned to Oakland with my sister and her sons. It was as easy as falling. As soon as Ruth described Robert’s school to me, I knew I’d been looking for a reason to keep me from returning to Europe. Something big enough to put up against the salvage of the past. Nothing else had claim over my life. My single problem lay in breaking the news to Jonah.
We called him from Philadelphia just before we left. I had trouble finding him at home, in Ghent. When he heard my voice, Jonah made it sound as if he’d been waiting for weeks at the side of the phone. “Damn it, Mule. I’ve been dying by inches here. What’s happening?”
“Why didn’t you just call if you wanted to hear from us?”
“That wouldn’t exactly be hearing from you, would it?”
“I’m going to California. Ruth’s building a school.”
“And you are going to …”
“Fucker. I’m going to teach for her.”
He thought a moment before saying anything. Or maybe it was the transatlantic lag. “I see. You’re quitting the group. You’re going to kill Voces Antiquae?” With the bull market in early music not even starting to peak, superlative, vibrato-free voices were springing up all over. I’d always been the ensemble’s weak link, the amateur latecomer. This was my brother’s chance to replace me with a real bass, a trained one, someone who could do justice to the others and lift them to that last level of international renown that had vaguely eluded us. He didn’t have to mourn the loss of my voice. He needed only to let me know how completely I’d betrayed him.
“Well, we had our run, didn’t we?” His was the voice of the future past. He sounded light-years away, anxious to get off the phone and start auditioning my replacements. “So how is your sister?”
“You want to talk to her?”
From the kitchen counter, where she’d been pretending not to listen, Ruth shook her head. Jonah said, “I don’t know, Joey. Does she want to talk with me?”
Ruth cursed me under her breath as I handed her the phone. She took the receiver as if it were a bone club. Her sound was small and flat. “JoJo.” After a while: “Long time. You old yet?” She listened, dead. Then she sat up, defending. “Don’t start this. Just … don’t.” After another pause, she said, “No, Jonah. That’s what you should do. That’s what you should fucking do.”
She lapsed into another listening silence, then handed the phone to Papap. He shouted into it. “Hallo. Hallo? Dieses ist mein Enkel?”
The words ripped me. They did worse to Ruth. She came over to me and whispered, so Europe couldn’t hear. “You sure about this? You had work. Maybe you belong over there.”
She just wanted noise from me. She couldn’t bear the sounds of that other conversation. We talked in a drone, drowning out Papap and listening in by helpless turns. He and Jonah talked for three or four minutes, nothing, everything—collapsing decades into a few hundred words. Papap grilled Jonah about Europe, Solidarity, Gorbachev. God only knows what answers Jonah invented. “When are you coming home?” Papap asked. Ruth tried to talk over the words, as if that would erase them. But that’s the thing about sounds: Even when they all happen at once, none of them cancels out the others. They just keep stacking up, beyond any chord’s ability to hold.
There was a silence, out of which Papap suddenly charged, enraged. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Behind the times. Come back and listen. Every song and dance in this country has gone brown.” Ruth and I quit our deaf show. She stared at me, but before I could even shrug, our grandfather was sailing. “You think you’re a traitor out there? You’re nothing but an advance scout. A double agent … Well, call it that, too, if you like. Name an immortal piece that wouldn’t sound better sung by the hired help. That little world you’ve been scouting is going to be overrun with black, once we show the least little bit of interest. Sie werden noch besser sein als im Basketball.”
Ruth quizzed me with a look. I felt myself giggling bitterly. “Just like basketball,” I translated. “Only better.”
They improvised their good-byes and my grandfather hung up. “Interesting man, your brother. He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had a new leader.” He chuckled, his shoulders jarring loose from his body. “I’m not entirely sure he’d heard of basketball, either.”
“What did he say to you?” I asked Ruth.
“He said I should travel. Get my mind off the past.”
The whole family showed for our departure. My uncle Michael, my aunts Lucille and Lorene, most of their kids and grandkids—I still didn’t know all their names. They gathered the night before we left, to send us out. We sang. What else was there? Delia Banks was there, her sound as wide as a flowering chestnut and as delicate as sweet williams. She didn’t solo, except for an aerial twelve bars. Tunes fell in line, jumbling up and overlapping, talking to one another, taking themselves as their only topic. The Daley game, too, was Crazed Quotations, drawn from another well, the water colder and more bracing. Where do you think your mother got it from? The send-off had no sadness. We’d meet back here next year and the year after, we and all our dead, as our dead had been meeting here without us every prior year. And if not here, then that flatted-seventh somewhere else.
Late that night, after the last cousin left, Papap came into his dead son’s room, the room that for weeks I’d inhabited. He held a stiff, shiny square of paper. He sat in his boy’s ancient chair, next to where I stretched out. I scrambled to my feet, and he waved me back down.
“Your sister got most of the keepsakes. I gave what I had to her years ago. I didn’t know you’d be showing up. But I found these for you.” A Polaroid of my brother and me opening Christmas presents, a photo Da had taken and given to the Daleys. And an older Brownie photo of a woman who could only be my mother. I couldn’t stop looking. I took it in in long gasps, a suffocating man needing air. It was the first fresh look I’d had of her since the fire. In the tiny black-and-white print, a young woman—far younger than I was now—of uncertain tone but clearly African features looked back through the lens, smiling weakly, seeing on the exposing film everything that would happen to her. She wore a dress of midcalf length with wide, pointed shoulders, the height of fashion in the years before my birth.
“What color is this dress?” I heard myself ask from a long while off.
He studied me. He saw my hunger, and it threatened to kill him. He tried to talk but couldn’t.
“Navy blue,” I told him.
He held still for a time, then nodded. “That’s right. Navy blue.”
We said good-bye to Papap. He wouldn’t let us pretend we’d ever see him again in this life. Ruth took her leave of our grandfather as if he contained all those people she had never gotten to say good-bye to. And he did. He came out onto the lawn as we got in the car, suddenly frailer than ninety. He took my hand. “I’m glad to have met you. Next life, in Jerusalem.”
My grandfather was right: Every music in America had gone brown. Our drive across the continen
t proved it. The car took me back to those days, Jonah and I crisscrossing the United States and Canada. The place had gotten infinitely bigger in the intervening years. The only way to get across a place so huge was still by radio. Every signal our receiver found—even the C and W stations drifting across the Great Plains—had at least one drop of black sloshing around in it. Africa had done to the American song what the old plantation massas had done to Africa. Only this time, the parent was keeping custody.
Ruth and I took turns driving and looking after little Robert. “You make this almost easy,” she said. “The trip out was hell.”
“I helped, Mama,” Kwame shouted. “I did the best I could.”
“’Course you did, honey.”
The driver got to choose the station, although Kwame’s need for a shattering bass beat usually dictated. He liked the ones whose rhythms were like Chinese water torture, the ones that forced the chords into your auditory canal with a syringe.
“What’s this called?”
“Hip-hop,” Kwame said, giving even those two syllables a rhythm I’d have to work at.
“I’m too old. Too old even to listen from a distance.”
My sister just laughed at me. “You were born too old.”
The country had strayed into musics beyond my ability to make out. I could only take them in contained doses. Now and then, during the three-day marathon of my belated education, I backslid and trolled for my own old addictions. The flood of now—the music that people really used and needed—had risen so high that only a few scattered islands of bypassed memory remained above water. When I managed to find classical stations at all, they beamed out a continuous stream of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Soon there would be only a dozen pieces left from the last thousand years of written music, pressed into anthologies suitable for seduction, gag gifts, and raising your baby’s IQ.
“Does this make my people an oppressed minority?” I asked Ruth.
“We’ll talk when they start shooting at you.”
Culture was whatever survived its own bonfire. Whatever you held on to when nothing else worked. And then, it didn’t, either.
Somewhere past Denver, driving, I chanced upon a clear signal of a chorus that, within three notes, I pegged as Bach. Cantata 78. I peeked at the backseat, where my nephew twisted and fidgeted. A look passed across his face, not even engaged enough for contempt. The music might have come from Mars, or farther. This was the boy, and hundreds like him, who I was now supposed to teach about music.
The opening chorus died away. I knew what was coming, though I hadn’t heard the piece for ages. Two beats of silence, and then that duet. “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” My brother at ten, Kwame’s age, had bounded along that upper line with eager steps, lost in the euphoria of his own voice. The soprano this time was another boy lost in time, as good as my brother had been, as drunk on the notes. The lower voice, now a countertenor, came alive in the game of harmonic tag, rejuvenated by trying to keep up with the boy he, too, must once have been. The two of them were high, clear, and fast as light. I looked at Ruth to see if she remembered. Of course, she couldn’t have. The boys flew, the music was good, and my life bent back on itself. I flew alongside these notes, racing myself toward what they wanted me to remember, until the flashing red lights in my rearview mirror stopped me. I looked down at the speedometer: eighty-nine miles an hour.
By the time I pulled over and the squad car nosed up behind us, Ruth was in pieces. She shrieked, “Don’t get out of the car. Don’t get out.” Kwame crouched on the backseat, pressed up against the door, ready to leap out and grab the cop’s gun. Little Robert started to wail, as if that terror really did start in race’s womb. My sister struggled to comfort him, calming and wrestling him down.
“This is it,” Kwame said. “We dead.”
The police car sat behind us, running our plates, toying with its food. When the officer got out of the car, all three of us let out our breath. “Thank God,” Ruth said, not believing. “Oh God, thank you.” The man was black.
I rolled down the window and fed him my license before he could ask. “You know why I pulled you over?” I nodded. “Is this car yours?”
“My sister’s.” I waved toward Ruth. She had one hand on the baby and the other stretched across the seat, restraining Kwame.
The officer pointed. “Who’s that?”
I looked down to where he pointed: the radio, Cantata 78 still pouring out of it. In the panic of the moment, I’d forgotten it was even on. I looked back at the policeman and smiled apologetically. “Bach.”
“No points for the obvious. I mean, who’s singing?”
He took my license and retreated to his car. Two lifetime prison sentences later, he returned and handed it back to me. “You have better things to do with your hundred and twenty bucks?”
Kwame understood the question before I did. “Build a school.”
The policeman nodded. “Keep it below allegro next time.”
Twenty miles down the interstate, Ruth burst out cackling. Nerves. She couldn’t stop. I thought I’d have to pull over. “You damn honkies.” She sucked air between her hysterical sobs. “They let you walk, every single time.”
DEEP RIVER
This is how time runs: like some stoked-up, stage-sick kid in his first talent show. One glance at that audience out there past the footlights and all those months of metronome practice vanish in a blast of presto. Time has no sense of tempo. It’s worse than Horowitz. The marks on the page mean nothing. I hit Oakland, and my life’s whole beat doubled.
I moved into the second story of a chewed-up gingerbread house ten blocks from my sister’s, near the interstate. I could walk to Preservation Park in twenty minutes. But then, I could also see the North Star on clear nights with my naked eye. De Fremery was a lot closer. The park’s old Panther Self-Defense outreaches were history, but the rallies went on, as timeless as the crimes they countered.
I passed through the East Bay like a masked figure through some Act Four costume party. For the first weeks, walking home through my new neighborhood at night, I felt every conscience-stricken terror my country had trained me to feel. I saw how I looked, dressed, sounded, and moved. I’d never been more conspicuous, even in Europe. Even I would have singled myself out to hit.
But no one sees anyone else, in the end. This is our tragedy, and the thing that may finally save us. We steer only by the grossest landmarks. Turn left at bewilderment. Keep going till you hit despair. Pull up at complete oblivion, turn around, and you’re there. After six months, I knew all my neighbors’ names. After eight, I knew what they needed from the world. After ten, what I needed from them. It might have taken longer, but I’d been born into an outsiders’ club. The only surprise about Oakland was how huge and shared outsideness could be.
From the beginning, Jonah’s and my performance had been whiteness, the hardest piece to make both believable and worth listening to. Now I entered another concert, the block party of the ticketless, where they had to let you in if you only so much as showed.
We heard from Uncle Michael before that first year was out. Dr. Daley had died in his sleep, just shy of his ninety-first birthday. “The first thing he ever did that didn’t take work,” Michael wrote.
As for me, nothing I do will ever be effortless again. I feel like I’m twelve and helpless. His age ends with him. We’re all drifting now … Lorene said he’d waited until he got a chance to make the acquaintance of his missing grandchildren … We’ll spare you all the surprises we found while going through his belongings. Nobody dies without telling everything. But one thing we found, you’ll want to hear about. You remember that mahogany desk he worked at in his study, Ruth? We wanted to save it, with the other pieces in the house worth saving. When we pulled the thing away from the corner, we found a yellowed folder, tucked between a piece of panel and the wall. It was all your clippings, Joseph, all the reviews of you and your brother. He’d be
en keeping them for years, hiding them from Mama. He kept them back there so long, he forgot they were there …
If that much hasn’t made you hang yourself yet, here’s the awful part. I helped the girls clean out Mama’s dresser two years ago, when she died. She kept a hidden clippings file, too. Secret keepsakes. We never told the man. You see how blood feuds go. Do white people do this to themselves, too?
The letter felt like lung surgery. A man and a woman joined together for decades, their own nation, and my parents’ experiment had split them. No one was left to beg forgiveness from. I had no one to atone to but myself. I lay in bed much of the weekend after reading the letter, unable to get up. When I did, I was filled with the need for real work.
For that, Ruth provided. She’d raided the Unified School District for a dozen of the most urgent teachers in the Bay Area, all old acquaintances. They were waiting for her, as much victims of contemporary education as the most hardened dropout. Her board had so much combined experience that theory could find no hiding place among them. They turned up sums of money hidden under rocks and tucked away in widowers’ mattresses. They were not above crackpot grant applications, community begging, rummage sales, and the common shakedown. One large anonymous no-strings gift helped seed a permanent endowment. We set up camp in an abandoned food store leased to us for little more than the insurance and taxes. New Day Elementary School—K through 3—opened in 1986 and was fully accredited within three years. “The first four years are everything,” Ruth said. Tuition depended upon means. Many of our parents paid in volunteer work.
She took me on probation, until I got certified like everyone else. I taught days and went back to school nights. I got my master’s in musical education just as Ruth completed her Ed.D. In every working week, my sister astonished me. I never imagined I could help make something happen in the actual world. It had never occurred to Ruth to bother doing anything else. “It’s a little thing. Flower coming up through the concrete. Doesn’t break the rock. But it makes a little soil.”
The Time of Our Singing Page 76
