The Time of Our Singing

  I sat him up, still shouting at him. I wrapped his arm in a piece of shirt. “Jesus Christ. They were going to kill you.”

  “I saw.” His jaw was trembling, out of control. “Right there. But you told them, didn’t you?” His throat closed and his breathing shut down. He laughed and tried to apologize. But a choking fit prevented him.

  I got him to his feet and made him walk. Two hundred yards to our left, a line of police advanced against a makeshift emplacement of stone-throwers. I took Jonah to the right, doubling back west past Albion, where we’d entered the inferno. The air was a kiln, and the concrete under our feet melted into tar. Jonah’s breathing worsened. We had to slow. He pulled up at a corner and put out his hand, reassuring me, staving off suffocation. “Keep walking; keep moving.”

  I leaned him up against a wall so he could catch his breath and slow his heart. While we stood, Jonah bending forward and me holding him, a light-skinned middle-aged man walked past and brushed our backs. I spun around and saw the gray-haired man walk placidly away, carrying a can of house paint and a brush. On Jonah’s bare back, and on the tails of my shirt, he left a spotty brown stripe. The man disappeared into the crowd, leaving his brand on anything that held still long enough.

  Jonah could see my shirt but not his back. “Me, too? He got me good?”

  “Yes. He got you.”

  His breathing eased. “We’re all set then, Mule. Passport stamped. Visa. Safe passage.” He started up again, humming. I took his good arm and walked him on. He felt even more wobbly than reality. We headed west along 112th Street, to safety. But we’d never be safe again. From two blocks away, I saw the police perimeter we’d crossed on our way in. It had thickened. A line of officers three deep fought back the rushing stone-throwers. Burning bottles arced upward and fell to earth in splashes of flame. Watts was trying to spread the pain to Westmont, Inglewood, Culver City. Someplace where the fires had something expensive to burn.

  “Come on, Mule.” He sounded drunk. “Keep going. We’ll talk our way through.” By then, he could barely form a sentence. I knew what the police would do if we got even close. Nobody was getting out across this line. The whole township was ringed by a thousand policemen, herding it at gunpoint. Behind the police wall was the National Guard. And behind the Guard, the Fortieth Armored Division. We were sealed off, trapped inside the permanent pen. My brother was too light to survive inside, and I was too dark to get us out.

  I dragged Jonah south, along a weed-shot alley that dead-ended in a street running diagonally along a railroad track. Scattered gunshot echoed off the flanking buildings, spattering from all directions at once, unreal, like cap pistols fired off into garbage cans. I steered us southwest, then realized we were running straight toward Imperial Highway. We came out in the middle of bedlam.

  A band of rioters had broken through the police salient and were fanning into the streets beyond. Retaliating, the police waded into a group of bystanders and beat whomever they could reach, tearing them up like dogs catching squirrels. People thrown to the sidewalk and slammed into walls, guns popping off, glass shattering, and the crowd, everywhere routed, shrieking and running.

  Jonah fell back, choking, into a covered doorway. He leaned forward to ease the pressure in his chest. His left arm nursed his damaged right. He pointed in awe at my leg. I looked down. My right trouser was torn and blood oozed from my shin. We stood there, bodies whipping past like planets in broken orbit, close enough to touch.

  A scream broke toward us. One white policeman, swinging a nightstick, chased two middle-aged, bloodied blacks, who cut in the direction of our door before seeing us and swerving. The slow-heeled cop stood mired for a second before spotting us. I saw how we looked to him: my gouged leg, Jonah doubled over, half-shirtless, his arm scraped open, both of us panting, marked with a brown stripe of paint. He charged us, stick raised. I put up my hands to break the blow. Jonah, choking, delirious, fell back on instinct. He swung upright and shouted a kind of high B. The pitched cry brought the cop up short. His voice saved us from having our faces beaten in.

  The cop scrambled backward, one hand feeling for his gun. I got my brother’s hands into the air. More stunned than we were, the cop handcuffed us together. He marched us two blocks to a police van, prodding us with his stick, still in control, keeping us out in front of him, his captives. Jonah regained his voice. “Wait until your sister hears this. She’s gonna love us all over again. Old times.”

  The officer jabbed us on. He was still wondering why he hadn’t clubbed us senseless. Still trying to figure out why the voice had stopped him.

  We were taken by van with a dozen others to an auxiliary jail in Athens. All the ordinary facilities were filled. Arrests poured in by the thousands. All of black L.A. was locked up, but the riots kept flowing. We sat all night in a narrow cell with twenty men. Jonah loved it. He stopped complaining about the throb in his arm. He listened to every inflection, every seditious word as if this were rehearsal for some new dramatic role.

  Talk in the cell was a grim mix of threat and predictions. The most articulate of the group were testifying. “They can’t stop this anymore. They know they can’t. We’ve won already, even if they lock us all away and destroy the key. They had to call out the army, man. They need the army for us. The whole world knows now. And they’ll never forget.”

  We were held until late the following afternoon, when our officer showed up and admitted that all we’d done was cower in a doorway. Half of those still held had done no worse. Our story checked out—the record company, the rented car, Juilliard, our agent, America’s Next Voice—everything except the reason why we’d been at the scene of a riot in the first place. We must have been inciting, part of a conspiracy of educated, radical, near-white blacks filtering into the tinderbox and encouraging it to set itself alight. The way the police went at us, we’d done something far worse than looting, arson, and assault combined. We had everything—advantage, opportunity, trust. We were the future’s hope, and we’d betrayed it. Our crime was sight-seeing, coming by to watch while the city went up in flames. The booking officers verbally abused us, pushed us around a little, and threatened to hold us for trial. But finally, they discharged us in disgust.

  The law couldn’t waste its breath on us. By Friday evening, it was clear that Thursday night had been just a prelude. Friday was the real fire. The violence started early and built without respite the entire day. By Friday night, Los Angeles descended into the maelstrom.

  We heard it on the radio on the way to LAX. Nothing that night was flying in or out, for fear of getting shot out of the sky. We sat glazed in front of the reports, watching the blaze spread. Nothing in Southeast Asia could match it. The firefight moved out of Watts into the southeast city. Snipers fired on police. Police shot at civilians. Police shot themselves and blamed the mob. Six hundred buildings were gutted; two hundred burned to the ground. Dozens of people died of gun wounds, burns, and collapsing walls. Thousands of National Guardsmen swept through the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder, sowing still more anarchy. Jonah listened to the reports, his lips like lead.

  We stayed in the airport all night, sleeping less than we had in our cell. We didn’t fly back to New York until late Saturday night, by which time thirteen thousand Guardsmen roamed the streets of Los Angeles. The rebellion would roll on for another two days.

  On the long flight, Jonah played with the gash on his arm. He stared at the back of the seat in front of him and shivered. We were over Iowa when I finally found the nerve to ask him. “When you were lying there on the ground? Your lips were moving.”

  He waited for me to finish, but I already had. “You want to know what I was singing?” He looked around. He leaned in and whispered, “You can’t know. The whole score was right there in front of me. I was looking up into it. It sounded good, Joey. Real good. Like nothing I’ve ever heard.”

  His voice never again sounded as it had before that night. I have the recordings to confirm me.

 
SUMMER 1941 – FALL 1944

  She’s known the song her whole life. But Delia Daley never heard the full voice of human hatred until she married this man. Until she bore her first child. Only then does the chorus of righteousness pour down on her, slamming her family for their little daily crime of love.

  She’s guilty of the greatest foolishness, and for that she must be punished. Yet she will wake startled in the middle of the night, wondering whom she has injured so badly that they must come after her. What future unforgiving accusers? Every time she tallies up her sins, it comes to this: to think that recognizing means more than its opposite. To think that race is still in motion. That we stand for nothing but what our children might do. That time makes us someone else, a little more free.

  Time, she finds, does nothing of the kind. Time always loses out to history. Every wound ever suffered has only lain covered, festering. Some girlish, unenslaved part of her imagined their marriage might cure the world. Instead, it compounds the crime by assaulting all injured parties. She and David say only that family is bigger than guilt. And for this, guilt must rise up and punish them.

  Great spaces of life have always been closed to her. But the spaces remaining were larger than she could fill. Now even her simplest needs become unmeetable. She’d like to walk down the street with her husband without having to play his hired help. She’d like to be able to hold his arm in public. She’d like to watch a movie together or go for dinner without being hustled out. She’d like to sling her baby on her shoulder, take him shopping, and for once not bring the store to a standstill. She’d like to come home without venom all over her. It will not happen in her lifetime. But it must happen in her son’s. Rage buckles down in her each time she leaves the house. Only motherhood is large enough to contain it.

  Once, she thought bigotry an aberration. Now that she ties her life to a white’s, she sees it for the species’s baseline. All hatred comes down to the protection of property values. One drop: just another safeguard of ownership. Possession, nine-tenths of the law.

  Negroes, of course, make room for them. Her family, her aunt in Harlem, the church circuit, her friends from college. That saint Mrs. Washington, who keeps a roof over their heads. Nobody’s exactly thrilled with the arrangement, of course. But if whiteness depends on those who can’t belong, blackness is forever about those who must be taken in. Her boy is nothing special. Three-quarters of her race has white blood. Age-old rights of the plantation: the disclaiming owner, the disowning father. The difference this time is just that her child’s father sticks around.

  Not every white they must deal with is certified hopeless. Her husband’s band of émigré colleagues see her as no more irrelevant than any wife. They’ve witnessed more suspect matches, couples more wildly crossed. Those musicians among them will show up at her house at the mention of a soiree, ready to make music in any key. With them, she can relax. They no longer appraise her, waiting to see how long she can walk on her hind legs without wobbling. But then, these men are not quite of this world. They live down in the interstices of the atom, or up among the sweep of galaxies. People are to them irreducible complications. Most of these men have fled their own homes. By and large, they’re big on being allowed to live. Every other one a refugee: Poles, Czechs, Danes, Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians. More Hungarians than Delia knew existed. A big self-knit international nation of the dispossessed, the bulk of them Jewish. Where else could this hapless group live except where her David does—in the borderless state that recognizes no passports, the country of particles and numbers?

  There’s Mr. Rabi, who hired David and who David says will turn Columbia into a commuter suburb of Stockholm. There are Mr. Bethe, Mr. Pauli, Mr. Von Neumann—a trio of mad foreigners. And Mr. Leo Szillard, who may truly be crazy, who doesn’t work anywhere, but lives out of a suitcase at the King’s Crown, the hotel where David stayed when he first arrived. Mr. Teller, with his eyebrow thicket, who plays Bach so beautifully, he must be good. Mr. Fermi and his wife, the dark, beautiful Laura, who got lost on their way back to fascist Italy after picking up his Nobel in Sweden and wound up in New York, at Columbia, another of her husband’s revered colleagues.

  Delia dreaded these men for months, hated even meeting them. She’d shake their hands and mumble stupid, earthbound things as they sized her up, and she’d struggle hopelessly to make out what they mumbled back. At the first musical gathering she and David hosted, Delia spent the evening in the kitchen, hiding out with the door closed, inventing labors, while these men talked shop in terms her mama would have consigned to the devil. She banged around with pots and pans—the hired kitchen help—until a quartet of them burst in, wine and cracker crumbs all over their jackets, saying, “Come. The music is starting.”

  Now she only pities them, the ones who apologize for moving through the room, the ones—like that Mr. Wigner from Princeton—whose every movement is humbled by mysteries they can’t penetrate. It’s as David tells her, sometimes, while their flanks press against each other’s in the dark: “The deeper you look, the more God’s plan recedes. At the edge of human measurements, infinite strangeness.” Pitching tent in a place so strange must blunt a man’s tribalism.

  The foreign scientists are easy around her, an ease born in ignorance as much as anything. They aren’t pinned underneath the weight of that old crime that cripples the country they now inhabit. They don’t look at her and flinch by reflex. They don’t need to defend themselves to her. They share, a little, her tacit exile. Yet, even these upended Europeans carry the disease. Empirical skeptics one and all, they still run their built-in statistics, invisible but sight-driven, that universal assumption, so deep that they don’t even know it’s assumed. The fact is, every one of them is shocked the first time they hear her sing.

  And what if they’re right? Right to look on her as on a trout sprouting wings. Twenty generations, and the difference goes real. This is the souldestroyer, the one no one gets around. Not a day goes by that she doesn’t have to account for the tunes she chooses.

  Her husband can’t begin to understand. She feels that now, her distance from him. She’d never have married him but for the lost boy, the hidden future they fell into together at the stray boy’s words, that day in Washington. She knew what it would cost this man to take on her citizenship, to share her birthright. She could not hope to preserve him from whiteness’s revenge. So it stuns her, night after night, to rediscover: The harder that the offended orders press them, the closer they huddle.

  He loves her so simply, so free from belief and prior category. She has known unconditional love—her parents’ fierce care, more dogged in the wake of where they’ve been, grittier in the face of where she’s going. With David, she just is. She likes the woman he sees when he looks at her—a favorite winter constellation, the steady alignment of stars he always knows how to find.

  She loves his amazement at her, his mindful explorations and grateful surprise. His tenderness matured in the cask of being. The awe of his fingers tracing her round, resistant belly when it contained the capsule of their union. Around him, she feels a bashful calm, the lightness of a tinker’s plaything. When they lie next to each other, the boy in his crib at the foot of their bed, their shyness multiplied by this drop-in company, this humming third party, they are not anything. Nowhere but here. Their tune together is constant modulation, distant keys always falling back to do.

  In the daily hard work of getting along, he holds his own. Not much of a housekeeper, his hygiene more random than his irregular verbs. His habits madden her. He can leave a quart of ice cream on the counter and be shocked, two hours later, to find it sticking to his soles. But he laughs readily. And for a man of theory, he’s remarkably patient. For a man: as kind as memory is long.

  It helps that he’s older than she, more able to tell real worry from its many free riders. It saves them, a hundred times a month, that he has so little fixed investment in how things ought to be done. Their surprise divergences at
every hour delight him. He picks up a favorite phrase from her, the one she exclaimed the first time she saw him write the number seven. Few weeks go by—watching her cook a stew or pay a bill or hang a picture—when he won’t need to say, “Would you look at that!”

  Any less joint astonishment and they’d never have reached their first Labor Day. Melting pot New York puts them through a blast furnace; five minutes out on the sidewalk threatens to melt them down to slag. But indoors, all ore belongs to them. They can sing any tune going, and, more often than not, make any two of them fit together. They’ve come to love the same composers, along routes so different that each confirms the other’s divergence. Their chords take their beauty from the surrounding dissonance.

  They made love for the first time just before they married. It surprised her, after all those months of nerve-racking abstinence, their dizzy, stifled necking. His choice—God knows, she wasn’t waiting for any ring. Once she’d committed, she was in with all limbs. All those nights, when she visited in New York and he sent her back to her aunt’s, she’d go away thinking, Can he really be that otherworldly? Or is he holding out for me?

  And then, the week before the wedding, they never broke off. David whispering while he touched her beyond the highest limits of his prior touch, “Next week, we promise to the state. Tonight, I make my promise to just you.” When they were finished and she lay coiled back up inside herself, wondering whether it was all that she’d expected, unable to remember just what that had been, he smiled, so full of confusion that she thought for one awful eternity something was wrong.

  He waved his hand behind him, at yesterday. “I feel a little boy sitting on my shoulder. He’s heavy. Like an old man. He wants me to go somewhere!”

  “Where?” she asked, touching his lips.