“Joey. Joey.” Ruth’s eyes filled with liquid. She grieved for me. “Why are you hiding from this? Don’t you see what they have done to us?”
Robert lowered the edge of his enormous hand to the table. “If the police had had a black suspect for this thing, the man would have fried six weeks after the crime.”
I looked up at this stranger. How long had they been working on this theory together? Where had they gotten these photocopies? My sister had said more about her mother’s death to this outsider than she’d ever shared with me. I sat rubbing water droplets off the outside of my glass. We’d been born in the same place, within a few years of one another, of the same parents. Now my sister lived in another country.
“Da collected on Mama’s life insurance.” I studied her as I spoke. I only now realized how criminal we’d been toward her. Most of that insurance money went into launching Jonah and me into performing orbit. Ruth had gotten only a fraction, for college tuition. And now she’d quit school. “If the insurance company had even a shred of evidence to make them doubt …”
Ruth looked at Robert, their proof wobbling. I’d wanted only to relieve her. I’d done just the opposite. Robert shrugged. “I’m sure the insurance company looked into it, as far as they were able to. They couldn’t prove fraud. Once that wasn’t the issue, they couldn’t be bothered with how the woman died.”
“Ruth. Listen to me. You know that Da would never have let this go by without an investigation. Not if there had been the smallest thing to go after. Any suggestion at all.”
Ruth stared back. I was failing her, attacking. But she still needed me for something I couldn’t understand. “The man is a white man. He has no concept of such things. He needed it to be an accident. Otherwise, her death is on his conscience.”
And Ruth: she needed the opposite. Mama murdered, and by someone we’d never know. Someone who might not even have known us. It was the only explanation that left her anyplace in the world to live. I lifted up the sheaf of copies, their body of evidence. “What are you planning to do with this?”
They looked at each other, too tired to enlighten me. Ruth shook her head and lowered it. Robert grimaced. “Black person’s never going to get a case like this looked into.”
I had the bizarre sensation they wanted me to get Da—some white person—to press the case. “What on earth do you want from me?” I heard the words leave my mouth and could not take them back.
Ruth pressed her clenched fingers against her lips. “Don’t worry, Joey. We don’t want anything from you.” Robert shifted in the booth. He looked down on the bench between them as if he’d dropped something. I felt a surge of admiration for the man, based on nothing but his willingness to be here. “We just thought you’d want to know how your mother …” Ruth’s voice turned liquid. She took the copies away from me and slid them back into her satchel.
“We have to tell Jonah.”
Some mix of hope and hatred rose in my sister’s eyes. “Why? So he can call me crazy, just like his little brother did?” Her lip trembled, and she bit it in, just to make it stop.
“He has a better head for … He’ll want to know what you think about this.”
“Why?” Ruth said again, her tone now pure self-defense. “I’ve been trying to tell him something like this for years. I can’t say shit to him without him busting my ass. The man despises me.”
Her mouth crumpled like a rear-ended car. Her eyes welled over and one glinting thread started down the walnut of her left cheek. I reached over and took her hand. It didn’t pull away. “He doesn’t despise you, Ruth. He thinks you don’t—”
“Last time I saw him?” She flipped her hand up toward her new hair. “He said I looked like a doo-wop backup singer. Said I sounded like Che Guevara’s diary. He just laughed in my face.”
“He was probably laughing in pleasure. You know Jonah …” I wasn’t halfway through the sentence when it hit me. “Hold on. You mean you’ve seen him recently?” She looked away. “He never told me … You never said anything!” I took my hand away from hers. She scrambled for it back.
“Joey! It was only five minutes. It was a bleeding disaster. I couldn’t say anything to him. He started shouting me down before I even—”
“One of you two might have told me. I thought something had happened to you. I thought you might be in trouble, hurt …”
She hung her head. “I’m sorry.”
I looked at her. The little girl who’d sung “Bist du bei mir” at her mother’s funeral. “Ruth. Ruth.” Another syllable and I was finished.
She didn’t look at me, but rooted around in her satchel for her wallet. Pay and run. Then she stopped and blurted, “Joey, come with us.”
My eyes widened and my right hand pointed downward: Now? I turned to Robert. His face set into that look: If not now, when? The fire—their theory about it, our argument—was just a passing item on a more sweeping agenda. “Come … Where are you going?”
Ruth laughed, a good alto laugh, from the gut. She wiped her eyes dry. “All sorts of places, brother. You name it, we’re headed there.”
A grin like the sun broke across Robert’s face. “It’s all happening. Anything we work hard enough at.”
I kept still. I was just happy, for a second, to have my sister back.
“We need you, Joey. You’re smart, competent, educated. People are dying, in Chicago, down in Mississippi. My God, over in Bed-Stuy. People dying by miles, because they refuse to die by inches anymore.”
“What are you … ?”
“We’re working for the day, brother. It’s easy. We’re everywhere.”
“Are you with some kind of organization?”
Ruth and Robert traded glances. They made an instant negotiation, appraising my file and deciding on discretion. Robert may have made the call, but my sister agreed. Why should they trust me, after all? My side was clear. Ruth reached across the table and took my elbow. “Joey, you could do so much. So much for people like us. Why are you … ?” She glanced at Robert. He wasn’t going to help her. I blessed the man for refusing, at least, to judge me. “You’re stuck in time, brother. Look at what you’re peddling. Look who’s buying. You don’t even see. How can you play that jewelried shit while your own people can’t even get a job, let alone protection under the law? You’re playing right into the power-hoarding, supremacist …” She checked her volume. “Is this the world you want to live in? Wouldn’t you rather work for what’s coming?”
I felt a million years old. “What’s coming, Ruth?”
“Don’t you feel it?” Ruth waved at the plate-glass window behind me—the world of 1967. I had to keep from turning around to look. “Everything’s shaking loose. It’s all coming down. New sounds, everywhere.”
I heard Jonah singing, in a funky falsetto, “Dancin’ in the Streets.” I raised my head. “We play a lot of new music, you know. Your brother is very progressive.”
Ruth’s laugh was brittle. “It’s over, Joey. The world you’ve given your life to has played out.”
I looked down at my hands. I’d been playing some piece on the tabletop. As soon as I noticed my hands, they stopped. “What do you suggest I do instead?”
Ruth looked at Robert. Again, the warning flash. “There’s more work to do than I can begin to tell you.”
An awfulness came over me. I didn’t even want to look at the evidence. “You two aren’t involved in anything criminal, are you?” I’d lost her already. I had nothing more to lose.
My sister’s smiled tightened. She shook her head, but not in denial. Robert took a chance far bigger than mine. “Criminal? Question doesn’t mean anything. You see, the law has been aimed against us for so long. When the law is corrupt, you no longer need to treat it like the law.”
“Who decides this? Who decides when the law—”
“We do. The people. You and me.”
“I’m just a piano player.”
“You’re anything you want to be, man.”
I backed into the corner of the booth. “And who are you, man?”
Robert looked at me, ambushed, reeling. I’d gone for anger; I got pain. I heard my sister say, “Robert’s my husband.”
For a long time, I could produce no answer. At last I said, “Congratulations.” All chance of feeling glad for them was lost. I’d have played at their wedding, all night long, anything they wanted. All I could do now was accept the news. “That’s great. How long?” Ruth didn’t answer. Neither did her husband. The three of us twisted in place, each sentenced to a private hell. “When were you going to tell me?”
“We just told you, Joe.”
“How long have we been sitting here?”
Ruth wouldn’t look at me. Robert met my eyes and murmured, “Actually, we weren’t going to tell you at all.”
My back slammed into the booth. “Why? What have I done to you?”
Ruth swung her face toward me. Her look said, What have you done for me? But she saw me, and broke. “It isn’t you, Joey. We didn’t want the news … to get back.”
“Get back? You mean to Da?”
“Him. And … your brother.”
“Ruth. Why? Why are you doing this to them?”
She folded into the man and put her arm around him. He hugged her back. My brother-in-law. Her protection against my words. Against all that the rest of us had done to bust her ass. “They’ve taken their stand. I’m not their business anymore.”
Everything in the declaration sounded forced and wrong. From across the booth, my sister’s marriage—I could hardly think the thing—seemed doomed before it started. “They’ll want to know. They’ll be happy for you.” I didn’t even sound feeble.
“They’d find some way to insult me and my husband both. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Don’t you dare tell them. Not even that you saw me.”
“Ruth. What’s happened? What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing’s got into me, brother. Everything was in me already. From birth.” She put her arm out on the table for me to examine. Physical proof.
“How can you treat Da like this, Ruth? The man’s your father. What has he ever—”
She tapped her satchel, the manila folder. “He knew. The man knew all about these reports, a month after it happened.”
“Ruth, you don’t know for—”
“He never said a word to us. Not then. Not when we got older. Everything was always just an accident. Just fate. He and his so-called housekeeper—”
“Mrs. Samuels? What does Mrs. Samuels have—”
“The two of them, raising us like three sweet little white kids. See No Race, Hear No Race, Sing No Race. The whole, daily, humiliating, endless …” Her body started to shake. Robert Rider, her husband, rested his hand on her back, and she collapsed. She curled into his open hands. Robert just sat there, patiently petting her burst of uncoiling hair. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. But it was no longer my place to offer comfort.
“That was their answer, Ruth. Move the world forward. Shortcut into the future, in one generation. One jump—beyond tribes.”
“That’s not a place,” she hissed. “That’s not a future.” I waited for her to finish the thought. She already had.
“If Da thought for one minute that someone …” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Whatever he told us or didn’t tell us about the fire, I’m sure he was just trying to honor her memory.”
Ruth put her palms out to stop my words. She’d had enough of me and my kind. She pulled away from her husband’s petting, ran her hands through her globe of hair, and blotted both eyes with a wadded napkin. When she took the napkin from her face, she was composed again. Ready for all the world’s work her parents had failed to tell her about. She grabbed her satchel and rose, speaking more to her wristwatch than to me. “You’ve got to give the man up, Joey.”
“The man? Give him up?”
“He’s done nothing but exploit you. From the beginning of time.”
“Da? Exploit me?”
“Not Da!” Her mouth twisted with agony. She wouldn’t say his name.
“Jonah?” I waved toward her satchel, the evidence. “Jonah doesn’t know anything about this. He can’t reject your theory if you never even—”
“Jonah,” she enunciated like a Met radio announcer, “doesn’t know much about anything beneath his perch.” Robert chuckled. I would have, too. Little Rootie had always been the perfect mimic.
“He’s doing what he can. What he does best in the world.”
“Being white, you mean?” She waved me off before I could counter. “You don’t have to defend him, Joey. Really, you don’t. So he’s got a secret. I ain’t gonna tell no one!”
“We could use a voice like that.” The way Robert said this made me guess: She’d slipped him into a concert. He’d heard his new brother-in-law sing, and the memory of that sound left even him a little ashen. “Whole world’s on fire. We could use everyone.”
“He’d end up using us,” Ruth said. She hated him. I couldn’t even admit it long enough to ask why. “Well, brother?” She pulled out her wallet and rooted for some dollars. I wondered what she was doing for money. I didn’t even know what my new brother-in-law did for a living. “You’ve heard all the evidence. The facts of what really happened to us. Make your own choice.”
“Ruth. What choice? You make this sound like some kind of cosmic showdown.” She tilted her head at me and lifted her eyebrows. “What choice am I supposed to make? I can play the piano, or I can help you save our people?”
“You can make a difference. Or not.”
“For God’s sake. You won’t even tell me where you’re living. You won’t even tell me what you’re involved in. Are you running guns or something? Bombing buildings?”
Robert’s massive hand came across the table and landed on my wrist. But softly, certain. Too graceful to frighten. He’d have made a magnificent cellist. “Look. Your sister and I have joined the Party.”
“The Party? The Communist party?”
Ruth chuckled. She pressed her palms into her cheeks. “Hopeless. The boy is hopeless.”
A Morse code smile flicked across Robert’s face. “Panthers.” He leaned forward. “We’re helping set up a New York chapter.”
Ruth was right. I was the white man’s nigger. Just the sound of the word scared me. I sat for a while, turning the name over in my head until it disintegrated. “Where’s the black leather jacket?”
“Left it at home.” Robert grinned, released my wrist, and waved outside. “I thought it was going to rain.”
Had she grown radical out of love, or fallen for the man out of politics? “You going to shoot at people?” I asked my little sister.
I meant it as a nervous joke. Ruth answered, “They’re shooting at us.” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even breathe without betraying some blood relation.
My sister saw my agony. She stiffened, ready to go to war. But her husband shifted between us, softening. “Land, bread, education, justice, and peace. That’s all we’re talking.”
“And the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”
Ruth laughed. “Joey! You’ve been reading the newspapers. White newspapers, of course. But still.”
Robert nodded. “We’re fighting that bill, yeah. We have to. Police want us empty-handed. Whites want us to be the only ones without arms. Then they can keep doing anything they damn please to us.” It sounded like madness to me. As terminally mad as the streets of Watts. And yet, aside from that one nightmare evening, I knew my life to be a far crazier, far more sheltered dream. “A man has a right to defend himself,” my brother-in-law was saying. “So long as the police go on killing us at will, I’m holding out for that right. They’ve got the choice: the Whited States of America or the Ignited States.”
His words were empty of theater. The sound died in the room’s background chatter. I saw what Ruth responded to in the man. I, too, needed his approval, and I didn’t even know
him. Ruth pulled at her husband. “Come on, Robert. Joey’s busy. Too busy for the facts. Too busy for what’s coming.”
“Ruth!” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “You’ll kill me. What does any of this have to do with … ?” I waved at her satchel.
“With how your mother died? I thought it might help you decide whose son you are. That’s all.”
My mammy’s own bairn. I spoke slowly, trying to find the beat. “My mother married my father. They raised us as they thought right. She died in a fire.” The fire didn’t kill her.
“Your mother died in what was more than likely an act of racial hatred. Every day, someone somewhere dies the way she did.”
“Your mother …” And I couldn’t anymore. Neither of us owned her. She was lost to us both. I looked at Ruth for a last moment. “Mama sang a mean Grieg.”
She didn’t reply. A look crossed her face. I saw it clearly, but I couldn’t read it. She threw too much money down on the table and the two of them left. I wanted to stand up and follow them, at least for a street or two. But I was stuck to the booth, worthless, without belief.
I didn’t tell Jonah I saw her. If he guessed, he never said as much. I never asked about his seeing her. I never even hinted at the meeting to Da. My loyalty to Ruth was greater than anything I owed either man, if only because I’d betrayed her so badly already. Each time I spoke to my father now, I saw a sheaf of photocopied police reports hidden away in his memory’s files. Did he know what they contained? Could he say what they meant? I couldn’t even form the questions in my head, let alone ask him. But Da sounded different to me now, filtered through all the things he’d never told me, whether they were his to tell me or not.
The year has become an operatic blur. Three astronauts burned alive on the launchpad. A South African surgeon put one man’s living heart in another man’s body. Israel ran through the assembled might of the Arab armies in six days, and even my anti-Zionist father feared something biblical in the lightning victory.
A play where a turn-of-the-century black boxer kissed his white wife onstage scandalized audiences worse than the real-life boxer had, half a century before. Tracy and Hepburn struggled with the prospect of a black son-in-law. A black man took his place on the Supreme Court, and I wondered if my sister’s husband took any pleasure in the event. Marshall’s appointment seemed, even to me, too little too late. Seventy separate riots spread through more than a dozen cities over the course of the year. The country turned upon itself, twisting on two simple words: Black Power.