Tens of thousands make the pilgrimage, each one for private motives. Lovers of free-flying danger. Those who’d have paid fortunes to witness this Europe-stealing phenomenon. Devotees who worshiped this woman’s throat before the force of destiny slipped into it. People who simply want to see a face like theirs up there on the marble steps, standing up to the worst the white world can throw at it and giving it all back in glory.
Over in Philadelphia, at Union Baptist, that temple towering over Fitzwater and Martin, this is the hour of deliverance, a congregation’s payback, though they’ve never sought the slightest reward. On this great gettin’-up morning, the pastor works Miss Anderson into his Easter sermon for the special early service. He speaks of the sound of a life that keeps on rising, breaking out of the grave, no matter how hard the far-flung empire might want it dead and buried. The great crescent banks of polished pews lean in to the message and ring it with amens. The children’s choir lets loose a noise more joyful than any it’s made since little Marian’s heyday, and the sound rises up to roost in the arcing carved rafters.
The gospel is good, and the church empties its worshipers like the contents of that old tomb. In Sunday finest, the great flock mills on the church porch, waiting for the busses, trading excitement, remembering the student recitals and the benefit concerts, the dimes pooled: Educate Our Marian, the pure voice of her people’s future.
The busses fill with song rolling across all registers, rich suspensions bridging the wilderness and Canaan. They sing searing anthems, tear off gospel hand-clappers, and lay into stolid four-part hymns. They sing a field full of spirituals, including their Marian’s favorite: “Trampin’.” “I’m trampin’, I’m trampin’, trying to make heaven my home.” The more pragmatic sing, “trying to make a heaven of my home.” Only this once, among the endless earthly schisms, the two inimical persuasions lie down alongside each other, separate parts in the same chorus.
Delia Daley’s adopted parish heads for the promised land without her. In her agony of one, Delia feels them leaving, abandoning her on the wrong side of those parting waters. She’s even had to miss the special sunrise service, saddled with her morning shift at the hospital, which she cannot slip. She stands at the nurses’ station, still begging for a charitable crumb, just an hour, half an hour’s mercy. The brick-complexioned Feena Sundstrom doesn’t even blink at her. “Everyone, Miss Daley, would like Easter Sunday off, our patients included.”
She considers leaving early anyway, but the Swedish Storm Trooper is already set to fire her just for looking sideways. Without the money coming in from her hospital hours, Delia can wave the last year of her voice training good-bye. She’d have to beg from her father again, just to have enough to graduate, something the man would no doubt almost love. She’s had to listen to the speech every semester for the last four years. “Allow me to remind you of a little matter of economic reality. You’ve heard about this party the high and mighty have dreamed up, a little thing called the Depression? Half our people, workless. It’s wiped out almost every Negro this country hasn’t already wiped out. You want to learn to sing? Take a look at what we folk have to sing about.”
When she told her father she wouldn’t be heading to Washington with Union Baptist, the doctor all but beamed. When she added that she’d be going later, by train, at extra expense, he turned back into Old Testament patriarch. “How is this indulgent excursion supposed to contribute to your making a living? Is that more of your magic of high art?”
No good telling him she makes ends meet. Miss Anderson makes a better living than ninety-nine hundredths of we folk, not to mention almost every white man alive. Her father would only repeat what he’s said endlessly since she entered school: The world of classical music makes professional boxing look like an ice-cream social. Gladiator combat unto death. Only the ruthless survive.
Yet Delia Daley has survived—her own brand of ruthless. Ruthless toward herself, toward her bodily strength, her available hours. A four-year, around-the-clock marathon, through every wall, and she’s ready to keep running, as long as she has to. Full-time at the hospital, twice that at school. Let her father see the power of high art.
But today art’s power falters, threatens to fall. The predawn shift is worse than murder, with nowhere to appeal. The feeble and infirm—always with us, as Jesus says, but somehow more numerous than usual, this Easter—lie waiting in their own waste for her to come clean them. She twice needs help in moving patients to get to the soiled linen. Then the Brick Nightingale makes her do second floor west’s bathrooms, just because the woman knows what today is. Feena the Fascist stands over her the whole while, sighing about colored people’s time. “You people are so slow getting in and so damn fast getting out.”
To augment the agony, three separate patients yell at her for clearing their breakfasts away before they’ve finish pecking at their vulcanized eggs. So Delia is almost a full, unpaid hour late getting out, counting the ten minutes of Feena’s reprimand. She runs home to wash and throw on a decent dress before rushing to the train, whose fare will set her back a week’s worth of hospital-subsidized lunches.
At home, her worst nightmare settles in for a double feature. Her mother insists she sit down for Easter dinner. “You have a bite of my holiday ham and get something green and filling in you. Specially if you’re taking a trip.”
“Mama. Please. Just this once. I’m going to miss her. I have to make the early train, or she’ll be done singing before I even—”
“Nonsense.” Her father dismisses her. “You won’t be late for anything. What time is she supposed to start? When has a singer of our race ever started a concert at the advertised hour?” He repeats the same litany each week when he takes her to Union Baptist for choir. His mirth is a running testament to how bitterly she has dashed his hopes.
Black’s not even half the battle. She, William Daley’s firstborn—cleverest baby ever birthed, either side of the line—has been his dream for achievement beyond even the unlikely heights he’s scaled in this life. She should go to medical school. He did. Pediatrician, internist, maybe. Do anything, if she weren’t so headstrong. Pass him up. Go to law school, first black woman ever. Force them to take her, on pure skill. Run for Congress, Lord help him.
Congress, Daddy?
Why not? Look at our neighbor, Crystal Bird Faucet. Rewriting all the rules— and she makes you look like Ivory soap. Washington’s next. Has to happen someday. Who’s going to move it down the line, if not the best? And the best, he insisted, was her. Somebody’s got to be the first. Why not his little girl? Make history. What’s history, anyway, except uncanting the can’t?
This is the measureless confidence that has led her astray. His fault, her singing. Stroked too much while growing up. Be anything. Do anything. Dare them to stop you. When she found her voice: You sound like the angels raised from the dead, if they still bothered with the likes of us down here. A sound like that could fix the broken world. How could she help but be misled?
But when he learned she meant to make singing her life, his tune changed keys. Singing’s just a consolation prize. Just a pretty trinket, to be put away for the day when we have some decent clothes. No one’s ever freed anybody with a song.
In her father’s house, standing over her mother’s linen table, Delia feels the creases in her shoulders. She gazes at her little brother and sisters spreading the holiday plates. Poor souls will have the fight of their lives just making it to adulthood. Just as much pressure from inside as from out.
Her mother catches her looking. “It’s Easter,” Nettie Ellen says. “Where else you going to eat, if not with your family? You’re supposed to set some example for these young ones. They’re growing up lawless, Dee. They think they can run around and do it all, no rules, just like you.”
“I have rules, Mother. Nothing but rules.” She doesn’t push. She knows her mother’s real terror. The doctor’s boundlessness will do his offspring in. There’s a lesson outside this house, a
truth too long and large to do much about. He should be readying his children, tempering their illusions, not setting them up for the kill.
Lawless Delia sits to dinner. She almost chokes, wolfing down a hunk of sugar-glazed ham. “It’s good, Mama. Delicious. The greens, the beets: Everything’s perfect. Best year ever. I have to go.”
“Hush. It’s Easter. You don’t have to leave for a while yet. It’s a whole concert. You don’t need to hear every song. There’s your favorite mince pie, still coming.”
“My favorite train to Washington’s coming before that.”
“Long gone,” brother Charles sings, twelve-bar, in a good tenor wail, new as of last year. “Long gone. That train that’s gonna save ya? Long gone.” Michael joins in the taunts, warbling his parody of a classical diva. Lucille starts to cry, sure, despite all reassurances, that Delia’s putting herself in danger, traveling to Washington all by herself. Lorene follows suit, because she always finishes anything her twin starts.
The doctor gets that look, the glare of domestic tranquillity. “Who is this woman to you, that you have to curtail Easter dinner with your family in order to—”
“Daddy, you hypocrite.” She wipes her mouth on her napkin and stares him down. He knows who this woman is better than anyone. He knows what Philadelphia’s daughter has single-handedly accomplished. He’s the one who told Delia, years ago, opened her eyes: The woman’s our vanguard. Our last, best hope of getting the white world’s attention. You want to go to singing school? There’s your first, best teacher.
“Hypocrite?” Her father stops in midforkful. She’s overstepped, one shade of will too deep. The doctor will rise up, a pillar of righteousness, and forbid her to go. But she holds his eyes; no other way out. Then the side of his mouth skews into a smirk. “Who taught you those big two-dollar words, baby? Don’t you ever forget who taught you them!”
Delia walks to the head of the table and pecks him high up on his balding crown. Through puckered lips, she hums “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” just loudly enough for him to hear. She hugs her scowling mother and then she’s gone, off to the station on another musical pilgrimage. She has made them for years, ever since the chance broadcast that changed her life. Made the trips to Colorado Street, Miss Anderson’s girlhood home, and to her second house on Martin Street. Walked around the halls of South Philly High, conjuring up the girl who walked them. Passed for Baptist, to her agnostic father’s dismay and her A.M.E. mother’s horror, just to attend, each week, the church of her idol, the woman who taught her what she might do with her life.
A framed magazine photo of that regal face has stared down from Delia’s desk these last two years, a silent reminder of all that sound can do. She heard it in that deep river of song flowing from her radio’s speaker, five years ago, and again in that shaft of light she basked in during Miss Anderson’s too-brief Philadelphia recital last year. She has shaped her own mezzo around that voice, fixed in her memory. Today she’ll see again, in the flesh, the owner of those sounds. Marian Anderson doesn’t even need to perform, for this trip to D.C. to pay off. All she needs to do is be.
Delia Daley subvocalizes on the train, shaping the lines in her mind. “The sound doesn’t start in the throat,” Lugati chides her every week. “The sound starts in the thought.” She thinks the notes of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” that Anderson standard, promised on the program for this day. They say the archbishop of Salzburg made her sing the Schubert twice. They say when she sang for a room of Europe’s best musicians a spiritual no one in the room could hope to have grasped, they grasped her anyway. And not a person dared applaud when her last note faded.
How must it feel, tone riding free on a column of breath, banking on the spirit’s slightest whim? Open throat, placement—all the techniques Lugati, her patient teacher, has harped upon these last years—will not teach her as much as this one train trip. Miss Anderson is her freedom. Anything her race cares to do, it will.
She steps off the train into a capital huddling under blustery April. She half-expects the cherry trees to greet her right inside Union Station. The coffered barrel vault arches over her, a fading neoclassical cathedral to transportation that she steps through, making herself small, invisible. She moves through the crowd with tight, effacing steps, waiting for someone to challenge her right to be here.
Washington: every fortunate Philadelphia schoolgirl’s field trip, but it has taken Delia until twenty to see the point of visiting. She heads out of the station and bears southwest. She nods toward Howard, her father’s school, where he suggested she go make something of herself. The Capitol rises up on her left, more unreal in life than in the thousands of silver images she grew up suspecting. The building that now stands open to her color again, after a generation, bends the very air around it. She can’t stop looking. She walks into the waking spring, the river of moving bodies, giggling even as she hushes herself up.
The whole city is a postcard panorama. Like being inside a white hand-me-down grade school civics text. Today, at least, the monument-flanked boulevards flow with people of all races. The group from Union Baptist told her to look for them up front on the left, near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She has only to hook right, on Constitution Avenue, to see how naive those plans were. There’ll be no rendezvous today. To the west, a crowd gathers, too dense and ecstatic to penetrate.
Delia Daley looks out over the carpet of people, more people than she knew existed. Her father is right: The world is vicious, too huge to care about even its own survival. Her steps slow as she slips in behind the mile-long crowd. All in front of her, the decades-long Great Migration comes home. She feels the danger, right down her spine. A crowd this size could trample her without anyone noticing. But the prize lies at the other end of this gliding crush. She breathes in, forcing her diaphragm down—support, appoggio!—and plunges in.
She expected something else, a lieder-loving concert crowd, only a little larger. The program today is hardly the Cotton Club. It isn’t even Rudy Vallee. Since when have Italian art songs pulled in such armies? She drifts across a barricaded Fourteenth Street at the crowd’s stately pace, falling under the outline of the Washington Monument, the world’s largest sundial, a shadow too long to read. Then she’s inside the whale’s belly, and all she can hear is the huge beating heart of the beached creature.
Something here, a thing more than music, is kicking in the womb. Something no one could have named two months ago now rises up, sucking in its first stunned breaths. Just past Delia in the press of bodies, a girl the color of her brother Charles—a high schooler, though from the look of her, high school is a vanished dream—spins around, flashing, to catch the eye of anyone who’ll look at her, a look of delivery that has waited lifetimes.
Delia pushes deeper into the sea, her throat, like a pennant, unfurling. Her larynx drops, the release Lugati has been hounding her these last ten months to find. The lock opens and a feeling descends on her—confirmation of her chosen life. Fear falls away, old leg chains she didn’t even know she was wearing. She’s on her appointed track, she and her people. Each will find her only way forward. She wants to kick back and call out, as so many around her are already doing, white people within earshot or no. This is not a concert. It’s a revival meeting, a national baptism, the riverbanks flooded with waves of expectation.
Inside this crowd, she feels the best kind of invisible. The slate-colored combed-silk dress that serves so well for Philadelphia concerts is all wrong here, too sleek by half, her hemline missing low by a full two inches. But no one marks her except with pleasure. She passes people fresh off mule-drawn tobacco-farm carts, others whose portfolios are padded with blocks of General Motors. To her right, a convention of overalls gathers together, huddled against the public. A stooped couple in black formal wear fresh from its Armistice Day outing brush past her, eager to push up close enough to catch a glimpse of the dais. Delia takes in the topcoats, capes, raglans, pelerines, the whole gamut from ratty to elegant, the n
ecklines cowled, draped, squared, and bateaued, all rubbing eager shoulders.
Her lips form the words, and her windpipe mimes the pitches: Every valley, exalted. A balding man about ten feet away from her, ghost white, with the Cumberland Gap between his two front teeth, perching inside a thin gray suit, starched blue shirt, and tie printed with Washington landmarks, hears her sing aloud what she has only imagined. “Bless you, sister!” the ghost man says. She just bows her head and lets herself be blessed.
The crowd condenses. It’s standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky. The deeper Delia wades in toward the speck of grand piano, the stickpin corsage of microphones where her idol will stand, the thicker this celebration. The press of massed desire lifts and deposits her, helpless, a hundred yards upstream, facing the Tidal Basin. Schoolbook cherry trees swim up to fill her eyes, their blossoms mad. They wave the dazzle of their pollen bait and, in this snowstorm of petals, fuse with every Easter when they ever unfolded their promissory color.
And what color is this flocking people? She’s forgotten even to gauge. She never steps out in a public place without carefully averaging the color around her, the measure of her relative safety. But this crowd wavers like a horizon-long bolt of crushed velvet. Its tone changes with every turn of light and tilt of her head. A mixed crowd, the first she’s ever walked in, American, larger than her country can hope to survive, out to celebrate the centuries-overdue death of reserved seating, of nigger heaven. Both people are here in abundance, each using the other, each waiting for the sounds that will fill their own patent lack. No one can be barred from this endless ground floor.
Far to the northwest, a mile toward Foggy Bottom, a man walks toward her. Twenty-eight, but his fleshy face looks ten years older. His neck is a pivot, his eyes behind their black horn-rims steadily measuring the life all around him. Just his being alive to measure this unlikeliness defies all odds.