The Time of Our Singing

  She reads the violence as her father steps into the room. She thinks at first, This bomb, this matter of morality he comes to discuss with David. But something nearer has happened. He doesn’t lean down to embrace the boys or carry them. He barely lets them cling to his legs before he brushes past down the corridor, radiating fury.

  She’s seen this before, more times than she cares to remember. Seen it first when she was no older than Joseph. In her boys’ faces, the seed of that poison tree: What did we do? The question she herself could never answer. Now it’s her boys’ turn to suffer the inheritance she can’t keep them from.

  Her father nears her, and she tries to hug him. He pecks her on the chin. She feels him struggle, with that last scrap of dignity so powerful in him, to bite down this rage and swallow it whole, a cyanide capsule they give to agents caught behind enemy lines. She knows he won’t be able to. He’ll wrestle and fail, no less spectacularly than the world has failed him. Meanwhile, she cannot ask, can’t do anything but play along, a show of cheer while waiting for all hell to break.

  It takes until after dinner. The meal itself—turkey, broccoli, and creamed corn—is polite, if strained. David doesn’t notice, or he’s shrewder than Delia ever supposed. He asks about the sulfa-drug conference and William answers in Western Union. William tries instead to rehash the mess at Potsdam and Truman’s doomed slum-revitalization program. David can only grin, hopeless on both scores. Delia feels them both fighting to stay off Japan, the atom shadow, the dawn of the new cosmic age. The case this night’s meeting was meant to hear.

  After the apple compote, her sons drift from the table to the spinet, that wedding gift from Dr. Daley, far and away their favorite toy. They tinker with octave scales. “Play me a nice old-time song,” Dr. Daley tells them. “Can you do that? You boys play a little tune for your grandpap?”

  The two boys—four and three—smash down onto the bench and play a Bach chorale: “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.” Jonah gets the melody, of course. Joseph holds down the bass. This is how it goes: two boys discovering the secret of harmony, delighting in passing dissonance, tumbling over the jumble of moving lines, romping through the transformed scale. “O Eternity, you thunderous word! You sword boring into the soul! Beginning minus ending, Eternity, time without time, take me whenever it pleases you!” Nobody in this room knows the words. It’s notes only in here tonight. The boys weave their runs, butt wrists, kick each other’s shins where they dangle in the air, lean away in the swell of progressions, come back playfully on the smallest slowing, home. The music is in them. Just in them, this opening chrysanthemum of chords. It makes them happy, each juggling lines utterly separate that nevertheless fall one inside the other. Breathing in this perfect solution to a day that belongs to no one.

  Some night, a life will arise that has no memory of where it came from, no thought of anything that has happened on the way here. No theft, no slavery, no murder. Something will be won then, and much will be lost, in the death of time. But this night is not yet that night. William Daley looks on these small boys, doing their chorale tumbling act. In that look lies every chord that music doesn’t speak. He shakes his head in wide, fact-denying arcs. The boys think he’s pleased, maybe even amazed, as every adult who has ever heard them has been. They lower themselves off the bench and toddle off to other discoveries. William turns to his daughter and stares at her, the way he once stared at his son Charles for playing coon songs on the parlor upright back home. The look sinks into her: accomplice, accuser. Anything you want. Wasn’t that the creed? The equal of any owner. The owner of all you would equal. Dr. Daley’s head shakes to a terrible stop. “What are you going to do with them?” He might mean anything. Anything you want.

  Delia rises and starts to clear the table. “David and I have decided to school them at home.” She’s almost in the kitchen by sentence’s end.

  “Is that so?”

  “We’ve thought about it, Daddy.” She swings back to the table. “Where can they get a better education? David knows everything there is to know about science and math.” She waves toward her husband, who bows his head. “I can teach them music and art.”

  “You going to give them history?” In the whip crack of his voice, there’s all the history he means. His fingers clamp around his water glass to keep his daughter from stealing it from him. “Where are they going to learn who they are?”

  She slips back into her seat without a sound. She wraps herself in this role, the way Mr. Lugati trained her to do onstage. We work hard during countless rehearsals, so we can be inside ourselves, free for that one performance. She reaches down to find that column of breath. “Same place I learned, Daddy. Same place you learned.”

  His eyes flash gunmetal. “You know where I learned who I am? Where I learned?” He turns toward David, who learned elsewhere. And that, Delia sees, is his unforgivable crime. “You asked about the conference? You wanted to know how the conference went?”

  David just blinks. No longer sulfa drugs. No more antibiotics.

  “I wish I could tell you. You see, I missed the better part of it. Detained downstairs in the lobby, first by the hotel dick, and later by a small but efficient police escort. A slight misunderstanding. You see, I couldn’t, in fact, be Dr. William Daley of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because Dr. Daley is a real medical doctor with genuine credentials, while I’m just a nigger busting his woolly head into a civilized meeting of medical professionals.”

  “Daddy. We don’t use that word in this house.”

  “You don’t? Your boys are going to have to learn it, between their pretty four-part hymns. Full dictionary definition. Count on it. Home school!”

  Her walls are in flames. “Daddy, you … I don’t understand you. You raised me …”

  “That’s right, miss. I raised you. Let’s agree on that.”

  She sees her lightness in the almond of his eyes. Has he forgotten? Does he think she has gone over, over to something as invented as the one laid down upon them?

  “‘You are a singer,’” she says. “‘You lift yourself up. You make yourself so damn good that they have to hear you.’”

  His palms flash outward. Look! “You’ve been out of school for half a decade. Where’s your career?”

  She falls back from him, smashed in the face.

  “She has been very busy,” David answers. “She is a wife and a mother of two. With one more coming.”

  “How has your career been? Family obligations haven’t kept you from tenure.”

  “Daddy.” The scale of the warning, in the back of Delia’s throat, startles even her.

  He won’t be humbled, not again this day. He wheels on her. “I’ll tell you where your career is. It’s waiting out back of the concert hall, in the alley. The Coloreds Only entrance. Which just happens to be boarded up for the foreseeable future.”

  “I haven’t really taken any auditions.”

  “What do you mean, ‘haven’t really’? Either you haven’t or you have.”

  “I’ll do more after the boys are older.”

  “How long does a voice last?”

  So many accusations come at her at once that she loses count. Smartest baby ever born, either side of the line, and she hasn’t become a lawyer, run for Congress, become even a mediocre concert artist. Hasn’t moved the race down the line. All she has done is raise two small boys, and that, apparently, not well.

  Her father drops into deep bass, a tone she’s never heard him use. The sound silts up with her mama’s yellow clay-bed Carolina, a place he’s not been, aside from one unwilling visit, for more than fifteen years. Forget tobacco, forget cotton: land too bleak for anything but the most pitiful beans and peanuts. Land too poor to pay its own rent. His voice comes out a note-perfect mock of his own battered-down father-in-law, the one Delia met just three awkward times in this life. Only the voice isn’t mocking. “Those people ain’t never gonna let you sing.”

  “They let Miss Anderson sing.”

  ??
?Sure. They let her sing, up at the Big House, on Novelty Night. Do a little dance, too, if she likes. Entertainment! Dogs on bicycles. Just make sure she gets back down to the darkie quarters when the act is over.”

  Delia sits, hands frozen on the half-cleared table. Some street gangster has taken over her daddy, the man who worked his private way through Ulysses, who corresponds with university presidents, who demanded David’s explanation of Special Relativity. The man who has spent his adult life easing the sick. Stripped of his clinic, separated from his wife, taken from the neighborhood where he has for years been a healing god, fingered in a hotel lobby and held like some petty crook or dope fiend. What the world sees will always destroy what he rushes to show it. There is no counter but that collapse that, in time, takes everyone. Identity.

  Dr. Daley walks over to the spinet. He plays the boys’ chorale from memory. He gets the first four bars, more or less as the backwoods cantor wrote them. It shocks Delia how good he is. He plays like one who has lost his native tongue. But he plays. She has never heard him play much of anything but snippets of Joplin. “That baby’s crying seemed to be,/Somewhere near the Sacred Tree.” A little broken boogie-woogie at Charlie’s memorial. Now this. By ear. Nothing but ear.

  William’s hands pull away from the saw-toothed Lutheran chords as if the piano lid just bit them. “You know what I hear when I hear that music? I hear, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’ I hear ‘White—all right: Brown—hang around: Black—get back.’”

  His daughter raises her blasted eyes to his. She tries for piano. Soft is harder than loud, as Lugati always said. “I’m sorry they were idiots at the conference, Daddy.” More reason, she wants to add, to beat them at what’s theirs.

  “Mount Sinai. Not idiots. Best there is.” His eyes test the extremes of punishment not yet visited on him. Stripped so easily, he knows no bottom. Held and humiliated for an hour: It cost him nothing. Laughable. Dust yourself off and walk away. But if that, why not locked up in the coat check, chained to the shoe-shine stand in Penn Station, kept illiterate, driven out of the polling place, beaten up for turning down the wrong alley, or hung from a ready sumac? Even the most stubborn self in time will be identified.

  From under his prayer shawl of silence, David speaks. “I have been thinking. What has been done to you today. This is an error of statistics.”

  William bolts up. “What do you mean?”

  “These are men who will not calculate while flying.”

  Dr. Daley stares at the man. He turns to his daughter, dumbfounded. Her lips pucker. “On the fly.”

  “Yes. On the flight. They are taking shortcuts in the steps of their deductions. They do not see the case, but only make bets on the basis of what they think likelihood tells them. Category. This is how thought proceeds. We cannot alter that. But we must change their categories.”

  “Likelihood be hanged. This is nothing but animal hatred. Two species. That’s what they see. That’s what they’re intent on making. And damn us all, that’s what we’re going to be. They couldn’t see my clothes. They couldn’t hear my speech. I was quoting whole chapters from the seventh edition of the motherfucking Merck Manual …”

  “My father told me it happens.” Her voice spinto, sailing on the shakes. She needs only ride this out. “My father taught me to live through it. To make a me too big to take away.”

  “And what will you tell your children?”

  Jonah chooses this moment to reenter the room. And where he strays, Joey isn’t far behind. Two preschoolers wandering in the woods, the pointless thicket of adulthood. William Daley clasps his eldest grandson’s shoulders. In this room’s light, the boy’s beige throws him. Somewhere between hang around and all right. A bent harmonica note, neither sharp nor natural. Between: like a rheostat, the slow turn of a radio dial receiving, for the slightest subtended turn, two stations at once. Like a coin landing freakishly on its edge, before the laws of likelihood condemn it to fall on one face or the other. He looks at this boy and sees a creature from the next world. Something comes back to him, an unusable aphorism he found while wasting his time trespassing in Emerson: “Every man contemplates an angel in his future self.”

  “Joseph,” he says.

  “Jonah.” The boy giggles.

  The doctor swings around on his daughter. “Why in the name of hell did you call them the same thing?” Back to the boy, he says, “Jonah. Sing me something.”

  Little Jonah starts out on a long, mournful canon. “By the waters, the waters of Babylon. We laid down and wept, and wept, for thee, Zion.” God knows what he thinks the syllables mean. Little Joey, a year younger, hears the round and waits, nailing his entrance, as he does with his parents night after night. But tonight, neither parent chimes in, and the canon trickles off after only two entrances.

  “Sing me another,” Papap commands. And the boys, happy to oblige, start up another round: “Dona nobis pacem.” William holds his finger up, cuts them off before the three words are out. “What about our music?”. He looks at the boys. But it’s their mother who answers.

  “When was it ever ours, Daddy?” Ours: the black aristocracy, the Talented Tenth. The most despised people of the most despised people on earth.

  He falls into oratory. “Before the Pilgrims,” he says, still regarding his grandchildren. “We were here, making our sounds.”

  “I mean, when was it yours? Ours. Around the house. What music did we ever make our own? I had Mama’s church tunes, everything that came out of the A.M.E. hymnal. And I had your set of Teach Yourself the Classics 78’s. I used to sneak off with Charlie to listen to the wild sounds from New York and Chicago. All the stuff you never let us tune the radio to. ‘Best way to have yourself treated like a savage is to sound like one.’ I knew the music that scared you and the music that you felt you had to learn. But aside from a few turn-of-the-century rags you used to play when you thought nobody was listening—oh, I loved it when you played those!—I didn’t even know what music you liked. I didn’t even know you could …” She points toward the spinet, the smoking gun.

  “You want these boys to sing? You want these boys to love … This boy.” He points to the darker one. His hand chops the air, fighting off the creep of prophecy. He can’t bear to look on his pronouncement. “This boy is going to be stopped, a quarter century from now. Going into some concert hall. Told there’s some mistake. He wants the stage on the other side of town. Not his music, going on inside. Complex, cultivated stuff. He wouldn’t understand.”

  “Dein, was du geliebt, was du gestritten.” The words issue from nowhere, no person. “What you have loved, what you have fought for, that is yours.”

  Dr. Daley swings around to face the challenge. There was a time when he’d have asked where the words came from. Now he says, “Who let you think so?”

  Delia rises, as on the day of Resurrection. She glides over the floor to her father. Before he can pull away from her, she’s behind him, one hand draping onto the coiled mass of shoulder, one hand painting the patterned patch of baldness at the crest of his majestic skull. “What do you love, Daddy? What music do you love?”

  “What music? Do I love?”

  She nods, head jittering, teeth bared through her tears. Humming the first few bars of anything under her breath. Ready to be his little girl again at his first word.

  “What music?” He thinks so long, he exhausts the catalog. “I sincerely wish that were the issue.” He lets himself be stroked, though only in distraction. “You’ve dropped your babies right down in between, haven’t you? Dead halfway. No-man’s-land.”

  She stands bathed in unearthly calm. “We were already between, Daddy. We were always between.”

  “Not always.”

  And then her mistake: “Everybody’s between something. Everybody’s halfway.” She fancies she speaks the words in something like her mother’s voice.

  But her father turns on her with a force that startles her fingers off him. He hisses at her, soft and civilized. “No, my
little halfway opera singer. Everyone is not. Some people aren’t even what they are. You think that just because their father is a white man, the world will—”

  “A white man?” Jonah giggles. “A man can’t be white! You mean like a ghost?”

  William Daley stares at Delia, stopped in place. His face hangs broken, waiting for explanation. But frozen by that pianissimo, by what her words have done, she can say nothing.

  The boy is enjoying himself. “How can a man be white? That’s silly.”

  “Sing something for your Papap,” their mother says. “Sing ‘This Little Light of Mine.’”

  “What are you teaching them?” The voice comes up at her out of the ground. A voice that puts an end to song. The voice of God rising up to ask Adam and Eve just what they thought they were hiding. Her mind snaps free to race ahead into its own answer. Adam and Eve, it hits her: Those two must have been a mixed-race couple. How else? What other scheme could have populated the whole world?

  “We’ve thought about this, Daddy.”

  “You’ve thought about this. And what has your thought led you to think?”

  David shakes himself from the undergrowth. He leans forward to give their reasons. But Delia holds out a palm to stop him. Make yourself the equal, the owner of this explanation. “We’ve decided to raise the children beyond race.”

  Her father turns, shakes his ears, deafened. Something pitiless infects his head. “Again?”

  “One quarter of a century from now,” David begins. Both Negroes ignore him.

  “We’ve made a choice.” Every word sounds, even to Delia, overmeasured. “We don’t name them. They’ll do that for themselves.” Anything they want. “We’re going to raise them for when everybody will be past color.”