But her father’s resolution only stiffens hers. She won’t surrender anything. Yes, of course: She’ll give them warmth, welcome, riffing, the congregating joy of call and response, a dip in that river, deep enough to sport in all their lives. She must give them the riches that are theirs by birth. Negro. American. Of course they must know the long, deadly way those terms have come. But she refuses to give them self by negation. Not the old defeating message that they’ve already been decided. All she can give them is choice. Free as anyone, free to own, to attach themselves to any tune that catches their inner ear.
But maybe her father is right. Maybe it’s only their lightness that gives them even the slightest leeway. Maybe choice is just another lie. There is a freedom she wouldn’t wish on anyone. She takes her boys outside, west, toward the river, down to the nearest strip of green in all this stone, the three of them out in the open air for all to appraise. She sees their triad of tones through the parkgoers’ gazes. Her body flinches, as always, under the assault. She hears what her neighbors call this freedom she would give. Striving. Passing. Turning. But what of her boys’ other family, that lineage she knows nothing about, cleaned out, solved, finally, by this world that stands no complications? Isn’t that family every bit as much theirs?
In the park, her boys climb on a set of concrete stairs as if it’s the greatest playground ever built. Each step is a pitch they cry out as they pounce on. They turn the staircase into a pedal organ, chasing up the scale, hopping in thirds, stepping out simple tunes. Two other children, white, see their ecstasy and join, hurtling up and down the flights, screaming their own wild pitches until their parents come shepherd them away, their averted glances apologizing to Delia for the universal mistake of childhood.
The incident does nothing to lessen her JoJo’s joy. Their manic pitchclimbing continues unabated. She can tell them now or wait for simplifying whiteness to inform them later. This is the choice that leaves her no choice. She knows what’s safest, the best defense against the power that will otherwise lynch them. The first attack, the first hate-whispered syllable will name them. They’ll suffer worse than their mother ever suffered, pay most for being unidentifiable. But something in Delia needs to believe: A boy learns by heart the first song he hears. And the first song—the first—belongs to no one. She can give them a tune stronger than belonging. Thicker than identity. A singular song, a self better than any available armor. Teach them to sing the way they breathe, the songs of all their ancestries.
When David comes home, she recognizes him again. The two of them: theirs. Her whole body shakes with relief, as if she’s stepped out of neck-high burial in a snowbank. She lurches down the front hall to grab him. Surely, if two people love the same thing, they must love each other a little. He takes her in his arms at the door, even before he takes off his hat. “This is not forever,” he says. “We will all be back, once more in the same place.” But they can’t be back, because they never have been. Not in the same place. Never even once.
After dinner and singing, radio and reading to the boys, they lie in bed. They talk into the night, softly to each other, after the boys fall asleep. Her JoJo can hear anyway. The words of this conversation go straight into dreams that will vex them for the rest of their lives.
“He’s angry with me,” David says. “Yet I feel I’ve done nothing wrong. Only what my country has asked of me. What everyone would have done.”
This angers her. It makes her Daddy wrong. Some man should apologize, even if he’s the injured party. Because he has been injured. For a moment, she hates them both, for neither saving her. “He’s angry with me,” she whispers back. But she doesn’t say why. That, too, is a loss of faith. Thinking David would never understand.
“We can call him tomorrow. Explain that it has all been a confusion. A Missverständnis.”
“It isn’t,” she hisses. “That isn’t what it was.” She feels her husband’s body tense in the first edge of anger against her, her opposition. Is no one above this need to be redeemed?
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that I’m sick of it. I want it to be over.”
His hand slides sideways across the sheet and finds hers. He thinks she means last night’s argument. This private war. “It will be over. It must be. How can something so angry last forever?”
He thinks she means Rassenhass. “It already has.”
He listens to her. If nothing else, this. “You want it to be over. But how should it end? How should the world best be? I mean, one thousand years from now? Ten thousand? What is the right place? The place we must try to reach?”
She’s never really had to say, not to herself, let alone anyone other. Every perfect place she starts to name already has a piece of evil slithering through it. She wants to stop talking, to roll over and sleep. She has no answer. But he asks her. This is the conversation, the terms of the contract they must improvise.
“The right place … the place I want … Nobody owns anybody. Nobody has claim on anything. Nobody’s anybody. Nobody’s anything but their own.”
She squeezes shut her eyes. The only place that calms her a little. The only place she can live. The only sane landing place. If it’s the right place for a thousand years from now, why not for her boys? For patience means submission, and waiting is never.
“This is where we go live, then. We call your father tomorrow.”
“He won’t … get it.”
“We call. We talk to him.”
What ignorance. Her father’s right: right about all things. She’s the one trying to get away, trying to trick the truth. She has no right to call and talk to him. All she has a right to is lasting reprimand.
“Remember what we saw,” David says. “Remember what’s coming.”
She can’t decide now whether what they saw even belonged to this world. No: It’s too soon for this life, too far out ahead of anything their children can reach. Something in this place needs race. Some groundfloor tribalism, something in a soul that won’t be safe or sound in anything smaller or larger. The day violence gets them, the day her boys meet those centuries of murder, on that day, they will hate her for not giving them the caste this caste-crazed country finally demands. But until that day, she’ll give them—however illusory or doomed—self. And let the image stand in for the thing.
She will not cut them off from their own. “We call tomorrow,” she says. But tomorrow comes and goes without a call. Shame blocks them, guilty memories. She can’t bear those words again, those accusations cutting her to the quick. She has no answer but this deliberate theft, this criminal leap ahead, this shortcut across one thousand years.
The baby’s coming. “The baby’s coming”: This is her Joseph’s universal cure, his answer to all things. The child has taken ownership of the mystery, this new life from nowhere. He wants Delia to eat more, to make the baby come faster. He wants to know what day the baby will arrive, and when this day will become that one.
Three weeks go by, with no contact from Philadelphia. Then a month. The same fire-forged pride that allowed her father to survive this country now turns to the task of surviving her. She can’t bear it, not with the new baby on the way. Something horrible is happening, fueled by love, something she can’t put right in herself, in her father, a fear as wild as the fear of losing oneself, going under.
She crumples and gives in. She writes a letter to her mother. It’s the child’s first trick, playing on her weaker parent. The letter smacks of cowardice. She types it without a return address, so her daddy won’t throw it out unopened. She mails it from New Jersey, laundering the postmark. She lies from the very first sentence: says she doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t understand. She tells her mama she needs to talk, to work out a way to patch things up. “Anywhere. I’ll come to Philadelphia. It doesn’t have to be the house. Anyplace we can talk.”
She gets a note back. It’s little more than an address—Haggern’s, a sandwich shop
on the edge of the old neighborhood, a short-order grill where her mother used to take her when they went shopping—along with a date and time. “You’re right. The house is not a good idea just now.”
The sentence destroys Delia. She’s a wreck until she steps on the train to Philly. She’s showing now, huge with her new one. She needs to get right with her folks before she delivers. Though she’s not due for weeks, this heaviness feels like she could give birth any second. She takes the boys with her on the train—too long to leave them with Mrs. Washington. Her mother will want to see them. They’ll make the meeting easier.
She’s sitting at Haggern’s a quarter hour before she needs to be. It surprises her when her mother walks in with the twins. They’ve just been shopping. It presses on Delia’s chest harder than she can understand. Her mother looks furtive, conspiratorial. But the thrill of seeing her grandsons smoothes out her crumpled face.
Lucille and Lorene: Can it have been that long? Just months, but there’s something new to them, suddenly adult, an earnest show of long skirts and pleated blouses, a new weight in their step. “How’d you girls get grown up so fast? Turn around. Turn round; let me look at you! Where’d you find those shapes overnight?”
Her sisters look at Delia as if she has declared against them. Daddy has said something. But they eye her swollen belly as well, their envy, fear, and hope all rolled into one. Nettie Ellen slings into the booth across from Delia and the boys. She reaches across, taking their pale heads into her searching hands. But even as she fondles them, she murmurs to her daughter, “What in heaven’s name you say to that man?”
“Mama, it’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?”
Delia feels weary and older than the earth. Silted, slow, and winding like a switchback river. But wronged, too. Betrayed by her bedrock trust. Hurt by ones who know her hurt. That horrific night: David and her father trading accusations: an Olympics of suffering. The moral leverage of pain. Two men who couldn’t hear their nearness. They’re the ones who ought to be sitting in this booth, across from each other. Not this old fallback alliance, mothers against men. Delia tries for her mother’s eye, just a little flicker to show that the alliance still holds. “He doesn’t like the way I’m rearing up my young.”
“He don’t like you scrubbing these leopards spotless.”
“Mama,” she pleads. Her eyes dart downward.
“Girls? Take your nephews over to that gum-ball game at Lowie’s.” She fishes in her pocketbook for two nickels for her grandsons to feed the mechanical gum-ball claw. The same prehistoric Saturday ritual she and Delia shared.
Delia scurries in her purse to beat her mother. “Here. Here, now. Take these.”
The twins don’t want anyone’s coins. “We’re not children,” Lucille says.
Lorene echoes her. “Come on, Mama. We know what’s happening.”
Nettie Ellen touches the teen conspiratorially. “Don’t I know that, child! It’s your nephews, need a little expert tending.”
The secret appeal overwhelms them. They sweep the boys up the way they used to during the war, when they’d push the infants around the block in strollers. They show their sister up, proving how fierce love ought to be. Then Delia and her mother are alone. Alone as on that day, up in her attic practice room, when Delia first spoke about the man she’d fallen for. How fine her mother had been, after the first shock. How solid and broad, this woman, whom time gives no reason to feel anything but eternal distrust. How good they’ve all been, her family. A blackness big enough to absorb all strains.
“I’m so tired, Mama.”
“Tired? What you tired of?” The warning audible: I was tired before you were born. I didn’t raise you to give in to tired.
“I’m tired of racial thinking, Mama.” The bird and the fish can fall in love. But there’s no possible nest but no nest.
A deep bronze waitress comes by to take their order. Nettie Ellen orders what she always orders at Haggern’s, since time began. Coffee, no cream, and a piece of blueberry pie. Delia orders a chocolate doughnut and a small milk. She doesn’t want it and can’t eat it. But she has to order it. Every time they’ve ever come here, she has. The waitress slides off, and Nettie Ellen’s eyes follow. “You tired of being colored. That’s what you’re tired of.”
Delia tries on the accusation like a gown. A prison uniform. Something in stripes. “I’m tired of everybody thinking they know what colored means.
Her mother looks around the shop. A teenage boy in white slacks, shirt, and a little dress-infantry paper hat mans the grill. Two old waitresses with stovepipe legs carry fries from the counter to the wooden tables. A young couple slumps over a shared soda in the booth across the way. “Who’s telling you that? Nobody here’s going to tell you what colored means. Only the o-fay do that.”
Her mother speaks that forbidden word. Once, at twelve, Delia had her mouth washed out with soap for using it. Something has broken down: the rules, or her mother. “My boys are … different.”
“Look around you, girl. Everybody here’s different. Different’s the commonest thing going.”
“I’ve got to give them the freedom to be—”
Her mother pinches up her face. “Don’t you dare talk to me about freedom. Your brother died in the war—for that word. A black man, fighting to give folks in other countries a freedom he wouldn’t ever’ve had in his own, even if he came back here alive.”
“Lots of people died in the war, Mama. White people. Black people. Yellow people.” Her boys’ other family.
“Your husband didn’t. Your husband—” She stops, unable to slander the father of her grandchildren.
“Mama. It’s not what you think.”
Her mother searches her. “Oh, don’t I know that. Nothin’s ever what I think.”
“It’s not one thing against the other. We’re not taking anything away. Just giving. Giving them space, choice, the right to make a life anywhere along—”
“This why you married a white man? So you could make babies light enough to do what they wouldn’t let you do?”
Delia knows why she married a white man. Knows the exact moment she was bound to him. But never in a million years could she explain to her mother what happened that day on the Mall, the future she saw.
Her mother stares out Haggern’s window at the passersby. “You could have stayed with us, sung every week for God and the people who need to hear Him. Why you need a fancy concert hall, where nobody gets to move or join in? There are more places to sing with us than you could have sung in a lifetime. More places to sing down here than there are in heaven.”
The kind of praise … the music I’ve studied … Every answer Delia thinks of breaks under its own weight. She’s saved by the waitress, who arrives with their orders. Steam still rises from Nettie Ellen’s slice of pie. The waitress slides it over. “Look here! This pie was hiding deep in the oven. Thinking itself too grand to come out and get eaten.”
“You try it yet?” Nettie Ellen asks.
“Ha! This place look like they treat me that good?”
“You go on have yourself a slice; tell them to put it on my bill. Go on!”
“Bless you, ma’am, but I gotta watch my figure. My man likes me all skinnied down. ‘Like a bar of soap at the end of the washing month.’”
“My man always trying to get me to fill out.”
“Gimme some of that. He got a son?”
“One.” Two, once. “But you’re going to have to wait another couple years before that particular pie comes out of the oven.”
“You come get me.” The waitress waves them both away, along with all the world’s foolishness. “I’ll be here.”
Delia will die of exile. She lived here once. Her boys never will. Never the leveling sass of a nation that sees through every pretension. One with more places to sing than even heaven. “Colored’s got to get bigger, Mama.” Something her daddy told her all her life.
“Colored, bigger?
Colored’s got no room to get bigger. Colored’s been smashed down to the biggest little thing that can be, without disappearing. White’s got to get bigger. White’s never had room for nobody but itself.”
They pick at their snacks in silence. If only the children would come back. Prove to them both that nothing has changed. Still your boys. Still your grandchildren.
“White’s just one color. Black’s everything else. You gonna raise them to have a choice? That choice don’t belong to you. It don’t even belong to them. Everybody else is gonna make it for them!” Nettie Ellen puts down her fork. She’s in her daughter’s eye. “My own mother. My own mother. Had a father was white.”
The words rock Delia. Not the fact, which she long ago gathered, in the cracks of the family history. But her mother’s saying so, here, out loud. She shuts her eyes. In such pain, they could travel anywhere. “What … what was he like, Mama?”
“Like? We never laid eyes on that man. Never showed his face a day to any one of us. Never even helped pay part of her child’s way. Could have been anyone. Could have been your own man’s grandfather.”
Delia coughs a low, horrible gurgle. “No, Mama. David’s grandfather … was never anywhere near Carolina.”
“Don’t you mouth me. Don’t you backtalk.”
“No, Mama.”
“Here’s the thing I never understood. If white is so God-awful almighty, how come fifteen of their great-great-grandparents can’t even equal one of ours?”
Delia can’t help test a smile. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mama. Jonah and Joey, half their world … Don’t they come just as much from—”
“You hear anything from the man’s parents?”
David has written a hundred letters, probed scores of vaults: Rotterdam, Westerbork, Essen, Cologne, Sofia, all the systematic German records of the abyss. “Nothing yet, Mama. We’re still searching.”
Both women bow their heads. “White folks killed their grandparents. You can’t lie to them about that. You get them ready. That’s all your father’s saying, child.”