The Time of Our Singing

“Well, you did that all right. Umm-hmm. That one was righteous!”

  I took forever to figure out the simplest things. “You like it? It suited you?”

  “You owe me a car. Nice reliable Dodge Dart in a pretty red.”

  Anyone but a musician might tell you that all silences sound the same. But Ruth’s silence, on the way home, modulated into a new song.

  I heard Delia’s Bach not long after that. She soloed across town in a pan-Philadelphia performance of the B Minor Mass. Jonah might not have favored such high-powered magnificence. But even he, hearing this, would have been delivered. Delia’s Laudamus Te carried all the rapture that that Latin-writing Lutheran posted forward in it. Every note was faultless, as written. And yet it swung, kicking back and dancing like there was no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Ever. That eerie, unearthbound work had found its celebrant. Praise is praise, my cousin’s voice said. Music’s music. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

  Two nights later, I heard her sing Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brazileiras no. 5. The piece had long ago become a theme-park poster for itself, as overplayed and unhearable a monument as Wilson Hart’s adored Rodrigo, done in by too much love. But in Delia Banks’s sinuous, ethereal turns, it went desperate for me again, mystic, possessed, sexy, a single endless sequence spun out of one breath. It wasn’t even that I’d never heard it properly. I’d simply never heard it. Her version sighed past any of the scores of recordings I knew. And hers would never be recorded.

  I had lunch with her, just the two of us, almost clandestine, in the same diner where my mother and grandmother had once secretly met. “Ghosts everywhere,” Delia said. “We’re lucky they’re so big on sharing.”

  I didn’t know how to speak my pleasure. “You could have … Name the life you want.” Times had changed. Or would have to, for this woman. “You can have the international concert career of your choice.” I knew the odds, yet knew, too, how little I was exaggerating. A person could live his whole life chasing music and be lucky to hear one time-sent voice. I was near kin to two of them.

  My cousin favored me with a high-watt version of her stage smile, the one that made her audiences love her before she opened her throat. “Thank you, sir. You say the sweetest things, for a lost soul.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know you are.” The waitress came and Delia traded barbs with her. When the woman left, my cousin shook her head at me. “You ever sing at Salzburg?”

  “Several times. A beautiful place. You’d love it.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the movie. The one with that spinning nun? You ever sing at the Festival d’Art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence?”

  “We once won a prize there.” As I answered, it dawned on me: Delia already knew.

  “You happy?” She knew the answer to that one, too. “Ask me if I’m happy. Ask me what kind of career I want. I got everything in the world already, cuz. Got my church. Who’d need a bigger stage than that? I’ve got people I love singing with me, building the sound, taking me higher. Every piece we do, we make our own, whatever post office it came on through. I got a repertoire long enough to last me two lifetimes. One short and the other long.”

  I went wily and virtuous all at once. “You owe it … to the source of your gift not to hide that light under a bushel. To bring that sound to as many people as possible.”

  Delia thought about my words. They troubled her, a slip of evil moving about in the Garden. “No. This isn’t about bigger numbers. Are you happy? You can’t make anyone happy if you’re not happy yourself.”

  She had my X-rays clipped up on the light box just to the side of our booth, and she didn’t at all like what she saw. I had to take the offensive, before she finished me off. “Are you afraid?”

  The idea amused her. “Of who?”

  I might have drawn her up a list: all the people who’d want you dead just for traveling on the only passport you get. She knew the costs, hidden and obvious, even just for singing across town. Avoidance might not be fear. It might be more like fear’s opposite. “Simple preference, then?”

  “Oh, I’ll sing whatever glory’s sitting on the music stand.”

  “But only religious music.”

  Delia played with the salt and pepper shakers. “All music’s religious music. All the good parts anyway.” It was true: Even her languorous, sultry Portuguese siren song had seduced for a brighter flame.

  “Well, I’ve heard what you did to that backwoods German cracker. So I know this isn’t about cultural ownership.”

  “Oh, but it is.” As soon as she spoke the words, everything was. No culture without owners, without owned.

  “You’re anti-Europe?” Sick, imperial, supremacist, and striving to please the eternal angels.

  “‘Anti-Europe’?” Delia rolled her eyes. “Can’t very well be that. Though Europe has cost me more cars than we’re going to talk about today, honey. No, can’t be anti-Europe without doing more amputation than is good for a body. Every song we sing’s got white notes running through it. But that’s the beauty of the situation, cuz. We’re making a little country here, out of mutual theft. They come over into our neck of the woods, take all we got. We sneak over into their neighborhood, middle of the night, grab a little something back, something they didn’t even know they had, something they can’t even recognize no more! More for everybody that way, and more kinds of everybody.” She shook her head. A low mezzo growl of despite came out of her chest. “No. Can’t be anti-Europe when everyone’s part Europe. But got to be pro-Africa, for the same reason.”

  Surely her church loved her too much to keep her to themselves. “Thousands could hear you. Hundreds of thousands.”

  “As many as hear your brother?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out.

  “You could change the way people think.”

  “Change! You still waiting for music to cure us? Bach? Mozart? Nazis love them, too. Music never cured anyone. Look at your poor sister. Look at her man. Figure that out with music. Do you have a single song you can sing her to take care of her now? One single song that can do anything for her, that won’t shrivel up and die of helpless shame?”

  It wasn’t too late for me to learn a trade. Some honest living. I could still type. Typing and filing for a pro bono law firm. I took a breath, went down into my bass days with Voces Antiquae, already ancient history. “The song is only as good as its listener.”

  “Your sister. For her. For her.”

  I looked for what I believed. “Maybe we sing for ourselves.”

  “At least that. Nothing without that. But nothing if only that. We need a music that sings to anyone. That makes them sing. No audience!”

  “AM radio.”

  “Can’t hurt me with that.”

  “Gospel sings to anyone?” I had another list for her, if she wanted it.

  “Anyone with ears to hear.”

  “That’s just it. Our ears only hear what sounds people get a chance to know.”

  “Oh, people know. Listen. Every beautiful sound comes from saying what’s happened to us. Well, name someone who’s had more happen to them than us.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes, cuz.”

  Her words blunted the ones that were loaded in my throat. I had no comeback but the one that shamed me most. “I’m greedy. I want to hear …” All those implicated, complicit, compromised old warhorses. She could work their salvation. Only a black voice could do that now. “I want to hear that music … redeemed.” Hear it be, at last, what it had always pretended to be.

  Delia glowed a moment with the thought. But I was the devil, tempting her to turn stones into bread. “Cuz, cuz. You’re not getting this. I’ve got my church. My Jesus.”

  “Doesn’t he come from Europe?”

  She grinned. “Ours comes from a little south of there. Listen to me. I’ve got my work. I’ve got ours. You hear how glorious that word sounds? I don’t blame you for living your life. You were raised when we still thought the only
way to get what they got is to copy their stuff. We’re us and ain’t never gonna be them, and where’s the pain in that? Just as big—bigger, given the whole story. Why you working so hard over something you can’t save and doesn’t want to be?”

  For the same reason that makes us sing anything. I glanced around the restaurant. All shades imaginable. Nobody much cared that I was there or had any stake in my desperation. I looked at my cousin. The national color averaged out somewhere between us. “You’re saying separate but equal?”

  “That’s right. Where’s the problem? Different cultures, equal status.”

  “Equal status with the dominant culture?”

  “They only dominate those they can.”

  “I thought the whole point was that separate could never be—”

  “There’s a big difference now. Now, it’s our choice.”

  But if it were impossible—impossible to search for chords outside of us, impossible to find that scale, that tune that sang beyond this time and place … I wanted more than this invented moment and this enforced difference, more than this wary truce pretending to be the peace we’d always been seeking. I tried with everything in me. I turned her words around more ways than there were ways to turn. “You’re saying that you can only sing what you are?”

  The coffee came. By the time the waitress left, they’d exchanged recipes, boyfriend grievances, and phone numbers. Then it was just the two of us. Delia wrapped her hands around her hot mug, drawing heat and horizon-wide pleasure. “Where were we again? No, no. I think it’s more like: You can only be what you sing.”

  “My sister could have been a singer. She had a voice to convert anyone.”

  “Joseph Strom!” I jerked my head up. For a moment, she was my mother, reprimanding a boy of nine. My cousin’s eyes were wet. She shook her head, horrified. “Listen to her, for once. Just listen.”

  I did. It would have come to me, sooner or later. I joined Ruth one evening for her routine walk around the neighborhood. Our aunts and uncle told her she was crazy, taking her life in her hands. They didn’t even like to ride down the street with their windows rolled up. Her evening walks sent Papap into fits. She waved them all away. “I’m safer out here than I am standing in front of Independence Hall. I’d sooner trust my life to the worst crackhead than to any police officer in this country.”

  Much of the neighborhood was out on their front porches, living in public, the way people lived in Ghent, the way few Americans above the poverty line lived. My sister greeted everyone we passed, sometimes by name. “I like to think about Grandma and Papap walking out here when they were young.”

  “Do you ever think about Da’s parents, Ruth? I’m not fighting with you. I’m not … I’m just …”

  She held up her palm sideways and nodded. “I’ve tried. I can’t even … You know, I’m addicted to the survivor accounts. I’ve seen every Holocaust documentary ever made. You’d have to be dead to have a memory big enough. The way I think about … our other grandparents? The supremacists got them, too.”

  “Even though they were white.”

  “They weren’t white. They weren’t even the same species. Not to the people running the ovens. We were sent along with them, what few of us were there.”

  “‘We’?”

  She heard, and nodded. “I mean the other us.”

  One would have to be dead already to survive such inheritance. We passed a row of century-old houses, now carved up into rented rooms. Ruth hummed under her breath. I couldn’t make out the tune. When the tune changed to words, she seemed to speak to someone across the street. “Look, Joey. It’s easy. The easiest question in the world. If they come and start rounding us up, which line are you going to get into?”

  “No question. Not even a choice.”

  “But they’ve been rounding us up, Joey.” She spread her hands around the neighborhood. “They’re rounding us up now. They’ll keep rounding us up, for as long as there’s a calendar.”

  I tried to follow her. When she spoke next, it reeled me back from Da’s deep-space catalog.

  “You should have married that white girl, Joey. I’m sure she was nice.”

  “Is. Is nice. But I’m not.”

  “Incompatible?” I looked at her. Her mouth twisted into a crook of empathy.

  “Incompatible.”

  “Take two people.”

  I waited. Then I realized this was the entire recipe. “Two people. Exactly.”

  “Mama and Da would have had to divorce. If she’d lived.”

  “You think?” The stories we told about their story no longer mattered to them.

  “Of course. Look at the statistics.”

  “Numbers never lie,” I said, in our old German accent.

  She winced and grinned at the same time. Hybrid vigor. “Robert and I were incompatible. But it worked.”

  “What about his parents?”

  Ruth looked at me, seeing ghosts. “You never knew? Your own brother-in-law?” Blaming, taking the blame. “I never told you? Of course not; when could I have? Robert was raised in a foster home. White folks. Only in it for the aid checks.”

  We covered two blocks. We were hit up twice for cash, once to help get a car out of hock to drive a wife to the hospital and once to tide a man over until an accident at his bank could be ironed out in court. Both times, my sister made me give them five dollars.

  “They’re just going to buy booze or dope with it,” I said.

  “Yeah? And what world-fixing were you getting up to with it?”

  Every third yard was a pachyderm’s graveyard of shopping carts, washing machines, and stripped Impalas whose last highway would be four cinder blocks. A cluster of kids Kwame’s age worked a basketball in an empty lot, dribbling between the larger shards of glass, using oil drums for their picks and rolls, and chucking the ball at a rim that seemed made from an old TV antenna. Every square foot of concrete was garlanded in tendrils of graffiti, the elaborate signatures of those who were prevented from putting their names on anything else. The block housed more poverty per yard than even my sister could identify with. The furnaces of progress were busy burning all the fuel they could find.

  Whatever dream my brother and I had been raised on was dead. Incredible to me: the 1980s. Uplift had fallen deeper than the place where it had started, back before hopes were raised.

  My years in Europe opened my eyes to the place stamped on my passport. Three months before, with Voces, I’d toured the Adriatic, singing an old Latin monastic text: “Teach me to love what I cannot hope to know; teach me to know what I cannot hope to be.” Here I was, walking through a ruined Philadelphia with my sister, begging to be what I couldn’t know, trying to know what I couldn’t love. All song that didn’t hear this massacre was a lie.

  My sister saw her own landscape. “We need control of our own neighborhoods. It wouldn’t solve things, of course. But it would be a start.”

  Always another start. And a start after that. “Ruth?” I was willing to look at any misery around me, except my sister. “How long are you planning to stay around here?”

  “You still on white people’s time, aren’t you?” I spun around, stiffening. Then I felt her arm slipping through mine. “Funny thing? My Oakland? It looks a lot like this.”

  “You could move.”

  She shook her head at me. “No, I couldn’t, Joey. It’s where all his work went. It’s where … he died.” We walked in silence, turning the last corner to Papap’s house again. Ruth stopped and blurted, “How am I supposed to do this, Joey? A ten-year-old on his way to hell and another little half-year-old with a murdered father.”

  “What are you saying? Kwame’s in trouble?”

  She shook her head. “You’ll go to your grave a classical musician, won’t you? A black boy in trouble. Imagine.” I pulled away from her, and she exploded, throwing her hands in the air. She brought them back down over her face, like falling ash. “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never make it.”

&nb
sp; My first thought, God help me, was, Make it where? I closed the distance and put my hands on her shoulders. She threw them off. As quickly as her tears came, they stopped. “Okay. Okay. No crisis. Just another husbandless single sister mother. Millions of us.”

  “How many of you got brothers?”

  Ruth squeezed my arm, a frantic tourniquet. “You don’t know, Joey. You can’t begin.” She felt me flinch, and grabbed on tighter. “I don’t mean that. I mean what’s happened to us, since you took off. The bottom’s dropped out of the whole country. Like living through a lifelong air raid. For a boy, a little boy?” Her shudder passed through me. I’d never feel safe again. “You haven’t noticed it, in him? You really haven’t noticed?”

  “Kwame? No. Well, he dresses … a little like a criminal.”

  She barked in pained amusement and smacked the air. “All the kids do now. And half the adults, too.”

  “And I’ve noticed he hates policemen.”

  “That’s just common sense. Survival benefit.”

  We stood still outside our grandfather’s house. I looked in and saw him at the window, pulling back a white curtain to look at us. Dr. Daley: the family practitioner under siege in the neighborhood he’d once served. He motioned violently for us to come in. Ruth nodded and held up a finger, bargaining for thirty seconds. Seeing no immediate emergency, he let the curtain fall and retreated.

  Ruth leaned toward me. “Kwame’s not like Robert. He has Robert’s healthy resentment. But Robert always had a counterplan. He was always working on an answer. One more public education drive, one more demonstration. Kwame’s got the rage, but not a single answer for it. Robert used to keep him in line by challenging him. Used to say, ‘Best thing to do when you’re feeling mad is make something of yourself that’s not them.’ When Kwame explodes, I do what Robert used to do. I sit him down with a sheet of paper and colored pencils. Or park him in front of a box of paint. Kwame can make—oh! The wildest things. But since … The last few times I tried to sit him down …”

  Then the boy appeared at the window, watching us. Through the glass, even with his headphones and their pounding pulse, he heard us talking about him. Fury and apathy fought for a controlling interest in his eyes. My sister looked back at her son, smiling at him through her panic. But what can you hide from a child who has already seen death? She turned and grabbed me just below the collar. “How much are we talking about, Joey? My portion of … the savings?”