The real CD in a real CD jewel box did intrigue Kwame. This was before worldwide make-your-own. “I got an uncle in a crew? That’s dope. Put it on, brother. Let the brother do his shit.” My nephew didn’t last through the first hemiola. “You fuckin’ with my bean, ’Tween.”
Little Robert, next to him, squealed with delight. “Yeah! Don’t be fuckin’ our beam!” I stared at him. He smirked and clapped a hand over his mouth.
I went back to Ruth. “So what did they say?” she asked. For a moment, she seemed to be hoping for a yes.
“They’re going to wait for the video.”
She lifted her palms. “What do you expect, Joe? Not our world.”
“Our world’s anywhere we go.”
“They don’t want us there. So we don’t have time for it.”
“Can’t be both, Ruth. Can’t both them and us decide.” She said nothing. “He wants you to go, Ruth. He wants us all to be there.”
I held out the tickets Jonah had sent. She gazed at them without touching. “Forty-five dollars? Can we just take the cash instead? Think of all the subsidized lunches …”
“Ruth? For me? It’s eating me up inside.”
She considered it. She really did. But the last sadness in my life was minuscule compared to what still had hold of her. She smiled a little, but not at me. “Can you imagine Robert and me dressing up to go to a show like this? Not without a purse full of smoke bombs, honey.” Then, not looking at me, forgiving me my trespass: “You go if you want. I think you ought to.” I turned to go. “He can always come by here, if he wants.”
The Friday of the concert, I went alone across the bay to Grace Cathedral. I knew the drill well enough not to contact Jonah beforehand. Of course, he didn’t contact me. I sat unrecognized in the fake Île-de-France nave, amazed by how many people turned out for the event. All my life in classical music, the audience had consisted of the disaffected and the dying. Mostly the dying. Either the art truly belonged to another lost time or certain human beings woke one day, crippled with age and desperate to learn a repertoire that was heavier than the rest of existence, before death came and stripped us of all our tribes. Sounds almost as old as death itself, sounds that had never belonged to them, sounds that no longer belonged to anyone. For what could belonging mean to the dead?
But this crowd was young, vital, manicured—crisp with the next new thing. I listened to two couples behind me as the preconcert excitement gathered, comparing the virtues of the Tallis Scholars and the Hilliard Ensemble the way one might compare two subtle Burgundies. I couldn’t follow the discography. I’d been away too long. I twisted around to check the swelling crowd. No more than twelve black faces were in attendance. But of course that was a count no one could make just by looking.
The house went hushed and the group sauntered on. The applause bewildered me. The church was full of fans, people who’d been waiting years to hear this blending. A blast of panic: I wasn’t dressed. I didn’t know the program. There was no way I could get up onstage without humiliating myself. A second later, I was again blissfully no one.
The six voices—two of them unknown to me—wandered at random to their marks on the stage. They dressed more silkily than we had back when. Otherwise, they sought that same casual, choreographed shock. My brother stopped and turned, staring out over the heads of the audience. The others seemed ambushed by calm. They stood for an awful moment, as we must have stood, building the intake, looking inward. Then the first fifths crystallized out of them.
All six were past words. But Jonah floated above the stage. He sang like someone from beyond the grave who’d managed to return for one remembering moment to don again the surprise of flesh. Everyone in the cathedral fell back against their pews. My brother had confessed to me the source of that perfection when we’d spoken over the phone. He’d tapped into the pure, voluptuous power of indifference, the sound of how good all sounds will sound to us once we’re past them.
After the second burst of applause, he seemed to see me, ten pews back. But the smile was too small for even professional recognition. He gave no sign for the rest of the performance that he felt anything but disembodied grace. He’d gotten beyond not only race. He’d gone beyond being anything at all.
My impatience blotted out the second half of that rapturous program. The lovelier the sound, the more criminal I felt sitting and listening. By the second encore, John Sheppard’s In manus tuas, I replayed in my mind every petty betrayal I’d ever committed. The fiercely applauding audience made the group sing two more encores.
I was a wreck by the time I found my way into the receiving line. Jonah sprang forward when he saw me near the head of the queue. But the light in his face dulled a little as he approached me. “You’re by yourself? Sorry, Joey. That’s not what I meant.”
“Of course I’m by myself.” When were we ever anything else?
“They didn’t want to come?” It seemed to confirm his worst suspicions.
Every lie we’d ever told ourselves occurred to me. I spared him all of them.
We were surrounded by packs of envious people who just wanted to stand close to these singers who’d thrown off all chains and could make sounds others only dreamed of. All nearby heads appraised us with that look that listens while pretending not to. Jonah stared at me. “Why not? Why wouldn’t she? How long …” I lifted my palms, pleading. He pursed his lips. “Fine.” He put his hand around my shoulders and led me back to where the other antique voices stood. “So what did you think of that Taverner? Was that the closest thing you’ve ever heard to God?”
Then there were the others. Hans Lauscher greeted me with awkward affection. Marjoleine deGroot swore I looked younger than when I’d left. Peter Chance patted my back. “How long has it been?”
I smiled as well as I could. “Since at least 1610.”
Everyone wanted the reunion to end as quickly as possible. Jonah had to return to attending to his fans. He was grace itself. He signed programs and smiled for pictures with the heavy donors. Total strangers wanted to invite him to fancy dinners, introduce him to celebrities, throw parties in his honor. Although this was ensemble work of the most selfless order, even the tone-deaf could hear where the magic came from. The gentry of the silicon age wanted my brother to love them as they already loved him. I stood by and watched Jonah charm his admirers like some high-art faith healer. It was after midnight by the time we were alone.
“You promised me a tour of your backwater,” Jonah said.
“Not this late. They’ll shoot us. Come say hello to Ruth. Tomorrow morning.”
He shook his head. “She doesn’t want that.”
“She doesn’t? Or you don’t? Somebody has to go first, Jonah.”
He put his hands on my chest. “You’ve got some new forte hints in there, brother.” His smile died at my silence. He withdrew his hand. “I can’t. I can’t force myself on them.”
“Come to school on Monday. Meet the kids. She’ll be there. It’ll be easy.”
“I wish I could. We leave tomorrow.” It seemed almost to save him.
“Come over in the morning at least. No ambushes. I’ll buy you breakfast.”
“You’re on. Draw me a map.”
He came to the apartment. By the time I opened the door, he’d had a chance to compose his face. “We’ve lived in worse,” I reminded him.
“Beats where I’m living now, actually. Celeste kept the Brandstraat place.” He pored over every American commodity in my kitchen—peanut butter, corn on the cob, cold cereal. “Look at this!” He held a cardboard box of oat squares with a picture of two little mixed-race kids, their smiling faces labeled TWIN PACK.
“Multiracialism’s hot,” I told him.
“That was our problem, Mule, a million years ago. We didn’t have the right marketing!”
I took him to my habitual breakfast place, second-guessing the choice a hundred times. We walked. Jonah took in the blocks, crumbling or gentrifying, rising up or succumbing to
a war fought house to house, a war he’d spent his life evading. He walked alongside me, nodding. I gave him running color commentary—who’d been evicted, who’d been bilked out, who’d gotten arrested. My neighbors waved or called out Saturday breakfast greetings. I called back, making no introductions.
“It reminds me of the old neighborhood,” Jonah said.
“What old neighborhood?”
“You know. The Heights. Our childhood?”
I stopped and gaped. “It’s nothing like New York. It couldn’t be further from our childhood if you—”
“I know that, Joseph. That doesn’t mean it can’t remind me.”
Milky’s was its usual Saturday-morning carnival. Parents of my students, my colleagues, my neighbors, the staff and regulars: Everyone asked about Ruth and the boys, how the latest school expansion plans were going, how I’d been, who the hell this foreigner was. Milky himself came to greet us in full green silk Chinese pajamas with a navy pea coat over them. “Your brother, you say? Never shit a shitter, Joe Strom.”
Only after we slipped into a booth did I get a chance to breathe. Jonah grinned from across the linoleum table. “You sly mother. You’re more famous than I am.” He insisted on ordering everything I did. “It’s Denver tonight. The Alps. I’m screwed for air supply already, the way it is.”
All breakfast long, he asked about his nephews. I gave him the facts: Kwame’s cage-rattling, word-battling rap. Little Robert’s lightning speed with reading, writing, and, most of all, numbers. Jonah kept nodding and pressing for details.
We passed through the greetings gauntlet again on the way out. By now, the funky foreigner with the ironed T-shirt and creased khakis was a regular, and all my friends urged him to come back next week.
“I’ll be here,” Jonah lied. Bald-faced. “Have my usual ready.” Milky and company laughed, and I hated my brother. Two weeks and he, too, might have belonged.
“Come to Ruth’s,” I said outside the diner.
“Can’t. I have to meet the group at the airport in fifty minutes.”
“You’ll never make it.”
“I’ll set my watch back.” We turned down my street, Jonah in thought. “So you’re good, then? This is it? This is all that you need?”
I nodded, ready to lie to him. Ruth, the school, my students: They were considerable. But they were not, in truth, all I needed. I was missing something I could not even name. Something in my past was waiting to be permitted. Some piece inside me needed scoring out, the one I’d once promised Will Hart I’d write down. But I could no longer hear where my notes were pointing. The chance to compose them had passed me by.
We stopped on the sidewalk in front of my building. I looked at my brother, his clothes flapping in that clement breeze. I was not good, not altogether. Not even close, in fact. I was still working for someone else. Some other blood-relation claim on me. But I wasn’t about to give Jonah the satisfaction of hearing as much. “Yep,” I said. “This is it. All anyone could ask for.”
“What are you teaching them? Your fourth graders. What kind of music?”
“K through three. And I’m teaching them everything.”
“Everything, you say?”
“You know. The good stuff. Pitches in time.”
“What kind of everything?” He eyed me. Too much to duck. He looked at his watch, already dashing.
“I give them what’s theirs. Their music. Their identity.”
“What’s theirs, Joey? If you have to give it … You give them their music? Their identity? Identical to what? Only thing you’re identical to is yourself, and that only on good days. Stereotyping. That’s what you’re giving them. Nobody’s anybody else. Their music is whatever nobody can give them. Good luck finding that.”
He wasn’t entirely dead yet. His soul’s handover deal had been signed and sealed but not yet delivered. I grabbed his elbow and slowed him. “Maestro. Chill, huh? I get them to teach me the songs they know. I trade them for a few old tunes. Stuff nobody else knows. I give them all kinds of noise—a little gospel swell, a little twelve-bar, even a little Pilgrim and Founding Fathers crap now and then. Theirs? Not theirs? Who the hell am I to say? It’s only music, for God’s sake.”
We’d gotten as far as my apartment. I motioned for him to come up for a moment. Jonah wagged his head. He looked around my neighborhood. “Unbelievable, Joey. You’re passing. You’re really passing. Remember how they used to call Jonah Strom the black Fischer-Dieskau?”
“Nobody ever called you that, Jonah. That was you.”
“Well, you’ve become the black Joseph Strom.” He cuffed my shoulder and turned to get back into his rental. There was pride; there was envy. Not dead yet. He had at least two out of the big seven covered. “Don’t worry, brother. Your secret’s safe with me.”
I couldn’t help watching for the reviews in New York, where the Voces Antiquae tour wound up. It was their hour onstage, or at least their fifteen minutes. The New York critics fell over one another declaring how long they’d been waiting for such a sound. Jonah sent me the clip from the Times—“All Ars Antiqua Is Nova Again”—afraid I might miss it. The piece singled him out as perhaps the clearest-voiced male singing early music in any country. No mention of color, outside the vocal. He’d clipped his business card to the corner of the rave and scribbled, “Warmest regards, your leading Negro recitalist.”
At last he had the vindication he’d so long sought. He had the listening world’s adulation, and he made a sound that stood for nothing other than what it was. But he and I both knew that the heat from that “nova” was thrown off from a core already burned through.
Yet his act had one more twist. Now that he stood for himself alone, he belonged to everyone but himself. His brilliance caught the moment’s buzz; his sound became anyone’s to interpret. Fame is the weapon of last resort that culture uses to neutralize runaways. A few months after his group made its North American tour, their Gesualdo recording won a Grammy. In December of 1990, they were named the oxymoronic “Early Music Performers of the Year.” I actually saw a poster of them, like a police lineup, on the wall of a music shop in downtown Oakland where I’d gone to buy mallets.
The kicker came half a year later, three months after Rodney King began being beaten nightly on ghostly videotape. Ruth showed up one morning in my broom-cupboard office at the school, waving the latest issue of Ebony. “I can’t believe it. I can’t take it.” She threw the magazine down on my desk, shaking all over. She pressed her lips to her teeth to keep from crying. I opened to the cover story: “50 Leaders for Tomorrow’s America.” I flipped through the list of scientists, engineers, physicians, athletes, and artists, testing each entry for its power to offend. I waded through the entire roster before I saw him. I raised my eyes to my sister’s. Hers were running in tears. “How, Joey? Tell me how.” She stamped the ground. “It’s worse than minstrelsy.”
I had to look down, back at the incredible page. “I don’t know how. Bastard’s not even in America. At least he’s buried down there in slot number forty-two, where he can’t hurt nobody.”
An awful sound escaped her. It took me two seconds to decide: Laughter. Maniacal. She reached out toward me. “Give it back. I have to show my sons.”
I was there at dinner that night, when she did. “Your blood relation,” she told them. “I knew this boy when he was no bigger than you. You see where you can go with a little effort? Look at all those stars he’s up there with. All the good they’ve gotten up to.”
“Half of them really white,” Kwame declared.
Ruth stared him down. “Which half? You tell me.”
“All those technocrackers. Look at this motherfucker: He don’t even know he’s nathan. CEO? That’s Casper the Ethnic Oreo.”
“This one?” little Robert said, pointing and smirking. “This one’s really white?”
“What makes them white?” Ruth challenged.
“This,” Kwame said, dismissing the whole magazine. “This cavebo
y noise. Whole white devil power shit.”
“What if I told you half the white race was walking around black and didn’t even know it?”
“I’d say you be bugging. Illin’ on your children.”
His mother shot me a silent appeal. “She’s right,” I said. “White’s got to prove white, all the way back. Who can do that?”
My nephew appraised me: hopelessly insane. “Wack. Don’t even know what I’m saying.”
Little Robert held up both arms. “The whole human race started in Ethiopia.”
Kwame took his little brother in a headlock and Indian-burned his scalp until the seven-year-old screamed with pleasure. “That’s right, bean boy. You all that. You my whole Top Fifty for Tomorrow, all rolled in one.”
Robert was the kind of child for whom his mother’s school was invented. He blazed through the day’s subjects, alarming his muzzy schoolmates. Every bit of learning that caught his eye, he set up in the sky like a glittering star. Stories left him dizzy with pleasure. “Is this real?” he’d want to know about every Reading Hour book. “Did this ever happen yet?”
He was his mother all over again, doing voices, tilting his head and squinting like the latest ridiculous adult. He built a walking robot out of Lego blocks that brought the whole first grade to a thirty-minute standstill. Math was his sandbox. He solved logic puzzles two grades above him. With nothing but poker chips and a world map, he designed games of complex trade. He loved to draw. History kept him sick with attention; he didn’t yet know that the stories were already over. He wept when he learned about the boats, the sealed holds, the auction blocks, the destroyed families. For Robert, everything that happened was still happening, somewhere.
But he could fly only so long as no one paid him any mind. The minute anyone fussed over him, he watched himself, and fell. The world’s praise of any black child carries an annihilating surprise. I’d grown up on it. Robert had only to hear that he might be doing something remarkable for him to stumble in apologies. He only wanted to be liked. Special meant wrong. In my class, he shone like the aurora. His voice anchored the whole alto section. But every time his marveling classmates mocked his skill, he hid his light back under a bushel for another several weeks.