For show-and-tell on the musician of his choice, he brought in the Ebony. It was months old, but he was still thinking about it. The room tittered as he spoke, and I hushed them, making things worse. All these black men making the future—fifty of them. And one of them was supposed to be Robert’s uncle, who’d changed the future of music a thousand years old. A brother, his mother had told him, might do anything. Robert spoke with that blast of pride already shot through with embarrassment and doubt.
Two weeks after the oral report, he came into my class with a sheaf of pages, each marked in a rash of colored-pen hieroglyphics. “This is mine. I wrote this.” He raced to explain the elaborate musical notation he’d devised, a system describing subtle changes in pitches and duration, notation that preserved many things lost in the standard staff. He’d written independent parts, thinking not only in running lines but also in a series of vertical moments. His chords made sense—delaying, repeating, turning back on themselves before coming home. His brother had sold for pocket change the little electric keyboard I’d given them. Ruth had no other instrument in the house. Robert had not only invented a system of notation from scratch; he’d written this whole work of harmony in his mind’s ear.
“How did you do this? Where did this come from?” I couldn’t stop asking him.
He shrugged and cowered, crumbling under my awe. “Came from me. I just … heard it. You think it sounds like anything?”
“We have to find out. We’ll perform it.” The idea made him pleasantly ill. “What’s it for?” He stood there, bewildered by the question. “I mean, what instruments?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about … instruments.”
“You mean you want it sung?” He nodded. First he’d thought of it. “Do you have words?”
He shook his head and axed the air. “No words. Just music.” Words out loud would poison it.
He taught the class to read his notation, and we performed the piece in school assembly. Robert conducted. So long as his music lasted, his soul climbed up into an ice blue sky on a bolt of mustard yellow. Five groups of voices chanted back and forth to one another, just as his notes said, clashing and cohabiting. His rowdy counterpoint came from another orbit, until then invisible. The sounds in his head kept him from hearing the din of the assembled gym. But the moment the piece was over, the noise broke over him.
The applause threatened to stop Robert from breathing. His eyes went wide, searching the room for a fire exit. Kids whistled and catcalled, teasing him. He bowed and knocked over the conductor’s stand. It brought down the house. I thought he might suffocate on the spot: Every muscle in his face worked to declare, Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. He flinched and fended off every admiration while jumping up to look out over the heads of his peers, trying to scout down the only opinion that mattered to him: his adored brother’s.
Kwame lumbered up afterward in his low-riding jeans. He’d skipped a day of his own school to be there. His arms made those little cartwheel jerks I couldn’t decode, half praise, half ridicule. His face screwed up to one side. “What you call that?”
Robert died by inches. “I call it ‘Legend.’”
“What legend? You think you’re a legend? No pump, no bump. Who you down with anyway?” Neither boy looked at me. They couldn’t afford to.
I thought the child would break apart, right there in front of the entire assembled New Day School. Kwame saw it, too. He puppy-cuffed his listless brother. “Hey. I said, Hey. It’s fresh. It’s slamming. You come marinate with me and my homies next time Dig’s in the house. See how you make some real G-funk.”
In his final year of votech school, Kwame’s band had grown to fill his entire horizon. They’d achieved a kind of mastery, one whose words entirely eluded me but whose pulse even I couldn’t deny. He had nothing else. Ruth tried to stay with his every evasion, keeping him accountable while propping him up without his knowing. “You thinking beyond school?”
“Don’t ride me, Mama.”
“Not riding. Helping you scout.”
“Me and the Nation. We can make it work. I don’t mean bank. Just making it.”
“You want to rap, then you need a battle. Just find something to hold yourself together while you make yourself the best.”
She unloaded on me privately. “God, I wish I weren’t an educator. I’d whack that child up side of the head until he got his life in order.”
In August, a car in a Brooklyn Hasidic rebbe’s motorcade ran a red light, hit another car, swerved onto the sidewalk, and killed a Guyanese boy Robert’s age. For three days, Crown Heights hammered itself. Kwame and N Dig Nation wrote a long rap that replayed the madness from every available angle. The song was called “Black Vee Jew.” Maybe it participated; maybe it revealed. You never know with art.
“Your grandfather was a Jew,” I told him. “You’re a quarter Jewish.”
“I hear you. That’s def. What you think of that noise, Uncle bro?”
Whatever the words, the song got the group its first airtime—real radio, all over the Bay. It intoxicated Kwame. “Beats the best method that bank can buy.” The band made five hundred dollars each. Kwame spent his on new audio equipment.
Late in September, Ruth called me up, out of control. All three members of N Dig Nation had been arrested for breaking into a music store in West Oakland and leaving with two dozen CDs. “They’re gonna finish him. He’s nothing but meat. They’ll kill him, and no one will know.” It took me a quarter of an hour to talk her down enough to get her to meet me at the station where Kwame was being held. Ruth came apart again when we got there and she saw her son in handcuffs.
“We weren’t biting nothing,” Kwame told the two of us. He sat behind a metal gun rail, a bruise covering the side of his face where the cops had held him to the wall. He was swaggering with the fear of death. “Just a little who ride.”
I thought Ruth might kill the boy herself. “You speak the language I taught you.”
“We buy stuff from the man all the time. His door was wide open. We were just gonna take a listen and bring all that noise back to him when we got done.”
“Records? You stole records? What kind of suicidal—”
“CDs, Mama. And we didn’t steal any.”
“What in the name of Jesus did you think you were doing, stealing records?”
He looked at her with an incomprehension so great, it was almost pity. “We’re on the way up. We have to drop science. Bust the bustas. Know what I’m sayin’?”
Ruth was brilliant at the sentencing. She asked for a punishment that might save a life, rather than waste it. But the judge pored over what he called Kwame’s “history,” and he decided that society was best served by putting this juvenile menace away for two years. He stressed the seriousness of breaking and entering, while Kwame kept saying, “We didn’t break.” Property was the heart of society, the judge said. The crime of theft tore out that heart. As his sentence was being read, Kwame muttered just loud enough for me to hear, “The man’s nathan. He’s not even dead.”
Two days later, my sister saw her son off to prison. “Your father was in jail once. You remember why. So what are you going to do with this? That’s what. the world wants to know.” She was crying as she spoke, crying for everything that had ever happened to this boy, all the way back for generations before his birth. Kwame couldn’t hold his head up long enough to meet her eye. She lifted it for him. “Look at me. Look at me. You are not just yourself.”
Kwame nodded. “I hear you.” And then he was waving good-bye.
Once Ruth was alone with me, she fell apart. “White teen goes to jail, it’s a pencil entry on the C.V. Youthful foolishness. Something to laugh at down the line. Black teen goes to jail, it’s another fatality. Judgment on the entire race. A hole he’ll never climb out of. It’s my fault, Joseph. I put them here. I didn’t have to drag them back into the cauldron. I could have set them up in some sleepwalking suburb.”
“Not y
our fault, Ruth. Don’t crucify yourself for half a millennium—”
“You see what he’s done to Robert. Big brother’s going to be the hero of a lifetime. Prerolled role model. That child sits in his room inventing whole new schools of arithmetic on his interlocking knuckles. He’s taught himself plane geometry. But he won’t count to twenty without mistakes if his brother’s looking at him the wrong way. Doesn’t want to be anything he’s not supposed to be. And he could be anything. Anything he wants …”
We both heard at the same time, as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Ruth looked at me, her nostrils flared. “Her son’s quit the country and her grandson’s in prison.” Then her throat caved in and she howled. “What have we done to her, Joey?”
Robert made his way through the third grade, toward his graduation from New Day School. He butted up against that age when it was murder for Ruth to encourage him in anything. Whatever she praised in him, he abandoned. With half his attention, he’d fill a sheet of blank newsprint with astonishing geometries. But if she hung it on the wall, he’d tear it down and burn it.
“I’m going to lose him, Joseph. Lose him faster than I lost Kwame.”
“You haven’t lost Kwame.” Kwame had, in fact, started a course in mechanical drawing at the prison.
We’d been to see him almost every weekend. “This place is for marks,” he told me. There was something incredulous about his insight. “Know what? They built this prison to fit us. Then they build us to fit it. Not me, Uncle. Once I stroll, this place can rot with my history in it.” He and his mother started a little ritual each time we said good-bye. How long? Not long. Meet you back in the new old world.
In early 1992, Jonah wrote to say he was coming through town in late April to sing at the Berkeley Festival. That’s how pointless separate continents had become. I wrote him back on a school fund-raising postcard: “I heard you last time.” And below the school’s address, I wrote out the date of his concert, the time 1:30 P.M., and my class’s room number.
My class didn’t need any special audience. There was no audience now, where I came from. There was only choir, and we’d have gone on preparing our score whoever showed up or didn’t on any given day. I was a grade school teacher of music. I lived for it, and that’s exactly how my kids sang. And yet I had given Jonah the time and room number of my best lot—real air walkers, his unmet nephew Robert among them. I told them we might have a special visitor. Even that much felt wrong.
I worked hard to make that day the most ordinary that had ever been. No chance he could make it: I’d guaranteed that when choosing the date. He never did anything the afternoon before a concert. But if, in some parallel universe, he did, we were ready with a sound that would unmake him.
By the time I set up for that afternoon class, I was gripped by a stage fright more violent than the bout that had once almost cost us Jonah’s first major competition. Children sense everything, and mine broke out with bursts of teasing, all of them sung, per the class rule. I settled them down and started them in on scalar swells, our usual warm-up. “I’m still standing,” up to the top of their giggling ranges and gently down again. My brother didn’t show. He couldn’t. There was nothing left of him, outside the concert hall. He’d disappeared into consummation. My body began to feel the relief of not having to meet him this time around.
We rolled out our stuff. Not despite. Not even anyway. With no one to impress, we delighted ourselves: all we have, really, when everything’s figured. We followed the usual steps to daily ecstasy. First, we laid down the elementary pulse, what my father years ago called “the laws of time.” Two kids on toms gave us a groove good enough to stay in for as long as we could move. Then we layered on the beat, Burundi drumming, a long, relaxed twenty-four-pulse cycle, with another half dozen players on pitched percussion doing what they’d have done gladly for a living all life long, plus some.
When all the plates were in the air and spinning, we cracked open some tunes. My kids knew the drill. They had been through it often enough to bring it to elementary school perfection. I conducted from the piano, waving my finger in the air, landing on a girl in a mint jumper, her hair in cornrows, grinning, already picked before I even knew I was picking her.
“What are you thinking about when you wake up?” I tossed the question above the trance of cycling pulses. This girl, my beacon Nicole, was ready for it.
Breakfast is on, and
I’m gonna eat like a Queen!
Mayhem reigned, but the rhythm held. She soloed, then settled into a cycle of her own. We took her pitch as home and set up camp. I pointed to another favorite in the front row, lanky, eager Judson, his tapping cross-trainers the size of his chest. “What did you think about last night, falling asleep?” Judson already knew.
Man, I was running,
through a long silver tunnel,
faster than anyone.
The two of them spun around each other, finding their entrances, nudging their pitches and syncopations to fit. I took a few more in that pitch center. “Where’s your safest place in the world?”
There’s a spot on a hill
at the end of my street
where I can look out
over everything.
“What did you see on the way to school? When are you best? Who you going to be this time next year?” I brought them in, clipping a phrase, drawing another out, speeding or slowing them as needed to get the roux to set. Half a dozen singers hung on to one another in midair, constantly changing, unchanged. I hushed them into a diminuendo, then started up five more. I played out the new starting pitch, then built a group at the dominant. Your five favorite words. The dream Saturday afternoon. Your name if your name wasn’t yours. I waved them into an alternation: one-five, five-one.
Then came the leap into changes. I thumped a key and pointed, and three singers transposed their phrase to that new place in the scale. They still knew, at age eight: a pitch for every place we have to go.
My choir started smirking, but not on account of my conducting. The singers’ mouths gaped, huge as fish in an aquarium, at something over my shoulder. Keeping time, I turned, to see Jonah standing in the classroom door, his own mouth open, a lesson in how to make a throat wide enough for rapture. I couldn’t stop to greet him; my hands were full of notes. He gestured me to turn back around and keep afloat that feather on the breath of God.
I hushed the first two groups and took them both aside, readying a third to travel into the relative minor. The most scared you’ve ever been. Five words you’d rather die than hear. I traced my finger in the air, searching for someone to sing The heaviest weight pressing on you, and landed on Robert. He took only two beats. He, too, was waiting for me.
My Daddy is dead
and my brother’s in prison.
When is the zero of change, the spot in time when time begins? Not the big bang, or even the little one. Not when you learn to count your first tune. Not that first now that twists back on itself. All moments start from the one when you see how they all must end.
Robert drew his thread, looping it over and over, into the elementary pulse. A cloud passed over the choir, but our song already anticipated that change in the light. I now had all the chords I needed to get anywhere pitches could go. I brought the lines in and out, swelled and hushed, slowed, then sped, chopped and extended, plucking out a solo and pasting together quartets, moving the whole freely from one key to another.
My Daddy is dead.
And I was running.
To that spot on a hill.
Where breakfast is on and I can look out,
but my brother’s in prison.
They knew already how to make it go. They ceased to care about the strange adult or even notice him. We stayed in the swell, working our favorite rondo form, coming back, whenever we strayed too far, to a full choral shout of “I’m still standing.” I pulled out every stop, everything every student of mine had ever taught me about how music runs. It shamed me that I
needed so badly to impress him. As if joy ever needed justifying, or could justify anything. And my shame stoked me to lift all my voices higher.
We rose as far as we ever had. We flowed back into ourselves, and I stirred the waters for one more full flood before returning to sea level. But as we crested one last time, I heard a ringing like a bell. Its attack was something only weather made. I hadn’t conducted it; it came from outside my students’ ranges, but nestled into their outlined harmonies, notes so sustained they were almost stopped. It took me an instant, forever, to place: my brother singing Dowland. The tune came from a life ago. The words from yesterday:
Bird and fish can fall in love.
I turned around to see, but Jonah waved me back again. He came alongside the end of the choir’s back row. The resonance he released rang like a gong. But my kids knew a good thing when they made one. I kept conducting, and they kept coming back in. I stole a look at Jonah. He lifted an eyebrow at me like he used to do, back in the day. And we were off.
Everywhere I brought my class, he found a way to follow. This time, I made him read my mind. Accompany me. Scraps of will-o’-the-wisp, poet love, songs of the death of children, the Dies Irae, old broken have-mercies: He fit them into the running chorus, changed by everything they harmonized. He gave them game. He sang in that high, clear, inevitable blade of light his whole lifetime had gone into perfecting. Even the children felt the power. Always the same seven words, scatting where he needed, as if born to it.
We circled on a giant updraft, drifting through the keys. His voice, joined to the voices of my children, was like a lamp in the night. We could have stayed up there for years, except for one accident. When he slipped into the classroom, Jonah failed to close the door. So every chant of “I’m still standing”—a little bit louder now; a little bit softer now—washed down the hall, the free property of anyone who heard. I didn’t realize we were disturbing the peace until the chorus joined in behind me.