Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The Daily Worker has a field day. Artists vent their outrage — Heifetz, Flagstad, Farrar, Stokowski. But America ignores these foreign interventions. Thousands of petition signatures produce nothing. Then the real bombshell falls. Eleanor Roosevelt, First Mother of all First Daughters, resigns her DAR membership. The president’s wife rejects her roots overnight, declaring that no ancestor of hers ever fought to found this republic. The story makes headlines here and in capitals abroad. Miss Anderson plunges, attacca, from lieder into high opera. But her alto remains the sole calm in the middle of a national outcry. She tells the press she knows less about the situation than any of them. Her poise is a gentle puff, yet breath enough to fan old cinders into flame.

On segregation, the presidency has held silent since Reconstruction. Now a classical vocal recital becomes the battlefield for this administration’s public stand. High culture signs on to battle not just another affront to the downtrodden Negro but a slander against Schubert and Brahms. The First Lady, former social worker, is furious. Long an Anderson fan, she had the alto sing a command performance three years earlier. Now the woman who sang at the White House can’t use the rented stage. Eleanor’s ad hoc Protest Committee looks for an alternate venue, but the Board of Education denies them Central High School. Central High, unavailable to Variety ’s third-biggest performer of the year. “If a precedent of this sort is established, the board will lose the respect and confidence of the people and bring about its destruction.”

Walter White, NAACP president, heads to the Capitol with the only possible solution, one large enough to turn catastrophe to work. Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, agrees to the idea in a heartbeat. The secretary has at his command the perfect venue. Its acoustics are awful and the seating worse. But oh, the capacity! Miss Anderson will sing outdoors, from the foot of the Emancipator. There’s no hiding place down here.

Word of the plan goes out, and hate mail pours in. Makeshift crosses of Japanese cherry pop up like daffodils in the White House lawn. Still, there’s no weighing the human soul except singly. The Texas chapter of the Daughters wires in an order for two hundred seats. But Ickes and Eleanor have saved their trump card. The tickets for this cobbled-up Sunday concert will go for free. Free is an admission price the nation understands, one that guarantees a house to make the DAR blanch. Even those who don’t know a meno from a molto, who couldn’t pick Aida from Otello out of a chorus line, plan to spend this Easter on the Mall.

Tens of thousands make the pilgrimage, each one for private motives. Lovers of free-flying danger. Those who’d have paid fortunes to witness this Europe-stealing phenomenon. Devotees who worshiped this woman’s throat before the force of destiny slipped into it. People who simply want to see a face like theirs up there on the marble steps, standing up to the worst the white world can throw at it and giving it all back in glory.

Over in Philadelphia, at Union Baptist, that temple towering over Fitzwater and Martin, this is the hour of deliverance, a congregation’s payback, though they’ve never sought the slightest reward. On this great gettin’-up morning, the pastor works Miss Anderson into his Easter sermon for the special early service. He speaks of the sound of a life that keeps on rising, breaking out of the grave, no matter how hard the farflung empire might want it dead and buried. The great crescent banks of polished pews lean in to the message and ring it with amens. The children’s choir lets loose a noise more joyful than any it’s made since little Marian’s heyday, and the sound rises up to roost in the arcing carved rafters.

The gospel is good, and the church empties its worshipers like the contents of that old tomb. In Sunday finest, the great flock mills on the church porch, waiting for the busses, trading excitement, remembering the student recitals and the benefit concerts, the dimes pooled: Educate Our Marian, the pure voice of her people’s future.

The busses fill with song rolling across all registers, rich suspensions bridging the wilderness and Canaan. They sing searing anthems, tear off gospel hand-clappers, and lay into stolid four-part hymns. They sing a field full of spirituals, including their Marian’s favorite: “Trampin’.” “I’m trampin’, I’m trampin’, trying to make heaven my home.” The more pragmatic sing, “trying to make a heaven of my home.” Only this once, among the endless earthly schisms, the two inimical persuasions lie down alongside each other, separate parts in the same chorus.

Delia Daley’s adopted parish heads for the promised land without her. In her agony of one, Delia feels them leaving, abandoning her on the wrong side of those parting waters. She’s even had to miss the special sunrise service, saddled with her morning shift at the hospital, which she cannot slip. She stands at the nurses’ station, still begging for a charitable crumb, just an hour, half an hour’s mercy. The brick-complexioned Feena Sundstrom doesn’t even blink at her. “Everyone, Miss Daley, would like Easter Sunday off, our patients included.”

She considers leaving early anyway, but the Swedish Storm Trooper is already set to fire her just for looking sideways. Without the money coming in from her hospital hours, Delia can wave the last year of her voice training good-bye. She’d have to beg from her father again, just to have enough to graduate, something the man would no doubt almost love. She’s had to listen to the speech every semester for the last four years. “Allow me to remind you of a little matter of economic reality. You’ve heard about this party the high and mighty have dreamed up, a little thing called the Depression? Half our people, workless. It’s wiped out almost every Negro this country hasn’t already wiped out. You want to learn to sing? Take a look at what we folk have to sing about.”

When she told her father she wouldn’t be heading to Washington with Union Baptist, the doctor all but beamed. When she added that she’d be going later, by train, at extra expense, he turned back into Old Testament patriarch. “How is this indulgent excursion supposed to contribute to your making a living? Is that more of your magic of high art?”

No good telling him she makes ends meet. Miss Anderson makes a better living than ninety-nine hundredths of we folk, not to mention almost every white man alive. Her father would only repeat what he’s said endlessly since she entered school: The world of classical music makes professional boxing look like an ice-cream social. Gladiator combat unto death. Only the ruthless survive.

Yet Delia Daley has survived — her own brand of ruthless. Ruthless toward herself, toward her bodily strength, her available hours. A four-year, around-the-clock marathon, through every wall, and she’s ready to keep running, as long as she has to. Full-time at the hospital, twice that at school. Let her father see the power of high art.

But today art’s power falters, threatens to fall. The predawn shift is worse than murder, with nowhere to appeal. The feeble and infirm — always with us, as Jesus says, but somehow more numerous than usual, this Easter — lie waiting in their own waste for her to come clean them. She twice needs help in moving patients to get to the soiled linen. Then the Brick Nightingale makes her do second floor west’s bathrooms, just because the woman knows what today is. Feena the Fascist stands over her the whole while, sighing about colored people’s time. “You people are so slow getting in and so damn fast getting out.”

To augment the agony, three separate patients yell at her for clearing their breakfasts away before they’ve finish pecking at their vulcanized eggs. So Delia is almost a full, unpaid hour late getting out, counting the ten minutes of Feena’s reprimand. She runs home to wash and throw on a decent dress before rushing to the train, whose fare will set her back a week’s worth of hospital-subsidized lunches.