Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I dragged Jonah south, along a weed-shot alley that dead-ended in a street running diagonally along a railroad track. Scattered gunshot echoed off the flanking buildings, spattering from all directions at once, unreal, like cap pistols fired off into garbage cans. I steered us southwest, then realized we were running straight toward Imperial Highway. We came out in the middle of bedlam.

A band of rioters had broken through the police salient and were fanning into the streets beyond. Retaliating, the police waded into a group of bystanders and beat whomever they could reach, tearing them up like dogs catching squirrels. People thrown to the sidewalk and slammed into walls, guns popping off, glass shattering, and the crowd, everywhere routed, shrieking and running.

Jonah fell back, choking, into a covered doorway. He leaned forward to ease the pressure in his chest. His left arm nursed his damaged right. He pointed in awe at my leg. I looked down. My right trouser was torn and blood oozed from my shin. We stood there, bodies whipping past like planets in broken orbit, close enough to touch.

A scream broke toward us. One white policeman, swinging a night-stick, chased two middle-aged, bloodied blacks, who cut in the direction of our door before seeing us and swerving. The slow-heeled cop stood mired for a second before spotting us. I saw how we looked to him: my gouged leg, Jonah doubled over, half-shirtless, his arm scraped open, both of us panting, marked with a brown stripe of paint. He charged us, stick raised. I put up my hands to break the blow. Jonah, choking, delirious, fell back on instinct. He swung upright and shouted a kind of high B. The pitched cry brought the cop up short. His voice saved us from having our faces beaten in.

The cop scrambled backward, one hand feeling for his gun. I got my brother’s hands into the air. More stunned than we were, the cop handcuffed us together. He marched us two blocks to a police van, prodding us with his stick, still in control, keeping us out in front of him, his captives. Jonah regained his voice. “Wait until your sister hears this. She’s gonna love us all over again. Old times.”

The officer jabbed us on. He was still wondering why he hadn’t clubbed us senseless. Still trying to figure out why the voice had stopped him.

We were taken by van with a dozen others to an auxiliary jail in Athens. All the ordinary facilities were filled. Arrests poured in by the thousands. All of black L.A. was locked up, but the riots kept flowing. We sat all night in a narrow cell with twenty men. Jonah loved it. He stopped complaining about the throb in his arm. He listened to every inflection, every seditious word as if this were rehearsal for some new dramatic role.

Talk in the cell was a grim mix of threat and predictions. The most articulate of the group were testifying. “They can’t stop this anymore. They know they can’t. We’ve won already, even if they lock us all away and destroy the key. They had to call out the army, man. They need the army for us. The whole world knows now. And they’ll never forget.”

We were held until late the following afternoon, when our officer showed up and admitted that all we’d done was cower in a doorway. Half of those still held had done no worse. Our story checked out — the record company, the rented car, Juilliard, our agent, America’s Next Voice — everything except the reason why we’d been at the scene of a riot in the first place. We must have been inciting, part of a conspiracy of educated, radical, near-white blacks filtering into the tinderbox and encouraging it to set itself alight. The way the police went at us, we’d done something far worse than looting, arson, and assault combined. We had everything — advantage, opportunity, trust. We were the future’s hope, and we’d betrayed it. Our crime was sight-seeing, coming by to watch while the city went up in flames. The booking officers verbally abused us, pushed us around a little, and threatened to hold us for trial. But finally, they discharged us in disgust.

The law couldn’t waste its breath on us. By Friday evening, it was clear that Thursday night had been just a prelude. Friday was the real fire. The violence started early and built without respite the entire day. By Friday night, Los Angeles descended into the maelstrom.

We heard it on the radio on the way to LAX. Nothing that night was flying in or out, for fear of getting shot out of the sky. We sat glazed in front of the reports, watching the blaze spread. Nothing in Southeast Asia could match it. The firefight moved out of Watts into the southeast city. Snipers fired on police. Police shot at civilians. Police shot themselves and blamed the mob. Six hundred buildings were gutted; two hundred burned to the ground. Dozens of people died of gun wounds, burns, and collapsing walls. Thousands of National Guardsmen swept through the streets, shoulder-to-shoulder, sowing still more anarchy. Jonah listened to the reports, his lips like lead.

We stayed in the airport all night, sleeping less than we had in our cell. We didn’t fly back to New York until late Saturday night, by which time thirteen thousand Guardsmen roamed the streets of Los Angeles. The rebellion would roll on for another two days.

On the long flight, Jonah played with the gash on his arm. He stared at the back of the seat in front of him and shivered. We were over Iowa when I finally found the nerve to ask him. “When you were lying there on the ground? Your lips were moving.”

He waited for me to finish, but I already had. “You want to know what I was singing?” He looked around. He leaned in and whispered, “You can’t know. The whole score was right there in front of me. I was looking up into it. It sounded good, Joey. Real good. Like nothing I’ve ever heard.”

His voice never again sounded as it had before that night. I have the recordings to confirm me.

Summer 1941—Fall 1944

She’s known the song her whole life. But Delia Daley never heard the full voice of human hatred until she married this man. Until she bore her first child. Only then does the chorus of righteousness pour down on her, slamming her family for their little daily crime of love.

She’s guilty of the greatest foolishness, and for that she must be punished. Yet she will wake startled in the middle of the night, wondering whom she has injured so badly that they must come after her. What future unforgiving accusers? Every time she tallies up her sins, it comes to this: to think that recognizing means more than its opposite. To think that race is still in motion. That we stand for nothing but what our children might do. That time makes us someone else, a little more free.

Time, she finds, does nothing of the kind. Time always loses out to history. Every wound ever suffered has only lain covered, festering. Some girlish, unenslaved part of her imagined their marriage might cure the world. Instead, it compounds the crime by assaulting all injured parties. She and David say only that family is bigger than guilt. And for this, guilt must rise up and punish them.

Great spaces of life have always been closed to her. But the spaces remaining were larger than she could fill. Now even her simplest needs become unmeetable. She’d like to walk down the street with her husband without having to play his hired help. She’d like to be able to hold his arm in public. She’d like to watch a movie together or go for dinner without being hustled out. She’d like to sling her baby on her shoulder, take him shopping, and for once not bring the store to a standstill. She’d like to come home without venom all over her. It will not happen in her lifetime. But it must happen in her son’s. Rage buckles down in her each time she leaves the house. Only motherhood is large enough to contain it.