Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Away from the windows,” she tells the children. Her calmness astounds her. “Come on, everyone. Let’s sit in the kitchen. It’ll be nicer there.”

“They’re coming this way,” Mrs. Washington cries. “They’re going to come up here and get the nice places. That’s what they’re after.”

“Hush. It’s miles away. We’re safe here.” She nurses the lie even as she serves it up. The thing she has seen — her house torched and gutted — is as real in her now as any fixed past. They shouldn’t be cowering here, in this death trap, waiting for the end to come find them. But where else can they go? Harlem is burning.

The boys aren’t frightened anymore. The night’s a game, a bright breaking of rules. They want lemonade. They want shaved ice. She gets them whatever they ask for. She and Jonah show Mrs. Washington how they sing “My country, ’tis of thee” in two-part harmony, with little Joseph keeping time on an overturned quart pot.

A quick listen in the front room confirms her fears: The night’s cries are coming nearer. She swears at David for choosing this night to be so far away. She couldn’t reach him now, even if she knew how. Then she remembers, and blesses their luck. His presence here tonight would finish them all.

“Nothing’s ever gonna change for us.” Mrs. Washington speaks like praying. “This is how it’s always gonna be.”

“Please, Mrs. Washington. Not in front of the boys.”

But the boys have curled up, each on his own oval rag rug, cushioned islands on the hardwood sea. Delia keeps vigil, ready to rush them out the back if the crowd reaches their door. All night long, she hears someone out there in the cauldron calling for her. This is how the four of them sit, the tide of violence lapping at the corner of their street, cresting in a fury of helplessness before subsiding just before dawn.

Morning breaks, silent. The fury of last night has spent itself to change exactly nothing. Delia rises to her feet, bewildered. She walks out to the front room, which is still, astonishingly, there. But she saw it. The house was gone, and now it’s still here, and she doesn’t know how to get from that one certainty back to this other.

Mrs. Washington draws Delia to her in a wild departing hug. “Bless you. I was dying of fright, and you were here. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”

“Yes,” Delia answers, still dazed. Then: “No! I did nothing.” That’s what must have saved them. Holding still, waiting for judgment to pass over.

When David returns, two nights later, she tries to tell him. “Were you frightened?” he asks. The weight of foreign words hobbles him so badly, he doesn’t even try for the thing he needs to know.

“We just sat there, the four of us, waiting. I knew what was going to happen. It all felt decided. Already done. And then…”

“Then it did not happen.”

“Then it did not happen.” She gives a soft shake of the head, refusing the evidence. “The house is still here.”

“Still here. And all of us, still, too.” He takes her in his arms, but their bafflement grows. He asks, “What has caused this riot?” She tells him: a hotel arrest. A soldier trying to keep the police from arresting a woman. “Six people dead? Many buildings burned? All this from one arrest?”

“David.” She closes her eyes, exhausted. “You can’t know. You simply cannot know.”

She sees this sting him across the face: a judgment. A rebuke. He tries to follow her — the rational scientist. But he can’t. Can’t know the pressure, millions of lives sharpened to a point, the blade that skewers you every time you try to move. He can’t even start to do the math. It’s something you come into, centuries before you’re born. To a white: a drunken woman breaking the law. But to those that the law effaces: the one standing, irrevocable death sentence.

David takes off his glasses and wipes them. “You say I cannot know. But will our boys?”

Two days after the riot, the boys have already forgotten. But something in them will remember hiding in the kitchen one night while still too young to know anything. Will they know the riot the way she knows, the way their father cannot? “Yes. They’ll have to. The largest part of them will know.” As if it had parts, this knowledge.

David looks up at her, pleading for admission. His sons will not be his. Every census will divide them. Every numbering. She watches the world take his slave children away from him to a live burial, an unmarked grave. We do not own ourselves. Always, others run us. His lips press together, bloodless. “Madness. The whole species.” She sits through this diagnosis in silence. Her man is in agony. The agony of his family, lost in bombed Rotterdam. The agony of his family, hiding in the dark in burning Harlem, while he is gone. “Nothing ever changes. The past will run us forever. No forgiveness. We never escape.”

These words scare her worse than that night’s sirens. It will end her, a blanket condemnation coming from this man, who so needs to believe that time will redeem everyone. And still, she can’t contradict him. Can’t offer him any hideout from forever. She sees the mathematician struggle with the crazed logic that assigns him: colored there, white here. The bird and the fish can build their nest. But the place they build in will blow out from underneath it.

“Perhaps they do not have four choices after all. These boys of ours.”

She touches his arm. “Nobody gets even one.”

“Belonging will kill us.”

She hides her head from him and cries. He places one hand on her nape, her shoulders, and feels the boulder there. His hand works softly, like water on that rock. Perhaps if humans had the time of erosion. If they could live at the speed of stones. He talks as he rubs her. She doesn’t look up.

“My father was finished with all of this. ‘Our people. The chosen. The children of God.’ And everyone else: not. Five thousand years was enough. A Jew was not geography, not nation, not language, not even culture. Only common ancestors. He could not be the same as a Jew in Russia or Spain or Palestine, who is different from him in every way that can be different except for being ‘our people.’ He even convinced my mother, whose grandparents died in the pogroms. But here is the funny thing.” Her lips contract involuntarily under his rubbing fingertips. She knows; she knows. He doesn’t need to say. “The funny thing…”

His parents are chosen anyway.

She lifts her head to him. She needs to see if he’s still there. “We can be our people.” Renewing their first vow. All its break and remaking. “Just us.”

“What do we tell these boys?”

She is bound to him. Will do anything to lift up the man, his solitary race of one. Anything, including lie. So she signs on to her downfall: love. She puts her hand on his nape, sealing the symmetry he began. “We tell them about the future.” The only place bearable.

A groan breaks out of him. “Which one?”

“The one we saw.”

Then he remembers. He takes hold again on nothing, a tree on a rock face, rooted in a spoonful of soil. “Yes. There.” The future that has led them here. The one they make possible. His life’s work must find them such junctures, such turnings. What dimensions don’t yet exist will come into being, bent open by their traveling through them. They can map it slowly, their best-case future. Month by month, child by child. Their sons will be the first ones. Children of the coming age. Charter citizens of the postrace place, both races, no races, race itself: blending unblended, like notes stacked up in a chord.

America, too, must jump into its own nonexistent future. Nazi transcendence — the latest flare-up of white culture’s world order — forces the country into a general housecleaning. The Tuskegee Airmen, the 758th Tank, the Fifty-first and Fifty-second Marine Corps divisions, and scores of other Negro units are shipped out to all the choke points of the global front. Whatever future this war leaves intact, it will never again be yesterday’s tomorrow.