Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Get back? You mean to Da?”

“Him. And…your brother.”

“Ruth. Why? Why are you doing this to them?”

She folded into the man and put her arm around him. He hugged her back. My brother-in-law. Her protection against my words. Against all that the rest of us had done to bust her ass. “They’ve taken their stand. I’m not their business anymore.”

Everything in the declaration sounded forced and wrong. From across the booth, my sister’s marriage — I could hardly think the thing — seemed doomed before it started. “They’ll want to know. They’ll be happy for you.” I didn’t even sound feeble.

“They’d find some way to insult me and my husband both. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. Don’t you dare tell them. Not even that you saw me.”

“Ruth. What’s happened? What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing’s got into me, brother. Everything was in me already. From birth.” She put her arm out on the table for me to examine. Physical proof.

“How can you treat Da like this, Ruth? The man’s your father. What has he ever—”

She tapped her satchel, the manila folder. “He knew. The man knew all about these reports, a month after it happened.”

“Ruth, you don’t know for—”

“He never said a word to us. Not then. Not when we got older. Everything was always just an accident. Just fate. He and his so-called housekeeper—”

“Mrs. Samuels? What does Mrs. Samuels have—”

“The two of them, raising us like three sweet little white kids. See No Race, Hear No Race, Sing No Race. The whole, daily, humiliating, endless…” Her body started to shake. Robert Rider, her husband, rested his hand on her back, and she collapsed. She curled into his open hands. Robert just sat there, patiently petting her burst of uncoiling hair. I wanted to reach across the table and take her hand. But it was no longer my place to offer comfort.

“That was their answer, Ruth. Move the world forward. Shortcut into the future, in one generation. One jump — beyond tribes.”

“That’s not a place,” she hissed. “That’s not a future.” I waited for her to finish the thought. She already had.

“If Da thought for one minute that someone…” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Whatever he told us or didn’t tell us about the fire, I’m sure he was just trying to honor her memory.”

Ruth put her palms out to stop my words. She’d had enough of me and my kind. She pulled away from her husband’s petting, ran her hands through her globe of hair, and blotted both eyes with a wadded napkin. When she took the napkin from her face, she was composed again. Ready for all the world’s work her parents had failed to tell her about. She grabbed her satchel and rose, speaking more to her wristwatch than to me. “You’ve got to give the man up, Joey.”

“The man? Give him up?”

“He’s done nothing but exploit you. From the beginning of time.”

“Da? Exploit me?”

“Not Da!” Her mouth twisted with agony. She wouldn’t say his name.

“Jonah?” I waved toward her satchel, the evidence. “Jonah doesn’t know anything about this. He can’t reject your theory if you never even—”

“Jonah,” she enunciated like a Met radio announcer, “doesn’t know much about anything beneath his perch.” Robert chuckled. I would have, too. Little Rootie had always been the perfect mimic.

“He’s doing what he can. What he does best in the world.”

“Being white, you mean?” She waved me off before I could counter. “You don’t have to defend him, Joey. Really, you don’t. So he’s got a secret. I ain’t gonna tell no one!”

“We could use a voice like that.” The way Robert said this made me guess: She’d slipped him into a concert. He’d heard his new brother-in-law sing, and the memory of that sound left even him a little ashen. “Whole world’s on fire. We could use everyone.”

“He’d end up using us,” Ruth said. She hated him. I couldn’t even admit it long enough to ask why. “Well, brother?” She pulled out her wallet and rooted for some dollars. I wondered what she was doing for money. I didn’t even know what my new brother-in-law did for a living. “You’ve heard all the evidence. The facts of what really happened to us. Make your own choice.”

“Ruth. What choice? You make this sound like some kind of cosmic showdown.” She tilted her head at me and lifted her eyebrows. “What choice am I supposed to make? I can play the piano, or I can help you save our people?”

“You can make a difference. Or not.”

“For God’s sake. You won’t even tell me where you’re living. You won’t even tell me what you’re involved in. Are you running guns or something? Bombing buildings?”

Robert’s massive hand came across the table and landed on my wrist. But softly, certain. Too graceful to frighten. He’d have made a magnificent cellist. “Look. Your sister and I have joined the Party.”

“The Party? The Communist party?”

Ruth chuckled. She pressed her palms into her cheeks. “Hopeless. The boy is hopeless.”

A Morse code smile flicked across Robert’s face. “Panthers.” He leaned forward. “We’re helping set up a New York chapter.”

Ruth was right. I was the white man’s nigger. Just the sound of the word scared me. I sat for a while, turning the name over in my head until it disintegrated. “Where’s the black leather jacket?”

“Left it at home.” Robert grinned, released my wrist, and waved outside. “I thought it was going to rain.”

Had she grown radical out of love, or fallen for the man out of politics? “You going to shoot at people?” I asked my little sister.

I meant it as a nervous joke. Ruth answered, “They’re shooting at us.” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even breathe without betraying some blood relation.

My sister saw my agony. She stiffened, ready to go to war. But her husband shifted between us, softening. “Land, bread, education, justice, and peace. That’s all we’re talking.”

“And the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”

Ruth laughed. “Joey! You’ve been reading the newspapers. White newspapers, of course. But still.”

Robert nodded. “We’re fighting that bill, yeah. We have to. Police want us empty-handed. Whites want us to be the only ones without arms. Then they can keep doing anything they damn please to us.” It sounded like madness to me. As terminally mad as the streets of Watts. And yet, aside from that one nightmare evening, I knew my life to be a far crazier, far more sheltered dream. “A man has a right to defend himself,” my brother-in-law was saying. “So long as the police go on killing us at will, I’m holding out for that right. They’ve got the choice: the Whited States of America or the Ignited States.”

His words were empty of theater. The sound died in the room’s background chatter. I saw what Ruth responded to in the man. I, too, needed his approval, and I didn’t even know him. Ruth pulled at her husband. “Come on, Robert. Joey’s busy. Too busy for the facts. Too busy for what’s coming.”

“Ruth!” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “You’ll kill me. What does any of this have to do with…?” I waved at her satchel.

“With how your mother died? I thought it might help you decide whose son you are. That’s all.”

My mammy’s own bairn.I spoke slowly, trying to find the beat. “My mother married my father. They raised us as they thought right. She died in a fire.” The fire didn’t kill her.

“Your mother died in what was more than likely an act of racial hatred. Every day, someone somewhere dies the way she did.”

“Your mother…” And I couldn’t anymore. Neither of us owned her. She was lost to us both. I looked at Ruth for a last moment. “Mama sang a mean Grieg.”