Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He stopped for a breath, but not because he needed one. He could have sailed on forever on that fountain of air.

“Or say it was the furnace, all by itself. Nobody helping it along, nobody’s historical mission. Why that furnace? Why were we living in that house, and not some other? Don’t they inspect those things, in the good neighborhoods? How would she have died if she’d been living over on some burned-out block between Seventh and Lenox? They’re dying of tetanus up there. They’re dying of flu. Illiteracy. Dying in the backseats of cars when the hospital won’t take them. A woman like Mama dies in this country, at her age — it’s somebody’s fault. What do you need to know? Listen, Joey. Would it change the way you live if they told you all the answers, beyond doubt?”

I thought of Ruth. I had no answer for Jonah. But he had one for me.

“You don’t need to know if someone burned her alive. All you need to know is whether someone wanted to. And you know the answer to that one already. You’ve known that one since — what, six? So somebody did what everyone’s thought of doing. Or maybe not. Maybe she died a raceless woman’s death. Maybe furnaces explode. You don’t know, you can’t know, and you’re never going to know. That’s what being black in this country means. You’ll never know anything. When they give you your change and won’t put it in your hand? When they cross the street a block down from you? Maybe they just had to cross the street. All you know for sure is that everyone hates you, hates you for catching them in a lie about everything they’ve ever thought of themselves.”

He did that head-rolling shoulder heave singers do to loosen themselves. Ready to return to recording, get on with his life. “I got Da talking once. God knows where you were, Joey. I can’t keep track of you all the time. Before they were married, apparently, he listed four possibilities for us, like a logic problem: A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B. He didn’t like the fixed categories. No element of time. What did he know about us? No more than we know about him. Neither of them liked race trumping everything. Wasn’t that how history screwed us in the first place? They both thought family should trump race. That’s who they were. That’s why they raised us how they did. Noble experiment. Four choices, all of them fixed. But even fixed things have to move.”

He stood and put his arms over his head, bent them back behind him and touched his shoulder blades, the sockets of his pruned wings. When I listen to that second disk now, this is how I see him. A glow in his eyes, about to launch into some tune that will mean the end of self.

“But you know what, Mule? They don’t. Don’t move. White won’t move, and black can’t. Well, white moves when black buys a place in the neighborhood. But beyond that, race is like the pyramids. Older than history and built to outlast it. You know what? Even thinking there are four choices is a joke. In this country, choice isn’t even on the menu.”

“Ruth’s married a Panther.” This, too, he somehow already knew. Maybe she’d told him when they’d met. All he did was nod. I carried on, stung. “Robert Rider. She’s joined, too.”

“Good for her. We all need to find our art.”

I flinched at the word. “She has the police reports. No, I mean for the fire. She and her husband… They’re sure. They say if the — if Mama had been white…”

“Sure of what? Sure of everything we already knew. Sure of what killed her? You’ll never know. That’s blackness, Mule. Never knowing. That’s how you know who you really are.” He did a horrible little minstrel-show shuffle. Years ago, I might have tried to talk him down, to bring him back from himself. Now I just looked away.

“If Mama and Da both wanted family more than…” The bile backed up my throat. “Why the hell don’t we even have our family?”

“Who? You mean Mama’s?” He held still, scanning the past. He alone was old enough to remember our grandparents. “Same reason Ruth took off, I guess.”

“Not the same reason.”

Jonah smiled at my open treason. His folded hands, steeple-style, touched his lips. “There was an argument. You remember. I told you, Mule. We can’t know. Didn’t I tell you? Race trumps family. It’s bigger than anything. Bigger than husband and wife. Bigger than brother and sister…” Bigger than objects in the sky. Bigger than knowing. And still there was one thing so small, it could slip past race without notice. Jonah put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, brother. We’ve got work to do.”

We went back into the studio and recorded “The Crow” in one take — the only time in the entire recording session we hit a song perfectly on a single try. Jonah listened to the master tape again and again, probing for the smallest flaw. But he could find none.

A crow was with me

As I made my way from town.

Back and forth, all the way to now

It has flown around my head.

Crow, you strange creature,

Won’t you leave me be?

Are you waiting for prey here, soon?

Do you mean to seize my corpse?

Well, there isn’t much farther

To go upon this journey.

Crow, let me finally see

A faith that lasts to the grave.

He kept his laser-guided pitches, but all the while his voice dissolved the notes, sliding into them with a whiff of Billie Holiday wandering across the remains of a lynching. He sang the words into their final mystery.

The night we finished taping, we shook hands with the technicians and stepped out into the strangeness of our hometown. Midtown was a blaze of fossil fuel. We walked down Sixth Avenue through the thirties, mixing into the brittle after-hours crowd. A siren cut through the air from ten blocks away. I grabbed Jonah. I practically jumped on him.

“Just a cop, Joey. Nabbing some second-shift robber.”

My chest was wound up tighter than Schubert’s organ-grinder. I’d been conditioned. I was waiting for the return loop, for some part of the city to ignite. I knew what happened whenever we laid down his voice into permanence. We walked all the way from the studios to the Village. New York had as many alarms that night as any. I flinched at every one, until my brother’s amusement turned into disgust. By the time we hit Chelsea, we were quarreling.

“So Watts was my fault? This is what you think?”

“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I think.”

At Fourth Street, he gave up on me and took off alone. I went to the apartment and waited up for him all night. He didn’t show until the next day. When he did, the topic was off-limits. I wasn’t to ask him anything of consequence, ever again. Nor did he ever ask how I knew about Ruth. She, too, was now off-limits. All the things we couldn’t talk about left me endless time to replay the things I’d told him. I convinced myself I hadn’t betrayed Ruth. She wanted me to tell. She’d sworn me to secrecy the way Jesus banned his disciples from telling anyone he was going around working miracles.

Every time the Panther Party made the news, I had the sick feeling she or Robert was going to be a footnote casualty. Huey Newton, the Party’s founder, was arrested for killing a police officer in Oakland. Ruth had about as much connection to the man as I had to President Johnson. But I dragged through two weeks, feeling as if she’d somehow helped to pull the trigger. A man has a right to defend himself. So long as the police go on killing us at will. Part of a state government building up in Albany collapsed, the result of building-code violations. No one was hurt, and there was no sign of tampering. But jumpy politicians tried to tie the collapse to a shrill call for rights put out by the New York Panther chapter, the group Robert and Ruth Rider were helping to organize.