Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Jonah,” I said to slow him. But he was flying.

“Professional suicide. Maybe the Europeans ate this thing up. But it’s going to bomb here. It’s going to end up looking just…”

“Suicide? Your chance to sing in front of thousands of people? To be reviewed across the entire country? Jonah, people know how to separate the performer from the piece. If they don’t like the show…”

“They won’t. I know what they’re going to say already. It’s not what people pay good money to see. Art can’t beat this country at its own game. Art shouldn’t even try.”

I didn’t ask what art should try to do. I kept wondering about Ruth, what she’d say about her brother playing the Negro, how it would sound to her, compared to yet more criminal Schubert. Nothing Jonah might sing would ever have a bearing on the cause. I wondered what music the Panthers listened to, in their cars, out on the hot street, in their beds at night. No doubt Ruth and Robert, like my brother, knew exactly what art shouldn’t do.

“It could be something,” I told him. “Something good. You could make…a difference.”

Air burst out of his mouth. “A difference? A difference to what?” I bowed my head. “No, really, Joey. A difference to who? You think there’s a single operagoer who’s going to think differently about herself because of music? They’re not listening to themselves, Joey. They’re listening to the performance. Connoisseurs about everything that’s not them. That’s where this piece falls flat. It’s too good. It’s too serious. It gives the audience too much credit.”

“So you’re saying if they offered you Rodolpho or Alfredo—”

“Or Tristan. Yes. That’s what I’m saying. Let me sing what I’ve given my life to learning.”

“Rodolpho? When have you given one hour—”

“Let me sing the things I could sing better than anyone in this world. The roles any other tenor of my caliber would be given. Who am I hurting by doing that?”

“Who are you hurting by taking this part?”

“Which part? The Negro? ”

“There’s a difference, Jonah.”

“No doubt. Between what and what?”

“Between…chickenshit deference and artistic cooperation. Between deciding your own life and making the world follow your own rules.” I was going to humiliate myself in front of him, all to get him to take a role I didn’t even want him to take. “Jonah, it’s okay. Okay to be a part of something. To choose to be one thing or the other. To come home, somewhere. Belong.”

“Belong? Belong with all the other Negro leads? A leading light unto my people, maybe? An exemplar?” His voice was horrible. He could sing anything now. Any role or register.

“To be something other than yourself.”

He nodded, but not in agreement. I wasn’t to talk until he’d decided the best way to annihilate me. “Why is the Met offering me this part? I mean this part?”

You’ll never know. That’s what being the Negro means.I dug in. “Because you can sing it.”

“I’m sure they have several dozen limber leads in their stables who can sing it. Men with operatic experience. Why not use them? They do Otello in blackface, don’t they?”

I heard a tiny, translucent, almost blue little girl ask, Are you two Moors? She never existed. We’d invented her. “Would you take Otello if they offered it?” They’d have to darken Jonah’s face, too, just to make him believable.

“I refuse to be typecast before I’ve sung a single role.”

“Everyone’s typecast, Jonah. Everyone. That’s how the human brain works. Name a singer who doesn’t stand for some… No one is just himself.”

“I don’t mind being a Negro. I refuse to be a Negro tenor.” He reached down to the keyboard and felt out four measures of what sounded like Coltrane. He could have played piano like a king, if he hadn’t sung so well.

“I don’t get you.”

“I won’t be the Caruso of black America. The Sidney Poitier of opera.”

“You don’t want to be mixed-race.” I was sitting with him at the top of the subway stairs in Kenmore Square, Boston. “That’s what you mean.”

“I don’t want to be any race.”

“That—” I was going to say, That’s your parents’ fault. “That is something nobody but a purebred white person could want to get away with.”

“‘Purebred white person’?” He laughed. “Purebred white person. Is that like a well-modulated soprano?” He prowled around the cage of our front room. It might have been a concrete cubicle in the Bronx Zoo, a mat of straw, a watering trough. He scraped his fingers back and forth in the mortar lines between the wall bricks. He might have rasped them raw if I hadn’t grabbed his wrist. He slunk back to the piano bench. The instant his mass touched wood, he was up again. “Joey. I’ve been an absolute idiot. Where are all the men?”

“What men?”

“Exactly. I mean, we have Price, Arroyo, Dobbs, Verrett, Bumbry — all these black women pouring out of every state in the union. Where the hell are the men?”

“George Shirley? William Warfield?” It sounded like clutching at straws, even to me.

“Warfield. Case in point. Brilliant voice, and opera’s basically locked the man out. Start out singing Porgy, and that’s all anybody’s going to be able to hear you do.”

“It’s not in the culture. Black man wants to be an opera singer? I mean, really.”

“It’s not in the culture for the women, either. And they’ve come up from nowhere — from Georgia, Mississippi, One hundred eleventh Street. They’re stealing the show, out of all proportion…”

“There’s the whole diva thing. That doesn’t work for men. Think of you at Juilliard. The recital stuff was fine. But nobody there was helping you over into the opera theater.”

“Exactly, exactly. Exactly my point. And why? The door’s kicked in, and the Man’s finally dealing with the whole thing, and there they are up onstage, this white guy and this black woman, kissing and cooing and, well, that’s kind of yummy, in a nice old-fashioned, time-honored plantation way. Same old domination by another name. Then there’s this big black man and this white woman, and what the hell? Who let this happen? Blow the whistle, wave the play dead. It all comes down to who’s doing the fucking and who’s getting—”

“Jonah.” All I could do was blink at him. “What difference does it make? Why do you need this role? You already have a career. More career than most singers of any color even dream of.”

He broke out of his pacing and stood behind me. He rested his hands on my shoulders. It felt like the last time he’d ever do that. “What do I have, Joey? Maybe fifteen years of prime voice left?” The figure shocked me, a crazy exaggeration. Then I did the math. “I just thought it might be good to go make some noise with other people. A little harmony, while I’m still in form.”

He turned down the offer to play the Negro. He was the one who said no, in the full knowledge that no one ever got a third try. But then, saying yes might have left him even more enslaved. This way, he kept at least one of his hands on what he thought was the rudder.

He was right about everything. The Met, their first choice gone, ended up not producing The Visitation. The opera did come to town, with the premiere cast that had triumphed with it in Hamburg the year before. Just as Jonah predicted, the New York critics slaughtered it. They accused the libretto of irrelevance at best and of stilted falseness at worst. If one wanted civil rights, one should read the papers or hop a bus down south. One came to the opera, on the other hand, for the passion and drama of the tragic self. The tickets were too expensive for anything else.