Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah left the United States at the end of 1968. No high-art gossip column reported the departure. At the moment when almost every other black singer, performer, artist, or writer cheered the birth of nationhood, my brother abandoned the country. He wrote from Magdeburg. “They love me here, Joey.” He might have been Robeson, on his first visit to the Soviet Union. Everything there made a mockery of everything here. “The East Germans look at me and see a singer. I never understood that stare Americans always gave me, until I got away from it. Nice to know what it feels like, for a while, to be something other than hue-man.”

The Magdeburg Festival sounded like high-art boot camp. “Living conditions are a bit Spartan. My room reminds me of our dorm at Boylston; only here, I don’t have to pick up your shit.” This from a man whose laundry I did every year we lived together. “Food consists of your more recalcitrant vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. Making up for all hardships, however, is a steady stream of music-loving women. Now that’s what I call a culture.”

He marveled at the scope of the musical gathering, all the world-class singers the celebration brought together. Several clearly put the fear of God in him. But he seemed to come alive on the challenge of ensemble singing. He was a kid who’d shot backyard hoops his whole childhood, finally playing full-court ball. He reveled in the thrill of reading a dozen other musicians at once and fusing with these perfect strangers.

The European reporters demanded to know why they’d never heard of him before. He didn’t dissuade them from publishing reports of American racism. He had offers to sing in a dozen cities, including Prague and Vienna. “Vienna, Mule. Think of the possibilities. More work than a short-order cook in Lauderdale during spring break. You simply have to come. That’s my last word on the matter.”

His letter took weeks catching up to me, because I’d moved. I couldn’t afford to keep our Village apartment alone. I briefly put up with Da in Fort Lee, to his delight and daily surprise each evening when he came back to Jersey and found me still there. I heard him wandering the house in the middle of the night, chatting away with Mama, who seemed a better conversationalist than his son would ever be.

I couldn’t stay in that house. I didn’t mind my father’s nightly chat with a dead woman. But the alarm I set off in my father’s prim neighborhood was too much for me. The police gave me a week before they decided I couldn’t be the man’s gardener. The first time they detained and searched me, I had no ID and only the most implausible story: unemployed Juilliard dropout classical pianist, the black son of a white German physicist who taught at Columbia. Even after they finally agreed to call Da down to the station to check out my story, it took all night to free me. The second time, two weeks later, I was ready for them with a wallet full of documentation. But they wouldn’t even let me make a phone call. They kept me overnight and let me go at nine the next morning, without explanation or apology.

I stopped leaving the house. For two months, I stayed home and practiced. I put the word out with everyone I knew that Jonah was gone. I was doing nothing, and would play with anyone for any kind of pay. I heard Jonah saying, You undersell yourself. Make them hear you.

Logically, I should have kept doing what I’d spent my life training to do. But that meant taking care of my brother. Jonah and I had lived for years in self-perfecting isolation. Now, as perfect as I had any hope of getting, I lacked the connections that any musician needed to survive.

I played a handful of exploratory tryouts. I’d arrange to meet some sterling mezzo or baritone in an uptown rehearsal space. When I showed up, the singer would recoil in reflex embarrassment: Some mistake. They’d fall all over themselves going over the score with me, practically trying to show me where middle C was.

It’s hard to play well when you feel like a fish on stilts. And it’s hard to sing when jarred out of your center. Most of the time, the trials ended in mutual praise and embarrassed handshakes. I played for a sumptuous soprano, a von Stade look-alike who liked what I did for her. She said no accompanist had ever given her such secured freedom. But I felt her struggling with all the overhead of traveling about the country with a black man, and frankly, I didn’t much want the overhead of traveling around the country with her. We parted enthusiastically. She went on to a modest but rewarding career and I went home to cold noodles and more études.

I played for Brian Barlowe, three years before anyone ever heard of him. He sounded like the Roman soldier at the foot of the cross. He had that same confidence Jonah once had, the utter certainty that the world would love him for what he could do. Only Brian Barlowe’s confidence was better placed than Jonah’s. I’d take Jonah’s voice over his in a heartbeat, at each man’s prime. But Barlowe belonged already. His audiences needed to think about nothing but the confirming sounds pouring out of him. Listeners came away from a Barlowe recital surer than ever of their birthright to beauty.

We played together on three separate days over the course of a month. Brian was nothing if not careful, and he intended to choreograph his march into fame with absolute precision. I showed up each time, stupid with needing to show him that I could read his mind and make even him better than he was. But by the time Barlowe was convinced of my playing — and what’s more, seeing that I could supply a transgressive frisson that would electrify his act — by the time he offered me a chance he was sure I’d leap at, my heart was no longer in it. The gratification of following Brian Barlowe around the world to the pinnacle of fame could not match the pleasure of handing the man back his scores and turning him down.

It dawned on me: I could accompany no one but my brother. When I played for others, for those who made music without the danger of having it taken away, the song never lifted off the page. With Jonah, a recital was always grand larceny. With the children of Europe, it was a revolving charge account. The joy of making noise was gone, even if the cold thrill of notes remained intact.

I sprouted two massive ganglions, one on each wrist: two cysts, like insect galls, as harsh as stigmata. Playing became unbearable. I tried every postural adjustment, even hunching over the keyboard on a low stool, but nothing helped. I thought I might never make music again. For weeks, I did nothing but eat, sleep, and nurse my wrists. I looked through the paper at the end of each week, scouting the want ads. I thought of becoming a night watchman in some high-rise business suite. I’d stroll around a graveyard of abandoned offices with a flashlight once an hour, and sit the rest of the time at a shabby wooden desk, pouring over a stack of Norton pocket scores.

I needed to get out of New York. By luck, I learned they were looking for barroom pianists for the season down in Atlantic City. Being dark would almost be an asset. I went down to a club that was advertising, a place called the Glimmer Room. The bar was something stuck in the La Brea tar pits — a complete sinkhole in time. Nothing had changed in the place since Eisenhower. The walls were full of signed black-and-white pub shots of comedians I’d never heard of.

I did a five-minute audition for a man named Saul Silber. My wrists still bothered me, and I hadn’t improvised since my days in a Juilliard practice room with Wilson Hart. But Mr. Silber wasn’t looking for Count Basie. The crowds had been ebbing in the Glimmer Room ever since the transistor. Woodstock was a wooden stake in its heart. The place was dying even faster than the city itself. Mr. Silber didn’t understand why. He just wanted to staunch the bleeding any way possible.