Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Huey’s free. True.” Robert squinted at me, guessing my weight. “But everything the man has tried to do — the whole movement — is coming apart.”

“Robert,” Ruth warned.

“What’s the difference? The shit’s public knowledge.”

I’d followed the stories, if only for their sake. The gun battle at UCLA. Hampton and Clark, the two Chicago Panther organizers, killed in their sleep in an illegal police raid. Connecticut trying Bobby Seale for killing a police informant. The FBI waging all-out war. Hundreds of members killed, jailed, or fleeing the country. Eldridge Cleaver in Cuba. I’d thought for a long time that Ruth and Robert, like Jonah, might have gone abroad. Seeing them cowering here, I wished they had.

“You know about the New York roundup?” The force of Robert’s gaze terrified me.

“I read… The papers said…” I’d been unable to take the official reports in. Twenty-one Panthers arrested, charged with an elaborate plan to blow up a suite of civic buildings and kill scores of police. The group that my sister and her husband had helped to organize.

“The papers, man. You got to decide whether you’re with the papers or with the people.” He jutted his head, besieged, a rhetorical boy, a thousand years old, sick to death of the disaster this country had made of everything human. I wasn’t with the papers. I wasn’t with the people. I wasn’t even with myself. I wanted to be with my sister.

“I’m starving,” Ruth said.

It seemed a godsend, something I might help with. “There’s an Italian place just down the street.”

Robert and Ruth looked at me, embarrassed at my density. Robert reached into his pocket and drew out four crumpled dollar bills. “Could you bring us something back? Doesn’t matter what, so long as it’s hot.”

I waved him off. “Back in a minute with the best bowl of steamers you ever tasted.”

His gratitude ruined me. “Owe you one, brother.”

I took the word all the way down to the ocean and back. When I returned, I caught them arguing. They stopped the instant my key hit the lock. “Now this is what you call shellfish,” I said, sounding stupid even to myself. But Ruth was filled with thanks. She kissed, then bit, my hand. The two of them dug in. It had been some time. I waited until they’d gotten their fill. Then I tried to draw Robert out a little. Juilliard dropout, commencing his belated education.

Robert indulged me. We talked about all that had happened since I’d seen them last, the running battle of the last three years. I held out for the ghost of nonviolent resistance. Robert didn’t laugh at me, but he refused to encourage the hope. “A small group has all the rest of us locked up down in the hold, and they’re standing over the hatches with guns. The longer they do that, the harder they need to.”

My sister waved her hands in the air. “It’s not just the people with the power. It’s the second-generation immigrants, locked down in the hold with us. First word they learn when they set foot in this country is nigger. People who have nothing, turning against one another. Pure Kapo system.”

I listened, just listened, unable to add a word. When the clams were gone, we hit a lull.

“Joey,” Ruth said. “You’re sleeping with someone.”

“How did you know?” I scanned the apartment for giveaways: pictures, notes, extra toothbrush. There were none.

“You seem good. Healthy.” It seemed to relieve Ruth. I loved Teresa more in the moment my sister spoke those words than I had since she had first sung with me. “She white?”

Robert stood and flexed. “Okay, now. Time out. Give the man some peace.”

“What? It’s a legitimate question. Man’s driving a shiny new vehicle. You ask him the make and model.”

Robert caught my eye. “It’s all right, brother. I’m sleeping with a German chick.”

“If I find her, husband, I’ll kill the both of you dead.”

“Her father’s disowned her,” I said. “Teresa’s father, I mean.” It sounded like a bagatelle, next to whatever Robert and Ruth were facing.

Robert rubbed his globe of Afro. “Bad deal. We’ll see about making her an honorary.”

“Teresa.” Ruth’s smile tried to stay polite. “When do we get to meet her?” My sister wanted to meet me somewhere. Find a place alongside this world, big enough for both of us to move in.

“Anytime. Tonight.”

“Maybe next visit,” Robert said. “This one ain’t exactly meet and greet.”

His words yanked them out of my story world, and the two of them were fugitives again. We sat silently, listening to signals in the traffic outside. At last, Ruth said, “It’s not that we don’t trust you, Joey.”

“I understand,” I lied. I understood only their pacing, their animal panic.

Robert spoke into the tips of his folded hands. “The less we say, the easier for you.” He might have been a university professor.

Ruth leaned back and sighed. My little sister, now decades older than I was, and pulling away at an accelerating pace. “So how’s the Negro Caruso?” She clenched when she spoke.

“What can I say? He’s singing. Somewhere in Europe. Germany, last I heard.”

She nodded, wanting more, not wanting to ask. “Probably where he belongs.”

Her husband stood and peeked through the kitchen curtains. “I’d go there myself, around about now.”

“Oh would you?”

“In a heartbeat.”

The idea amused Ruth. She cooed at him in German, every pet name Da ever used on Mama.

“I have to go work,” I said. “Daily bread and all.” I stuck my paws out and wiggled them, singing, without thinking, “Honeysuckle Rose.”

“Wish I could hear you play that,” Ruth said.

“I bet you do.”

“Little Joey Strom, learning what side his bread is buttered on.”

I studied her, the bruises of her two brown eyes. “Don’t be ashamed of me, Ruth.”

“Shame?” Her face crumpled. The house was on fire again, and she was standing out on the frozen sidewalk, biting the fireman. “Shame? Don’t you be ashamed of me!”

“Of you! How could… You’re out there working…giving yourself to things I wouldn’t even have known about except for you.”

My sister clamped tight on the muscles in her cheeks. I thought for a moment she might lose herself. But the spasm passed and she came back. This time, she didn’t offer me a place in the movement or suggest that the desperate world might need even someone like me. But she did reach out one pink palm and place it on my chest. “So what do you play?”

“Name your tune, and I’ll fake it.”

Her smile bent her ears. “Joey’s a Negro.”

“Only in Atlantic City.”

“Half Atlantic City’s black,” Robert said. “They just don’t know it yet.”

“You have to hear this man of mine. All America’s African. Come on, sugar. Give him the spiel.”

Robert smiled at her word choice. “Tomorrow. Tonight, I got to get some sleep. My brain’s fried.”

“Take my bed, you two. I’ll stay with Teresa.”

“Teresa.” My sister laughed. “Teresa what?” I had to spell Wierzbicki for her. Ruth laughed again. “Does your father know you’re balling a Catholic?”

I came home from Teresa’s the next day. I stopped at the store and stocked up on beer, chicken, fresh-baked bread, news magazines — all the amenities I never kept around. But when I let myself into the apartment, it was empty. A half sheet of my torn music paper filled with my sister’s handwriting sat on the kitchen table.

Joey,

We had to go. Believe me, it’s safer this way. They’re hounding us down, and you don’t want in any deeper than you already are, just by being brother to this sister. You were a lifesaver to put us up. And it was good to see you haven’t been completely broken. Yet! Robert says you’re a good man, and I’m learning not to argue with my husband, because, honey, he never lets me win.