Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

But in the time it takes her mouth to form that first pitch, her eyes scan this audience, unable to find its end. She sees it the way the newsreels will: 75,000 concertgoers, the largest crowd to hit Washington since Lindbergh, the largest audience ever to hear a solo recital. Millions will listen over radio. Tens of millions more will hear, through recordings and film. Former daughters and stepdaughters of the republic. Those born another’s property, and those who owned them. Every clan, each flying their homemade flags, all who have ears will hear.

NATION LEARNS LESSON IN TOLERANCE, the newsreels will say. But nations can’t learn lessons. Whatever tolerance graces this day will not survive the spring.

In the eternity that launches her first note, she feels this army of lives push toward her. Everyone who ever drew her on to sing is here attending. Roland Hayes is in this crowd somewhere. Harry Burleigh, Sissieretta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield — all the ghosts of her go-befores come back to walk the Mall again, this brisk Easter. Blind Tom is here, the sightless slave who earned a fortune for his owners, playing by ear, for staggered audiences, the piano’s hardest repertoire. Joplin is here, the Fisk and Hampton jubilees, Waller, Rainey, King Oliver and Empress Bessie, whole holy choirs of gospel evangelists, jug banders and gutbucketers, hollerers and field callers — all the nameless geniuses her ancestors have birthed.

Her family is there, up close, where she can see them. Her mother stares up at Lincoln, the threatening, mute titan, appalled by the weight her daughter must carry for the collected country, now and forever. Her father sits even closer, inside her, in the shape of her vocal cords, which still hold that man’s mellow bass, silenced before she really knew him. She hears him singing “Asleep in the Deep” while dressing for work, always the first line, endlessly caressing, never managing to get all the way to the phrase’s end.

The size of the crowd, its gravity, splinters her measure’s first beat. Common time goes cut, allegro to andante to largo. Her racing brain subdivides the notes in her first number’s introduction, eighth note turns into quarter, quarter becomes half, half whole, and whole expands without limit. She hears herself inhale and the pickup spreads into standstill. As she forms the note’s forward envelope, time stops and pins her, motionless.

The tune that the minuscule grand piano strikes up opens a hole in front of her. She can look through and see the coming years as if scanning a railroad timetable. Down this narrow strip of federal land she witnesses the long tour ahead. This day changes nothing. She’ll sit outside the Birmingham, Alabama, train station four years from now, waiting for her German refugee accompanist to bring her a sandwich, while German prisoners from North Africa occupy the waiting room she can’t enter. She’ll be given the keys to Atlantic City, where she’ll perform to sold-out houses but won’t be able to book a room in town. She’ll sing at the opening of Young Mr. Lincoln, in Springfield, Illinois, barred from the Lincoln Hotel. All coming humiliations are hers to know, now and always, hovering above this adoring, immeasurable crowd as the piano homes in on her cue.

The Daughters will repent their error, but repentance will come too late. No later justice can erase this day. She must live through it for all time, standing out here in the open, singing in a coat, for free. Her voice will be linked to this monument. She’ll be forever an emblem, despite herself, and not for the music she has made her own.

These faces — four score thousand of them — tilt up to seek hers out, Easter’s forgetting bulbs seeking the feeble sun. Those who until this afternoon were sunk in hopeless hope: too many of them, swarming the shores of Jordan, to get over in one go. Their ranks carry on swelling, even as she traces their farthest edge. In the convex mirror of 75,000 pairs of eyes she sees herself, dwarfed under monstrous columns, a small dark suppliant between the knees of a white stone giant. The frame is familiar, a destiny she remembers from before she lived it. A quarter century on, she’ll stand here again, singing her part in a gathering three times this size. And still the same hopeless hope will flood up to meet her, still the same wound that will not heal.

Down one world line she sees herself crushed to death, twenty minutes from now, when the audience surges forward, 75,000 awakened lives trying to get a few steps closer to salvation. Those who’ve spent a life condemned to the balcony will push toward a stage that is now all theirs, release driving them toward themselves, toward a voice wholly free, until they trample her. She sees the concert veer toward catastrophe, the mass accident of need. Then, down another of this day’s branching paths, she watches Walter White stand and come forward to the microphones, where he pleads with the crowd for calm. His voice turns the mass back into its parts, until they are all just one plus one plus one, able to do no worse to her than love.

Oceans past this crowd, larger ones gather. Six hours ahead, six zones east of her, night already falls. In the town squares, vegetable markets, and old theater quarters where she has performed, inside the Schauplatzen that wouldn’t engage her, voices build. She looks on the world’s only available future, and the coming certainty swallows her. She will not sing. She cannot. She’ll hang on the opening of this first pitch, undone. Her choices close down, one after the other, until the only path left is to turn and run. She casts a panicked look back, toward the Potomac bridge, across the river into Virginia, the only escape. But there’s no hiding place. No hiding place down here.

A girl’s spinto soprano inside her strikes up its best warding-off tune. When you see the world on fire, fare ye well, fare ye well. She uses the time-honored performer’s cure. She need only focus on one face, shrink the mass down to one person, one soul who is with her. The song will follow.

Deep in the crowd, a quarter of a mile forward, she finds her mark, the one she’ll sing to. A girl, an earlier her, Marian on the day that she left Philadelphia. That soul looks back, herself already singing, sotto voce. The girl calms her. In the frozen fermata before her downbeat, she reviews the program she must complete. “Gospel Train,” and “Trampin’,” and “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord.” But before that, Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” And before the Schubert, “O mio Fernando.” Of this whole grab bag of tunes, she’ll remember singing exactly none. It will be as if some ghost placeholder walks away with the experience and she comes away with nothing. She’ll read of her delivery much later, learning through the clippings how each song went, long after the fact, after the deed is done and gone.

But even before the coming amnesia, she must make it through “America.” Time thaws. The piano starts up again, unrolling the last of those simple block chords, a sequence under the skin of anyone born in these parts, a perfect cadence, as familiar as breathing. All she can hear as the brief lead-in starts up again a tempo is the sound of her own lungs. For one brief beat that stretches out as far as the filled horizon, she forgets the words. Their overlearned familiarity blocks them from coming. Like forgetting your name. Forgetting the numbers from one to ten. Too known to remember.

Again, the crowd surges forward, a great wave needing only to sweep over and drown her. This time, she lets them. She may forget. But time reorders all. A lightness rises, a way point in this gathering sea of dark, the darkness that belonging itself has made. For a moment, here, now, stretching down the length of the reflecting pool, bending along an arc from the shaft of the Washington Monument to the base of the Lincoln Memorial, curling down the banks to the Potomac behind her, a state takes shape, ad hoc, improvised, revolutionary, free — a notion, a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be. This is the place her voice creates. The one in the words that come back to her at last. That sweet, elusive thee. Of thee I sing.