Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The incident does nothing to lessen her JoJo’s joy. Their manic pitchclimbing continues unabated. She can tell them now or wait for simplifying whiteness to inform them later. This is the choice that leaves her no choice. She knows what’s safest, the best defense against the power that will otherwise lynch them. The first attack, the first hate-whispered syllable will name them. They’ll suffer worse than their mother ever suffered, pay most for being unidentifiable. But something in Delia needs to believe: A boy learns by heart the first song he hears. And the first song — the first — belongs to no one. She can give them a tune stronger than belonging. Thicker than identity. A singular song, a self better than any available armor. Teach them to sing the way they breathe, the songs of all their ancestries.

When David comes home, she recognizes him again. The two of them: theirs. Her whole body shakes with relief, as if she’s stepped out of neck-high burial in a snowbank. She lurches down the front hall to grab him. Surely, if two people love the same thing, they must love each other a little. He takes her in his arms at the door, even before he takes off his hat. “This is not forever,” he says. “We will all be back, once more in the same place.” But they can’t be back, because they never have been. Not in the same place. Never even once.

After dinner and singing, radio and reading to the boys, they lie in bed. They talk into the night, softly to each other, after the boys fall asleep. Her JoJo can hear anyway. The words of this conversation go straight into dreams that will vex them for the rest of their lives.

“He’s angry with me,” David says. “Yet I feel I’ve done nothing wrong. Only what my country has asked of me. What everyone would have done.”

This angers her. It makes her Daddy wrong. Some man should apologize, even if he’s the injured party. Because he has been injured. For a moment, she hates them both, for neither saving her. “He’s angry with me,” she whispers back. But she doesn’t say why. That, too, is a loss of faith. Thinking David would never understand.

“We can call him tomorrow. Explain that it has all been a confusion. A Missverständnis.”

“It isn’t,” she hisses. “That isn’t what it was.” She feels her husband’s body tense in the first edge of anger against her, her opposition. Is no one above this need to be redeemed?

“What is it, then?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that I’m sick of it. I want it to be over.”

His hand slides sideways across the sheet and finds hers. He thinks she means last night’s argument. This private war. “It will be over. It must be. How can something so angry last forever?”

He thinks she means Rassenhass. “It already has.”

He listens to her. If nothing else, this. “You want it to be over. But how should it end? How should the world best be? I mean, one thousand years from now? Ten thousand? What is the right place? The place we must try to reach?”

She’s never really had to say, not to herself, let alone anyone other. Every perfect place she starts to name already has a piece of evil slithering through it. She wants to stop talking, to roll over and sleep. She has no answer. But he asks her. This is the conversation, the terms of the contract they must improvise.

“The right place…the place I want… Nobody owns anybody. Nobody has claim on anything. Nobody’s anybody. Nobody’s anything but their own.”

She squeezes shut her eyes. The only place that calms her a little. The only place she can live. The only sane landing place. If it’s the right place for a thousand years from now, why not for her boys? For patience means submission, and waiting is never.

“This is where we go live, then. We call your father tomorrow.”

“He won’t…get it.”

“We call. We talk to him.”

What ignorance. Her father’s right: right about all things. She’s the one trying to get away, trying to trick the truth. She has no right to call and talk to him. All she has a right to is lasting reprimand.

“Remember what we saw,” David says. “Remember what’s coming.”

She can’t decide now whether what they saw even belonged to this world. No: It’s too soon for this life, too far out ahead of anything their children can reach. Something in this place needs race. Some ground-floor tribalism, something in a soul that won’t be safe or sound in anything smaller or larger. The day violence gets them, the day her boys meet those centuries of murder, on that day, they will hate her for not giving them the caste this caste-crazed country finally demands. But until that day, she’ll give them — however illusory or doomed — self. And let the image stand in for the thing.

She will not cut them off from their own. “We call tomorrow,” she says. But tomorrow comes and goes without a call. Shame blocks them, guilty memories. She can’t bear those words again, those accusations cutting her to the quick. She has no answer but this deliberate theft, this criminal leap ahead, this shortcut across one thousand years.

The baby’s coming. “The baby’s coming”: This is her Joseph’s universal cure, his answer to all things. The child has taken ownership of the mystery, this new life from nowhere. He wants Delia to eat more, to make the baby come faster. He wants to know what day the baby will arrive, and when this day will become that one.

Three weeks go by, with no contact from Philadelphia. Then a month. The same fire-forged pride that allowed her father to survive this country now turns to the task of surviving her. She can’t bear it, not with the new baby on the way. Something horrible is happening, fueled by love, something she can’t put right in herself, in her father, a fear as wild as the fear of losing oneself, going under.

She crumples and gives in. She writes a letter to her mother. It’s the child’s first trick, playing on her weaker parent. The letter smacks of cowardice. She types it without a return address, so her daddy won’t throw it out unopened. She mails it from New Jersey, laundering the postmark. She lies from the very first sentence: says she doesn’t know what happened, doesn’t understand. She tells her mama she needs to talk, to work out a way to patch things up. “Anywhere. I’ll come to Philadelphia. It doesn’t have to be the house. Anyplace we can talk.”

She gets a note back. It’s little more than an address — Haggern’s, a sandwich shop on the edge of the old neighborhood, a short-order grill where her mother used to take her when they went shopping — along with a date and time. “You’re right. The house is not a good idea just now.”

The sentence destroys Delia. She’s a wreck until she steps on the train to Philly. She’s showing now, huge with her new one. She needs to get right with her folks before she delivers. Though she’s not due for weeks, this heaviness feels like she could give birth any second. She takes the boys with her on the train — too long to leave them with Mrs. Washington. Her mother will want to see them. They’ll make the meeting easier.

She’s sitting at Haggern’s a quarter hour before she needs to be. It surprises her when her mother walks in with the twins. They’ve just been shopping. It presses on Delia’s chest harder than she can understand. Her mother looks furtive, conspiratorial. But the thrill of seeing her grandsons smoothes out her crumpled face.

Lucille and Lorene: Can it have been that long? Just months, but there’s something new to them, suddenly adult, an earnest show of long skirts and pleated blouses, a new weight in their step. “How’d you girls get grown up so fast? Turn around. Turn round; let me look at you! Where’d you find those shapes overnight?”