Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Her sisters look at Delia as if she has declared against them. Daddy has said something. But they eye her swollen belly as well, their envy, fear, and hope all rolled into one. Nettie Ellen slings into the booth across from Delia and the boys. She reaches across, taking their pale heads into her searching hands. But even as she fondles them, she murmurs to her daughter, “What in heaven’s name you say to that man?”

“Mama, it’s not like that.”

“What’s it like, then?”

Delia feels weary and older than the earth. Silted, slow, and winding like a switchback river. But wronged, too. Betrayed by her bedrock trust. Hurt by ones who know her hurt. That horrific night: David and her father trading accusations: an Olympics of suffering. The moral leverage of pain. Two men who couldn’t hear their nearness. They’re the ones who ought to be sitting in this booth, across from each other. Not this old fallback alliance, mothers against men. Delia tries for her mother’s eye, just a little flicker to show that the alliance still holds. “He doesn’t like the way I’m rearing up my young.”

“He don’t like you scrubbing these leopards spotless.”

“Mama,” she pleads. Her eyes dart downward.

“Girls? Take your nephews over to that gum-ball game at Lowie’s.” She fishes in her pocketbook for two nickels for her grandsons to feed the mechanical gum-ball claw. The same prehistoric Saturday ritual she and Delia shared.

Delia scurries in her purse to beat her mother. “Here. Here, now. Take these.”

The twins don’t want anyone’s coins. “We’re not children,” Lucille says.

Lorene echoes her. “Come on, Mama. We know what’s happening.”

Nettie Ellen touches the teen conspiratorially. “Don’t I know that, child! It’s your nephews, need a little expert tending.”

The secret appeal overwhelms them. They sweep the boys up the way they used to during the war, when they’d push the infants around the block in strollers. They show their sister up, proving how fierce love ought to be. Then Delia and her mother are alone. Alone as on that day, up in her attic practice room, when Delia first spoke about the man she’d fallen for. How fine her mother had been, after the first shock. How solid and broad, this woman, whom time gives no reason to feel anything but eternal distrust. How good they’ve all been, her family. A blackness big enough to absorb all strains.

“I’m so tired, Mama.”

“Tired? What you tired of?” The warning audible: I was tired before you were born. I didn’t raise you to give in to tired.

“I’m tired of racial thinking, Mama.” The bird and the fish can fall in love. But there’s no possible nest but no nest.

A deep bronze waitress comes by to take their order. Nettie Ellen orders what she always orders at Haggern’s, since time began. Coffee, no cream, and a piece of blueberry pie. Delia orders a chocolate doughnut and a small milk. She doesn’t want it and can’t eat it. But she has to order it. Every time they’ve ever come here, she has. The waitress slides off, and Nettie Ellen’s eyes follow. “You tired of being colored. That’s what you’re tired of.”

Delia tries on the accusation like a gown. A prison uniform. Something in stripes. “I’m tired of everybody thinking they know what colored means.”

Her mother looks around the shop. A teenage boy in white slacks, shirt, and a little dress-infantry paper hat mans the grill. Two old waitresses with stovepipe legs carry fries from the counter to the wooden tables. A young couple slumps over a shared soda in the booth across the way. “Who’s telling you that? Nobody here’s going to tell you what colored means. Only the o-fay do that.”

Her mother speaks that forbidden word. Once, at twelve, Delia had her mouth washed out with soap for using it. Something has broken down: the rules, or her mother. “My boys are…different.”

“Look around you, girl. Everybody here’s different. Different’s the commonest thing going.”

“I’ve got to give them the freedom to be—”

Her mother pinches up her face. “Don’t you dare talk to me about freedom. Your brother died in the war — for that word. A black man, fighting to give folks in other countries a freedom he wouldn’t ever’ve had in his own, even if he came back here alive.”

“Lots of people died in the war, Mama. White people. Black people. Yellow people.” Her boys’ other family.

“Your husband didn’t. Your husband—” She stops, unable to slander the father of her grandchildren.

“Mama. It’s not what you think.”

Her mother searches her. “Oh, don’t I know that. Nothin’s ever what I think.”

“It’s not one thing against the other. We’re not taking anything away. Just giving. Giving them space, choice, the right to make a life anywhere along—”

“This why you married a white man? So you could make babies light enough to do what they wouldn’t let you do?”

Delia knows why she married a white man. Knows the exact moment she was bound to him. But never in a million years could she explain to her mother what happened that day on the Mall, the future she saw.

Her mother stares out Haggern’s window at the passersby. “You could have stayed with us, sung every week for God and the people who need to hear Him. Why you need a fancy concert hall, where nobody gets to move or join in? There are more places to sing with us than you could have sung in a lifetime. More places to sing down here than there are in heaven.”

The kind of praise…the music I’ve studied…Every answer Delia thinks of breaks under its own weight. She’s saved by the waitress, who arrives with their orders. Steam still rises from Nettie Ellen’s slice of pie. The waitress slides it over. “Look here! This pie was hiding deep in the oven. Thinking itself too grand to come out and get eaten.”

“You try it yet?” Nettie Ellen asks.

“Ha! This place look like they treat me that good?”

“You go on have yourself a slice; tell them to put it on my bill. Go on!”

“Bless you, ma’am, but I gotta watch my figure. My man likes me all skinnied down. ‘Like a bar of soap at the end of the washing month.’”

“My man always trying to get me to fill out.”

“Gimme some of that. He got a son?”

“One.” Two, once. “But you’re going to have to wait another couple years before that particular pie comes out of the oven.”

“You come get me.” The waitress waves them both away, along with all the world’s foolishness. “I’ll be here.”

Delia will die of exile. She lived here once. Her boys never will. Never the leveling sass of a nation that sees through every pretension. One with more places to sing than even heaven. “Colored’s got to get bigger, Mama.” Something her daddy told her all her life.

“Colored, bigger? Colored’s got no room to get bigger. Colored’s been smashed down to the biggest little thing that can be, without disappearing. White’s got to get bigger. White’s never had room for nobody but itself.”

They pick at their snacks in silence. If only the children would come back. Prove to them both that nothing has changed. Still your boys. Still your grandchildren.

“White’s just one color. Black’s everything else. You gonna raise them to have a choice? That choice don’t belong to you. It don’t even belong to them. Everybody else is gonna make it for them!” Nettie Ellen puts down her fork. She’s in her daughter’s eye. “My own mother. My own mother. Had a father was white.”

The words rock Delia. Not the fact, which she long ago gathered, in the cracks of the family history. But her mother’s saying so, here, out loud. She shuts her eyes. In such pain, they could travel anywhere. “What…what was he like, Mama?”