Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Like? We never laid eyes on that man. Never showed his face a day to any one of us. Never even helped pay part of her child’s way. Could have been anyone. Could have been your own man’s grandfather.”

Delia coughs a low, horrible gurgle. “No, Mama. David’s grandfather…was never anywhere near Carolina.”

“Don’t you mouth me. Don’t you backtalk.”

“No, Mama.”

“Here’s the thing I never understood. If white is so God-awful almighty, how come fifteen of their great-great-grandparents can’t even equal one of ours?”

Delia can’t help test a smile. “That’s just what I’m saying, Mama. Jonah and Joey, half their world… Don’t they come just as much from—”

“You hear anything from the man’s parents?”

David has written a hundred letters, probed scores of vaults: Rotterdam, Westerbork, Essen, Cologne, Sofia, all the systematic German records of the abyss. “Nothing yet, Mama. We’re still searching.”

Both women bow their heads. “White folks killed their grandparents. You can’t lie to them about that. You get them ready. That’s all your father’s saying, child.”

“It won’t always be this way. Things are changing, even now. We have to start making the future. It’s not going to come any other way.”

“Future! We got to make the here and now. We don’t even have that to live in, yet.”

The daughter looks away, at this room of people without a present. She doesn’t know how, but when she hears her boys sing, when they set out on their tiny adventures of canon and imitation, she finds her here and now, large enough to live in.

In that awful blood right, exercised so often as she was growing up, her mother reads her mind. “I never cared what music you sang. I never understood it myself. But anything you sang was fine by me, so long as you sang with everything you owned. And never called yourself anything you weren’t. What you going to tell them to call themselves?”

“Mama. That’s the point. We’re not calling them anything. That way, they’ll never have to call another person—”

“White? You raising them white?”

“Don’t be silly. We’re trying to raise them…beyond race.” The only stable and survivable world.

“‘Beyond’ means white. Only people who can afford ‘beyond.’”

“Mama, no. We’re raising them…” She looks for the word, and can only find nothing. “We’re raising them what they are. Themselves first.”

“Ain’t nobody so fine they deserve to put themselves first.”

“Mama, that’s not what I mean.”

“Nobody’s so good as that.” Four big beats of silence. Then: “What you going to give them, for everything you take away?”

Suppose it’s theft. Murder. The children return, saving Delia from answering. All four are rolling in hilarity. The girls pretend to be giant mechanical claws, their shrieking nephews the helpless gum balls. Nettie Ellen brings them into line with one sharp eyebrow.

“Grandmop,” Jonah says. “Aunties are crazy!”

She wraps her arms around the boy, petting his halfway hair. “How’re they crazy, child?”

“They say a lizard’s just a snake with legs. They say singing’s just talking, only speeded up.”

Their waitress comes to see if the children want to eat. The boys draw her up short. Delia sees the woman eye her boys’ skin tones, telling God knows what explanatory story. The waitress points at Jonah. “This ain’t the one I’m supposed to wait for, is it?”

Nettie shakes her head. Delia looks down, full of tears.

The children have their pie. For another fifteen minutes, she, her mother, her sisters, and her children are all there, talking, needing no name for anything but one another. She and her mother fight over the bill. She lets her mother win. They stand on the sidewalk, outside Haggern’s. Delia leans into her sisters, waiting for the invitation— Of course, child! — to come back to the great house just blocks away. Her home. There on the moving street, she waits her awkward eternity.

“Mama,” Delia begins, her voice as tight as the day of her first professional lesson. “Mama. I need your help with this. Get me back with the man.”

Nettie Ellen takes her by the elbows, fierce with knowing. “You can get back. You’re not even apart. You two just having a bad hour. ‘This too shall pass,’ the Book says. You just call him up on the telephone and tell him you’re sorry. Tell him you know you’re wrong.”

Delia stiffens. The condition of belonging: She and her husband, the thing they’ve thought about and chosen, must be surrendered as wrong. She may be wrong, wrong in all she’s decided, wrong in each thing she chooses, but she is right in her right to be. In the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song. This much her father long ago preached to her, and this much he forces on her now.

They go their separate ways, Nettie and the twins to the doctor’s house, Delia and the boys to the train. Delia squeezes her sisters before they part. “Stop growing up so fast, now. I want to be able to recognize you, next time I see you.”

She tries — tries to call her father. She waits another week, hoping seven more days might blunt all conditions. But the phone call gets off to a catastrophic start and goes south from there. Then she, too, is saying horrible things into the phone, things she’s not capable of saying, things whose sole point is to leave her with things worth regretting forever.

Her time comes. She wants to turn to stone. She wants to lie in bed and never stand again. Only the boys get her through. Only that glance ahead, at company coming. She writes Nettie Ellen another note. Still her mother’s daughter.

Mama,

The baby’s coming. It’ll have to be this week or next. I can’t make it past that. This one’s strong. Takes after its grandfather, I guess, and it’s wearing me out. I’d so love if you could help again, like you did with Jonah and Joey. It’d be so good to have a woman to mind the boys. You know how helpless men are, when it counts. David would love it, too. You tell me what we can do to make this possible. It wouldn’t be right, having your new grandchild without you around! All love ever, Dee.

Every manipulation available. She’s not above anything that redemption might call for. But she’s not ready for the note she gets back.

Child

It was not easy for me to marry your father or have his children. Maybe you never thought that. He and I came from different worlds, different as anything you think you’ve gotten into. But I loved the man and I made him the promise like the Book talks about: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried.” There’s nothing I put above this, and don’t ask me to. I understand you have to make the same promise to you and yours. I’m not casting you out, and you know we’re ever waiting to take you back in, when you want and when you need.

It’s signed “With love, Mrs. William Daley.” By letter’s end, Delia’s whole body convulses. When her husband finds her, the baby has already breached. He needs to call an ambulance, to rush mother and daughter to the hospital. She never tells him about the note, the only truth she ever conceals from him. When they tell her the child’s a girl, she says, “I know.” And when her husband asks, “What should we name her?” she says, “Her name is Ruth.”

Don Giovanni

Half a dozen places in Atlantic City might have hired me. This was the early 1970s, still the waning heyday of live music, and the music I played offended no one but me. There was a war going on. Not capitalism versus socialism, the United States versus Vietnam, students against their parents, North America versus the rest of the known continents. I mean the war of consonance against dissonance, electric against acoustic, written against improvised, rhythm against melody, shock against decency, long hair against longhair, past against future, rock against folk against jazz against metal against funk against blues against pop against gospel against country, black against white. Everybody had to choose, and music was your flag. Who you were depended on your radio presets. “Whose side,” the song wanted to know. “Whose side are you on?”