Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

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Rootie comes. “It’s a miracle,” Da says. That much is obvious, even to me. First she’s pale and milky, like a potato without the skin. In a few weeks, she’s brown, like a potato with the skin back on. Nothing is one color for very long. First, Root is smaller than the smallest violin, but soon she’s too big for me to lift easily. Just like Mama was big before Ruth came, and now she’s back to small again.

I ask Mama if Root will be in our school. Mama says she already is. Mama says everybody’s in school, always. “You?” I giggle at the idea, embarrassed. “Are you still in school?” She smiles and shakes her head, like she’s saying no. But she’s not. She’s saying the saddest yes I’ve ever heard.

Jonah’s faster than I am in lessons, but Mama says when we’re alone that that’s because he had a head start. I try harder, but that only makes my brother try harder, too, just enough to stay ahead and beat me. Every day, we do something we’ve never seen before. Sometimes even Mama’s new to it. Little Rootie just lies there and laughs at us. Da’s away teaching physics to grown-ups because everyone’s always in school. When Da comes home, we play at more school, right through dinner and into the evening, when, to close each day, we sing together.

But even before the singing at day’s end, we have songs. Songs about animals and plants, the presidents, states and capitals. Rhythm and meter games about fractions; chords and intervals for our times tables. Experiments with vibrating strings teach us science. We learn birds by their calls, and countries by their national anthems. For every year that we study in history, Mama has the music. We learn a little German, French, and Italian through snippets of aria. A tune for everything, and everything a tune.

We go to the museums or the park, collecting leaves and insects. We take tests — sheets of questions on smudgy newsprint that Mama says the state needs in order to see if we’re learning as much as other boys. Jonah and I race through, trying to get the most questions done the fastest. Mama sings to us—“The race is not to the swift”—and makes us go back over.

Life would be practice for paradise if it were only this. But it isn’t. When the other boys on our street come home from their schools, Mama sends us out—“at least one hour”—to play. The boys always find something wrong with us, and our punishments are always new. They blindfolded us and hit us with sticks. They use us as home plate. Jonah’s not big enough to try to refuse. We hide in secret alley spots, inventing stories to tell Mama on our return, spending the hour singing funny, dissonant rounds, rounds so soft that our torturers can’t hear.

Mama has an answer for the world. When we’re out together, at the dentist’s office, in the grocery store, or on the subway train, and someone says something or shoots us the evil eye, she tells us, “They don’t know who we are. They think we’re somebody else. People are floating in a leaky boat,” Mama says. “Afraid they’re going under.” Our mother has an answer for that fear. “Sing better,” she says. “Sing more.”

“People hate us,” I tell her.

“Not you, JoJo. They hate themselves.”

“We’re different,” I explain.

“Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?” I think about this, but she doesn’t really expect an answer. She cups us both by the crowns of our heads. “People who attack you with can’t are afraid you already can.”

“Why? How can that hurt them?”

“They think all good things are like property. If you have more, they must have less. But you know, JoJo? Everybody can make more beauty, anytime they need.”

Months later: “What do we do if they attack?”

“You’ve got a weapon stronger than anyone’s.” She doesn’t even have to say it anymore, she’s said it so often. The power of your own song. I don’t correct her. I no longer tell her that I don’t know what that means.

I come home one day, my upper-right canine knocked out by a boy three years older. I don’t tell my mother. It would only hurt her. When she sees my new gap, she shouts. “You’re getting so big, JoJo. So big so fast.” But the new tooth is weeks coming in. I smile at her, every chance I get. Once, she looks away, crying in what I think is shame at her gap-mouthed boy, grinning his obliging toothlessness. I’ll take fifty years learning to read her.

Why do we need to go out at all? This is what we boys want to know. Why can’t we stay in and read, listen to the radio, pitch pennies or skip rope in the cellar for exercise, like Joe Louis does? My parents can read each other’s minds. They always give the same answer to these questions. They practice in advance. They know when the other has already built up a boy’s will or countered a boy’s won’t.

“This family’s not fair,” Jonah says. “Not a real democracy!”

“Yes, it is,” Da tells him. Or maybe Mama. “Only, big people get two votes.”

They complete each other’s sentences and finish each other’s half-sung phrases. Sometimes, humming out loud over breakfast or housecleaning, they land on the same downbeat of the same tune, a piece neither has sung for weeks. Spontaneous unison. At the same tempo, in the same key.

I ask Da, “Where do we really come from, Germany or Philadelphia? What language did we speak before we learned English?”

He studies me to see what I’m really asking. “We come from Africa,” he says. “We come from Europe. We come from Asia, where Russia really is. We come from the Middle East, where the earliest people came from.”

That’s when Mama chides him. “Maybe that was their summer home, sugar.”

I know ten names: Max, William, Rebecca, Nettie, Hannah, Charles, Michael, Vihar, Lucille, Lorene. I see family pictures, but not many. On bad nights, when Ruth is ill or something has broken between Mama and Da, I send these names messages.

Jonah asks, “What color was Adam?” He smirks, knowing he’s breaking the law.

Mama looks at him sideways. But Da brightens. “This is a very good question! On how many issues do science and religion give exactly the same answer? All of the peoples on earth must have the same ancestors. If only memory were a little stronger.”

“Or a little weaker,” Mama says.

“Think of it! Arising once, in one place.”

“Except for those Neanderthal stallions jumping the fence.”

Da blushes, and we boys laugh, too, no clue except the general silliness. “Before that, I mean. The first seed.”

Mama shrugs. “Maybe that one blew in the window. From outdoors.”

“Yes,” Da says, a little startled. “Probably you are right!” Mama laughs, nudging him in scandal. “No, truly! This is more likely than native-grown. Given the earth’s youth, the size of all outdoors!”

Mama shakes her head, her mouth bunched up on one side. “Well, children. Your father and I have decided. Adam and Eve were little and green.”

We boys laugh. Our parents have gone mad. Speaking total nonsense. We can’t understand a word. But Jonah understands something I don’t. He’s faster, with a long head start. “Martians?”

My mother nods gravely, our great secret: “All of us, Martians.”

All the world’s people: We get them in geography, history. Tens of thousands of tribes, and not one of them ours. “We have no people,” I tell my parents one night before bed. I want them to know. Protect them, after the fact.

“We are our people,” Da says. Every month he writes letters to Europe. Searching. He’s been doing that for years.