Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“I’m not sure. Given everything.”

He stared at me, livid. “Of course she’ll want to know! Do you think a week has passed when she hasn’t thought about him?”

I felt what it must have meant to be this man’s child. We sat for a long time. I sipped; he glowered. At last, he snorted. “‘No saying.’” He nodded his head, smirking at my formulation. “Your brother?”

My brother. How much of a lifetime I’d spent answering that question. “He’s well. He’s happy living in Belgium. Singing early music.”

My grandfather didn’t bother to move his head. I’ve no time for your foolishness. The question’s a simple one. Do you mean to answer or not? “Am I going to see my oldest grandson again before I die?”

I felt my blood rising. “There’s…there’s never any saying with Jonah, either.”

Papap grinned grimly. “Still after his kind of freedom. I remember that from when he was six months old. Is he finding it, do you suppose?”

His tone held something of judgment, without the sentence. I had my private guess. “You have to hear him sing.” The only answer that answered him.

Dr. Daley rose and took my emptied coffee cup and saucer. I stood to help him and he waved me down. “It doesn’t seem as if I’m going to be granted that experience in this lifetime.” He washed my dirty dishes and, hands trembling, placed them in the strainer, next to his own. “I’ve tried more than once to tell your sister what came between us. Yes, the innate insanity governing all races. But don’t be misled. We put our personal stamp on it. Your father and I. Your parents…”

He came back to the breakfast table and lowered himself into his chair, where he’d taken breakfast for the last half a century. Same table, with everything else in existence around it changed.

“Your parents thought they saw some way out of the rule. The rule of the past.” He stared out onto the spring lawn, trying to picture what they saw. “They wanted a place with as many categories as there were cases. But they still had to bring you up here.” His voice was desperate, racing the clock. “They wanted a place where everyone was his own tone.” He shook his head. “But that’s blackness. There is no shade it doesn’t already contain. You weren’t any more double than any of us. Your mother should have known that.”

Footsteps came down the stairs, and my sister wandered in. She toted little Robert, and something heavier. She wore the same red robes and green-and-black West African headdress as she’d worn the day before. My sister the widow. Her face was bleary with the hour. “This child had me up all night.” On cue, the baby gurgled with pleasure. How could either of them live?

“That’s their job description.” Our grandfather, lifelong family practitioner, stood to make coffee for Ruth. It seemed an old ritual. To me, he said, “I made things worse.”

Ruth needed no program. She’d been listening on the stairs. She shook her head. “You did nothing, Papap. They were living a dream. Mama’s the one who married a white man. She chose her path.”

“I was too proud. Your mother always said so.” He froze in place. “I mean, your grandmother.” He brought Ruth her coffee — black, with a teaspoon of sugar. “I was afraid. Afraid of losing myself in their idea. The orienting righteousness. Afraid of—”

“Of whiteness’s whole sick trip,” Ruth interrupted. “Fucked-up. To a man.”

“Don’t swear.”

“Yes, Papap.” She bowed her head to this ninety-year-old, like a child of nine.

“I made your grandmother pay for my principles. I lost her her daughter, her grandchildren. I never got to see you come into…”

Ruth stood and traded him a cup of coffee for the baby. She took the cup and sipped. Then she started hot cereal and fruit mash for little Robert. “You didn’t make her, Papap.” The old man raised his hand to his head to deflect the words. “Grandma was with you all the way.”

“And who was I with?” Dr. Daley asked no one. No one who could hear him. “Hypodescent. You’re familiar with the word?” I nodded. I was the word’s boy. “It means a half-caste child must belong to the caste with the lower status.”

Ruth spooned food into little Robert’s mouth with one hand and stirred the air with her other. “It means white can’t protect its stolen property, can’t tell the owners from the owned, except by playing purebred. They’re pure all right. Pure invention. One drop? One drop, as far back as you can go? Every white person in America is passing.”

He thought a moment. “Hypodescent means we’re supposed to take everybody else in. All the rest.”

“Amen,” Ruth said. “Everyone who’s not insane with inbreeding is black.”

“Everyone. All the half-castes and quarter-castes and one-thirty-second-castes. We should have made room for you.”

“Don’t you blame yourself for what other folks went off and did.”

He didn’t hear her. “All of us! You think you three were alone?” His eyes begged me, as if only my nod might set the long wrong right. “You think you were the first in the world to live this line? Your grandmother, half white. My family. Right out of the slave owner’s loins. My family’s name. The whole race. One look at us. We’ve had the Europeans living in us for three hundred years. I’ve always wondered what America might have been had the one-drop rule worked the other way.”

Ruth shushed him. “Papap, you’re going senile at last.”

“A mighty nation. As good as its best myth about itself.”

“Wouldn’t be the U.S. That’s for damn sure.”

Dr. Daley watched his granddaughter feed his great-grandson, a soul too grabbing and exploratory to survive the world. “I let that madness break my family.”

“They broke mine anyway,” Ruth said.

We sat silent. Only the baby had heart enough to make even the simplest sounds. Soon, even he would know. Everything was laid down for him, before he even spoke his own name: his father, his grandmother, his broken line all the way back to the start of time. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t go back to the pretty sleep of Europe. I’d been raised to believe in self-invention. But any self I might invent would be a lie.

Ruth had beaten me to this future. She knew long ago that one day I’d have to catch up with her. “Funny thing about one drop? If white plus black makes black, and if the mixed-marriage rate is anything above zero per year…” Ruth’s eyes rallied on the kind of thought experiment her father had loved. The old slaveholder’s property protection was now its victims’ only weapon. Blackness was the arrow of time, the churning tribe that gathered itself while purity chose its privileged suicide. “Follow out the curve. Just a matter of time, and everybody in America will be black.”

“I thought…” My voice sickened me. “I thought you were against black marrying white.”

“Honey, I’m against anyone marrying white. Mixed marriage mixes you up something permanent. But so long as people are fool enough to try it, I’m fool enough to be the beneficiary.” She looked at our grandfather. He was shaking his head in great arcs of fatal resignation. “What? You got a problem with that math?”

“Ain’t gonna work.” The only time the man ever slandered the rules of grammar. “As soon as they see it coming, they’ll repeal the rule.”

A sound like thunder broke loose, confirming him. My nephew Kwame appeared on the stairs, a silver box in his hands and two wired foam-lined cups strapped to his ears. Vibrations pulsed out of him, staggered syncopations I couldn’t follow or score. Under the beats was a cadence of rhythmic berating. The pulse pounded the air around him. I gasped at what it was doing to the insides of his head.