Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Michael played Charles’s old tenor sax, his brother’s ghost still there in every keypad click. Lucille’s eldest son, William, played bass guitar as if it were as limber as a lute. Almost everyone could lay into the parlor piano, four, six, sometimes eight hands at a time. What did you think? Where did you suppose you got it from? I was lucky to grab some buried interior line, needing all ten fingers to keep up. No one asked me to solo, or to solo any more than anyone else.

The instrument was a minefield. Half a dozen keys, including middle C, buzzed or bleated or no longer rose. “That’s part of the game,” Michael explained. “You got to make a noise while staying out of the potholes.” In the middle of a huge ad hoc chorus, I stopped and saw the keys I was pressing for what they were. The ones my mother had learned on.

So long as the house was full of singing relatives, Ruth seemed as close to peaceful as I’d seen her look since Mama died. During that first barn-burner night, she stretched out on a sofa, a truculent son under one arm, a happy baby sleeping on a cushion, and her slain husband seated next to her. Safe, she let loose with a descant that made me want to stop singing for good. I came and stood by her. She opened her eyes and smiled. “This is why we came back here.”

“Maybe why you came,” Kwame corrected, hearing every word from under his headphones.

“How long have you been here?”

“This visit? Since just after Robert…” She looked around, then cradled her forehead in her palm, rubbing out the nightmare again. “How long has that been anyway?”

My aunts Lucille and Lorene ran the choir at Bethel Covenant, the church where they, their parents, and their children had all gotten married, the church where my mother was baptized and where they’d all learned to sing. To their father’s despair and their mother’s delight, they chose the church over the law, for which they’d trained. Lucille played the organ and piano while Lorene conducted the choir, a good slice of which consisted of their own children. The second Sunday after my arrival, Ruth decided we’d go hear them. “All of us,” she warned her son, grandfather, and brother as one.

Dr. Daley made the most noise. “Let me die in peace, a godless heathen.”

“The man’s right,” Kwame said. “We gonna fight. Heathen of the world, unite.”

“I never went for your mother. I never went for your grandmother.”

“You’ll go for me,” Ruth said.

“Well, I’m going to sit with this young man here, and we’re going to talk about Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him this atheist Jew had sung more Catholic settings in the last five years than most of the pious attend in a lifetime.

I wasn’t the lightest person in church. Not even in our half of the pews. Bethel Covenant proclaimed the gospel: Color’s in the equation, but it’s not the only variable. Ruth caught me staring at one redheaded choir girl, pale as a Pre-Raphaelite model. “Oh, she’s black, brother.”

“How do you know?”

“Black people always know.”

“Hell with you, too, baby.”

My sister fought back her smirk. “Don’t swear in church, Joey. Wait until we’re back out in the parking lot. In fact, not only is she black; she’s kin of yours. Don’t ask me exactly how. Some third cousin once removed.”

Not surprisingly, the choir sounded much like jubilee night with the Daleys. But not until the anthem did I learn why I was there. The tune was that old nineteenth-century warhorse, “He Leadeth Me,” the solo line sung by a fresh-faced woman with a tight Afro who was several years my junior. The first verse came off pretty straight, the way it’s written down in the old Methodist hymnal. Yet the soloist was so brilliant, even Kwame, busy practicing his graffiti signature on every inch of a mangled church bulletin in advance of spraying it all over Oakland, looked up to see who made such glory.

By the second verse, I was just about standing. The girl had pipes that could drain Alaska. Her pitch was something NASA used to guide satellites. She lifted up the hobbled tune and spun it about on her outstretched fingers, passed it between her legs and behind her back, and floated it over her head. Every tone in the waterfall spray was its own cut lapidary. I swung around to Ruth for explanation, but she stared straight ahead, smirking, pretending not to notice.

The voice swept outward, peeling off cloak after cloak until its light began to sear. All the while the full choir, steady as a heartbeat, swelled the refrain: “He leadeth me. He leadeth me.” And on into new keys: “He leadeth me.” Their gospel wall made, for the soloing girl, a rock-hard foundation from which to launch any praise at all. She rose up into the ear’s ionosphere, eyes alight, lifting in the humility of absolute delight, as close as the soul comes to knowing its own amplitude. I couldn’t believe she was improvising those huge aerial profusions with such certainty. Yet neither did I think for a moment that such fresh bursts could have been written out in advance.

The hymn built up in ever-breaking waves. Hands sprouted in the air around us. I was beside myself, unable to hold the beauty as it passed. I looked at Dr. Daley, shaken out of everything but the question: Who? He nodded gravely. “That’s Lorene’s baby.” I couldn’t marry the woman; she was my first cousin. “That’s Dee.”

I turned back to my sister at the sound of the name. Her smile was broken into scrap by the long way here.

“My God. What a voice. She needs the best training possible.”

My sister hissed, loud enough for those in the pew ahead of us to hear. “Asshole. You think that is some spontaneous jungle talent? She has had the best training possible. Can’t you hear?”

“Who? Where?”

“They’re falling all over her. At Curtis.”

After the service, we waited in the receiving line to meet the phenomenon. My cousin Delia recognized me as we approached. I guess I wasn’t too hard to pick out. Before Ruth could do introductions, the girl waved her off. She stared at me. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.” A knot of Sunday celebrants turned to study the commotion. “Coming in here, the picture of innocence. You got to answer for what you’ve done.”

The list formed in my mind. I was ready to sign it all and serve any penance. I felt the heat emanating from this woman. Ruth and Dr. Daley stood at my elbow, silent bailiffs. I knew what I’d done. My family had known, long before I did. There was no choice but to stand still and receive the awful sentence.

“Whose idea was it to do that Bach like that?”

It took me half the length of a chorale before I could even feel relief. And another half a phrase before I could answer, “Ah! Everyone has their own Bach.” She was still scowling, shaking her angry head. “Was it too small for you?” This had been our most faulted transgression: one voice per line. Thinking heaven might answer to the private call.

My cousin glared at me, smoldering like Carmen. “You owe me a car.”

“I…a car?” My checkbook ready already.

“I had your little motets on the tape player while trying to drive. Right through the red light at Sixteenth and Arch. Glorious! Didn’t even know I was in the intersection until this Ford Escort came through at nine o’clock and clipped my wings. Escorted me right back to this world, thank you. Sing Unto the Lord a New Song?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well, you did that all right. Umm- hmm. That one was righteous!”

I took forever to figure out the simplest things. “You like it? It suited you?”

“You owe me a car. Nice reliable Dodge Dart in a pretty red.”