Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

For the same reason that makes us sing anything. I glanced around the restaurant. All shades imaginable. Nobody much cared that I was there or had any stake in my desperation. I looked at my cousin. The national color averaged out somewhere between us. “You’re saying separate but equal?”

“That’s right. Where’s the problem? Different cultures, equal status.”

“Equal status with the dominant culture?”

“They only dominate those they can.”

“I thought the whole point was that separate could never be—”

“There’s a big difference now. Now, it’s our choice.”

But if it were impossible — impossible to search for chords outside of us, impossible to find that scale, that tune that sang beyond this time and place… I wanted more than this invented moment and this enforced difference, more than this wary truce pretending to be the peace we’d always been seeking. I tried with everything in me. I turned her words around more ways than there were ways to turn. “You’re saying that you can only sing what you are?”

The coffee came. By the time the waitress left, they’d exchanged recipes, boyfriend grievances, and phone numbers. Then it was just the two of us. Delia wrapped her hands around her hot mug, drawing heat and horizon-wide pleasure. “Where were we again? No, no. I think it’s more like: You can only be what you sing.”

“My sister could have been a singer. She had a voice to convert anyone.”

“Joseph Strom!” I jerked my head up. For a moment, she was my mother, reprimanding a boy of nine. My cousin’s eyes were wet. She shook her head, horrified. “Listen to her, for once. Just listen.”

I did. It would have come to me, sooner or later. I joined Ruth one evening for her routine walk around the neighborhood. Our aunts and uncle told her she was crazy, taking her life in her hands. They didn’t even like to ride down the street with their windows rolled up. Her evening walks sent Papap into fits. She waved them all away. “I’m safer out here than I am standing in front of Independence Hall. I’d sooner trust my life to the worst crackhead than to any police officer in this country.”

Much of the neighborhood was out on their front porches, living in public, the way people lived in Ghent, the way few Americans above the poverty line lived. My sister greeted everyone we passed, sometimes by name. “I like to think about Grandma and Papap walking out here when they were young.”

“Do you ever think about Da’s parents, Ruth? I’m not fighting with you. I’m not… I’m just…”

She held up her palm sideways and nodded. “I’ve tried. I can’t even… You know, I’m addicted to the survivor accounts. I’ve seen every Holocaust documentary ever made. You’d have to be dead to have a memory big enough. The way I think about…our other grandparents? The supremacists got them, too.”

“Even though they were white.”

“They weren’t white. They weren’t even the same species. Not to the people running the ovens. We were sent along with them, what few of us were there.”

“‘We’?”

She heard, and nodded. “I mean the other us.”

One would have to be dead already to survive such inheritance. We passed a row of century-old houses, now carved up into rented rooms. Ruth hummed under her breath. I couldn’t make out the tune. When the tune changed to words, she seemed to speak to someone across the street. “Look, Joey. It’s easy. The easiest question in the world. If they come and start rounding us up, which line are you going to get into?”

“No question. Not even a choice.”

“But they’ve been rounding us up, Joey.” She spread her hands around the neighborhood. “They’re rounding us up now. They’ll keep rounding us up, for as long as there’s a calendar.”

I tried to follow her. When she spoke next, it reeled me back from Da’s deep-space catalog.

“You should have married that white girl, Joey. I’m sure she was nice.”

“Is. Is nice. But I’m not.”

“Incompatible?” I looked at her. Her mouth twisted into a crook of empathy.

“Incompatible.”

“Take two people.”

I waited. Then I realized this was the entire recipe. “Two people. Exactly.”

“Mama and Da would have had to divorce. If she’d lived.”

“You think?” The stories we told about their story no longer mattered to them.

“Of course. Look at the statistics.”

“Numbers never lie,” I said, in our old German accent.

She winced and grinned at the same time. Hybrid vigor. “Robert and I were incompatible. But it worked.”

“What about his parents?”

Ruth looked at me, seeing ghosts. “You never knew? Your own brother-in-law?” Blaming, taking the blame. “I never told you? Of course not; when could I have? Robert was raised in a foster home. White folks. Only in it for the aid checks.”

We covered two blocks. We were hit up twice for cash, once to help get a car out of hock to drive a wife to the hospital and once to tide a man over until an accident at his bank could be ironed out in court. Both times, my sister made me give them five dollars.

“They’re just going to buy booze or dope with it,” I said.

“Yeah? And what world-fixing were you getting up to with it?”

Every third yard was a pachyderm’s graveyard of shopping carts, washing machines, and stripped Impalas whose last highway would be four cinder blocks. A cluster of kids Kwame’s age worked a basketball in an empty lot, dribbling between the larger shards of glass, using oil drums for their picks and rolls, and chucking the ball at a rim that seemed made from an old TV antenna. Every square foot of concrete was garlanded in tendrils of graffiti, the elaborate signatures of those who were prevented from putting their names on anything else. The block housed more poverty per yard than even my sister could identify with. The furnaces of progress were busy burning all the fuel they could find.

Whatever dream my brother and I had been raised on was dead. Incredible to me: the 1980s. Uplift had fallen deeper than the place where it had started, back before hopes were raised.

My years in Europe opened my eyes to the place stamped on my passport. Three months before, with Voces, I’d toured the Adriatic, singing an old Latin monastic text: “Teach me to love what I cannot hope to know; teach me to know what I cannot hope to be.” Here I was, walking through a ruined Philadelphia with my sister, begging to be what I couldn’t know, trying to know what I couldn’t love. All song that didn’t hear this massacre was a lie.

My sister saw her own landscape. “We need control of our own neighborhoods. It wouldn’t solve things, of course. But it would be a start.”

Always another start. And a start after that. “Ruth?” I was willing to look at any misery around me, except my sister. “How long are you planning to stay around here?”

“You still on white people’s time, aren’t you?” I spun around, stiffening. Then I felt her arm slipping through mine. “Funny thing? My Oakland? It looks a lot like this.”

“You could move.”

She shook her head at me. “No, I couldn’t, Joey. It’s where all his work went. It’s where…he died.” We walked in silence, turning the last corner to Papap’s house again. Ruth stopped and blurted, “How am I supposed to do this, Joey? A ten-year-old on his way to hell and another little half-year-old with a murdered father.”

“What are you saying? Kwame’s in trouble?”

She shook her head. “You’ll go to your grave a classical musician, won’t you? A black boy in trouble. Imagine.” I pulled away from her, and she exploded, throwing her hands in the air. She brought them back down over her face, like falling ash. “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never make it.”