Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

They improvised their good-byes and my grandfather hung up. “Interesting man, your brother. He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had a new leader.” He chuckled, his shoulders jarring loose from his body. “I’m not entirely sure he’d heard of basketball, either.”

“What did he say to you?” I asked Ruth.

“He said I should travel. Get my mind off the past.”

The whole family showed for our departure. My uncle Michael, my aunts Lucille and Lorene, most of their kids and grandkids — I still didn’t know all their names. They gathered the night before we left, to send us out. We sang. What else was there? Delia Banks was there, her sound as wide as a flowering chestnut and as delicate as sweet williams. She didn’t solo, except for an aerial twelve bars. Tunes fell in line, jumbling up and overlapping, talking to one another, taking themselves as their only topic. The Daley game, too, was Crazed Quotations, drawn from another well, the water colder and more bracing. Where do you think your mother got it from? The send-off had no sadness. We’d meet back here next year and the year after, we and all our dead, as our dead had been meeting here without us every prior year. And if not here, then that flatted-seventh somewhere else.

Late that night, after the last cousin left, Papap came into his dead son’s room, the room that for weeks I’d inhabited. He held a stiff, shiny square of paper. He sat in his boy’s ancient chair, next to where I stretched out. I scrambled to my feet, and he waved me back down.

“Your sister got most of the keepsakes. I gave what I had to her years ago. I didn’t know you’d be showing up. But I found these for you.” A Polaroid of my brother and me opening Christmas presents, a photo Da had taken and given to the Daleys. And an older Brownie photo of a woman who could only be my mother. I couldn’t stop looking. I took it in in long gasps, a suffocating man needing air. It was the first fresh look I’d had of her since the fire. In the tiny black-and-white print, a young woman — far younger than I was now — of uncertain tone but clearly African features looked back through the lens, smiling weakly, seeing on the exposing film everything that would happen to her. She wore a dress of midcalf length with wide, pointed shoulders, the height of fashion in the years before my birth.

“What color is this dress?” I heard myself ask from a long while off.

He studied me. He saw my hunger, and it threatened to kill him. He tried to talk but couldn’t.

“Navy blue,” I told him.

He held still for a time, then nodded. “That’s right. Navy blue.”

We said good-bye to Papap. He wouldn’t let us pretend we’d ever see him again in this life. Ruth took her leave of our grandfather as if he contained all those people she had never gotten to say good-bye to. And he did. He came out onto the lawn as we got in the car, suddenly frailer than ninety. He took my hand. “I’m glad to have met you. Next life, in Jerusalem.”

My grandfather was right: Every music in America had gone brown. Our drive across the continent proved it. The car took me back to those days, Jonah and I crisscrossing the United States and Canada. The place had gotten infinitely bigger in the intervening years. The only way to get across a place so huge was still by radio. Every signal our receiver found — even the C and W stations drifting across the Great Plains — had at least one drop of black sloshing around in it. Africa had done to the American song what the old plantation massas had done to Africa. Only this time, the parent was keeping custody.

Ruth and I took turns driving and looking after little Robert. “You make this almost easy,” she said. “The trip out was hell.”

“I helped, Mama,” Kwame shouted. “I did the best I could.”

“’Course you did, honey.”

The driver got to choose the station, although Kwame’s need for a shattering bass beat usually dictated. He liked the ones whose rhythms were like Chinese water torture, the ones that forced the chords into your auditory canal with a syringe.

“What’s this called?”

“Hip-hop,” Kwame said, giving even those two syllables a rhythm I’d have to work at.

“I’m too old. Too old even to listen from a distance.”

My sister just laughed at me. “You were born too old.”

The country had strayed into musics beyond my ability to make out. I could only take them in contained doses. Now and then, during the three-day marathon of my belated education, I backslid and trolled for my own old addictions. The flood of now — the music that people really used and needed — had risen so high that only a few scattered islands of bypassed memory remained above water. When I managed to find classical stations at all, they beamed out a continuous stream of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Soon there would be only a dozen pieces left from the last thousand years of written music, pressed into anthologies suitable for seduction, gag gifts, and raising your baby’s IQ.

“Does this make my people an oppressed minority?” I asked Ruth.

“We’ll talk when they start shooting at you.”

Culture was whatever survived its own bonfire. Whatever you held on to when nothing else worked. And then, it didn’t, either.

Somewhere past Denver, driving, I chanced upon a clear signal of a chorus that, within three notes, I pegged as Bach. Cantata 78. I peeked at the backseat, where my nephew twisted and fidgeted. A look passed across his face, not even engaged enough for contempt. The music might have come from Mars, or farther. This was the boy, and hundreds like him, who I was now supposed to teach about music.

The opening chorus died away. I knew what was coming, though I hadn’t heard the piece for ages. Two beats of silence, and then that duet. “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” My brother at ten, Kwame’s age, had bounded along that upper line with eager steps, lost in the euphoria of his own voice. The soprano this time was another boy lost in time, as good as my brother had been, as drunk on the notes. The lower voice, now a countertenor, came alive in the game of harmonic tag, rejuvenated by trying to keep up with the boy he, too, must once have been. The two of them were high, clear, and fast as light. I looked at Ruth to see if she remembered. Of course, she couldn’t have. The boys flew, the music was good, and my life bent back on itself. I flew alongside these notes, racing myself toward what they wanted me to remember, until the flashing red lights in my rearview mirror stopped me. I looked down at the speedometer: eighty-nine miles an hour.

By the time I pulled over and the squad car nosed up behind us, Ruth was in pieces. She shrieked, “Don’t get out of the car. Don’t get out.” Kwame crouched on the backseat, pressed up against the door, ready to leap out and grab the cop’s gun. Little Robert started to wail, as if that terror really did start in race’s womb. My sister struggled to comfort him, calming and wrestling him down.

“This is it,” Kwame said. “We dead.”

The police car sat behind us, running our plates, toying with its food. When the officer got out of the car, all three of us let out our breath. “Thank God,” Ruth said, not believing. “Oh God, thank you.” The man was black.

I rolled down the window and fed him my license before he could ask. “You know why I pulled you over?” I nodded. “Is this car yours?”

“My sister’s.” I waved toward Ruth. She had one hand on the baby and the other stretched across the seat, restraining Kwame.

The officer pointed. “Who’s that?”

I looked down to where he pointed: the radio, Cantata 78 still pouring out of it. In the panic of the moment, I’d forgotten it was even on. I looked back at the policeman and smiled apologetically. “Bach.”