Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Hold up. Here’s the deal.” She could see me shaking, and she took my arm. I dropped several decibels. “Here’s what I can do for you. I am giving these kids something that no one else in the world is ever going to give them. No one. But me.”

She stroked me, as scared as I was. “You’re right, Joey. I’m sorry. You’re the music teacher. And I’m not the cops.” It was the only time we struggled over curriculum.

I might have married, now. The picture of Mama that Papap had given me sat framed atop my bookshelf full of music-education texts: The woman I’d spend my life with, the ghost that had kept me from marrying Teresa was returned home. I lived surrounded now by women who’d been everywhere my mother had, who’d passed auditions beyond the one Mama had been turned away from, women who might wake me from nightmares I didn’t even know I was having, women whose split lives might dovetail perfectly with mine. But I had no time to meet and court a wife. All I had time for was my children and their songs.

I was putting in more hours working for Ruth than I had working for Jonah. The job took all I had, and for the first time in my life, I did work that wouldn’t have been done if I wasn’t doing it. It should have been enough, everything that was lacking in my life in Europe. But it wasn’t. Something in me still needed out. The place I had come from was dying, for lack of a way of getting to where I was.

I wasn’t alone, stranded in the standing present. My nephew Kwame never went to New Day School. He was too old by the time our alternative was under way. I saw him only once or twice a month, when I went to Ruth’s for Sunday dinner. Truth was, Ruth gave so much of herself to her concrete-defeating flower that her own boy ended up taking private lessons in latchkey school. He doubled in size from eleven to thirteen. His voice dropped through the floor and thickened so much, I had trouble understanding him. He started to scare me, just the way he hung and talked. Oakland came and found him out and solved his father’s death. Rhythm freed him: the trick it always promises. He dressed in rage, an apprentice criminal, yards of baggy black sailcloth for a shirt, sagging jeans, the bill of his Dodgers baseball cap tipped back onto his thickening neck, or, later, a stocking pulled over his head. He held his fingers splayed like chopsticks, rapper-style, slicing the air. All he needed was a snub-nosed gun.

I tried giving him piano lessons. They weren’t even a disaster. I was his uncle, whatever that meant. He felt his father’s ghost too strongly to dis me outright. But my chords were worthless to him. He couldn’t even slander me, so clueless did I come. My nephew’s hands could span a tenth on the keyboard with ease, magnificent. But ten minutes a week of practice was beyond him. Like asking someone to carry a stone around with him, just for the good it might do his soul.

Each lesson forced us more into the open. “This thing play ‘Dopeman’? This thing play ‘Fuck tha Police’?”

He couldn’t get to me; I’d been gotten to already, too long ago. “It plays anything you want. You just have to get good enough to tell it how.”

What owns us? What can we own? Kwame tried to plunk out his untranscribable rap. It was like doing sculpture with a trowel. The results only made him furious. He brought in a disk for us to work with. To spite me, really. “You’ll like this. Wreckin’ Cru. Old-time shit. Still uses keyboards.”

I looked at the date. Eighteen months old. He played me a track with a wild, irregular synthesizer riff. I ran it back for him, note for note. Took everything I had left in me.

“Damn,” Kwame said in a low, affectless monotone.

More out of curiosity than to impress him, I tried the line again, this time juked up, hammered out, fitted with a good Baroque figured bass. Then I tried to fugue it. Sampling the sampler. The whole system runs on theft. Tell me what hasn’t already been stolen?

When I finished, my nephew just stared at me, shaking his head. “You the illest, you know that?”

“I am aware.”

His was an act, but not an act — this gangsta son of a doctor of education. He went with the tune that best served him. Kwame’s at least had some angry fire that my dress-up had lacked. We go through our lives playing ourselves. Black is and black ain’t. Ten years on and he’d lose this music, too. Every affluent white kid from Vancouver to Naples would be playing him.

His two uncles had sung about that theft once, a wasted old tune and even older words. We’d performed it in a converted shipping house in The Hague that had amassed fortunes on the triangle trade: What we love is left us. Kwame rapped for me, songs about killing police or Koreans, about putting women in their place. He giggled over the words when I asked him. I wasn’t sure he knew what they meant. I didn’t. But his body knew, in every twitch of those sinuous slingshot rhythms: Here was all the room he had to live.

He came to lessons with his eyes red, his body heavy, the muscles in his face sluggishly amused at the entire white-owned world. His clothes held that sweet, acrid smell of burning rope I remembered from my brother’s forays in the Village a quarter of a century ago. Jonah had run his experiments for a while, then graduated. Kwame, I thought, would, too. I considered mentioning things to Ruth. But that would have killed what little trust her son and I had won.

Ruth came to my apartment late on a winter night in 1988, Robert in tow. The child was only four, but already smart enough to guess everything that adults really meant when they cooed at him. Now he stood tugging at his mother’s knees, trying to make her laugh. She didn’t even feel him there.

“Joey, the child wrecked my car. Wrapped the bumper around a telephone pole two blocks down my street. That thug friend of his, Darryl, was sitting next to him in the passenger seat with an open bottle of malt liquor. God knows where they stole it.”

“Is he okay?”

“Was until I got my hands on him. He’s lucky we got to them before the police did.” She paced around my tiny living room. I knew enough not to offer any comfort. All she wanted was a living ear. “I’m losing him. I’m losing my firstborn.”

“You’re not losing him. You know children, Ruth.”

“I’ve been losing him since Robert was killed.”

“It’s just kid’s stuff. Wildness of the times. He’ll grow out of it.” She shook her head, struggling with some holdout fact. “Tell me,” I said.

She twisted in place. “Tell you what?”

“Whatever it is you’re not telling me.”

She deflated. She sat down between me and her younger son. “He’s taken to calling me…names.” She fought to keep her voice. She looked at little Robert, who, on cue, walked off into my bedroom to play. Ruth leaned in toward me. “We argued. He called me ‘white.’ White! ‘You so white, woman. Little car wreck. Nigga don’t care ’bout no old hooptie.’ Where does that come from? The boy’s fourteen years old, and he’s holding his genes against me! Hating me for infecting him.”

Her body shook as if she were freezing. I had nothing for her. No consolation, even remote. “Wait,” I said. “Just wait a couple of years. Sixteen, seventeen. When it really starts.”

“Oh Jesus, Joey. No. If he comes up with worse than that, I’ll die.”

She survived. But not from Kwame’s lack of enterprise. Even as her school took off — winning awards, securing grants, appearing in a regional television feature — Ruth’s teenage son ran his own race. I never heard half the stories; Ruth was ashamed to tell me. I never saw Kwame anymore. He stopped coming by for the lessons that infuriated both of us. Six weeks after he quit showing up, Ruth asked how the lessons were going.