Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Come over in the morning at least. No ambushes. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“You’re on. Draw me a map.”

He came to the apartment. By the time I opened the door, he’d had a chance to compose his face. “We’ve lived in worse,” I reminded him.

“Beats where I’m living now, actually. Celeste kept the Brandstraat place.” He pored over every American commodity in my kitchen — peanut butter, corn on the cob, cold cereal. “Look at this!” He held a cardboard box of oat squares with a picture of two little mixed-race kids, their smiling faces labeledTWIN PACK.

“Multiracialism’s hot,” I told him.

“That was our problem, Mule, a million years ago. We didn’t have the right marketing!”

I took him to my habitual breakfast place, second-guessing the choice a hundred times. We walked. Jonah took in the blocks, crumbling or gentrifying, rising up or succumbing to a war fought house to house, a war he’d spent his life evading. He walked alongside me, nodding. I gave him running color commentary — who’d been evicted, who’d been bilked out, who’d gotten arrested. My neighbors waved or called out Saturday breakfast greetings. I called back, making no introductions.

“It reminds me of the old neighborhood,” Jonah said.

“What old neighborhood?”

“You know. The Heights. Our childhood?”

I stopped and gaped. “It’s nothing like New York. It couldn’t be further from our childhood if you—”

“I know that, Joseph. That doesn’t mean it can’t remind me.”

Milky’s was its usual Saturday-morning carnival. Parents of my students, my colleagues, my neighbors, the staff and regulars: Everyone asked about Ruth and the boys, how the latest school expansion plans were going, how I’d been, who the hell this foreigner was. Milky himself came to greet us in full green silk Chinese pajamas with a navy pea coat over them. “Your brother, you say? Never shit a shitter, Joe Strom.”

Only after we slipped into a booth did I get a chance to breathe. Jonah grinned from across the linoleum table. “You sly mother. You’re more famous than I am.” He insisted on ordering everything I did. “It’s Denver tonight. The Alps. I’m screwed for air supply already, the way it is.”

All breakfast long, he asked about his nephews. I gave him the facts: Kwame’s cage-rattling, word-battling rap. Little Robert’s lightning speed with reading, writing, and, most of all, numbers. Jonah kept nodding and pressing for details.

We passed through the greetings gauntlet again on the way out. By now, the funky foreigner with the ironed T-shirt and creased khakis was a regular, and all my friends urged him to come back next week.

“I’ll be here,” Jonah lied. Bald-faced. “Have my usual ready.” Milky and company laughed, and I hated my brother. Two weeks and he, too, might have belonged.

“Come to Ruth’s,” I said outside the diner.

“Can’t. I have to meet the group at the airport in fifty minutes.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“I’ll set my watch back.” We turned down my street, Jonah in thought. “So you’re good, then? This is it? This is all that you need?”

I nodded, ready to lie to him. Ruth, the school, my students: They were considerable. But they were not, in truth, all I needed. I was missing something I could not even name. Something in my past was waiting to be permitted. Some piece inside me needed scoring out, the one I’d once promised Will Hart I’d write down. But I could no longer hear where my notes were pointing. The chance to compose them had passed me by.

We stopped on the sidewalk in front of my building. I looked at my brother, his clothes flapping in that clement breeze. I was not good, not altogether. Not even close, in fact. I was still working for someone else. Some other blood-relation claim on me. But I wasn’t about to give Jonah the satisfaction of hearing as much. “Yep,” I said. “This is it. All anyone could ask for.”

“What are you teaching them? Your fourth graders. What kind of music?”

“K through three. And I’m teaching them everything.”

“Everything, you say?”

“You know. The good stuff. Pitches in time.”

“What kind of everything?” He eyed me. Too much to duck. He looked at his watch, already dashing.

“I give them what’s theirs. Their music. Their identity.”

“What’s theirs, Joey? If you have to give it… You give them their music? Their identity? Identical to what? Only thing you’re identical to is yourself, and that only on good days. Stereotyping. That’s what you’re giving them. Nobody’s anybody else. Their music is whatever nobody can give them. Good luck finding that.”

He wasn’t entirely dead yet. His soul’s handover deal had been signed and sealed but not yet delivered. I grabbed his elbow and slowed him. “Maestro. Chill, huh? I get them to teach me the songs they know. I trade them for a few old tunes. Stuff nobody else knows. I give them all kinds of noise — a little gospel swell, a little twelve-bar, even a little Pilgrim and Founding Fathers crap now and then. Theirs? Not theirs? Who the hell am I to say? It’s only music, for God’s sake.”

We’d gotten as far as my apartment. I motioned for him to come up for a moment. Jonah wagged his head. He looked around my neighborhood. “Unbelievable, Joey. You’re passing. You’re really passing. Remember how they used to call Jonah Strom the black Fischer-Dieskau?”

“Nobody ever called you that, Jonah. That was you.”

“Well, you’ve become the black Joseph Strom.” He cuffed my shoulder and turned to get back into his rental. There was pride; there was envy. Not dead yet. He had at least two out of the big seven covered. “Don’t worry, brother. Your secret’s safe with me.”

I couldn’t help watching for the reviews in New York, where the Voces Antiquae tour wound up. It was their hour onstage, or at least their fifteen minutes. The New York critics fell over one another declaring how long they’d been waiting for such a sound. Jonah sent me the clip from the Times —“All Ars Antiqua Is Nova Again”—afraid I might miss it. The piece singled him out as perhaps the clearest-voiced male singing early music in any country. No mention of color, outside the vocal. He’d clipped his business card to the corner of the rave and scribbled, “Warmest regards, your leading Negro recitalist.”

At last he had the vindication he’d so long sought. He had the listening world’s adulation, and he made a sound that stood for nothing other than what it was. But he and I both knew that the heat from that “nova” was thrown off from a core already burned through.

Yet his act had one more twist. Now that he stood for himself alone, he belonged to everyone but himself. His brilliance caught the moment’s buzz; his sound became anyone’s to interpret. Fame is the weapon of last resort that culture uses to neutralize runaways. A few months after his group made its North American tour, their Gesualdo recording won a Grammy. In December of 1990, they were named the oxymoronic “Early Music Performers of the Year.” I actually saw a poster of them, like a police lineup, on the wall of a music shop in downtown Oakland where I’d gone to buy mallets.

The kicker came half a year later, three months after Rodney King began being beaten nightly on ghostly videotape. Ruth showed up one morning in my broom-cupboard office at the school, waving the latest issue of Ebony. “I can’t believe it. I can’t take it.” She threw the magazine down on my desk, shaking all over. She pressed her lips to her teeth to keep from crying. I opened to the cover story: “50 Leaders for Tomorrow’s America.” I flipped through the list of scientists, engineers, physicians, athletes, and artists, testing each entry for its power to offend. I waded through the entire roster before I saw him. I raised my eyes to my sister’s. Hers were running in tears. “How, Joey? Tell me how.” She stamped the ground. “It’s worse than minstrelsy.”