Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

I had to look down, back at the incredible page. “I don’t know how. Bastard’s not even in America. At least he’s buried down there in slot number forty-two, where he can’t hurt nobody.”

An awful sound escaped her. It took me two seconds to decide: Laughter. Maniacal. She reached out toward me. “Give it back. I have to show my sons.”

I was there at dinner that night, when she did. “Your blood relation,” she told them. “I knew this boy when he was no bigger than you. You see where you can go with a little effort? Look at all those stars he’s up there with. All the good they’ve gotten up to.”

“Half of them really white,” Kwame declared.

Ruth stared him down. “Which half? You tell me.”

“All those technocrackers. Look at this motherfucker: He don’t even know he’s nathan. CEO? That’s Casper the Ethnic Oreo.”

“This one?” little Robert said, pointing and smirking. “This one’s really white?”

“What makes them white?” Ruth challenged.

“This,” Kwame said, dismissing the whole magazine. “This caveboy noise. Whole white devil power shit.”

“What if I told you half the white race was walking around black and didn’t even know it?”

“I’d say you be bugging. Illin’ on your children.”

His mother shot me a silent appeal. “She’s right,” I said. “White’s got to prove white, all the way back. Who can do that?”

My nephew appraised me: hopelessly insane. “Wack. Don’t even know what I’m saying.”

Little Robert held up both arms. “The whole human race started in Ethiopia.”

Kwame took his little brother in a headlock and Indian-burned his scalp until the seven-year-old screamed with pleasure. “That’s right, bean boy. You all that. You my whole Top Fifty for Tomorrow, all rolled in one.”

Robert was the kind of child for whom his mother’s school was invented. He blazed through the day’s subjects, alarming his muzzy schoolmates. Every bit of learning that caught his eye, he set up in the sky like a glittering star. Stories left him dizzy with pleasure. “Is this real?” he’d want to know about every Reading Hour book. “Did this ever happen yet?”

He was his mother all over again, doing voices, tilting his head and squinting like the latest ridiculous adult. He built a walking robot out of Lego blocks that brought the whole first grade to a thirty-minute standstill. Math was his sandbox. He solved logic puzzles two grades above him. With nothing but poker chips and a world map, he designed games of complex trade. He loved to draw. History kept him sick with attention; he didn’t yet know that the stories were already over. He wept when he learned about the boats, the sealed holds, the auction blocks, the destroyed families. For Robert, everything that happened was still happening, somewhere.

But he could fly only so long as no one paid him any mind. The minute anyone fussed over him, he watched himself, and fell. The world’s praise of any black child carries an annihilating surprise. I’d grown up on it. Robert had only to hear that he might be doing something remarkable for him to stumble in apologies. He only wanted to be liked. Special meant wrong. In my class, he shone like the aurora. His voice anchored the whole alto section. But every time his marveling classmates mocked his skill, he hid his light back under a bushel for another several weeks.

For show-and-tell on the musician of his choice, he brought in the Ebony. It was months old, but he was still thinking about it. The room tittered as he spoke, and I hushed them, making things worse. All these black men making the future — fifty of them. And one of them was supposed to be Robert’s uncle, who’d changed the future of music a thousand years old. A brother, his mother had told him, might do anything. Robert spoke with that blast of pride already shot through with embarrassment and doubt.

Two weeks after the oral report, he came into my class with a sheaf of pages, each marked in a rash of colored-pen hieroglyphics. “This is mine. I wrote this.” He raced to explain the elaborate musical notation he’d devised, a system describing subtle changes in pitches and duration, notation that preserved many things lost in the standard staff. He’d written independent parts, thinking not only in running lines but also in a series of vertical moments. His chords made sense — delaying, repeating, turning back on themselves before coming home. His brother had sold for pocket change the little electric keyboard I’d given them. Ruth had no other instrument in the house. Robert had not only invented a system of notation from scratch; he’d written this whole work of harmony in his mind’s ear.

“How did you do this? Where did this come from?” I couldn’t stop asking him.

He shrugged and cowered, crumbling under my awe. “Came from me. I just…heard it. You think it sounds like anything?”

“We have to find out. We’ll perform it.” The idea made him pleasantly ill. “What’s it for?” He stood there, bewildered by the question. “I mean, what instruments?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about…instruments.”

“You mean you want it sung?” He nodded. First he’d thought of it. “Do you have words?”

He shook his head and axed the air. “No words. Just music.” Words out loud would poison it.

He taught the class to read his notation, and we performed the piece in school assembly. Robert conducted. So long as his music lasted, his soul climbed up into an ice blue sky on a bolt of mustard yellow. Five groups of voices chanted back and forth to one another, just as his notes said, clashing and cohabiting. His rowdy counterpoint came from another orbit, until then invisible. The sounds in his head kept him from hearing the din of the assembled gym. But the moment the piece was over, the noise broke over him.

The applause threatened to stop Robert from breathing. His eyes went wide, searching the room for a fire exit. Kids whistled and catcalled, teasing him. He bowed and knocked over the conductor’s stand. It brought down the house. I thought he might suffocate on the spot. Every muscle in his face worked to declare, Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. He flinched and fended off every admiration while jumping up to look out over the heads of his peers, trying to scout down the only opinion that mattered to him: his adored brother’s.

Kwame lumbered up afterward in his low-riding jeans. He’d skipped a day of his own school to be there. His arms made those little cartwheel jerks I couldn’t decode, half praise, half ridicule. His face screwed up to one side. “What you call that?”

Robert died by inches. “I call it ‘Legend.’”

“What legend? You think you’re a legend? No pump, no bump. Who you down with anyway?” Neither boy looked at me. They couldn’t afford to.

I thought the child would break apart, right there in front of the entire assembled New Day School. Kwame saw it, too. He puppy-cuffed his listless brother. “Hey. I said, Hey. It’s fresh. It’s slamming. You come marinate with me and my homies next time Dig’s in the house. See how you make some real G-funk.”

In his final year of votech school, Kwame’s band had grown to fill his entire horizon. They’d achieved a kind of mastery, one whose words entirely eluded me but whose pulse even I couldn’t deny. He had nothing else. Ruth tried to stay with his every evasion, keeping him accountable while propping him up without his knowing. “You thinking beyond school?”

“Don’t ride me, Mama.”

“Not riding. Helping you scout.”

“Me and the Nation. We can make it work. I don’t mean bank. Just making it.”

“You want to rap, then you need a battle. Just find something to hold yourself together while you make yourself the best.”