Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She unloaded on me privately. “God, I wish I weren’t an educator. I’d whack that child up side of the head until he got his life in order.”

In August, a car in a Brooklyn Hasidic rebbe’s motorcade ran a red light, hit another car, swerved onto the sidewalk, and killed a Guyanese boy Robert’s age. For three days, Crown Heights hammered itself. Kwame and N Dig Nation wrote a long rap that replayed the madness from every available angle. The song was called “Black Vee Jew.” Maybe it participated; maybe it revealed. You never know with art.

“Your grandfather was a Jew,” I told him. “You’re a quarter Jewish.”

“I hear you. That’s def. What you think of that noise, Uncle bro?”

Whatever the words, the song got the group its first airtime — real radio, all over the Bay. It intoxicated Kwame. “Beats the best method that bank can buy.” The band made five hundred dollars each. Kwame spent his on new audio equipment.

Late in September, Ruth called me up, out of control. All three members of N Dig Nation had been arrested for breaking into a music store in West Oakland and leaving with two dozen CDs. “They’re gonna finish him. He’s nothing but meat. They’ll kill him, and no one will know.” It took me a quarter of an hour to talk her down enough to get her to meet me at the station where Kwame was being held. Ruth came apart again when we got there and she saw her son in handcuffs.

“We weren’t biting nothing,” Kwame told the two of us. He sat behind a metal gun rail, a bruise covering the side of his face where the cops had held him to the wall. He was swaggering with the fear of death. “Just a little who ride.”

I thought Ruth might kill the boy herself. “You speak the language I taught you.”

“We buy stuff from the man all the time. His door was wide open. We were just gonna take a listen and bring all that noise back to him when we got done.”

“Records? You stole records? What kind of suicidal—”

“CDs, Mama. And we didn’t steal any.”

“What in the name of Jesus did you think you were doing, stealing records?”

He looked at her with an incomprehension so great, it was almost pity. “We’re on the way up. We have to drop science. Bust the bustas. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Ruth was brilliant at the sentencing. She asked for a punishment that might save a life, rather than waste it. But the judge pored over what he called Kwame’s “history,” and he decided that society was best served by putting this juvenile menace away for two years. He stressed the seriousness of breaking and entering, while Kwame kept saying, “We didn’t break.” Property was the heart of society, the judge said. The crime of theft tore out that heart. As his sentence was being read, Kwame muttered just loud enough for me to hear, “The man’s nathan. He’s not even dead.”

Two days later, my sister saw her son off to prison. “Your father was in jail once. You remember why. So what are you going to do with this? That’s what the world wants to know.” She was crying as she spoke, crying for everything that had ever happened to this boy, all the way back for generations before his birth. Kwame couldn’t hold his head up long enough to meet her eye. She lifted it for him. “Look at me. Look at me. You are not just yourself.”

Kwame nodded. “I hear you.” And then he was waving good-bye.

Once Ruth was alone with me, she fell apart. “White teen goes to jail, it’s a pencil entry on the C.V. Youthful foolishness. Something to laugh at down the line. Black teen goes to jail, it’s another fatality. Judgment on the entire race. A hole he’ll never climb out of. It’s my fault, Joseph. I put them here. I didn’t have to drag them back into the cauldron. I could have set them up in some sleepwalking suburb.”

“Not your fault, Ruth. Don’t crucify yourself for half a millennium—”

“You see what he’s done to Robert. Big brother’s going to be the hero of a lifetime. Prerolled role model. That child sits in his room inventing whole new schools of arithmetic on his interlocking knuckles. He’s taught himself plane geometry. But he won’t count to twenty without mistakes if his brother’s looking at him the wrong way. Doesn’t want to be anything he’s not supposed to be. And he could be anything. Anything he wants… ”

We both heard at the same time, as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Ruth looked at me, her nostrils flared. “Her son’s quit the country and her grandson’s in prison.” Then her throat caved in and she howled. “What have we done to her, Joey?”

Robert made his way through the third grade, toward his graduation from New Day School. He butted up against that age when it was murder for Ruth to encourage him in anything. Whatever she praised in him, he abandoned. With half his attention, he’d fill a sheet of blank newsprint with astonishing geometries. But if she hung it on the wall, he’d tear it down and burn it.

“I’m going to lose him, Joseph. Lose him faster than I lost Kwame.”

“You haven’t lost Kwame.” Kwame had, in fact, started a course in mechanical drawing at the prison.

We’d been to see him almost every weekend. “This place is for marks,” he told me. There was something incredulous about his insight. “Know what? They built this prison to fit us. Then they build us to fit it. Not me, Uncle. Once I stroll, this place can rot with my history in it.” He and his mother started a little ritual each time we said good-bye. How long? Not long. Meet you back in the new old world.

In early 1992, Jonah wrote to say he was coming through town in late April to sing at the Berkeley Festival. That’s how pointless separate continents had become. I wrote him back on a school fund-raising postcard: “ Iheard you last time.” And below the school’s address, I wrote out the date of his concert, the time 1:30P.M., and my class’s room number.

My class didn’t need any special audience. There was no audience now, where I came from. There was only choir, and we’d have gone on preparing our score whoever showed up or didn’t on any given day. I was a grade school teacher of music. I lived for it, and that’s exactly how my kids sang. And yet I had given Jonah the time and room number of my best lot — real air walkers, his unmet nephew Robert among them. I told them we might have a special visitor. Even that much felt wrong.

I worked hard to make that day the most ordinary that had ever been. No chance he could make it: I’d guaranteed that when choosing the date. He never did anything the afternoon before a concert. But if, in some parallel universe, he did, we were ready with a sound that would unmake him.

By the time I set up for that afternoon class, I was gripped by a stage fright more violent than the bout that had once almost cost us Jonah’s first major competition. Children sense everything, and mine broke out with bursts of teasing, all of them sung, per the class rule. I settled them down and started them in on scalar swells, our usual warm-up. “I’m still standing,” up to the top of their giggling ranges and gently down again. My brother didn’t show. He couldn’t. There was nothing left of him, outside the concert hall. He’d disappeared into consummation. My body began to feel the relief of not having to meet him this time around.

We rolled out our stuff. Not despite. Not even anyway. With no one to impress, we delighted ourselves: all we have, really, when everything’s figured. We followed the usual steps to daily ecstasy. First, we laid down the elementary pulse, what my father years ago called “the laws of time.” Two kids on toms gave us a groove good enough to stay in for as long as we could move. Then we layered on the beat, Burundi drumming, a long, relaxed twenty-four-pulse cycle, with another half dozen players on pitched percussion doing what they’d have done gladly for a living all life long, plus some.