Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“Who told you that? You give this field nigger the man’s address. I’m a have a little parlay with him.”

But the boy reads his brother’s every word as an initiation rite, a test of his downness. “You playing me. You like school so much, how come you’re not still in it?” You like caveboys so much, how come you got a record?

“Don’t you close that book, bean boy. Stop being so cat. Your father. Your father studied math, Beanie. Don’t you know that?” And your grandfather. Where do you think you got it from?

To this, his little brother only shrugged. The whole ascendant, world hip-hop culture exposed all the million futilities of such Tomming. That was then. This is now.

“Beanie. You’re my ticket onward. Don’t you think big no more?”

Ode only smiled, seeing through the psych-out. There was nothing bigger, in his eyes. Nothing bigger than his ex-con brother.

This is my oldest nephew’s penance, the reason we’re here. He wouldn’t have made us fly out to Washington, wouldn’t even have crossed the street for something so slight as self-affirmation, if not for his brother. Kwame knows what self is his. We’re here only for Robert, who every two minutes threatens to disappear into the crowd in search of the real action.

I turn around and stare down the length of the reflecting pond to the steps of the memorial. The woman who sang on those steps because she could not sing inside has died, two years ago, in April, just as Kwame left prison. An alto singing scraps of Donizetti and Schubert changed my nephews’ lives. No, that makes no sense. Her impromptu concert did not change them. It made them.

Kwame follows my glance back along the length of the Mall. But he can’t see the ghost. The sight of the Lincoln Memorial twists my nephew’s features. “Man’s a bald-faced nigger-hater. Why we still worship him? Freed the slaves? Mother didn’t free nothing.”

“We’ll see,” I say. Kwame just stares at me, as if I’ve finally gone over. I shake his shoulder. “Caught between a racist cracker and an anti-Semite minister of God. Between a piece of marble and one very hard place. What’s a brother to do?”

The brothers to our right throw us a look. Those in front of us turn around, smiling.

The podium comes to life and the signifying begins. At any moment, Kwame and Robert will ask to move up front, just a little, without me. Some tacit understanding: Nothing personal, Uncle bro, but this whole healing thing isn’t really about you. But in this life, even as I stiffen for it, the request never comes.

The papers will count a grudging couple of hundred thousand. But this is a million if it’s a man. Tens of millions; whole lifetimes of lives. I’ve never stood in a gathering so large. I expected claustrophobia, agoraphobia, the choke of old stage fright. I feel only an ocean of time. Things reaching themselves. The feeling grows, strange and magnificent and tainted as anything human, only many times bigger.

I can’t say what my nephews see. Their faces show only thrill. A million is nothing to them. Nothing alongside the size of their transmitted world, the giant screens, the monster concerts in international surround sound, the global transports that their world daily broadcasts. But maybe they’re right where I am, every bit as awed by this millionfold makeshift fix, this pressing to redeem. Maybe they feel it, too, how likeness has it all over difference, for sheer terror. If there’s no mix, there’s no move. This is what the million-man minister means, despite what he thinks he’s saying. Who is enough, in being like himself? Until we come from everyplace we’ve been, we won’t get everywhere we’re going.

Kwame cranes to see the podium and make out the speakers. Robert — Ode — wasted by all the talk, finds a friend his age. They size each other up and move into the aisle to teach each other moves. The celebrities, songwriters, and poets take their turns, then give way to the minister. He plays the crowd. He brings out Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. He takes a shot at Lincoln, at the Founding Fathers, and Kwame has to cheer him. He says how all prophets are flawed. He says how we are more divided now than the last time we all stood here. He starts to ramble, to invoke weird numerologies. But all the numbers come down to two. A long division.

“So, we stand here today at this historic moment.” The sound fans out, tiny and metallic, lost in the endless space it must fill. “We are standing in the place of those who couldn’t make it here today. We are standing on the blood of our ancestors.”

People on all sides of us call out names. Some massive church. My nephews know the drill anyway, by another path. “Robert Rider,” Kwame calls. His voice breaks, not because he remembers, but because he can’t. “Delia Daley,” he adds. He might go further back.

“We are standing on the blood of those who died in the Middle Passage…in the fratricidal conflict…”

Those around us name their dead, and because he feels me standing there, my nephew adds, “Jonah Strom.”

The notion’s so crazy I have to laugh. Transformed by death: my brother’s operatic debut at last. Then I hear little Robert bragging to his newfound friend, “My uncle died in the Los Angeles riot.” And I suppose, in some world, he did. His last performance on that long, self-singing vita.

“Toward a more perfect union.” The minister does not know whereof he speaks. Union will undo his every call to allegiance, if allegiance doesn’t do us all in first. I’m standing in this million-man mass, a billion miles away, grinning like the idiot my brother knew I was. An old German Jew proved it to me, lifetimes ago: Mixing shows us which way time runs. I have seen the future, and it is mongrel.

Kwame chooses that moment to whisper to me. “The man’s a chickenhead. Thing’s fuckin’ obvious to anyone who’s clocking. Only one place we can go. Everybody’s going to be a few drops everything. What the fuck? I say let’s just go do it and get it done with.”

I shake my head and ask him. “Where do you think you got that from?”

The minister is going for a record-breaker. But he has the crowd to help him. We wave our hands in the air. We give fistfuls of money. We embrace total strangers. We sing. Then the classically trained violinist tells us, “Go home. Go back home to work out this a-tone-ment… Go back home transformed.” We end like every other thwarted, glorious transformation in the past, and all the pasts to come. Home: the one place we have to go back to, when there’s no place left to go.

But our boy has other destinations, farther afield. The speeches break up and the crowd folds into itself, embracing. Kwame hugs me to him, an awkward promise. We part from the clinch embarrassed, and look around for Robert. But he’s vanished. We see the friend he was hanging with, but the boy has no idea where Robert has gone. Kwame shakes him, almost yelling, and the frightened child starts to cry.

My nephew descends into his worst recurrent nightmare. And mine. This is his doing. He’s brought his brother here, keeper-style, thinking to undo his own influence. He waved off all Ruth’s warnings. He promised her a thousand times: “Nothing can go wrong.” He’s kept the boy on the shortest of leashes, all through this mammoth crowd. And now, in the first dropped glance, we’ve lost the child, as if he were just waiting for the chance to break free.

Kwame is frantic. He runs in all directions at once, toward any half-sized figure, shoving men aside to get past. I try at first to keep up with him. But then I stop short, a sense of peace coming over me, so great that I think it will be fatal. I know where Robert has gone. I could tell Kwame. I have the whole piece, the whole song cycle there, intact, in front of my sight-singing eyes. The piece I’ve been writing, the one that’s been writing me since before my own beginning. The anthem for this country in me, fighting to be born.