Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

There were still too few Negroes in the city then to raise white alarm. And James had been born knowing how to blunt white fear. His customers stayed loyal to him, and even tipped. He never returned to the South, or to any record of his enduring enslavement, except each night, in the dark, when work couldn’t help him ward off memory. All night long, the waters cried to him.

While most of his race remained legal chattel, James Daley worked for himself, his only revenge on the ones he had once worked for. He cut hair from seven in the morning until nine at night. When the shop closed, he made deliveries, running his dray sometimes until sunrise. He did with little so that his sons might do with a little bit more. He tempered his boys in the furnace of his will. Free to be spit on, he taught them. Free to be legally cheated. Free to be beaten. Free to be trapped and swindled at every turn. Free to decide how to answer such freedom. Iron James and his steel sons fended off raids, dug in, pried open a little living space, and grew the business. After a shaky birth, it turned a modest profit every year of James’s life.

Daley Barbering and Grooming Shop clung to its lot, a fair walk from the banks of the Delaware. It went from one chair to two. The sons grew up indentured to the cutting of straight, sandy hair. They could not cut their friends’ or relatives’ hair in their own shop or even tend the hair of one another, except at night, with the shade drawn. They could talk to and even touch the white man, so long as they had a scissors in their hands. When they put their scissors down for the day, even a graze of shoulders was assault.

James’s second son, Frederick, kept even longer hours than his father. He lifted his head high enough to send his own son Nathaniel — like storming heaven — to Oxford, just outside the city, to attend the new colored college, Ashmun Institute, soon renamed Lincoln University. Nathaniel met his own tuition by singing with a jubilee. He returned, walking with a step his father couldn’t fathom and his still-enslaved grandfather couldn’t even see.

College didn’t close up the Daleys’ twoness; it tore it wide open. Nathaniel barnstormed through to his degree, talking of medicines, the healing arts — the old provenance of haircutters for centuries, when barbers doubled as dentists and even surgeons. “Doctors of the short robe,” he told his brothers, to their brutal mirth. But the idea lodged deep, hushing them. “That was what we did, once. That’s what we were. That’s what we’ll be again.”

Iron James died, bewildered by the distance of his life’s run. But before he passed from the earth’s fact, he saw his grandson trade in the family’s striped pole for a small pharmacy. This was decades before the Great Migration, when the Daleys could still sit anywhere on the trains, shop at department stores eager for their dollar, even send their children to the white public schools. Race was not yet all it would become. Daley Pharmacy served both races, each of which recognized good decoctions at the right price. Only after the southern flood did the clientele irreversibly divide.

Nathaniel Daley brought the family into the forms of legitimacy no Negro Daley had ever known. He shored up the business with the same legal tricks that crafty white folks used, folks who every now and then came by to knock the business back down some. Time passed, and the pharmacy survived every twist of white will. The Daleys began to think the game might almost be theirs to play.

William, the great-grandson, outstripped even Nathaniel’s curve of hope. He ventured out to Washington, that watchtower on the Old South’s border, to attend Howard. He came home almost a decade later, a doctor of medicine and certified member of the Talented Tenth. He never spoke of the years that twice landed him in a state of mental collapse. Medical school could break even those who weren’t being pecked to death by Jim Crow. But William outlasted the curriculum, learning the nature of each muscle, artery, and nerve that composed the godly anatomy of every human.

William Daley, M.D., completed his internship at that same Negro hospital where his family had long suffered as model patients. Black doctor: He met all looks of surprise and alarm with cool possession. More: He fought alongside the dozens of his rank throughout the city to take up staff positions at the institutions where they served out their peonage. Advance, he insisted, was just a matter of permanent slogging. But even William, some reflecting nights, found the air at his new altitudes a little thin and dizzying.

Though James had long since passed beyond the colorless veil, Frederick lived long enough to see his grandson establish a modest family practice in a mixed residential neighborhood in the Seventh Ward, south of Center City. That’s where the girl, Nettie Ellen Alexander, broke upon William like a womanly Johnstown flood. He neither searched her out nor made provision for her accidental arrival. She just appeared to torment him, merely twenty, yet finer in line than any creature of any color he’d ever properly seen. He hadn’t looked at women for the eight long years he’d been in school, anatomy texts aside. Now, chancing upon this girl, he wanted to make up for his years of lost looking all in one go, squeezing them into the first afternoon he laid eyes on her.

Nettie smiled at him before she properly knew him. Flashed him a whole rank of perfect ivories, as if to say, Took your time, didn’t you? Smiled at him because she didn’t know him, but knew she would. A whole mess of muscles in her face squeezed together with enough pleasure at the sight of him to galvanize his own helpless mouth into foolish reciprocation. Miss Alexander’s grin loosened a horde of silverfish inside him. Muscles that weren’t on any anatomy exam twitched worse than those dead men’s flexors on the dissection slab, brought back to life by that dry-cell practical joke beloved of medical students everywhere.

Medicine gave him no names for this condition. He found himself thinking of her upper thorax when thumping those of others. The dorsal surface of her scapula was something a sculptor might nick, sand, and polish for thirty years and still miss by a millimeter. Her sixth cervical vertebra’s spinous process sprouted from the base of her neck like some starter bud for a coming set of wings. Each time the woman breathed, William tasted raspberry liquor, though she swore she never touched a drop.

The air around her shone, even in the Alexanders’ parlor, where the couple sat, all the lamps doused, a conservation Nettie’s father employed to make ends meet from month to brutal month. Her eyes put William in mind of fireflies, or luminous deep-sea fishes, living so dark for so long, they had to make their own light just to do a little subsistence fishing. The doctor could not fathom her glow, let alone say how she made it.

Nettie was light. Some days, her paleness almost frightened him away. It startled him and it nattered at his poise. He could feel folks turning to inspect them— Those two? A pair? — each time they stepped out together. Her lightness left him lapsing into feats of erudition, donning learning’s armor each time he visited. He didn’t relish the thought of adding one more twoness to his birthright. He told himself that yellow meant nothing. Said that he had to look past her tone, to the shadings of her spirit. Yes the woman was light, but it came from that lamp that she carried around inside her.

Still it dazzled him, this high-gold blaze. Whether her skin’s shade or her hair’s wave, whether posture, curve, carriage, or something more ghostly and finer, Nettie Ellen was the one whom William recognized, the crown he didn’t know he’d been reaching out for until she stood sparkling in front of him, just past his trembling fingers.