Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

And still the country raced madly ahead of him. The white man had some covert entry that didn’t even require Jim Crow to keep the Negro out. Dr. Daley studied the prosperity racket — the game of real riches, not the slow, hard-won advancement that had until then been his. The answer was there, staring at anyone who bothered to look: stocks. The country was gulping down equities like so much nerve tonic. Every thuggish son of an Irish immigrant knew the secret: Buy America. And finally, Dr. Daley did just that. He did so, over the scandalized Nettie’s howls, and later, without her knowledge. Stock picking was worlds easier than doctoring. Nothing to it, really. You bought. The price went up. You sold. You found another investment, a little more expensive, to shelter the compounded cash. The whole scheme kept feeding itself, as long as you wanted to ride.

The daily fight for a reasonable existence turned by degrees into another struggle. By 1928, he found himself toying with the newly introduced De Soto, maybe even a small second house outside of town, in the country somewhere.

“Country house?” Nettie Ellen laughed. “ Countryhouse? With colored folks by the tens of thousands trying to get out of the country up where we already are?”

His wife fought him over his ill-gotten gains, which continued to grow. One evening in that warm, early spring of the following year, while taking his evening constitutional around the neighborhood, he was struck by the realization that dabbling — or, as had become his practice, submerging — in the stock market was wrong. Not wrong, as his wife had it, because the Lord abhorred gambling. Her Lord, after all, had staked the oldest, biggest crapshoot in existence. No: Making money on pure speculation was wrong, William now saw, for two inarguable reasons. First, every winner in this game profited from some loser, and Dr. Daley no longer desired to take anything away from another man, even a white one. Even if all he stole was opportunity, he could not profit. For the theft of opportunity was the original sin.

And further: No man in God’s crapshoot had the right to profit from anything but the sweat of his brow. Labor was the lone human activity capable of creating wealth. Any other accumulation was just plantationism, disguised. That spring evening, taking the air, waving to his neighbors as they rocked themselves on their porch swings, William swore off not just the market but also banks, savings and loans, and any other institution that promised something for nothing.

Within the week, he turned his holdings into cash, bought a fireproof Remington safe, and kept his net worth stashed inside. In the fall of that year, when the whole national pyramid of speculation collapsed, he found himself standing up on a city of rubble.

Hardship saved its best for the colored man. Within two years, half of working Negro Philadelphia had no livelihood. The WPA, when it came, paid coloreds only a fraction of white wages, when it hired coloreds at all. Jobless, white America turned even more vicious than when the living had been easy. Lynchings tripled. They strung up Herndon and railroaded the Scottsboro boys. Harlem burned; Philly would be next. Catherine Street teetered, threatening to go the way of all Southwark.

Medicine, at least, remained Depression-proof, if not his patients’ ability to pay. People paid in fresh vegetables, tinned fruit, errands, and odd jobs. In the deflated barter economy, the cash in the Remington safe went further, each increasingly desperate month. William and his bewildered Nettie looked around, to find themselves living up on a sheltered bluff, looking over the devastation of their neighborhood.

Their children would go to college — no more than the Daleys had enjoyed for two generations and no less than Nettie Alexander had herself once dreamed of, without hope of reaching. They fed their young on the upward hope of the oppressed: How much we’ve done, from inside the tomb. How much more we might do, with just a little living space.

Such was the squeezed hope that made up Delia’s birthright. William’s first child to live was his pride and religion. “You’re my trailblazer, baby. A colored girl, learning everything there is to learn, a colored girl sailing through college, following a profession, changing the laws of this country. What’s wrong with this idea?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, Daddy.”

“Damn right, nothing. Who’s going to stop it?”

“Nobody,” Delia would reply, sighing.

They could stop her from seeing Steamboat Willie and Skeleton Dance down at the Franklin Cinema. They could restrict her to the Colored Players or send her away with nothing. They could stop her buying a root-beer float at the drugstore ten blocks from her house. They could arrest her if she crossed over the invisible neighborhood line. But they couldn’t stop her from humoring her father.

He drilled her. “You’ve got a miracle to work. How’s that miracle not going to happen?”

“No way it’s not going to happen.”

“That’s my girl. Now tell me, my talented offspring. What can’t your people do?”

Her people could do anything. The week never went by without some further proof. Just doing the same work as a European, the Negro already surpassed him, for the one was filling his house from the attic on down, while the other was carting his furnishings up from the cellar. Negroes hadn’t yet begun to stand and deliver their full abilities. Time would spring them. The future would shake with their concerted movements.

“What are you going to be when you grow up, my girl?”

“Anything I want.”

“You know it, beauty. Anyone ever tell you that you look a whole lot like your old man?”

“Ugh, Daddy. Never.”

But five right answers out of six was not bad at all.

By thirteen, her race’s destiny hunched the child over. Her mother alone consoled Delia. “You take your time, honey. Never you mind about knowing everything. Nobody ever knew everything yet, nor is going to, until the Last Day, when things no one can guess are going to get laid out on the table. Even your father’s gonna have a few surprises waiting for him.”

The girl had music in her. So much music, it frightened both parents. At Delia’s birth, Dr. Daley installed a piano in the parlor, a salute to prosperity and a striding, rag thank-you to his ancestors, offered up in private, after all the patients went home. His little black pearl crawled up on the bench and picked out melodies before she even learned her letters.

She had to have lessons. Her parents found her a college-trained music teacher who served the neighborhood’s better families. The music teacher marveled to the doctor that his daughter might outdo any white girl her age. Might outdo the college-trained music teacher herself, William suspected, given a few years.

Every seventh day, Delia’s mother took all five of the children, climbing all over one another like crabs in a pot, to Bethel Covenant, the center of all music. In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

Delia sang fearlessly. She threw back her head and nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet. She sang with such unfurling of self that the congregation couldn’t help but turn and look at the teenager, even when they should have been looking skyward.

The choir director asked her to sing her first solo. Delia demurred. “Mama, what should I do? It’s not really decent, is it? To put yourself on display like that?”

Nettie Ellen shook her head and smiled. “When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don’t belong to you anyway. It’s not yours to hide.”