Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

That was all the answer the girl wanted. As rehearsal, she sang for the combined Sunday schools. She prepared one of the New Songs of Paradise, by Mr. Charles Tindley, the famous composer from over at East Calvary Methodist Episcopal: “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” She took the tune at full force and let out all her stops. Here and there hands flew up — half holding back the rush of glory, half giving in, overcome by praise. After that glorious testimonial, Delia looked for something more somber. The junior choir director, Mr. Sampson, found her a piece called “Ave Maria,” by a long-dead white man named Schubert.

Delia could feel them as she sang, the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up with her as she savored the song’s arc. She sheltered those souls in her sound and held them as motionless as the notes themselves, in that safe spot up next to grace. The audience breathed with her, beating to her measure. Her breath expanded sufficiently to take her across even the longest phrase. Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted.

When she finished, the congregation let out their collective breath. Their lungs emptied in a mass sigh, reluctant to leave the music’s sanctuary. The rush Delia felt as the last beat died outstripped any pleasure she’d ever known. Her heart pounded with the sound all earthly applause only imitated.

Afterward, she stood in the greeting line next to the pastor, still shaken, still humming. People she knew only by sight grabbed and hugged her, pumping her hand as if she’d just put them right in their own hearts. Delia told her mother on the walk home. “Three separate people said I was going to be our next Marian.”

“You listen here, missy. Pride goeth… Just remember that. Pride goeth before every fall you can even think to fall. And believe me, you can fall in a thousand more ways than you can hope to rise.”

Delia didn’t press for explanations. It took some doing to exasperate her mother, but once she did, negotiation was over for the day. “You’re not our next anyone,” Nettie Ellen muttered, warding off the evil eye as they turned up the parkway. “You’re our first Delia Daley.”

Delia asked her father about the magic name.

“The woman’s our cultural vanguard. Brightest light we’ve thrown off in a good long time. White men say we lack the skill or the will to take on their best music. This woman shows them up for fools. They don’t have a singer this side of Hell, let alone Mississippi, who can touch that one. You listening, daughter? I thought you wanted to know.”

Daughter wanted more than knowing could contain. But already she was miles above her father’s lecture. Years. She built an image of that voice even before she heard it. When the radio finally played her the real thing, the real Miss Anderson’s sound did not match the one she’d imagined. It was the one.

“You want to sing?” her father told her after that broadcast. “There’s your teacher. You study that woman.”

And Delia did. She studied everything, devouring, whole, every scrap of music she could gather. She exhausted one neighborhood vocal teacher and demanded another. She joined the Philadelphia People’s Choral Society, the finest Negro choir in the city. She began going to Union Baptist, musical magnet of black Philadelphia, singing there every Sunday, rubbing shoulders with whatever enchantment had given Miss Anderson wings.

The move shattered her mother. “Taking up with the Baptists? What’s the matter with your real church? We’ve always been A.M.E.”

“It’s the same God, Mama.” Close enough, anyway, for human ears.

Too late, William Daley discovered what fire he’d lit in his daughter. He took to futile dousing. “You have a duty, girl. Abilities you haven’t even discovered yet. You have to make something worthy of your future.”

“Singing is worthy.”

“It has its use. But damn it. Only as something a person does to round out a real day’s work.”

“It is a day’s work, Daddy. My day. My work.”

“It can’t support a body. It’s not enough for you.” The long, careful upward Daley climb threatened to crash down all around him. “It’s not a life. You can’t make a living out of singing, any more than you can out of playing dominoes.”

“I can make a living at anything I want, Daddy.” She ran her fingers through the few remaining ripples of his retreating hair. He was a bull, ready to charge. But still, she stroked him. “My papa taught me that nobody’s going to stop my miracle from happening.”

Their battle turned fierce. He said there’d be no money for singing school. So in her junior year of high school, she got a job changing sheets in the hospital. “A maid,” William said. “The kind of work I’d hoped never to see any of my offspring ever do.”

He fell back on every feat of oratory he could raise. But he stopped short of forbidding her to follow the path of her choosing. No Daley would ever again have a master, even another of her own. His daughter’s life was hers to advance or to squander. A part of him — a tiny, grain-sized irritant — fell back, impressed that the flesh of his flesh could run so gladly to ruin, as determined as the most affluent, willful white.

She applied to the city’s great conservatory. The school scheduled her for an audition. Delia’s coaches and choir conductors did their best to prepare her. She brushed up those church recital songs that best showed off her slow, sustained control. For a showier complement, she learned an aria—“Sempre libera,” from La Traviata. She picked it up phonetically from an old 78, guessing at the more exuberant syllables.

Delia chose to sing a cappella, rather than risk being compromised by any fervent but finger-faulty accompanist. It seemed an act of bold self-confidence, of calculated risk. The professionals would doubtless shake their heads over her lack of training. But Delia could make up in pure sound what she lacked in finish. Her held high notes were her ace in the hole. They thrilled her to unleash, and they never failed to devastate every warm-up audience she tried them on, with the sole exception of her savage little brothers. She felt ready to face any trial, even the sight-singing, where she knew she was weakest.

She chose and vetoed half a dozen outfits — too formal, too plain, too sexy, too sacky. She settled on a deep blue flare-shouldered dress with white accents at the cuffs and collar: classic, with a hint of flash. She looked so good that a fretting Nettie Ellen took her picture in it. Delia showed up half an hour early at the institute, beaming at each stray body dragging through the foyer, sure that any one of them might be Leopold Stokowski. She approached the receptionist, faking a confident smile. “My name is Delia Daley. I have an audition with the vocal faculty at two-fifteen?”

She might have been the stone statue of the Commendatore, barging into Don Giovanni’s front room. The receptionist flinched. “Two…fifteen?” She flipped weakly through random paperwork. “Do you have a letter of confirmation?”

Delia showed the letter, her arms going cold. Not this. Not here. Not in this castle of music. Her explanations raced ahead, while reason stayed behind in the guilty vehicle, arrested.

She handed over the letter, forcing her numbed fingers to release it. The receptionist scoured a massive file, all polite efficiency. “Would you mind taking a seat? I’ll be with you in a moment.” She disappeared, her high heels a cut-time clip, down the music-riddled corridors. She returned with a stocky, balding man in tortoise-rimmed glasses.

“Miss Daley?” All grins. “I’m Lawrence Grosbeck, associate dean and a professor of voice.” He didn’t offer his hand. “Please forgive us. A letter should have gone out to you. All the positions in your range have already been offered. It looks, also, as if we’re probably about to lose one of our soprano faculty. You’re… You…”