Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah hears it, too, the blade in their back-and-forth. Though he’ll remain a dutiful child for another year and a half, this crisis moves him to desperation. He ends their whispering the only way he knows how. While our parents argue over the photo, he goes to the magazine and looks.

So the fight sinks, weighted, underwater. We’re a family again, looking together, at least the four of us. Ruth, my parents agree, is too small to see. We’re all too small, even my father. But we look, together, anyway. That’s what the mother of the boy — the boy in the photo — wants.

“Is this real?” I ask. “Really real?” I would rather have them arguing again, anything but this. “A real human being?” I see only a macabre rubber mask, two months too early for Halloween. My mother won’t answer. She’s fixed by the image, petitioning the invisible, asking the same question. But she’s not asking about the boy.

My mother is crying. I can’t say anything, but I must say something. I need to keep her with us. “Are you related to him?” I ask. It’s just possible. I have much family on my mother’s side, whom she and Da say I’ll someday meet. But Mama won’t answer me. I try again. “Are you friends with—”

She waves me away, mute, broken, before I can find how to reach her.

I ask my father. “Do we know this boy or something?”

But he, too, gives only a distracted “Sha. Sei still, Junge.”

He comes for me at night, the thing they say is a boy. This happens more nights running than I can count. He lies decked out in that black suit, that perfect starched shirt, topped by the grotesque mushroom that ought to be his face. Then he sits up. His body pinches in the middle and he flips forward, his face zooming up to mine. He springs up to get me, the pulped mouth smiling, trying to befriend me, to speak. I try to scream, but my own mouth melts into another rubber mask as fused as his. I wake up wet, a moan leaking out of me, more cowlike than human. The moan wakes my brother, on the bunk above me. “Go back to bed,” he snaps at me. He doesn’t bother to ask what’s wrong.

The child’s funeral in Chicago becomes a national event. Da asks if Mama wants to go. “We could go together. I have not been out to the University of Chicago since Fermi died. I could get an invitation. We would be right there, on the South Side.”

My mother says no. The funeral of a stranger? She has her students, and there’s Ruth’s day school to think of. But even at thirteen, I know: She can’t go to this funeral, not this one, on the arm of a man my father’s color.

Ten thousand people turn out to mourn a boy only a hundred of them knew. Each shows up locked in a private eulogy, humming a whole hymnal of explanations. Unlucky boy, backwoods regional madness, the relic of a nightmare history: This is the funeral white America thinks it attends. But black Chicago, black Mississippi, friends of the boy’s mother, or last week’s mother, or next week’s, grab the mourning suit out of the closet — haven’t even had time to iron it — and go to the mountain again.

The coffin stands open throughout the service. The public files by for a last look, or a next-to-last, a second-to-next. The crowds show up again, back in Mississippi, for Bryant and Milam’s trial. All three infant television networks are there, and the newsreels, too, holding their audience repulsed but mesmerized.

A northern black member of the House of Representatives comes down in person to the county courthouse in Sumner. The bailiff refuses to let him in the room. Nigger says he’s a Congressman. At last they admit him but restrict him to the back, with the press and the handful of colored witnesses the law requires.

The courtroom is an oven. Even the judge strips down to his shirt-sleeves. The case prosecutes itself. The grooves in a cotton gin are unique, cut by only one fan. The fan tied with barbed wire to Emmett Till’s neck belongs to the gin still sitting in J. W. Milam’s barn. The prosecutor asks Mose Wright if he can see anyone in the courtroom involved in his grand-nephew’s abduction. The sixty-four-year-old preacher rises up alone against the world’s collected power and points at Milam. His finger arcs up and out, like the hand of God whose awful indictment created the first man. “Dar he.” Two words start up the irreversible future.

Where the prosecution is direct, the defense is ingenious. The body floating up out of the river is too disfigured to recognize, too decomposed to have lain submerged for just three days. Perhaps the signet ring was placed on the mangled body by some northern colored-loving group, eager to raise trouble where they don’t belong. Perhaps the boy is still alive, hiding up in Chicago, part of a conspiracy against a couple of men who wanted only to protect their womenfolk. Throughout, the defendants sit by their family, smoking cigars, their faces edged with defiant smiles.

If Bryant and Milam are found guilty,the defense attorney asks the jury, where, under the shining sun, is the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The jury is out for only an hour and seven minutes. They wouldn’t have taken even that long, one juror tells a reporter, if the twelve whites hadn’t lingered to drink a soda pop. The verdict comes down: Innocent on all counts. Milam and Bryant have done no wrong. They go free, back to their women and families. The whole trial is over in four days. The magazines run another picture: the killers and their mates, cheering their victory in the courtroom.

Jonah and I don’t hear this outcome. We’re back at our private conservatory, growing into our new voices, learning the lower lines in a vast choral fantasy about how all men are brothers. We’re deep in our own improvised lives, carrying snapshots around in our own wallets. We set aside the nightmare boy, the unforgettable photo, too disfigured to be anything but a ruined clay model. We never ask our parents what happened at the trial, and they never tell us. For if there’s one thing we need protection from, even more than this crime, it’s this verdict.

I do not learn the final verdict until adulthood, the adulthood Emmett Till never reaches. One child dies, and another survives only by not looking. What other protection could they offer us, our parents, who stripped us of all protection when they chose to make us? For after this country, there is no safety.

But here is the part I can’t get past. It’s twelve years later, 1967. Jonah and I are in a room on the eleventh floor of the Drake, in Chicago, in town a dozen years too late for the funeral. I’m at our window, trying unsuccessfully to peer past the fire escapes to something the map calls the Magnificent Mile. My brother lies on one of the double beds, paralyzed with agitation. We’re here for his Orchestra Hall debut, that night.

We’ve at last broken free from the wilds of Saskatchewan and the rain-leaking concert barns of Kansas. Jonah is streaking like a meteor across what is left of classical music’s sky. High Fidelity has named him one of their “ten singers under thirty who will change the way you listen to lieder.” And the Detroit Free Press has called him “a tenor who sings like a planet-scouting angel carrying back word of a place rich and strange.” He has recorded a successful disk with a small label and is about to do another. There’s talk of his signing a long-term contract with a larger house, perhaps even Columbia. He has only to keep from smoking and a triumphant life is all but guaranteed.

But triumph shows its first catch. A leading intellectual, whom Jonah has never heard of, has just ambushed him in print. It’s only a passing line, in Harper’s, not a venue likely to cause his career much lasting harm. Jonah keeps reading the line out to me until we both have it memorized. “Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.” And the intellectual goes on to name a famous modern dancer, an internationally acclaimed pianist, and Jonah Strom. The piece, of course, makes no mention of me, nor any of the thousands of lesser-skilled but loyal little brothers.