Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Everything in the accusation is true. People are dying, and the streets are on fire. Newark is an inferno. A river of flame runs through downtown Detroit. From the eleventh floor of the Drake, it doesn’t yet feel like civil war. But the evidence is everywhere, and my indicted brother has become addicted to it. In each new city we barnstorm through, in every pastel hotel room, we watch the bewildered news recaps — riots with the sound turned down — as Jonah runs through his scales and I tap out pantomime finger warm-ups on the tabletops.

It’s August, as it was for Till, only twelve years later. The nation again looks on, wanting to believe that the worst has passed. Everything has changed, but nothing is different. A black man sits on the Supreme Court. The rest are in prison, trapped in burning cities, or dying in Asia’s jungles. On the television in the Drake, a camera tracks down an avenue of commercial buildings, block after block of gutted brick. My brother stops in midarpeggio, three tones shy of the top of his usual workout range.

“You remember that boy?”

We’ve almost doubled in age since that day. Since my nightmares, we’ve never once spoken about the photo. Nor can I remember thinking about it. But the thing our parents fought over, the false hope of protection, has worked away inside us. I know in a beat who he means.

“Till,” my brother says, just as I say, “Emmett.” My brother falls quiet, calculating. He can be thinking only one thing. Once upon a time, I was this boy’s age. But now I’m twenty-six, and he’s still fourteen.

The dozen years since the boy’s death open in front of us, like an empty concert hall ten minutes before curtain. I look on that year, the one I couldn’t see when I lived there. Twelve years too late, I hear what our parents argued about that night. I hear our mother crying for this boy she didn’t know. On the muted hotel TV, the camera pans across men shivering in doorways along what might as well be Lenox, a handful of blocks from the house we grew up in.

“She didn’t want us to see. She didn’t want us to know.”

My brother stares at me. The first time he has looked me in the eye in over a week. “What do you mean?”

“The picture.” I wave at the screen, where club-swinging police and their white-fanged German shepherds wade into a screaming crowd. “She thought it might damage us, to see what…they did to him.” I snort. “I guess it did.” Jonah looks at me as if I’m another species. I can’t believe the idea has never occurred to him. “She was a mother, first, before…anything. We were her babies.” My brother is shaking his head, denying. I start to gutter, so I press on, harder. “But your father, the scientist: ‘What do you mean, too young? If it’s a physical fact, they have to know.’”

“Your memory has totally fucked this up.”

My face swells as if beaten. I’m ready to wheedle with him, to beg. At the same time, my fists clench. I’ve devoted myself to accompanying him, spent my whole life making sure that the real world won’t defeat him. I’ve carried my brother for a quarter of a century. I’m only twenty-five. “Me? My memory? You’re full of shit, Jonah. You don’t remember them—”

“Don’t try to swear, Mule. It’s even less convincing than your Chopin.”

“What are you saying? You think she had some other reason? You think she was—”

“You’ve got it backward. Da was the one. Didn’t want us even to hear them arguing. Wanted to keep our dreams musical and clean. Wanted to think the boy was a fluke; deviant history. Never going to happen anymore. You and me and Rootie? Our generation? We’d be the fresh start. Don’t tell us, and there’d be no scars.”

I shake my head, short wipes of denial. He might as well be telling me we’re adopted.

“I’ll tell you what. Mama was furious. Said he didn’t have the first idea in hell what was going on. I remember her wailing. ‘Whatever you think these boys are, the world is going to see them as a couple of black boys.’ We had to get ready. Had to know what people wanted to do to us.” Jonah gazes at the TV, at the Harper’s article, there, as always, on his bed stand, within reach. “Da tried to tell her it was just the South, just a couple of death-deserving animals. He’s the one who said it would only fuck us up to look at it.”

I can’t wrap my head around his words. The people he describes: I don’t know them. My mother couldn’t have said those things to my father. My father couldn’t have thought such stupidity.

“You know what happened? You know how things turned out?” Jonah looks up at me, smiles, and waves his hands in the air. “I mean, with the killers?”

My brother, the near illiterate, has been reading, behind my back. Or he’s learned the facts on some civil rights documentary, the kind of show that airs at a harmless hour late at night, on educational TV, when all good citizens, like me, are safe in bed.

“The whites. The murderers. They sell their confession to some picture magazine a few months after their acquittal. The trial’s barely over, and they’re telling the whole country exactly how they killed the kid. Make a quick couple of bucks, pocket money. The kid forced them to do it, apparently. Of course, they can’t be tried twice for the same crime.” Jonah’s face, in the hotel room light, looks almost white. “Did it do anything to you? That picture?”

“Nightmares for weeks. You don’t remember? I used to wake you up, with the moaning. You used to scream at me to shut up.”

“Did I?” He shrugs and waves, forgiving me for angering him. “Only weeks? I was seeing him for years. Fourteen, you see. That’s what was going to happen. They were coming for me. I was going to be next.”

I look at him and can’t see. My fearless brother, who wrapped the world around his little finger. My brother lies back on the bed. He splays both palms as if to break his fall. He closes his eyes. The bed rushes up beneath him. “A little trouble breathing, here, Mule. I think I might be having an attack.”

“Jonah! No. Not tonight. Get up.” I talk to him like he’s a small child, a puppy on the furniture. I walk him around in slow, relaxed circles, all the while rubbing his back. “Breathe normally. Nice and easy.”

I walk him over to the window. The noise of the Loop, the lazy tangle of commerce below, helps ease him a little. Jonah collects himself. His shoulders drop. He starts to breathe again. He tries to smirk at me, his neck pulled back: “What the hell’s your problem, buddy? What’s with all the physical contact all of a sudden?”

He tweezers my hand off his shoulder, twisting my wrist to steal a look at my watch. He, of course, doesn’t wear one. Nothing distracting or weighty allowed to touch his body. “Jesus Christ. We’re late,” he says, as if I’m the one who has been malingering. “Our big night, remember?”

He flashes a performer’s bitter smile and heads toward the bathroom, where his tux has been hanging in steam. He goes through the whole ritual: hot towels around the neck, eucalyptus rub and lemon wedges, vocalizing as he ties his white tie. I pull the curtains and dress out in the room, between the two beds. Jonah calls downstairs for his concert shoes, which come up to the room reflecting light like a pair of obsidian mirrors. He tips the bellhop obscenely, and the man beats an apologetic, resentful retreat.

We go take our debut turn at Orchestra Hall, the songs of Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Brahms. The white culture game. Nerves and overlearning get us through in a splash of color. There’s an edge to Jonah tonight, the radiant glow of a tubercular patient about to die. The Chicago crowd — all North Siders and suburbans — feels present at the birth of a wondrous discovery.