Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

This is how I see my brother, forever. He is twenty; it’s December 1961. One moment, the Erl-King is hunched on my brother’s shoulder, breathing the promise of a blessed deliverance. In the next, some trapdoor opens in the warp of the air and my brother is elsewhere, teasing out Dowland of all things, a bit of ravishing sass for this stunned lieder crowd, who can’t grasp the web that slips over them. He touches his tongue to his hard palate, presses on the cylinder of air behind it until his tongue tips over his front teeth with a dwarf explosion, that fine-point puff of tuh that expands, pulling the vowel behind it, spreading like a slowed-film cloud, to ta to tahee to time to transcend the ear’s entire horizon, until the line becomes all it describes:

Time stands still with gazing on her face,

Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.

All other things shall change, but she remains the same,

Till heavens changed have their course and time hath lost his name.

He sings that gaze, the one the heart tried to hang on to but couldn’t. His eyes shine with the light of those who’ve freed themselves to do what they need. Those who see shine back, fixed at this moment, arrested, innocent. As he sings, Elizabeth’s ships sail out to sudden new continents. As he sings, Freedom Riders one state away are rounded up and jailed. But in this hall, time stands still, afraid to do so much as breathe.

Jonah wins. Half a dozen years too young to walk away with a prize this size, my brother leaps into the inheritance he’s always known was his. In the chaos afterward, the other singers hating him, the remembering audience still in the throes, wanting just to stand near him, he seems complete. He can’t notice our sister well enough to feel the scope of her misery here, at this last public concert of his that she will ever attend. He and my father dance a little dance around the near past, their growing awkwardness. Da faults Jonah’s German, calls him a Polack. Says he almost was one, in another life.

“I could have been a Polack?” my brother asks.

“You are a near Polack. A counterfactual Polack.”

“A Polack in one of many alternate universes?”

My sister and I try to hush them. But my brother is past hushing, past even hearing the likes of us. For a moment, he has everything that singing can give him. When we’re out of earshot, I beg him again to ditch me, to get an accompanist worthy of him. And again he refuses.

An old gentleman of the landed, tobaccoed countryside interrogates us. I smell hostility on his affronted breath. “What exactly are you boys?” And my brother sings to him, smart-mouthing, the prize in hand granting him liberty to ignore how the world sees him:

“I am my mammy’s ae bairn,

Wi’ unco folk I weary, Sir…”

The word he sings in mockery draws me back, down into that ending we passed through only moments before. We’re onstage again, centered in that stillness he brings on simply by chanting about it. At the keyboard, I force my fingers to their marks, imitating the flourishes of a Renaissance lute. I concentrate, try not to listen, keeping off the reef he has arranged for me. But I stray close enough to that stilled spot to hear what prize my brother means to win. All music is just a means to him, toward that one end. In the timeless time it takes him to reach the cadence, the song starts to work. She rises up behind him, following, just as the gods promised. But in the thrill of his tune’s victory, Jonah forgets the ban, and looks back. And in his joy-cracked face as he turns around, I see him watch as Mama disappears.

Not Exactly One of Us

Nettie Ellen takes the news in silence, as she does everything that the white world has inflicted since the captivity. Not a hateful silence, just a dead one. ’Nother sorrow coming. ’Nother piece of flesh stripped away.

All the questions she climbed up into the attic to ask her daughter mean nothing now. She doesn’t sharpen her silence for the kill. But it does the job, blunt, just as well. She sits motionless. And motionless, outside of time.

Her daughter, too late, repents this thing she never asked to feel. But love outlasts repentance, three falls out of five. Something scrabbles in Delia Daley, wanting the old, first absolution. Mama, don’t leave me. I’m still your girl. She knows that also is a lie: a lie, most of all, about who’s leaving whom.

Delia, too, keeps still. But in that standing stillness, she reaches out to cover her mother’s arm. The arm feels nothing but added weight. Her mother looks out on this new trial she should never have had to look on. Here it is, the old master of the lash, the one they’d almost outlived, coming round and letting himself in the side entrance.

The woman, Nettie, looks up at the flesh of her flesh. She can’t ask that the cup be taken away, now it’s already spilled down the front of her best Sunday dress. Can’t even ask why Delia’s done what she’s done. Her girl has already wrecked herself with explanations. When Nettie Ellen can talk again, all she says is, “You best go tell your father.”

The doctor rises up righteous at the news. He paces and wheels, the danger there in the room with them, spitting distance from where his daughter struggles to tell him. “What kind of self-satisfying… What in the name of God Almighty do you think you’re doing?”

“Daddy,” she guns. “You’re getting religion.”

“Don’t get smart with me, daughter. Or you’ll live to regret how smart you are.”

She crumples through the middle, her Yes, sir dying in darkness. Yesterday, she’d have had the man grinning like an imp at her impudence. Today, he’s stone. Stone of her making.

He paces the book-lined study, thinking. She has seen him this way, with patients whose poverty of body and mind turns him from healer to killing messenger. “What ever possessed you to side with those who’ve done your own—”

“Daddy. I’m not siding with anybody.”

He whirls about. “What exactly are you doing?”

She doesn’t know. She’d hoped he might.

“You’re a colored woman. Colored. I don’t care how high-toned you are. I don’t know what the world of that white music has been leading you to—”

“Daddy, you’ve always told me it’s whiteness makes us black. Whiteness that makes us a problem.”

The sole of my shoe isblack. The coal we burn too much of is black.

“Don’t you dare turn my words against me. And don’t you dare pretend you aren’t doing what you’re doing. A public proclamation that none of the eligible, accomplished men of your own race—”

“This isn’t about race.”

He stops pacing and sinks into the red Moroccan chair. He fixes her in his eyes, as if she’s a malingering patient. “Not…? Tell that to the whites. And you’ll have to, young lady. Every minute of your life. In ways you can’t begin to imagine.”

She tries to hold his gaze, but his unmasks her. She must look away or burn. Defeating hers, his eyes take on four hundred years of violence coming from all directions.

“Not about race? What is this about?”

She wants to say love. Two people, neither of them asking for this. Neither of them knowing what to do or how to make a home wide enough for the fear they now must live in.

He turns his face away from her, toward his books. He throws open the agenda on his desk and takes his pen, as if to sign a final severance. His hand hovers, then slams down on the blotter. He swings around to face her again. His voice drops, its menace multiplied by an awful, collaborator’s confidence. “What is this about, then? You tell me, seeing as how you’re the expert. What do you imagine you’re trying to prove?”