Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

“You’ve got a lot of confidence in folks with a bad track record.”

“Come on, brother. We’re uplift. We’re moral advancement. The coming fashion.”

“Don’t want to be the coming fashion, Jonah.”

He cranes his neck back. “What do you want?”

“I just want to play the music I know how to play.”

“Come on, Joey.” He grabs my strip of tie out of my hand, wraps it around my neck, and begins tying. “We’ll tell them you’re my chauffeur or something.”

At one evening gathering in late June, I’m standing in a corner, smiling preemptively, counting the rests until Jonah’s ready to leave. Over the burr of the conversation, like a radio station bleeding through static, something hits me. The party’s sound track switches in my head from ground to figure. The jazz coming through our host’s expensive speakers is state-of-the-art Village, the innovations Jonah and I so recently learned to follow.

I listen, the melody slipping me, like a name too familiar to recover. I close my eyes and surrender to this agonizing sense of known unknown. I’m sure I’ve heard the piece, tracing in advance its every modulation, but just as sure it’s nothing I could have heard before. I drift to the turntable. The prospect of cheating kills all chance of naming that tune.

A tall guy in green jacket and plastic horn-rims, skinny and pale even by these parties’ standards, stands by the hi-fi equipment, nodding in time to the music. “What is this?” I surprise us both with my urgency.

“Ah! That’s my man Miles.”

“Davis?” The trumpeter who dropped out of Juilliard ten years before we started and who went on to turn bebop cool. The man who, just a few years earlier, was beaten by police and jailed for standing outside a club where he was slated to play. A man so dark, I’d cross the street if I saw him coming.

“Who else?” Green Jacket says.

“Friend of yours?” First-name basis. A fair assumption, at this party of music’s elite.

But the face behind the horn-rims turns hostile. “I dig the music, man. You have problems with that?”

I back off, palms up, looking around for my big brother. Who does this skinny, pale guy think he is? Even I could beat him senseless. My rage builds, knowing all it can do is back off. This punk owes me an apology, one he expects me to offer him. But all the while, it eats at me: more grating than my humiliation by this white Negro. The music. I need to know how I know it. I’ve heard lots of Miles Davis, but never this. Yet these scorched chord clusters, modal, atavistic, play through my head as if I wrote them. Then it dawns on me: transcription. The piece is not for trumpet; it’s for guitar. It isn’t Miles I recognize. It’s Rodrigo.

I take the record sleeve from the pale guy’s hands. My excitement keeps him from taking a punch at me. I fumble with the cardboard, wondering if two independent people can stumble on the same fact independently, like those souls wandering in the scientific wilderness Da used to tell us about over dinner. The sleeve calls the music Sketches of Spain. I’m the last man on earth to hear of it: a Juilliard School dropout’s treatment of Aranjuez. Music has to sit around for at least a hundred years before I get it. It feels to me at least that long since Wilson Hart and I sat down to see what was hiding in this tune, more than a century since we played four-hand and I learned to improvise.

Will was right about the Reconquista, right about the uses this tune could be put through. Yet everything about these trumpet-led sketches is different from what Will and I made that day — everything but the theme. The lines play back and forth from Andalusia to the Sahara and southward, all cultures picking one another’s pockets, not to mention the pockets of those who only stand and listen.

I listen, in tears, not caring if this white Negro sees me. I hear the loneliest man I’ll ever meet, transcribed from his world into another, loving a music that had no home, huddled in a practice room writing orchestral suites he knew would be the ridicule of any group he showed them to. And he showed them to me. A man who made me promise to write down the tune inside me. And to date, I’ve written down not a single note — exactly what’s in me.

I hear the fact in every reworked Spanish note: I failed to become my friend’s friend. I don’t know why. I haven’t tried to contact him since our good-bye, and I know I won’t, not even when we go home tonight, my heart full of the man. I don’t know why. I know exactly why. That’s okay, brother Joe. Let every soul praise God in his own fashion. This is my way: lieder recitals in Hartford and Pittsburgh, and Upper East Side dress-up balls full of the musical elite. The cardboard record sleeve shakes in my hands. Andalusia via East St. Louis washes out of the speakers, the trumpet discovering its inevitable line, and all I can do is stand here, shaking my head, sobbing. “It’s okay,” I tell Green Jacket, his glare turned to fear. “It’s cool. There isn’t a horse alive that’s purebred.”

We see Da and Ruth at least once a week, up in Morningside, for Friday dinner, if we’re not on the road performing. Ruth’s growing up fast, under the care of our father and his fifty-year-old housekeeper, Mrs. Samuels, against whom Ruthie now wages continuous war. She has a pack of girlfriends I can’t keep straight, who’ve tried to fix her hopelessly hybrid hair into a slightly limp globe and who dress her up in a shiny, vinyl way that Mrs. Samuels calls “criminal.”

Ruth’s all set to go to college in the fall, over at NYU Uptown, in University Heights, where she’s planning to study history. “History?” Jonah asks, surprised. “What possible use is there in studying that?”

“Not all of us can be as useful as you are, Jonah,” she mimics in her best FM announcer style.

We meet most of her inner circle one night, when they come by to drag Ruth to the movies, three black-dressing girls. The lightest of them makes Ruthie look vaguely Latina. They can barely contain their mirth at me and Jonah, and they start shrieking the moment Ruth follows them out the apartment and pulls the door shut. Ruth grows tighter with them until, over Da’s objections, the weekend outings become regular and she’s rarely there anymore when Jonah and I do make it uptown for Friday dinner. Over the course of the summer, we manage a full reunion only three times. But all four of us, and Mrs. Samuels, too, are sitting eating together in the same room in early August when Da announces, “We are going to Washington!”

Jonah is eating latke off the tip of his knife. “Who do you mean ‘we,’ Da?”

“We. Us. This whole family. Everyone.”

“First I’ve heard.”

“What’s in Washington?” I ask.

“Lots of white marble,” Ruth answers.

“There will be a great objection movement.”

Jonah and I exchange shrugs. Mrs. Samuels clucks. “You boys haven’t heard about the march? Where have you been keeping yourselves?”

Turns out everyone has been alerted but us. “Jesus, you two. There are leaflets all over town!” Ruthie shows off a little metal button, which cost her twenty-five cents and which is funding the enterprise. She’s bought one for each of us. I put mine on. Jonah does coin tricks with his.

Da holds up ten fingers. “The one-hundred-year marking of the Emancipation.”

“Which freed no one, of course,” our sister says. Da lets his gaze fall.

Jonah raises his eyebrows and scans the table. “Someone? Anyone? Please.”

Ruthie volunteers. “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Mr. A. Philip Randolph has organized—”

“I see,” Jonah says. “And might anyone here know exactly when this manifestation is planned?”