Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He takes longer to hang up the phone than Mahler takes to resolve a chord. He calls my name, although I’m standing right there. “Joey. I don’t understand.”

“False alarm. You both should be relieved.”

“That’s not it. She’d have said that.”

I’m not slow. Just stupid. “She lost it.” I hear the words. Lost it, in her carelessness.

“When? Thirty minutes before the party? That’s what gave her the halo glow?” He wants me to shut up, to never say anything again. But silence will drive him mad. “She’s going to get somebody to do it, Joey. If she’s not on her way to do it right now. She loves my people. But she’d rather kill my baby than—”

“Jonah. Look. Even if it is yours—”

“It’s mine.”

“Even if… You still don’t know that she…”

He knows everything. Knows where we’ve lived our whole lives.

Da calls to tell us what we missed down in Washington. “The whole world at once, walking down Independence Avenue!” Jonah listens to every detail, indifferent, frantic for distraction.

Time confirms Lisette Soer. No problem: no baby. “Taken care of,” Jonah tells me. Something in him has been taken care of, too. The gap in their ages closes, faster than he predicted to her. He sits on the piano bench, chin on his knees, fetal. But older than she is.

“She didn’t want to lose her peak career years,” I say. Every word makes him hate me. “She didn’t want hormones wrecking her voice.” Didn’t want a baby. Didn’t want a husband twelve years younger. Didn’t want a husband. Didn’t want him.

He nods, rejecting my every sop. “She doesn’t want black. She doesn’t want a kid with lips. Why take chances with your life? Once black is in the blood, it’s Russian roulette.”

At night, he smashes things. He hurls a plate of spaghetti I’ve made out the window. It shatters in the street, almost hitting a pedestrian. Now that we need a road trip, we have no bookings. Not that he could sing. The top of his range drops two full steps. He goes out alone and returns reeking of reefer. I chat with him until bedtime about nothing. Jonah, his slack face unrecognizable, sits and giggles. I jabber to a man who can’t talk back, all the while terrified that the smoke he’s inhaling has already ravaged those vocal cords.

A week later, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham explodes. We see it on the television, then in the two newspapers we buy the next day. The church is a spew of brick and slag, glass and twisted metal. I’m standing on the scorched, frozen sidewalk outside our house that day eight years ago, while the car waits, trying to recognize my life. I stare at this new photo, swallowing down the taste that rises into my throat, half memory, half prediction.

The bombers have waited for the church’s annual Youth Sunday. The explosion rips out the church basement, where the children practice their parts in the special ceremony. Four girls are killed, three fourteen-year-olds and one eleven-year-old. My brother can’t stop staring at their photos, running his fingers over their beaming faces until he smears the newsprint. He’s a boy of ten, singing a euphoric duet for a church so pleased to have a little Negro singing Bach for them. He’s seeing his own little girl a decade from now, the one just taken away from him. Seeing these four dead girls: Denise, Cynthia, Carole, and Addie Mae.

Seven bombings in six months. Bloody battles roll through the streets of Birmingham, like something the United States ordinarily exports abroad. The Reverend Connie Lynch tells the world, “If there’s four less niggers tonight, then I say ‘Good for whoever planted the bomb!’” Two more black children are killed, a thirteen-year-old shot by a pair of Eagle Scouts and a sixteen-year-old murdered by a state trooper.

The nation I lived in is dead. The president speaks of law and order, justice and tranquillity. He calls on white and Negro to set aside passion and prejudice. Two months later, he, too, is dead. Malcolm says: The chickens have come home to roost.

Lisette Soer calls my brother but gets me. She wants to know why he’s missed three lessons. She wants him to call her back. The first time, I tell her Jonah’s laid up with a virus. She sends him daisies. The second time, I tell her he’s gone to Europe and won’t be back for a long time. My brother sits ten feet away, barely able to nod. Miss Soer takes the news with stunned rage. Lisa Sawyer, the brewer’s daughter from Milwaukee, calls me a lying monkey.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I tell her. But by now, this monkey has a fair idea.

They gather at the base of the Washington Monument. People pour in from wherever there is still hope of a coming country. They rumble up from the fields of Georgia on broken-down grain trucks. They ride down in one hundred busses an hour, streaming through the Baltimore tunnel. They drive over in long silver cars from the Middle Atlantic suburbs. They converge on two dozen chartered trains from Pittsburgh and Detroit. They fly in from Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas. An eighty-two-year-old man bicycles from Ohio; another, half his age, from South Dakota. One man takes a week to roller-skate the eight hundred miles from Chicago, sporting a bright sash readingFREEDOM.

By midmorning, the crowd tops a quarter of a million: students, small businessmen, preachers, doctors, barbers, salesclerks, UAW members, management trainees, New York intellectuals, Kansas farmers, Gulf shrimpers. A “celebrity plane” airlifts in a load of movie stars — Harry Belafonte, James Garner, Diahann Carroll, Marlon Brando. Longtime Freedom Riders, veterans of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Albany, join forces with timid first-timers, souls who want another nation but didn’t know, until today, how to make it. They come pushing baby strollers and wheelchairs, waving flags and banners. They come straight from board meetings and fresh out of prison. They come for a quarter million reasons. They come for a single thing.

The march route runs from Washington’s needle to Lincoln’s steps. But as always, the course will take the long way around. Somewhere down Constitution are jobs; somewhere down Independence is freedom. Even that winding route is the work of fragile compromise. Six separate groups suspend their differences, joining their needs, if only for this last high-water mark.

The night before, the president signs orders to mobilize the army in case of riot. By early morning, the waves of people overflow any dam the undermanned crowd-control officers can erect. The march launches itself, unled, and its leaders must be wedged into the unstoppable stream after the fact, by a band of marshals. There’s agitation, picketing, a twenty-four-hour vigil outside the Justice Department. But not a single drop of blood falls for all the violence of four hundred years.

Television cameras in the crow’s nest of the Washington obelisk pan across a half a mile of people spilling down both sides of the reflecting pool. In that half mile, every imaginable hue: anger, hope, pain, newfound power, and, above all, impatience.

Music breaks out across the Mall — ramshackle high school marching bands, church choirs, family gospel groups, pickup combos scatting stoic euphoria, a funeral jubilation the size of the Eastern Seaboard. Song echoes from staggered amplifiers across the open spaces, bouncing off civic buildings. A bastard mix of performers work the staging area — Odetta and Baez, Josh White and Dylan, the Freedom Singers of SNCC and Albany fame. But the surge of music that carries the marchers toward the Emancipator is all self-made. Pitched words eddy and mount: We shall overcome. We shall not be moved. Strangers who’ve never laid eyes on one another until this minute launch into tight harmonies without a cue. The one thing we did right was the day we began to fight. The song spins out its own rising counterpoints. The only chain we can stand is the chain of hand in hand. All past collapses into now. Woke up this morning with my mind on freedom. Hallelujah.