Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

David Strom hears the swelling chorus in a dream. The sound bends him back upon his past self, the day that first took him here, the day that made this one. That prior day is here completed, brought forward to this moment, the one it was already signaling a quarter century before. Time is not a trace that moves through a collection of moments. Time is a moment that collects all moving traces.

His daughter walks beside him, eighteen, just two years younger than her mother was then. The message of that earlier day travels forward to her, too. But she will need more time, another bending, before it will reach her. His daughter walks two steps ahead of him, pretending that this pale face tagging along behind her is nothing she knows. He humiliates her, just by being. He trots and stumbles to keep up with her, but she only walks faster. “Ruth,” he calls her. “You must wait up for your old man.” But she can’t. She must disown the day he carries. She needs to deny him, if she’s to have any chance of signaling to her later self or remembering her way into the future she will make, the next time here.

He can’t see why he so shames her. He’s far from the only white here. Whites turn out by the tens of thousands. He moves through the gathering, the same one that he saw massing at the end of Virginia Avenue that day he came down from Georgetown, only far larger. The crowd has more than tripled since that first outing. Strom looks west and sees himself, a young man, fresh with twenty-eight-year-old immigrant ignorance, about to collapse into his own destiny. Which way did she come that day, his Ruth’s mother? He looks to the northeast, piecing back the woman’s vanished coordinates as she rushed from her Philadelphia train. Barely older than this girl who walks ahead of him, recalling herself toward some menacing, misread future, the life that life held out for her. “Impossible,” she told him several times. She knew already. Impossible.

The crowd pushes forward, like that first crowd. He shouldn’t think first. Strom stands at the curb as this parade passes. Then shortcutting across the hidden radius of time, the same parade circles past him again. There will be another march, one that will, in time, turn this later day earlier again. The crowd will surge on, downstream, and he’ll rejoin it there.

They sing, “We shall not be moved.” He knows the tune, if not the words. But the words, too, he remembers from somewhere as soon as he hears them. The words arose before any melody at all. Just like a tree that’s standing by the water. We. We shall not. We shall not be moved.

Rhythm, Strom hears, is a closed, timelike loop. The chorus dies and lifts up again, above the heads of its participants. It circles and reenters, canonic, the same each time, each time embroidered into a new original. Just like a tree. A tree standing by the water. He quickens his pace past the meter of the song. He gains on the moving march, draws abreast of his daughter. She is her mother’s profile, only more so: the same bronze in a brighter light. He looks on the girl, and the shock of memory knocks him forward. Every remembrance, a prophecy in reverse. His Ruth moves her lips, singing along, her own inner line. Time stays; we flow.

He sees it at last, after a quarter century: This is why the woman sang that day. Why she stood next to him, voicing under her breath. Why he leaned in to hear what sound those moving lips were making. “Are you a professional?” he asked. And she answered, “Noch nicht.” Not yet. Moving her lips while another woman sang: This was the thing that made him talk to her, when all the world would have prevented their ever trading a word. The thing that made them try a life together. That makes this later girl, their flesh and blood, walking alongside him, pretending she isn’t, move her lips in silent song.

For two years now, she has sung nothing with him. Since her brothers left, she’s refused all duets. She, the quickest of them all, the girl who read notes before she could read words. Once, he and her mother couldn’t put this one to bed if any voice anywhere north of Fifty-ninth Street was still singing. Now, if she sings at all, it’s away from the house, with friends who teach her other tunes, out of her father’s hearing.

Ruth was their peace baby, born three months after the eternal war ended. From birth, she had that soul that thought all things were put here for her to love. She loved the mailman with all her heart for his daily generosities. She wanted to invite him to her fourth birthday party, and she cried until they promised to ask him. She loved their landlady, Mrs. Washington, for giving them a house to live in. She loved Mrs. Washington’s terrier as she might have loved God’s angel. She sang to total strangers on the street. She thought everyone did.

At eight, an older boy in the park called her a nigger. She ran back to her mother on her bench, asked what it meant. “Oh honey!” Delia told her. “It means that boy is all confused.”

She ran back to the boy. “How come you’re all confused?”

“Nigger,” the boy mumbled. “Monkey girl.”

Ruth, the peace baby, child of certainty, scolded him in delight. “I’m not a monkey girl! This is a monkey girl.” And she improvised for him a chimp dance, something out of her own Carnival of the Animals, cupping her lips and aping primate joy. The boy broke into a nervous laugh, standing there entranced, ready to be wrong, ready to join in until his own mother came and yanked him away.

“Is Joey a nigger?” Ruth asked on their way home. “Is Jonah?” In her mind, she’d formed three categories. And hers was the smallest and most dangerous.

“Nobody’s a nigger,” Delia answered, stripping the loving girl of all defenses.

Ruth made friends while her parents weren’t looking. She found them at the mixed school David and Delia sent her to, their belated admission of how little good they’d done the boys through home schooling. Ruth brought them home before her mother died, friends of all shades. Sometimes they even came back, after the shock of the first visit. And through these friends, she learned all those melodies her parents had failed to teach her, the melodies that drove her into David’s study one night, asking, “What am I?”

“You’re my girl,” he told her.

“No, Da. What am I?”

“You are smart and good at whatever you do.”

“No. I mean, if you’re white and Mama is black…”

The answer he gave her then: also wrong. “You are lucky. You are both.” Wrong about so many things.

Ruth just looked at him, a shame bordering on scorn. “That’s what Mama said, too.” Like she’d never be able to trust either of them again.

Their children were supposed to be the first beyond all this, the first to jump clean into the future that this fossil hate so badly needs to recall. But their children do not jump clean. The strength of the past’s signal won’t let them. Strom and his wife, so lost in time, guessed wrong — too early, too hopeful by decades. In every future that his Delia’s lips mouthed on that day, she dies too soon and leaves her daughter hearing only how wrong their music was. But they are right, Strom must still believe, about how the double bar will sound. Right that the world will someday hear what its cadence must be. Like a tree by the water. His girl’s lips move silently. Two hundred meters and twenty-four years away, off where his Ruth can’t hear, her mother’s silent lips answer back.

The crowd moves them on. He and Ruth float down this living river, silting out in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Everything horribly the same: same day, same statue, same thrilled hope signing the air, same brutal truth waiting just off the Mall. More posters, more banners, more protests. People have more words now for what they don’t have. The sound of these thousands of voices billows, eerie and reverberant, the song of a continent that didn’t exist when he was here last. But this is the same human carpet stretching over the curve of the horizon. Strom gauges where he and his daughter stand. He figures where he and his wife were. Dead reckoning, distances at sea.