Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

The mass elation overwhelms him. His sight blurs and his knees start to give, a middle-aged man, faint with heat and excitement. He stumbles for his daughter. She props him up, as anxious about him as she is humiliated. He points a finger at the ground. “We were here. Your mother and I.”

She knows the lore: how Strom met Daley, how she came to be. She hushes him, smiles sheepishly at the circle around them. No one cares. Half a million eyes are on the speaker’s stand, a quarter mile away.

“Here,” he repeats. “Right here.” She stares at the ground. His certainty shakes her.

A flurry on the podium, and the singing falls hushed. Only when the tunes stop can they hear how many melodies were running at once. The PA’s rumble takes a full second to pass over them. The crowd comes to order, fusing into a city-sized camp meeting. One by one, speakers take the stand, each a different shade, each telling this otherworldly crowd where they’re heading. The first counsels compromise; the second scorches with fact. The measureless congregation calls out “Go on, tell it, now!” Cameras and microphones capture chapter and verse. Even ABC cuts away from its scheduled soap operas to give the nation its first full look at itself.

Ruth slumps and straightens during the speeches. Her body registers changes in pressure Strom struggles to interpret. She twitches through the white preachers’ catch-up bandwagoning. She comes alive for John Lewis, the SNCC spokesman, five years older than she, hurling his indictments down the length of the reflecting pool. He speaks of living in constant fear, a police state, and Ruth applauds. He asks, “What does the government do?” and she joins the piercing response: “Nothing!” He speaks of immoral compromise, of evil and evil’s only answer: revolution. The mile of people carry him onward, and Strom’s daughter is with them, cheering.

Fear of suffocation comes back over Strom. If this crowd turns angry, he’s dead. As dead as his own parents and sister, killed for being on the wrong side of a crowd. Dead as his wife, who died for making a life with him. Dead as he will be anyway, when the signal of the past at last remembers him.

The sun turns brutal and the speeches turn long. Someone — it must be Randolph — introduces the women of the movement. An older woman on the dais gets up to sing, and Strom lifts up through his own skull. Still he looks, and still he chides himself for believing the hallucination. There is some resemblance, but only enough to tease the credulity of an old man. The differences are greater. The sheer age, for one: This woman is a generation older than the one he confuses her with.

Then the past swamps him, like pavement swimming up to slam a falling man. “My God. Oh my God. It is her.”

His daughter jerks up at his voice. “Who? What are you talking about?”

“There. This one, up there. That is her.” The hat is bigger, the dress more colorful, the body weighed down by twenty-four more years. But the sound is the same, at its core.

“ Who, Daddy?”

“The woman who married your mother and me.”

A pained laugh comes out of Ruth, and they fall silent in the music. The girl hears only an old woman, no voice left, years past her prime, warbling “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Banal tune, with even sadder lyrics. Ruth sees what she saw when they taught her the song in third grade: solar system — sized hands cupped around the globe as if it were a prize cat’s-eye. What color, those hands? If he ever had the planet cradled, the better part of it has long ago slipped through his cumbersome fingers. The wind and the rain. The moon and stars. You and me, sister. For eight years, ever since she stood screaming to break free from death’s fireman grip, Ruth has known what this old lady hasn’t yet admitted.

Strom is lost in other songs—“O mio Fernando.” “Ave Maria.” “America.” The voice one hears only once a century — what Toscanini said of her, in Vienna, back in another universe, before that sick metropolis was leveled. And he was right. For it has been a century since Strom heard this voice, if it has been an hour. And even longer since he’s had someone to listen with.

The moment passes, father and daughter frozen in separate forevers, waiting for the song to end. Ruth looks over at her father, her face curdled by catching up to the past. This is the woman, the mighty myth she was raised on. Strom feels her disappointment. He holds still in this coda to his wife’s shortened tune. He shouldn’t have lived long enough to hear this voice again, when his Delia cannot.

More singers follow, with harder memories. Mahalia Jackson releases a mighty “I’ve Been ’Buked,” her unaccompanied voice rolling across the mile of people, parting the reflecting pool like the Red Sea. Then come more speakers. And more after that. The day will never end, nor ever come again. The crowd chafes at the moment, a promise unfilled. Too many speeches, and Ruth dozes. In her dream, she meets her mother in a teeming train station. People crash into them, keep them from reaching each other. Ruth’s children have disappeared somewhere in the crowded hall. Her mother scolds her: Never take your eyes off the little ones. But Delia sings the scold, up high in her range, in a ghostly accent.

Then the song turns back to speech, and the accent turns to German. Someone is shaking her, and that someone is her father. “You must wake up. You must hear this. This is history.” She looks up at him in rage, for once again taking her mother away. Then she swims awake. She hears a swelling baritone, a voice she has heard before, but never like this. We also have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

Now: the reason why her father wakes her. But the thought nags at her between the rolling baritone thunder: Her father couldn’t have known the words were coming until after he shook her awake. Then she forgets, posting the question to a later her. Something happens in the crowd, some alchemy worked by the sheer force of this voice. The words bend back three full times in staggered echoes. Her father is right: history. Already she cannot separate these words from all the times she’ll hear them down the years to come.

The preacher starts to ad-lib, stitching together Amos and Isaiah with snippets of Psalms that Ruth remembers from old anthem settings her family once sang together. Unearned suffering will redeem. She’d dearly like to believe him. One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation… She sees herself with children of her own, and still no nation.

Every valley exalted. Every hill laid low.God help her: She can’t keep from hearing Handel. Her parents’ fault; a birthmark stain. She could sing the whole text from memory. The rough made plain…and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

With this faith we will transform the jangling discords of our nation into a symphony.She lifts her eyes and looks out — brown on brown, all the way to the edges of sight. A massive music, beyond all doubt, but nothing like a symphony. Ruth looks back at her father beside her. His white skin looks sick to her, alien. The thinning gray hair, tangled by the wind, is nothing of hers. The words of this speech roll down his cheeks like waters. She can’t remember her father ever crying, not even at her mother’s funeral. Back then, he was only bewildered smiles, his theory of timeless time. Now he weeps for these words, this abstract hope, so desperate and obvious, so far past realizing. And she hates him for waiting so long. For refusing to look at her.

Strom feels his daughter’s eyes on him, but he will not turn. So long as he doesn’t turn his face square on that face, his Delia is still more than half there, at the concert they once shared. When the preacher starts in on those words, the words the voice of the century sang that first day, Strom is waiting for them. He knows in advance the moment when they must start, and when they do, it’s because he wills them.