Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

On Broadway, the first three cabs we flagged wouldn’t take us. In the cab, Mama couldn’t stop humming Bach’s exultant little tune. We boys sat on either side of her, with Ruth on her lap and Da up front. She wore a black silk dress printed with little lambs so small, they might have been polka dots. Cocked on her head was a cupped potsherd hat—“your mother’s yarmulke,” Da called it — with a piece of black net she pulled down like a half veil in front of her face. She looked more beautiful than any movie star, with all the beauty Joan Fontaine never quite pulled off. Singing in a cab on Broadway, surrounded by her triumphant family, she was black, still young, and, for five minutes, free.

But my brother was elsewhere. “Mama,” he asked. “You are a Negro, right? And Da’s…some kind of Jewish guy. What exactly does that make me, Joey, and Root?”

My mother stopped singing. I wanted to slug my brother and didn’t know why. Mama looked off into whatever place lay beyond sound. Da, too, shifted. They’d been waiting for the question, and every other one that would follow, down the years to come. “You must run your own race,” our father pronounced. I felt he was casting us out into coldest space.

Ruth, on our mother’s lap, laughed in the face of the glorious day. “Joey’s a Nee-gro. And Jonah’s a Gro-nee.”

Mama looked at her little girl with a crooked little smile. She lifted her veil and held Ruthie to her. She rubbed her nose into her daughter’s belly, humming the Bach. With two great bear arms, she drew our heads into the embrace. “You’re whatever you are, inside. Whatever you need to be. Let every boy serve God in his own fashion.”

She wasn’t telling us everything. Jonah heard it, too. “But what are we? For real, I mean. We got to be something, right?”

“Have.” She sighed. “We have to be something.”

“Well?” My brother fiddled to free his shoulders. “What something?”

She released us. “You two boys.” The words came out of the side of her mouth, slower than that morning’s glacial sermon. “You two boys are one of a kind.”

The cabbie must have been black. He took us all the way home.

This was all our parents said about the matter, until the end of summer. We went back to the local church circuit with our mother, where ours were just a part of the deep, concerted voice. August trickled out, and Jonah readied to leave home. Our evenings of song tapered off. The chords we made were no longer crisp, and no one had the heart for counterpoint.

Sometimes at night, through our parents’ door, we heard Mama weeping at her mirror, and Da trying for all the world to answer. Jonah did his best to comfort them both. He told them Boston would be good for him. He’d come back singing so well, they’d be glad they’d sent him away. He said he’d be happy. He told them everything they wanted to hear, in a voice that must have destroyed them.

Easter, 1939

This day, a nation turns out for its own wake. The air is raw, but scrubbed by last night’s rain. Sunday rises, red and protestant, over the Potomac. Light’s paler synonyms scratch at the capital’s monuments, edging the blocks of the Federal Triangle, turning sandstone to marble, marble to granite, granite to slate, settling down on the Tidal Basin like water seeking its level. The palette of this dawn is pure Ashcan School. Early morning coats every cornice with magentas that deepen as the hours unfold. But memory will forever replay this day in black and white, the slow voice-over pan of Movietone.

Laborers drift across a Mall littered with scraps of funny papers scattering on the April wind. Sawhorses and police cones corral the lawless expanse of public space. Federal work teams — split by race — finish ratcheting together a grandstand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A handful of organizers gazes over the reflecting pool, swapping bets about the size of the crowd that will turn out for this funeral turned jubilee. The crowds about to descend on them in three hours will swamp their most outrageous guesses.

Knots of the curious gather to witness these last-minute preparations. Accounts have been flying for some time now — word of this forbidden concert. American Dream and American Reality square off, their long trajectories arcing toward midair collision. The ancient ship of state, gone too long without a hull scrape, groaned at anchor last night in the Washington Navy Yard, upriver on the Anacostia, and now entire neighborhoods of the city, this Easter morning, 1939—in crowds already assembling to the east of Scott Circle and north of Q Street, all the way up into the Maryland suburbs; whole communities still in church, calling out their response to this year’s recounting of the ancient Resurrection fable — begin to wonder whether today might witness the leaky old brig’s mercy scuttling, a full-fledged burial at sea.

“How long?” the church songs ask. “How long until that Day?” As late as last Friday, no tune dared more than soon, no singer thought sooner than never. Yet this morning, by some overlooked miracle, the stone has rolled away, Rome’s imperial elite lie sprawled about the tomb, and the messenger angel floats front and center, beating its wings over the Jefferson Memorial, saying now, singing release in the key of C.

Over on Pennsylvania Avenue, pink children in vests and pinafores hunt for Easter eggs on the White House lawn. Inside the Oval Office, the silver-tongued president and his speechwriters conspire on the next fireside chat to a country still hoping to evade the flames. Each new paternal radio address stores up more strained reassurances. “Brutality,” the old man tells his fireside family, “is a nightmare that must waken to democracy.” A loving-enough lie, perhaps even believable, to those who’ve never strolled northward up Fourteenth Street. But Roosevelt’s address on the widening crisis goes hunting, this Easter, for an audience. Today, the nation’s radios tune to a different performance, a wider frequency. Today, Radio America broadcasts a new song.

Democracy is not on the program this afternoon. Freedom will not ring from Constitution Hall. The Daughters of the American Revolution have seen to that. The DAR have shut their house to Marian Anderson, the country’s greatest contralto, recently returned from a triumphal tour of Europe, the sensation of Austria and the toast of the Norwegian king. Sibelius embraced her, declaring, “My roof is too low for you!” Even Berlin booked her for multiple engagements, until her European manager confessed to the authorities that no, Miss Anderson was not 100 percent Aryan. The great Sol Hurok has taken her into his fold of international stars, sure he can replicate, at home, the wonder of the jaded Old World. Last year, he booked Miss Anderson on a seventy-concert U.S. tour, the most grueling ever performed by a recital singer. This same alto has just been barred from the capital’s best stage.

Who can say what revolution the DAR staves off, sandbagged behind its blinding-white Roman portico? “Booked through the end of winter,” the programming director tells Hurok. “Spring, as well.” The agency’s associates call in another booking, for a different artist, this one 100 percent Aryan. They get a choice of half a dozen slots.

Hurok tells the newspapers, though this story is hardly news. It’s the country’s longest-running serial feature. The press asks the Daughters for comment. Is this permanent policy, or some vague stopgap? The DAR answers that, by tradition, certain of the city’s concert halls are reserved for performances by Miss Anderson’s people. Constitution Hall is not one. It’s not DAR policy to defy community standards. Should sentiment change, Miss Anderson might sing there. Sometime in the future. Or shortly thereafter.