Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Jonah just grunts. Ruth looks down, upset and skeptical. “What did she sound like?”

The timbre of her voice is in the bones of my skull. It’s packed so close, I can’t get to it. The sound is second nature, but to try to describe it would be worse than a cheap recording. Not this; not that. I can’t say what my mother sounded like, any more than I can hear myself sing. Not even Jonah could reproduce her.

“She… I don’t know. She used to call us ‘JoJo.’ The two of us.” I kick my motionless brother. “Like we were one child with two bodies.”

“I remember.” Ruth squirms in place. This isn’t what she wants.

“She was a fantastic teacher. She used to praise and correct us in the same breath. ‘JoJo, that’s wonderful. That sounded just about perfect. Try it a few more times, and I bet that octave leap will be right there.’”

Jonah just nods. He has never been big on comprimario roles. When he’s not center stage these days, he doesn’t bother coming onstage at all.

“Did she have students?”

“All the time. Talented adults, coming back to music. Teens and older kids, from around the neighborhood.”

“Black or white?” All my sister asks is what the world asks her. It’s the only question of any interest, over in the Bronx, at NYU Uptown. In the twitchy streets of Harlem. The old neighborhood.

I turn on the sofa, sidesaddle, to look out the front bay window. No whiter street. I imagine myself a child of this neighborhood, a suburban boy, biking through its manicured blocks, tossing a pigskin across its tracts, party to a fantastic mass evasion. Our parents couldn’t have lived here if they’d wanted. I couldn’t have walked down these streets as a boy and lived. Even now, for this briefest family visit, some neighbor is already on the phone to the police. Tonight, if I walk around the block, they’ll stop me for questioning.

It strikes me how rarely Jonah and I left our house, even in the city. We stayed home, huddled over the piano, radio, and record player. Mama had to force us out. I count up how many of our childhood tormentors were black, how many white, how many as ambiguous as we were. We covered most bases. “Both, I think. Mostly black?”

I glance at Jonah, the only real authority. That one-year difference between us was almost an eon back then. Jonah sets down his puzzle and, in a deep gospel bass, intones, “Red and yellow, black and white, they are equal in His sight. Jesus loves the little students of this world.”

Ruth laughs, despite herself. She leans over him and slugs him in his softening underbelly. “You’re a complete asshole. You do know that?”

It’s supposed to be playful. He looks up at her impassively. I blunder forward, before there’s an incident. “She was still taking lessons herself, you know. At Columbia, when we were little. She even studied for a little while with Lotte Lehmann.”

“Is that supposed to be something special?”

I fall back, mouth open. “Lotte Lehmann?” All I can think to say. A name I know better than my own blood relatives. “You don’t…”

“Naw,” Jonah says, standing and stretching. “Nothing special. Just some famous diva bitch.”

Ruth’s ignoring him. It’s the most productive thing she can do with him these days. “What made Mama get interested in classical? Can you think of any reason why she would choose…” Ruth circles the question, unwilling to go to war over something she’s not sure she can win. “How good was she, anyway?”

I want to say, How dare you ask? “Don’t you know? You must have heard her just about every night for a decade!” The words come out harsher than I mean them. Ruth takes them across the face. I start again, softer. “She was…” The voice against which I measure every other. The sound that my sound strove for. A richness not even Jonah has learned to produce, one that came from giving up everything. “Her voice was warm. High and clear, but full-blooded. Never a hint of a slavishness.” I hear the word before I can suppress it.

“Sun coming up on a field of lavender,” Jonah says. And I remember why I’ll always do anything for him.

It almost satisfies Ruth. But she nurses a bigger demon, one that only gets hungrier when the smaller ones are fed. “What was she like?”

Even Jonah looks up, hearing the edge in her voice. I know just what Ruth wants one of us to say. But I can’t give her the Mama she needs. “When we were little, she used to walk us around, each of my feet on top of hers. Each step we took was a beat of a favorite tune. As if the song she sang was the motor of this enormous walking machine.”

My sister’s face is a spoiled watercolor. “I remember. ‘I’m Tram-pin ’. I’m Tram-pin’.’”

“She cut out little stars from silver paper and stuck them up on our bedroom ceiling, in the shapes of constellations. She got us growing potatoes and lima beans in water glasses. She was a perpetual sparrow-rescuer. We had an eyedropper always filled with sterilized milk, ready for every maimed creature between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“She used to beat us boys with nail-studded planks,” Jonah confides. “She’d softened a good deal by the time you came along.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “Never anything longer than carpet tacks.”

Ruth throws up her arms in disgust and stands up to leave. I hold her and bring her back down. She sits, with a little persuading. There’s no place else for miles around for her to go.

I stroke her bruised arm. “She’d fret for two days if the subway attendant looked at her the wrong way while she was putting her dime in the turnstile. But she was tougher than Jesus. She could hold her breath longer than she could hold a grudge. She loved having people over. At least to sing.”

None of this is any use to Ruth. “How black was she?” she asks at last. She studies my face for any cheating, a pitiless external examiner.

Blackis now the going term. Ruth started using it not long after hearing the young John Lewis at the March on Washington. Negro is for gradualists, appeasers, and Baptist ministers. Black means business, and it’s taken hold, after what’s happened this year in Harlem, Jersey City, and Philadelphia. The country keeps changing the problem’s name every few years, like a liar elaborating his excuse. I’m not sure what the word for mulatto is at the moment. It’ll be something new a year or so from now.

I don’t even glance at Jonah. I know his answer. “How black?” One drop, I want to tell her. That’s the going rule. No scale, no fractions, no how much. Not something this country lets you have degrees of. The only shade Americans see: One spurned size fits all. Ruth’s known as much since the age of ten. But now she’s decided there’s more to know. Another scale, one that measures degree. I meet her gaze. “What exactly are you asking?”

“What do you think I’m asking? Don’t be a fool, Joe.”

“Fool?”I pull my arm off her. “You can sit here asking these questions about your own mother, and you call me …”

Ruth turns her head. Her neck is the shade of beautiful polished walnut. She waves her hand, casting a fishing rod. “Okay, I’m sorry.” She won’t fight me. I’m the peacemaker, the conciliator, the crossover, the thing she won’t, yet, call me. I reach out and take her slender fingers. She turns to fix me, shaking her head a little, hurt, puzzled, needing me to be with her on this. Like, her look says, you were once.

Jonah stops his humming, but his words are almost chanted. “You mean did she talk Gullah before you were born? Did she cook chitlins and pone?”

She doesn’t even turn to look at him. “Who asked you, Tuxedo Boy? Do you have a hang-up with this? Does my asking about this make you uptight?”