Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

Hang-up, uptight: the terms of the hour. My sister is, as ever, ahead of her time. Or at least ahead of me. A part of me, the white, simplifying part, wants to keep Da from hearing us. But I won’t hush her; I won’t drop my voice. We died when Mama did; no one left to protect.

A supplicant hang of my sister’s head, and I’m her brother again. Ruth needs from me what no one else in the world can give. From those few extra years I lived with our mother, she thinks I might know the secret of what black is. She knows Jonah won’t hand it over. But me: She imagines I can show her how to slip into it, like an old chemise of Mama’s Ruth has found hanging in a closet of her dreams. My refusal to tell her is simple perversity.

“What can I tell you, Ruth? Her father was a doctor. One of a couple dozen in all of Philadelphia. More broadly educated than Da. Her family was better off than his. You know what they lived with, Ruth. What’s the secret membership? What else do you want me to say?”

I’m telling her, saying already, by all I can’t say. Very black. Blacker than her mule sons can enter into. Black inflicted and black held on to. Black by memory and invention. The daily defensive backing off and smiling, twenty generations of remembered violence that doubled you over even when you thought you weren’t doubled. Black in the way that is the sole property of high yellow. The day never passed when she didn’t store it up, when she didn’t have to touch its protecting core. But every bit as light in skin, hair, features, and all things visible as her mixed-race daughter, who hates herself for not being simpler.

“Black, Ruth. She was black.”

“Black’s all right,” Jonah says. “Some of my best genes are black.”

Ruth says nothing. She’s turning over the possibility: The truth is too monochrome and stupid to make it out. She makes some massive reverse Middle Passage, getting no closer to that coming future our parents imagined than this starter bungalow in the suburban desert of New Jersey, where none of us can live.

“You don’t know, Joey. A year and a half, back and forth across the Harlem River from University Heights… I sit there in those classes full of crew-cut white business majors, all set to carry their fiancées back home to Levittown. The nice ones look at me like I’m neutered, and the cretins come on to me like I’m some kind of exotic barnyard lust machine. Or they want to know why I talk the way I do. They ask me if I’m adopted. If I’m Persian, Pakistani, Indonesian. Or they’re afraid to ask, afraid to offend me.”

“Tell them you’re a Moor,” Jonah said. “Works every time.”

She’s looking at me, her eyes welling, like I can help save her. Save her from America, or at least from her oldest brother. “Nobody at school knows what to make of me. Gangs of those Irish-Italian-Swede dumpling girls talk to me slowly, through foot-long smiles, swearing how close they’ve always been to their domestic help. But at the Afro Pride meetings, there’s always some sister grumbling out loud about infiltration by funny-featured, white-talking spies.” She nods her head, quizzing me: Right? Right? Whatever our parents taught us to recognize in ourselves must have been wrong.

This is what she’s learning at school. Every day, she braves a neighborhood that’s fleeing from her and her nonexistent kind. Last year’s residents are halfway to White Plains by now. The university has tried to salvage the uptown campus, hiring Marcel Breuer to stamp it with pedigreed European high modernism. But all the slabs of brutal concrete, grafted onto McKim, Mead & White’s Italianate arcades, only make it obvious to everyone that the game is over. Soon University Heights will sell its buildings to a “transitioning” community college for pennies on the dollar.

And my sister knows she’s to blame. I put my hand on her shoulder, the safe top knob of the collarbone. Five inches up from where that policeman grazed her. “Ruthie. Don’t let them beat you up. You aren’t the one, you know.”

“Don’t patronize me, Joey. What would you know about it?”

“Joey?” Jonah says. “Joey’s an authority. He wrote the damn book. Gray Like Me. ”

Ruth just snorts. My sister thinks I’m over the line, right up there as light as Jonah, just because I trot out onstage with him night after night, to the applause of near-blind octogenarians. It doesn’t occur to her that Jonah makes me look darker than I’ve ever made her.

“What would I know about it? Nothing, Ruth. Totally ignorant.”

“Well, where the hell were the two of you, then, while I was growing up? You could have run interference for me. You could have told me what…”

I can’t answer. More time has passed than I can account for.

“Ron yoor own race,” Jonah says. “Ron yoor own race.” I jerk up and shush him, hoping Da hasn’t heard him go this far. My family is coming undone, faster than it did that first time. Ruth’s words swing in the air in front of us. She’s past the first accusation and is on to a new one, below skin, up against bone. Where were we when she was growing up? Off somewhere, singing. Who said we should spend our childhoods away? Why can’t I remember her between the ages of eight and eighteen? This woman disappears into no place I recognize. Worse by far than the one I lived through. The identical place, changed by the run of a mere few years.

My sister opens her throat, but nothing comes out. She tries again. At last, the rasp catches. “Jesus Christ. It gets so old.”

“It was old when Mama was young.”

“What were they thinking?”

Jonah says, “I’m not sure thinking is the operative word.”

I inhale. “They wanted us to grow up believing…” But that’s not quite right. “They thought they could raise us beyond…”

The bile in her throat spits out in an acid laugh. “ Beyond?They got that one right, didn’t they?”

My eyebrows work away on nothing. “I must have been seven before I saw how different Da’s and Mama’s tones were.”

“You, Joey, are beyond beyond.” My sister shakes her head, mourning me. But around her eyes, the folds of recognition.

“They wanted us to be what happens next. To transcend. They didn’t want us to see race. Didn’t even want us to use the word.”

“ Dadidn’t,” Ruth says.

Jonah’s gone back to his slider puzzle, to Fauré. It makes Ruth cover her ears and shriek. When she stops, I say, “They were very big on the future. They thought the thing was never going to get here unless we leapt into it with both feet.”

“We leapt into something all right.” Ruth wrinkles her nose. “Soft, warm, foul-smelling? Is that the future we’re talking?”

“Parents have done worse,” I say.

“What did she do with her blackness? After she married. After she had us three.”

This blackness, a misplaced trinket — a ring of keys, a scribbled note. Jonah hears what I do. “It’s probably still around here somewhere.”

Ruth presses her head. “Well, you two seem to have set it down somewhere you can’t find.”

My fault, everything I can’t deliver to her. But she’s my sister, every drop, and there’s nowhere she can go without my finding her. I circle around the one thing, that fact I ought to tell her, even though she may read it totally wrong. Yet whatever Ruth might make of it, I have to give it over. For it’s already hers.

“It’s true. She used to laugh more, early on. Dance around. Like there was music all the time, even when there wasn’t.”

Ruth bobs her head, taking my concession, for which she gives thanks. Neither of us owns this woman’s memory. But as Ruth’s head bobs its short, shallow dips, I see pure Mama. She enters into our mother without knowing it, reincarnating her, body for body, nod for nod. She moves the way Mama used to move on those nights when our family sang, five lines flying in all directions.