Richard Powers (14 page)

Husband and wife battened down against the loss, cleaving to each other. But James’s death claimed a piece of each of them. Nettie grew, if not harder, more guarded. Then strong-lunged Delia came, her mother’s consolation, every wail of those stunned lungs a cause for joy. After a long and anxious gap, interpreted so differently by William and Nettie that they stopped talking about it, there came the rash of young ones: Charles, Michael, and at last the twins, Lucille and Lorene.

Over her husband’s objections, Nettie had the children properly churched. She dressed and dragged them to Sunday school each week. Long before she married, she knew that William’s freethinking would now and then burst out in some fresh foolishness about belief that she’d have to maneuver around. She’d raise no child an ignorant, self-ruling savage. Mother and brood went and celebrated, while the doctor stayed home and worked. On holidays, even he had to scrub and attend. He stood among the believers, singing lustily, even speaking the Creed, although he coughed at all references to the deity.

Nettie served as receptionist to William’s patients, those endless processions of the ailing and infirm who passed through his office. A thriving man’s wife, and light: The combination wasn’t likely to endear her to the hard-pressed surrounding neighborhoods. But the woman had only to open her mouth and let one honeyed word trickle out for those around her to be caught.

She baked for her husband’s patients. She made the rounds with him through that besieged community, administering her own doses of the listening cure at the sides of sickbeds in four adjacent districts. She kept the man attached to his patients, engaged and understandable. She remembered all their names for him. “You do what Dr. Daley tells you,” she told them behind his back. “But go on ahead and mix up this little poultice, too. The Lord knows it can’t kill you, and it might just help.” As the doctor’s reputation grew, he credited his constant efforts to keep up with the latest medical developments. But in this careful diagnosis, he was a minority of one.

She worshiped her man and also worked him. Both came to the same thing. “I marvel at you, William C.

Daley,” she declared, bringing a bromide to his office late one night. “What kind of studying you laying into now? Human Nature and Conduct. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Such-and-So-ology of Everyday Life. James Joyce, Useless . Whoo-my. Fine black ship out there in all that cold white ice.

Be careful you don’t hit something and go down with all hands.”

He rose up, a pillar of righteousness. “I am not black , any more than you are. The sole of my shoe is black . The coal we pay too much for every month is black . Look at me, woman. Look at yourself.

Look at any brother of ours in the whole outcast race. You see black ?”

“I see all sorts of carrying on. That’s what I see.”

“It’s the other side that makes us black . The other side wants to know what it feels like to be a problem

.” For among all the treacherous white ice, he’d also read that light, mixed man, Du Bois. “Black’s what the world wants us to be. How can we even see ourselves to be ourselves?”

She waved him away. As always when they talked such things, Nettie just shook her head at his notions.

“You’re whatever you want to be, I suppose. And whatever that is, Dr. Daley, you’re my one of a kind.”

In the long crescendo that stoked the twenties into a roar, everything Dr. Daley touched arose and walked. The clinic’s success spread by word of mouth. New patients appeared in such numbers that he took to seeing them, against Nettie’s wishes, on Sundays. He lucked into the perfect moment to refinance the house. Even with five children, even waiving every other indigent patient’s payment, he found himself adding to his capital. His school debts and start-up costs melted away. He bought government bonds.

His helpmate kept the books and ran the house with the old Alexander frugality. As his lone indulgence, William picked up a Chrysler Six hot off the line.

And still the country raced madly ahead of him. The white man had some covert entry that didn’t even require Jim Crow to keep the Negro out. Dr. Daley studied the prosperity racket—the game of real riches, not the slow, hard-won advancement that had until then been his. The answer was there, staring at anyone who bothered to look: stocks. The country was gulping down equities like so much nerve tonic.

Every thuggish son of an Irish immigrant knew the secret: Buy America. And finally, Dr. Daley did just that. He did so, over the scandalized Nettie’s howls, and later, without her knowledge. Stock picking was worlds easier than doctoring. Nothing to it, really. You bought. The price went up. You sold. You found another investment, a little more expensive, to shelter the compounded cash. The whole scheme kept feeding itself, as long as you wanted to ride.

The daily fight for a reasonable existence turned by degrees into another struggle. By 1928, he found himself toying with the newly introduced De Soto, maybe even a small second house outside of town, in the country somewhere.

“Country house?” Nettie Ellen laughed. “ Countryhouse? With colored folks by the tens of thousands trying to get out of the country up where we already are?”

His wife fought him over his ill-gotten gains, which continued to grow. One evening in that warm, early spring of the following year, while taking his evening constitutional around the neighborhood, he was struck by the realization that dabbling—or, as had become his practice, submerging—in the stock market was wrong. Not wrong, as his wife had it, because the Lord abhorred gambling. Her Lord, after all, had staked the oldest, biggest crapshoot in existence. No: Making money on pure speculation was wrong, William now saw, for two inarguable reasons. First, every winner in this game profited from some loser, and Dr. Daley no longer desired to take anything away from another man, even a white one. Even if all he stole was opportunity, he could not profit. For the theft of opportunity was the original sin.

And further: No man in God’s crapshoot had the right to profit from anything but the sweat of his brow.

Labor was the lone human activity capable of creating wealth. Any other accumulation was just plantationism, disguised. That spring evening, taking the air, waving to his neighbors as they rocked themselves on their porch swings, William swore off not just the market but also banks, savings and loans, and any other institution that promised something for nothing.

Within the week, he turned his holdings into cash, bought a fireproof Remington safe, and kept his net worth stashed inside. In the fall of that year, when the whole national pyramid of speculation collapsed, he found himself standing up on a city of rubble.

Hardship saved its best for the colored man. Within two years, half of working Negro Philadelphia had no livelihood. The WPA, when it came, paid coloreds only a fraction of white wages, when it hired coloreds at all. Jobless, white America turned even more vicious than when the living had been easy.

Lynchings tripled. They strung up Herndon and railroaded the Scottsboro boys. Harlem burned; Philly would be next. Catherine Street teetered, threatening to go the way of all Southwark.

Medicine, at least, remained Depression-proof, if not his patients’ ability to pay. People paid in fresh vegetables, tinned fruit, errands, and odd jobs. In the deflated barter economy, the cash in the Remington safe went further, each increasingly desperate month. William and his bewildered Nettie looked around, to find themselves living up on a sheltered bluff, looking over the devastation of their neighborhood.

Their children would go to college—no more than the Daleys had enjoyed for two generations and no less than Nettie Alexander had herself once dreamed of, without hope of reaching. They fed their young on the upward hope of the oppressed: How much we’ve done, from inside the tomb. How much more we might do, with just a little living space.

Such was the squeezed hope that made up Delia’s birthright. William’s first child to live was his pride and religion. “You’re my trailblazer, baby. A colored girl, learning everything there is to learn, a colored girl sailing through college, following a profession, changing the laws of this country. What’s wrong with this idea?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it, Daddy.”

“Damn right, nothing. Who’s going to stop it?”

“Nobody,” Delia would reply, sighing.

They could stop her from seeing Steamboat Willie and Skeleton Dance down at the Franklin Cinema.

They could restrict her to the Colored Players or send her away with nothing. They could stop her buying a root-beer float at the drugstore ten blocks from her house. They could arrest her if she crossed over the invisible neighborhood line. But they couldn’t stop her from humoring her father.

He drilled her. “You’ve got a miracle to work. How’s that miracle not going to happen?”

“No way it’s not going to happen.”

“That’s my girl. Now tell me, my talented offspring. What can’t your people do?”

Her people could do anything. The week never went by without some further proof. Just doing the same work as a European, the Negro already surpassed him, for the one was filling his house from the attic on down, while the other was carting his furnishings up from the cellar. Negroes hadn’t yet begun to stand and deliver their full abilities. Time would spring them. The future would shake with their concerted movements.

“What are you going to be when you grow up, my girl?”

“Anything I want.”

“You know it, beauty. Anyone ever tell you that you look a whole lot like your old man?”

“Ugh, Daddy. Never.”

But five right answers out of six was not bad at all.

By thirteen, her race’s destiny hunched the child over. Her mother alone consoled Delia. “You take your time, honey. Never you mind about knowing everything. Nobody ever knew everything yet, nor is going to, until the Last Day, when things no one can guess are going to get laid out on the table. Even your father’s gonna have a few surprises waiting for him.”

The girl had music in her. So much music, it frightened both parents. At Delia’s birth, Dr. Daley installed a piano in the parlor, a salute to prosperity and a striding, rag thank-you to his ancestors, offered up in private, after all the patients went home. His little black pearl crawled up on the bench and picked out melodies before she even learned her letters.

She had to have lessons. Her parents found her a college-trained music teacher who served the neighborhood’s better families. The music teacher marveled to the doctor that his daughter might outdo any white girl her age. Might outdo the college-trained music teacher herself, William suspected, given a few years.

Every seventh day, Delia’s mother took all five of the children, climbing all over one another like crabs in a pot, to Bethel Covenant, the center of all music. In that weekly ecstatic keeping of faith and bearing of witness, Delia fell in love with singing. Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

Delia sang fearlessly. She threw back her head and nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet.

She sang with such unfurling of self that the congregation couldn’t help but turn and look at the teenager, even when they should have been looking skyward.

The choir director asked her to sing her first solo. Delia demurred. “Mama, what should I do? It’s not really decent, is it? To put yourself on display like that?”

Nettie Ellen shook her head and smiled. “When the people come for you, your choice is already made.

All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don’t belong to you anyway. It’s not yours to hide.”

That was all the answer the girl wanted. As rehearsal, she sang for the combined Sunday schools. She prepared one of the New Songs of Paradise , by Mr. Charles Tindley, the famous composer from over at East Calvary Methodist Episcopal: “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” She took the tune at full force and let out all her stops. Here and there hands flew up—half holding back the rush of glory, half giving in, overcome by praise. After that glorious testimonial, Delia looked for something more somber.

The junior choir director, Mr. Sampson, found her a piece called “Ave Maria,” by a long-dead white man named Schubert.

Delia could feel them as she sang, the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up with her as she savored the song’s arc. She sheltered those souls in her sound and held them as motionless as the notes themselves, in that safe spot up next to grace. The audience breathed with her, beating to her measure.

Her breath expanded sufficiently to take her across even the longest phrase. Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted.

When she finished, the congregation let out their collective breath. Their lungs emptied in a mass sigh, reluctant to leave the music’s sanctuary. The rush Delia felt as the last beat died outstripped any pleasure she’d ever known. Her heart pounded with the sound all earthly applause only imitated.

Afterward, she stood in the greeting line next to the pastor, still shaken, still humming. People she knew only by sight grabbed and hugged her, pumping her hand as if she’d just put them right in their own hearts. Delia told her mother on the walk home. “Three separate people said I was going to be our next Marian.”

“You listen here, missy. Pride goeth… Just remember that. Pride goeth before every fall you can even think to fall. And believe me, you can fall in a thousand more ways than you can hope to rise.”

Delia didn’t press for explanations. It took some doing to exasperate her mother, but once she did, negotiation was over for the day. “You’re not our next anyone,” Nettie Ellen muttered, warding off the evil eye as they turned up the parkway. “You’re our first Delia Daley.”

Delia asked her father about the magic name.

“The woman’s our cultural vanguard. Brightest light we’ve thrown off in a good long time. White men say we lack the skill or the will to take on their best music. This woman shows them up for fools. They don’t have a singer this side of Hell, let alone Mississippi, who can touch that one. You listening, daughter? I thought you wanted to know.”