Richard Powers (94 page)

Ruth shushed him. “Papap, you’re going senile at last.”

“A mighty nation. As good as its best myth about itself.”

“Wouldn’t be the U.S. That’s for damn sure.”

Dr. Daley watched his granddaughter feed his great-grandson, a soul too grabbing and exploratory to survive the world. “I let that madness break my family.”

“They broke mine anyway,” Ruth said.

We sat silent. Only the baby had heart enough to make even the simplest sounds. Soon, even he would know. Everything was laid down for him, before he even spoke his own name: his father, his grandmother, his broken line all the way back to the start of time. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t go back to the pretty sleep of Europe. I’d been raised to believe in self-invention. But any self I might invent would be a lie.

Ruth had beaten me to this future. She knew long ago that one day I’d have to catch up with her. “Funny thing about one drop? If white plus black makes black, and if the mixed-marriage rate is anything above zero per year…” Ruth’s eyes rallied on the kind of thought experiment her father had loved. The old slaveholder’s property protection was now its victims’ only weapon. Blackness was the arrow of time, the churning tribe that gathered itself while purity chose its privileged suicide. “Follow out the curve. Just a matter of time, and everybody in America will be black.”

“I thought…” My voice sickened me. “I thought you were against black marrying white.”

“Honey, I’m against anyone marrying white. Mixed marriage mixes you up something permanent. But so long as people are fool enough to try it, I’m fool enough to be the beneficiary.” She looked at our grandfather. He was shaking his head in great arcs of fatal resignation. “What? You got a problem with that math?”

“Ain’t gonna work.” The only time the man ever slandered the rules of grammar. “As soon as they see it coming, they’ll repeal the rule.”

A sound like thunder broke loose, confirming him. My nephew Kwame appeared on the stairs, a silver box in his hands and two wired foam-lined cups strapped to his ears. Vibrations pulsed out of him, staggered syncopations I couldn’t follow or score. Under the beats was a cadence of rhythmic berating.

The pulse pounded the air around him. I gasped at what it was doing to the insides of his head.

Papap gestured his great-grandson to remove the phones and kill the tape. The boy did, in a cloud of venomous grumbles that no adult could hear or interpret. The doctor rose up, an Old Testament prophet.

“If you want to scramble your brains, go bang your head against a wall.”

“Don’t dis my tracks,” Kwame answered. “My music’s def.”

“If you want deaf, just poke sticks in your ears. You call that music? It doesn’t even have pitches. It’s not even savage.” Our grandfather turned to Ruth for backup.

“Oh, Papap! We’ve been over this. That’s our sound. Comes right out of all the salvation we’ve ever made for ourselves. Right down from the old dirty Dozens.”

“How do you know about the Dozens?” Ruth blanched, and the old man patted her arm. “Don’t mind me. I know. Same place I learned it. Some cultural prophet, desperate to preserve our heritage.”

Ruth howled. “Don’t you worry about preserving our heritage! Every white boy on five continents wants a piece of this.”

“They biting our lines,” Kwame said. “Totin’ their own Alpines. Wiggas can’t cope, our sound so dope!”

He swiveled his head, jutting it right and left with fluid pride. His little brother giggled and reached.

Kwame went back under the headphones, lost to us. Ruth, baby mash all over her, put her arm around our immaculate grandfather. He suffered its stains. “You’re worse than my own father. He used to get on me all the time about my music. I swore I’d never do that to any child of my own.”

“He did?” I asked, incredulous. “He used to ride you about music ?”

She groaned as if whipped. “All the time. James Brown. Aretha. Anything that had the least power.

Anything of any use to me. He wanted me to go your route, his route. Why do you suppose the street hates your tunes, Joey?”

For the same reason that those tunes had been the street’s salvation once—because they’re useless. Our grandfather groaned, too, a soft old gospel subito, remembering old judgments, shattered trusts, allegiances killed in the honoring. He stared on his own headstone and read the things he’d said to his daughter, written there in granite. He held Ruth by the wrist, flashing a look of desperation. “What’s music, that anyone should wreck their life over it?”

“When did he die?” Ruth asked, late that day.

I thought, for one mad beat, we’d switched lives. “He? Not long after I saw you last. I tried reaching you every way I could think.”

“You didn’t think of this way.” She simply stated the fact, helping me catch up to her past. Her tears were quiet and cast away, no comfort for anyone. She cried to herself, not caring that I overheard. All her mournings gathered together. It was a long time before she spoke again. “Such an oblivious bastard.

You think he ever knew what he did to us?”

I felt no need to fight over the man’s identity. I couldn’t even do that for my own, anymore.

“What did he die of?” I must have stayed silent longer than I realized. “I have a right to know. It might have some bearing on my sons.”

“Cancer.”

She winced. “What kind?”

“Pancreatic.”

She nodded. “We get that, too.”

“There’s some money. I set it up in an account in your name. It’s worth something by now.”

She struggled. Repugnance versus need: I’d never have imagined the size of either. Her face went hunted.

She couldn’t decide what was hers by right and what she’d disowned. “Later, Joseph. Give it time.”

“He left you a message.” I hadn’t considered it for a decade. “Something I was supposed to tell you.”

Ruth cowered, as if I were battering her. I held out my palms. I felt no investment in the matter one way or the other. I only wanted to tell her and be done.

She pressed her palms to her temples, hating me for allowing this to get to her. Her fists balled up in the last counterattack of capitulation. “Let me guess. ‘I know you’re really a good girl. All is forgiven.’”

“He said to tell you there’s another wavelength everyplace you point your telescope.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean? You tell me what in hell I’m supposed to do with that.” She’d wanted another message, one she didn’t know she wanted. This one only left her more brutally orphaned.

“He wasn’t well, Ruth. He was saying all sorts of things by the end. But he made me swear to tell you, if I ever got the chance.”

Da’s last words were too muddled to sustain resentment. She couldn’t war with something so hopeless.

“The man never knew how to talk to me.” She let herself cry. “Never on this planet.”

“Ruth. I can’t stop thinking…about Robert.” She coughed up a dead little pellet of irony. You can’t?

“Forgive me. Do you mind my asking?”

She shrugged: You can’t ask me anything I haven’t asked myself.

“What did the two of you do, in New York?”

She looked at me, confused. “What did we do ?”

“When you came to my place that day in Atlantic City. You were in trouble. Something really wrong. The law was after you.”

Her look fell away, too weary even for disgust. “You’ll never, never get it, will you?” her voice filled with pity. “My brother.”

“You said the police ran Robert’s plates through the police computer. That he…”

My sister breathed in, trying to make room for me. “We ran a shelter program for neighborhood kids.

That’s what we did . Made them sing ‘Black Is Beautiful’ over their cornflakes. Everything else was Hoover. He turned us into the number-one threat to American security. Government agents calling us in the middle of the night, threatening to spread our brains across the pavement. Saying they’d send us to prison for the rest of our lives. We were already in prison, Joey. That’s our crime. It was eating their conscience, what they’ve done to us. That’s what we did in New York. And that’s what we kept on doing in Oakland. Until they got Robert and he died in their hospital.”

That was the last white question I ever asked her.

My grandfather’s house was an open territory, untroubled by schedule. There was a purpose to life on Catherine Street, but no fixed pace. The family gathered my second night. My uncle Michael showed up with most of his family: his wife, his two daughters, and my cousins’ children. I met my twin aunts, Lucille and Lorene, their husbands, and several of their children and grandchildren. I was a curiosity: the prodigal, the chameleon. For a moment, everyone needed a peek. But in a family that size, no novelty holds the stage for long. They fussed over me, heard what little I had to say for myself, then went back to fussing over Dr. William, the patriarch, or little Robert, the clan’s latest Benjamin.

Ruth and Robert had been coming here for years, since just after they’d stopped in Atlantic City, looking for a place to hide. “It was the easiest thing in the world to look them up, Joey. You could have done it anytime you wanted.”

The Daleys had a rolling ease, the high spirits of folks in a bomb shelter, holding out on makeshift joy.

When three or more of them were in the same room, there was music. When they reached a critical mass, everyone started singing. After a period of negotiated chaos— Get off of my line and get one of your own. What you meanyour line? I’ve been singing that line since before you were born —the Daley tabernacle choir settled into its singular five-and-a-half-part harmony.

I sang along where I could latch on, scatting or faking some pig Latin melisma when I didn’t know the words. My early music bass sat well enough amid the full-throated riches that no one noticed it. No one stood out, and nobody sat out, either. The family made even Dr. Daley take a chorus or two in his nonagenarian growl. They allowed no exempted audience: each to a part, the praise of his choice.

Michael played Charles’s old tenor sax, his brother’s ghost still there in every keypad click. Lucille’s eldest son, William, played bass guitar as if it were as limber as a lute. Almost everyone could lay into the parlor piano, four, six, sometimes eight hands at a time. What did you think? Where did you suppose you got it from? I was lucky to grab some buried interior line, needing all ten fingers to keep up. No one asked me to solo, or to solo any more than anyone else.

The instrument was a minefield. Half a dozen keys, including middle C, buzzed or bleated or no longer rose. “That’s part of the game,” Michael explained. “You got to make a noise while staying out of the potholes.” In the middle of a huge ad hoc chorus, I stopped and saw the keys I was pressing for what they were. The ones my mother had learned on.

So long as the house was full of singing relatives, Ruth seemed as close to peaceful as I’d seen her look since Mama died. During that first barn-burner night, she stretched out on a sofa, a truculent son under one arm, a happy baby sleeping on a cushion, and her slain husband seated next to her. Safe, she let loose with a descant that made me want to stop singing for good. I came and stood by her. She opened her eyes and smiled. “This is why we came back here.”

“Maybe why you came,” Kwame corrected, hearing every word from under his headphones.

“How long have you been here?”

“This visit? Since just after Robert…” She looked around, then cradled her forehead in her palm, rubbing out the nightmare again. “How long has that been anyway?”

My aunts Lucille and Lorene ran the choir at Bethel Covenant, the church where they, their parents, and their children had all gotten married, the church where my mother was baptized and where they’d all learned to sing. To their father’s despair and their mother’s delight, they chose the church over the law, for which they’d trained. Lucille played the organ and piano while Lorene conducted the choir, a good slice of which consisted of their own children. The second Sunday after my arrival, Ruth decided we’d go hear them. “All of us,” she warned her son, grandfather, and brother as one.

Dr. Daley made the most noise. “Let me die in peace, a godless heathen.”

“The man’s right,” Kwame said. “We gonna fight. Heathen of the world, unite.”

“I never went for your mother. I never went for your grandmother.”

“You’ll go for me,” Ruth said.

“Well, I’m going to sit with this young man here, and we’re going to talk about Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him this atheist Jew had sung more Catholic settings in the last five years than most of the pious attend in a lifetime.

I wasn’t the lightest person in church. Not even in our half of the pews. Bethel Covenant proclaimed the gospel: Color’s in the equation, but it’s not the only variable. Ruth caught me staring at one redheaded choir girl, pale as a Pre-Raphaelite model. “Oh, she’s black, brother.”

“How do you know?”

“Black people always know.”

“Hell with you, too, baby.”

My sister fought back her smirk. “Don’t swear in church, Joey. Wait until we’re back out in the parking lot. In fact, not only is she black; she’s kin of yours. Don’t ask me exactly how. Some third cousin once removed.”

Not surprisingly, the choir sounded much like jubilee night with the Daleys. But not until the anthem did I learn why I was there. The tune was that old nineteenth-century warhorse, “He Leadeth Me,” the solo line sung by a fresh-faced woman with a tight Afro who was several years my junior. The first verse came off pretty straight, the way it’s written down in the old Methodist hymnal. Yet the soloist was so brilliant, even Kwame, busy practicing his graffiti signature on every inch of a mangled church bulletin in advance of spraying it all over Oakland, looked up to see who made such glory.

By the second verse, I was just about standing. The girl had pipes that could drain Alaska. Her pitch was something NASA used to guide satellites. She lifted up the hobbled tune and spun it about on her outstretched fingers, passed it between her legs and behind her back, and floated it over her head. Every tone in the waterfall spray was its own cut lapidary. I swung around to Ruth for explanation, but she stared straight ahead, smirking, pretending not to notice.