Richard Powers (97 page)

“What color is this dress?” I heard myself ask from a long while off.

He studied me. He saw my hunger, and it threatened to kill him. He tried to talk but couldn’t.

“Navy blue,” I told him.

He held still for a time, then nodded. “That’s right. Navy blue.”

We said good-bye to Papap. He wouldn’t let us pretend we’d ever see him again in this life. Ruth took her leave of our grandfather as if he contained all those people she had never gotten to say good-bye to.

And he did. He came out onto the lawn as we got in the car, suddenly frailer than ninety. He took my hand. “I’m glad to have met you. Next life, in Jerusalem.”

My grandfather was right: Every music in America had gone brown. Our drive across the continent proved it. The car took me back to those days, Jonah and I crisscrossing the United States and Canada.

The place had gotten infinitely bigger in the intervening years. The only way to get across a place so huge was still by radio. Every signal our receiver found—even the C and W stations drifting across the Great Plains—had at least one drop of black sloshing around in it. Africa had done to the American song what the old plantation massas had done to Africa. Only this time, the parent was keeping custody.

Ruth and I took turns driving and looking after little Robert. “You make this almost easy,” she said. “The trip out was hell.”

“I helped, Mama,” Kwame shouted. “I did the best I could.”

“’Course you did, honey.”

The driver got to choose the station, although Kwame’s need for a shattering bass beat usually dictated.

He liked the ones whose rhythms were like Chinese water torture, the ones that forced the chords into your auditory canal with a syringe.

“What’s this called?”

“Hip-hop,” Kwame said, giving even those two syllables a rhythm I’d have to work at.

“I’m too old. Too old even to listen from a distance.”

My sister just laughed at me. “You were born too old.”

The country had strayed into musics beyond my ability to make out. I could only take them in contained doses. Now and then, during the three-day marathon of my belated education, I backslid and trolled for my own old addictions. The flood of now—the music that people really used and needed—had risen so high that only a few scattered islands of bypassed memory remained above water. When I managed to find classical stations at all, they beamed out a continuous stream of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Barber’s Adagio for Strings . Soon there would be only a dozen pieces left from the last thousand years of written music, pressed into anthologies suitable for seduction, gag gifts, and raising your baby’s IQ.

“Does this make my people an oppressed minority?” I asked Ruth.

“We’ll talk when they start shooting at you.”

Culture was whatever survived its own bonfire. Whatever you held on to when nothing else worked. And then, it didn’t, either.

Somewhere past Denver, driving, I chanced upon a clear signal of a chorus that, within three notes, I pegged as Bach. Cantata 78. I peeked at the backseat, where my nephew twisted and fidgeted. A look passed across his face, not even engaged enough for contempt. The music might have come from Mars, or farther. This was the boy, and hundreds like him, who I was now supposed to teach about music.

The opening chorus died away. I knew what was coming, though I hadn’t heard the piece for ages. Two beats of silence, and then that duet. “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” My brother at ten, Kwame’s age, had bounded along that upper line with eager steps, lost in the euphoria of his own voice. The soprano this time was another boy lost in time, as good as my brother had been, as drunk on the notes. The lower voice, now a countertenor, came alive in the game of harmonic tag, rejuvenated by trying to keep up with the boy he, too, must once have been. The two of them were high, clear, and fast as light. I looked at Ruth to see if she remembered. Of course, she couldn’t have. The boys flew, the music was good, and my life bent back on itself. I flew alongside these notes, racing myself toward what they wanted me to remember, until the flashing red lights in my rearview mirror stopped me. I looked down at the speedometer: eighty-nine miles an hour.

By the time I pulled over and the squad car nosed up behind us, Ruth was in pieces. She shrieked,

“Don’t get out of the car. Don’t get out.” Kwame crouched on the backseat, pressed up against the door, ready to leap out and grab the cop’s gun. Little Robert started to wail, as if that terror really did start in race’s womb. My sister struggled to comfort him, calming and wrestling him down.

“This is it,” Kwame said. “We dead.”

The police car sat behind us, running our plates, toying with its food. When the officer got out of the car, all three of us let out our breath. “Thank God,” Ruth said, not believing. “Oh God, thank you.” The man was black.

I rolled down the window and fed him my license before he could ask. “You know why I pulled you over?” I nodded. “Is this car yours?”

“My sister’s.” I waved toward Ruth. She had one hand on the baby and the other stretched across the seat, restraining Kwame.

The officer pointed. “Who’s that?”

I looked down to where he pointed: the radio, Cantata 78 still pouring out of it. In the panic of the moment, I’d forgotten it was even on. I looked back at the policeman and smiled apologetically. “Bach.”

“No points for the obvious. I mean, who’s singing?”

He took my license and retreated to his car. Two lifetime prison sentences later, he returned and handed it back to me. “You have better things to do with your hundred and twenty bucks?”

Kwame understood the question before I did. “Build a school.”

The policeman nodded. “Keep it below allegro next time.”

Twenty miles down the interstate, Ruth burst out cackling. Nerves. She couldn’t stop. I thought I’d have to pull over. “You damn honkies.” She sucked air between her hysterical sobs. “They let you walk, every single time.”

Deep River

This is how time runs: like some stoked-up, stage-sick kid in his first talent show. One glance at that audience out there past the footlights and all those months of metronome practice vanish in a blast of presto. Time has no sense of tempo. It’s worse than Horowitz. The marks on the page mean nothing. I hit Oakland, and my life’s whole beat doubled.

I moved into the second story of a chewed-up gingerbread house ten blocks from my sister’s, near the interstate. I could walk to Preservation Park in twenty minutes. But then, I could also see the North Star on clear nights with my naked eye. De Fremery was a lot closer. The park’s old Panther Self-Defense outreaches were history, but the rallies went on, as timeless as the crimes they countered.

I passed through the East Bay like a masked figure through some Act Four costume party. For the first weeks, walking home through my new neighborhood at night, I felt every conscience-stricken terror my country had trained me to feel. I saw how I looked, dressed, sounded, and moved. I’d never been more conspicuous, even in Europe. Even I would have singled myself out to hit.

But no one sees anyone else, in the end. This is our tragedy, and the thing that may finally save us. We steer only by the grossest landmarks. Turn left at bewilderment. Keep going till you hit despair. Pull up at complete oblivion, turn around, and you’re there. After six months, I knew all my neighbors’ names.

After eight, I knew what they needed from the world. After ten, what I needed from them. It might have taken longer, but I’d been born into an outsiders’ club. The only surprise about Oakland was how huge and shared outsideness could be.

From the beginning, Jonah’s and my performance had been whiteness, the hardest piece to make both believable and worth listening to. Now I entered another concert, the block party of the ticketless, where they had to let you in if you only so much as showed.

We heard from Uncle Michael before that first year was out. Dr. Daley had died in his sleep, just shy of his ninety-first birthday. “The first thing he ever did that didn’t take work,” Michael wrote.

As for me, nothing I do will ever be effortless again. I feel like I’m twelve and helpless. His age ends with him. We’re all drifting now… Lorene said he’d waited until he got a chance to make the acquaintance of his missing grandchildren… We’ll spare you all the surprises we found while going through his belongings.

Nobody dies without telling everything. But one thing we found, you’ll want to hear about. You remember that mahogany desk he worked at in his study, Ruth? We wanted to save it, with the other pieces in the house worth saving. When we pulled the thing away from the corner, we found a yellowed folder, tucked between a piece of panel and the wall. It was all your clippings, Joseph, all the reviews of you and your brother. He’d been keeping them for years, hiding them from Mama. He kept them back there so long, he forgot they were there…

If that much hasn’t made you hang yourself yet, here’s the awful part. I helped the girls clean out Mama’s dresser two years ago, when she died. She kept a hidden clippings file, too. Secret keepsakes. We never told the man. You see how blood feuds go. Do white people do this to themselves, too?

The letter felt like lung surgery. A man and a woman joined together for decades, their own nation, and my parents’ experiment had split them. No one was left to beg forgiveness from. I had no one to atone to but myself. I lay in bed much of the weekend after reading the letter, unable to get up. When I did, I was filled with the need for real work.

For that, Ruth provided. She’d raided the Unified School District for a dozen of the most urgent teachers in the Bay Area, all old acquaintances. They were waiting for her, as much victims of contemporary education as the most hardened dropout. Her board had so much combined experience that theory could find no hiding place among them. They turned up sums of money hidden under rocks and tucked away in widowers’ mattresses. They were not above crackpot grant applications, community begging, rummage sales, and the common shakedown. One large anonymous no-strings gift helped seed a permanent endowment. We set up camp in an abandoned food store leased to us for little more than the insurance and taxes. New Day Elementary School—K through 3—opened in 1986 and was fully accredited within three years. “The first four years are everything,” Ruth said. Tuition depended upon means. Many of our parents paid in volunteer work.

She took me on probation, until I got certified like everyone else. I taught days and went back to school nights. I got my master’s in musical education just as Ruth completed her Ed.D. In every working week, my sister astonished me. I never imagined I could help make something happen in the actual world. It had never occurred to Ruth to bother doing anything else. “It’s a little thing. Flower coming up through the concrete. Doesn’t break the rock. But it makes a little soil.”

I learned more in my first four years teaching for New Day than I’d learned in the forty years before that.

More about what happened to a tune on its way back to do . It seemed I had some time left after all to sample the sounds that weren’t mine, to study their scales and rhythms, the national anthems of all the states I couldn’t get to from my place of origin. At New Day, we came into an idea that was simplicity itself. There was no separate audience. There were no separate musics.

We had words and phonics and sentence cadences. Numbers and patterns and rhythmic shapes.

Speaking and shouting. Birdsong and vibration; tunes for planting and protection; prayers of remembering and forgetting, sounds for every living creature, every invention under the sky and each of that sky’s spinning objects. All topics talked to all others, through pitches in time. We rapped the times tables. We chanted the irregular verbs. We had science, history, geography, and every other organized shout of hurt or joy that’s ever been put on a report card. But we taught no separate cry called music. Just song everywhere, each time any child turned his or her head. The occult mathematics of a soul that doesn’t know it’s counting.

“I’m not looking for miracles,” Ruth told me. “I just want more kids reading at grade level than we have families living at the median.”

We didn’t have much money for instruments. What we lacked, we made. We had steel drums and glass harmonicas, cigar-box guitars and tubular bells. We wrote out our own arrangements, which each new wave of children learned afresh. Every year had its composers, its choruses, its prima donnas, its solid, no-nonsense sidemen. My kids howled for me almost as they might have, had I not been there. I did nothing but give them room.

Ruth challenged me once. “Joey, let me take you to a record store. It’s like the year you went to Europe, you stopped listening to—”

“No more room, Ruth. My scores are all full.”

“Nonsense. You’ll love what’s going on. And your kids will be much—”

“Hold up. Here’s the deal.” She could see me shaking, and she took my arm. I dropped several decibels.

“Here’s what I can do for you. I am giving these kids something that no one else in the world is ever going to give them. No one. But me.”

She stroked me, as scared as I was. “You’re right, Joey. I’m sorry. You’re the music teacher. And I’m not the cops.” It was the only time we struggled over curriculum.

I might have married, now. The picture of Mama that Papap had given me sat framed atop my bookshelf full of music-education texts: The woman I’d spend my life with, the ghost that had kept me from marrying Teresa was returned home. I lived surrounded now by women who’d been everywhere my mother had, who’d passed auditions beyond the one Mama had been turned away from, women who might wake me from nightmares I didn’t even know I was having, women whose split lives might dovetail perfectly with mine. But I had no time to meet and court a wife. All I had time for was my children and their songs.

I was putting in more hours working for Ruth than I had working for Jonah. The job took all I had, and for the first time in my life, I did work that wouldn’t have been done if I wasn’t doing it. It should have been enough, everything that was lacking in my life in Europe. But it wasn’t. Something in me still needed out. The place I had come from was dying, for lack of a way of getting to where I was.