The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

Music itself, like its own rhythms, played out in time. A piece was what it was only because of all the pieces written before and after it. Every song sang the moment that brought it into being. Music talked endlessly to itself.

Singing was something that might make sense of a person. Singing might make more sense of life than living had to start with.

“Do you know what time is?” His voice is so soft, I think I’m making it up. “Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once.” I reply as he taught me, long ago, the year my voice broke. “You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another.”

It’s a stale late August Sunday, hotter than human thought and drier than a dust-coated dead mule.

The truth is: We and music are not unified. Nothing in our animal past calls for anything so gratuitous as song. We must put it on, wrap it around us like the dark, cold firmament.

“The music’s dumb.” And she’d rip off a parody Mozart sonatina, brilliant in its improvised burlesque. She mocked it, sneering through the keys, the music we were brought up on. The music that killed her mother. “What’s so dumb about it?” “It’s ofay.” “What’s ofay?” I asked Jonah that night, when Ruth couldn’t hear. My brother was never at a loss for more than an eighth note. “It’s French. It means up to date. Means you know how things are done.” I asked Da. His face turned stern. “Where did you hear this?” “Around.” Evading my own father. Everything honest in our home had died the day our mother did. My father removed his glasses. He was blind without them. Blinking, helpless, a flounder on ice. “Do they still say that?” “Sometimes,” I bluffed. “It’s not good. It’s pork Latin.” I burst out laughing. He should have slapped me. “Pig Latin.” “Pig Latin, then. For white people.” Oe-fay. Foe. I

That this country had a music—spectacularly reinventing itself every three years, the bastard of chanted hymns, spirit hollers, cabin songs, field calls and coded escape plans, funeral rowdiness gathered by way of New Orleans, gutbucketed and jugged, slipped up the river in cotton crates to Memphis and St. Louis, bent into blue intervals that power would never recognize, reconvening north, to be flung out everywhere along Chicago’s railhead as unstoppable rag, and overnight—the longest, darkest overnight of the soul in all improvised history—birthing jazz and its countless half-breed descendants, a whole glittering Savoy ballroom full of offspring scatting and scattering everywhere, dancing the hooves off anything whiteness ever made, American, American, for whatever that meant, a music that had taken over the world while the classical masters were looking the other way—had not yet dawned on these Europe-revering halls.

Cash, like time, flowed in one direction: away.

The woman, Nettie, looks up at the flesh of her flesh. She can’t ask that the cup be taken away, now it’s already spilled down the front of her best Sunday dress. Can’t even ask why Delia’s done what she’s done. Her girl has already wrecked herself with explanations. When Nettie Ellen can talk again, all she says is, “You best go tell your father.”

Then she hears his voice from the other room: David. Her David. We are not born familiar. At best, familiar waits for us down the run of years. Familiar is what he can become to her only through life. But familiar to herself, already, looking on him.

She starts to tell her mother she must go. But the woman hears her before Delia can speak a word. A low keening tears from Nettie’s throat, a flood of whatever comes before words, whatever thicker thing words are made from. Her mother sobs rhythm, her narrow chest a drum. The river of loss dam-bursts out of her, up from a world Delia knows only in shadow, bits of ground-up ancestry refusing to be shed, a tongue not yet English, older than Carolina, older than the annihilating middle passage of this life that cages them all.

For the second recording, he got it into his head to do a cycle of English songs—Elgar, Delius, Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Drake. Harmondial talked him out of it. The aura of decadent sweetness that clung to his voice left the tunes sounding freakishly pure, like some choirboy who’d gone through every part of puberty except the crucial one.

My brother stuck his fingers into the lemon water and rubbed a trickle into his neck. “Look. Here’s what I think. I’ve thought about this for twelve years.” His voice was gaunt, from somewhere that had never known song. “You want to know what happened. You think that knowing what happened will tell you … what? What the world’s going to do to you. You think that if your mother was killed, if your mother really died by chance … Say it wasn’t some random furnace. Say it had human help. That answers something? That’s not even the start of what you need to know. Why were they after her? Because she was black? Because she was uppity, sang the wrong stuff? Because she crossed the line, married your father? Because she wouldn’t keep her head down? Because she sent her mutant children to private school? Was it a scare tactic, intimidation gone wrong? Did they even know she was home? Maybe they wanted Da. Maybe they were trying for us. Somebody helping to return the country to its original purity. You want to know whether it was a crazy person, some neighborhood committee, some clan from some other neighborhood, twenty blocks north or south. Then you want to know why your father never …” He stopped for a breath, but not because he needed one. He could have sailed on forever on that fountain of air. “Or say it was the furnace, all by itself. Nobody helping it along, nobody’s historical mission. Why that furnace? Why were we living in that house, and not some other? Don’t they inspect...

She lies in bed, six inches from a man who has helped—what? Begin a new age. Helped his awe-blind friends think the unthinkable and place it squarely into this world. She might ask him, and gain only his confusion. She can come no closer than flush alongside him. Every human a separate race. Each one of us a self no one can enter.

He lies back quiet, content in their plans. Maybe that is whiteness, manness. Safe within himself, even on a day like this day. Even with all that has happened to his own family. In a minute, his contentment leads to what it always does. His night to start tonight: He hums a tune. She can’t say what it is. Her mind is not naming yet, but keeps inside the phrase. Something Russian: the steppes; onion domes. A world as far away from hers as this world permits her. And by the time his slow Volga tune comes into its second measure, she’s there with the descant. This is how they play, night after night, more regular than sex, and just as warming. One begins; the other harmonizes. Finds some accompaniment, even when she has never heard the tune, when it comes down out of the attic from some musty culture no one would claim to own. The secret’s in the intervals, finding a line half free of the melody, yet already inside it. Music from a single note, set loose to run in unfolding meter. Humming in bed: softer than love, so as not to wake their two sleeping children.

Each of us is alien to every other. Race does nothing but make the fact visible.

“My boys are … different.” “Look around you, girl. Everybody here’s different. Different’s the commonest thing going.”

For prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying. All we ever do is fulfill the beginning.

We covered two blocks. We were hit up twice for cash, once to help get a car out of hock to drive a wife to the hospital and once to tide a man over until an accident at his bank could be ironed out in court. Both times, my sister made me give them five dollars. “They’re just going to buy booze or dope with it,” I said. “Yeah? And what world-fixing were you getting up to with it?”

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.

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

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.

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.

Fame is the weapon of last resort that culture uses to neutralize runaways.

We do not fear difference. We fear most being lost in likeness. The thing no race can abide.