The Time of Our Singing

The Visitation

During the call to Philadelphia, Jonah hovered at my elbow. But he wouldn’t take the phone when I handed it to him. Speech without pitches terrified him. He wanted me between him and where we came from. My grandfather put Ruth on the line. She tried to tell me what had happened to Robert, but she couldn’t begin. Her voice was past anger, past warmth, past memory. Past everything but shock. The month since her husband’s death had done nothing to help her back. Nor would years.

She got out two numb sentences. Then she gave me back to our grandfather. William Daley couldn’t quite grasp which of Ruth’s brothers I was. I said I’d very much like to meet him. “Young man, I turned ninety six weeks ago. If you want to meet me, you’d best catch the next flight out.”

I told Jonah I wanted to go. The idea of returning twisted Jonah’s face, half temptation, half disgust. “You can’t fix anything, Joey. You know that? You can’t fix what’s already happened.” But he pushed me away with his free hand while he pulled with the other. “No, of course. Go. One of us has to. It’s Ruth. She’s back.” He seemed to think I might at least fix the things that hadn’t happened yet.

I bought an open ticket. Ruth was back. But she’d never really left. We were the ones who’d gone away.

My uncle Michael met me at Philadelphia International. He wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowd. All I had to do was look. He picked me out, too, as soon as I came through the passenger chute. What could be easier? Bewildered, middle-aged, mixed-race boy gazing all over the place in excitement and shame. I moved toward him, holding my two carry-ons in front of me as if they were delinquent children. My uncle came up to me, as shaky as I was, but empty-handed. After a second’s hesitation, he took my shoulders with the strangest, most wonderful grace. Don’t know you. Don’t know why. But I will.

It amused him, how awkward two total strangers could be. We were total foreigners, connected by blood in another life. “You remember me?” Dazed, I did. I’d last seen him for all of four minutes, when I was thirteen, a third of a century ago, at my mother’s funeral. Even more remarkable: He remembered me. “You’ve changed. You’ve gotten…” He snapped his fingers, jogging his memory.

“Older?” I suggested. He clapped his hands and pointed at me: Bingo.

He took one of the bags and we walked the long concourse to the parking lot. He asked about the flight, Europe, and my brother. I asked about Ruth — alive; Dr. Daley — also, remarkably. Michael told me of his wife and children, his lot in life. He was a personnel officer at Penn. “Only do this chauffeur job in my after hours, when vanished relations come back from the dead.” He looked me up and down, in the wonder of genetic recognition. We looked more like each other than either of us could accept. He seemed to be deciding whether his own nephew could really be white.

His car was the Hindenburg. Years in a small foreign country will do that to a person’s sense of scale. Michael started the engine, and a burst of exuberance blared out of the dashboard. It was only two beats, but at a volume I’d forgotten, from a rhythm section wider than oppression is long. It had been forever since I’d heard anything like it. In something short of embarrassment, Michael leaned forward and snapped off the stream.

“Please. Don’t shut it off for me.”

“Just old R & B. My feel-good. My church. What I listen to when I’m alone.”

“It sounded like a dream.”

“You’d think a man well into his fifties would have outgrown that.”

“Not until we die.”

“Amen. And not even then.”

“I used to play that stuff.” He looked at me in disbelief. “In Atlantic City. Only, you know, solo piano. Tip glass on the music rack. Liberace Covers Motown. The old Eastern European émigrés who came down for holidays couldn’t get enough.”

Michael coughed so hard, I thought I’d have to take the wheel.

“People are strange.”

He whistled. “You got that. Stranger than anyone.” He flipped the radio back on, although he doused the volume. We listened together, each according to his needs. By the time we hit the heart of town, we were harmonizing. Michael did this outrageous full-pipe falsetto, and I hit the changes in the bass. He smiled at my passing tones. Theory can help get you through a shortfall of soul — at least in the easy keys.

We turned off the highway onto local streets. The size of the most modest apartment block amazed me after years in hunchbacked Ghent. We neared his boyhood house. Michael grew morose. “Rough times. Trickle down shakes the last few golden drops on inner Philly. Every cheap scrap of manufacture has headed offshore. Then it’s our fault for doing crack.”

I was at sea. I couldn’t even ask for definitions.

Michael looked out the window, seeing his old neighborhood through my eyes. His face was racked with betrayal. “You would have loved this street. So fine once. No way you can even recognize it now. We’ve been trying to get the doctor out of here for the last five years. He’s not moving. Insists on dying inside that monstrosity. Riding out the decline and fall until the house collapses around him or his body gives up, whichever comes first. ‘What would happen to Mama if we sold the house to strangers?’”

“Mama?” My grandmother. Nettie Ellen Daley. “Isn’t she…”

“Oh, yeah. Completely. Two years ago. The doctor hasn’t quite come into possession of the fact yet. A real ass-buster, I have to tell you. My sisters and me, coming all the way in here, five times a week. We go through caretakers like chocolate through a dog.”

His street indeed reeled from the present. Even the most stately old houses had died intestate. We slowed and turned into the driveway of an ample house bucking the tide around it. Michael flipped off the radio as we hit the driveway mouth. He caught me smiling at the gesture. “Old habit.”

“Not his music of choice?”

“Don’t get him started on it.”

We were still yards from the house. “His hearing’s really that good?”

“My Jesus, yes. You got it from somewhere, didn’t you?”

The shock of that thought was still banging around in me when a figure drifted out onto the lawn to meet us. A full, fluid, statuesque woman, one shade paler than I remembered her. I was out of the car without feeling myself leave. Michael stayed behind the wheel, giving us our minute. She had her head down as I closed the distance. She wouldn’t look at me. Then I put my arms around my sister.

Ruth wouldn’t hold still for the embrace. But she gave me more than I’d hoped, and I held her longer than I had all my life. Three full seconds: It was enough. She pulled free to look at me. She wore red robes and a green-and-black headdress that even I knew was supposed to invoke Africa. “Ruth. Let me look at you. Where’ve you been?”

“In hell. Here. This country. How about you, Joseph?” Her eyes were deep and broken. Something was wrong with her arms. She hadn’t seen me for even longer than I hadn’t seen her.

“I’ve missed you.” Almost chant.

“Why come back now, Joey? Black men are killed every week. Why did you wait until it was…?”

For you, Ruth. I came back for you. Nothing else big enough to bring me.

A young boy, maybe a fifth grader, materialized on the lawn beside us. I didn’t see him come up, and the sudden apparition scared me. He was dark, closer to Michael than to Ruth or me. Michael got out of the car and I turned to him. Happy for the deflection, I waved toward the boy. “Yours?”

Michael laughed. “You’re stuck on the escalator, man. You’re in a time hole. My oldest daughter has one of her own almost this old!”

“Mine,” Ruth said.

“Not yours,” the boy told her.

My sister sighed. “Kwame. This is Joseph. Your uncle.” The boy looked as if we were collaborating to cheat him out of his inheritance. He didn’t say, Not my uncle. He didn’t have to. Ruth sighed again. “Oakland. That’s where we’ve been. Oakland.” The word went up my spine like prophecy. “Community organizing. Working.”

“Then the cops killed my dad,” Kwame said.

I put my hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off. Ruth put her hand where mine had been, and he suffered it, but believing nothing. Ruth steered her child toward the house, and we men followed.

My mother’s father waited just inside the door. His close-cropped hair was Niagara white. The air around him, like the high-tide mark on a beach, still registered how large a man he’d been. He wore a steel gray suit. Everyone had dressed for this occasion except me. He tilted his head back to get me in the bottom pane of his bifocals. “Jonah Strom.”

“Joseph,” I said, holding out my hand.

My objection angered him. “I still don’t see why she had to give you boys the same name. Never mind. Es freut mich, Herr Strom. ” He took my hand, even as I shrank. “Heißen Sie willkommen zu unserem Haus.”

I stood there gaping. Uncle Michael chuckled as he dragged my bags upstairs. “Don’t let him fool you. He’s been practicing for the last three days.”

“He can make hotel reservations and change your currency for you, too,” Ruth said.

Dr. Daley threatened to break forth in Sturm und Drang. “Sie nehmen keine Rücksicht auf andere.” Something more than three days’ practice.

Ruth put her arm around him. “It’s okay, Papap. He’s not an other. He’s one of us.”

From the hall to my right came crying. A startling sound: the wail of a creature wholly dependent on the unknown. Ruth moved toward the cry almost before I heard it. She slipped into the distant room, murmuring as if to herself. When she came back, she held a dozen-pound squirming infant trying to fling itself free to safety or death.

“Also mine,” Ruth said. “This is little Robert. Five months. Robert, this is your uncle Joey. Haven’t told you about him yet.”

Michael set me up in an upstairs room. “This was my brother’s. We’re moving Kwame into the twins’ old room.” I was violating a sanctuary. But there was no place else to go. “Sleep,” my uncle told me. “You probably need it.” And then he left for his own home.

Ruth came by to check on me. She held little Robert, who every so often stabbed out with his arm to prove my existence. My sister talked to him steadily, sometimes words, sometimes just pitched phonemes. She stopped only to ask, “You good?”

“I am now.”

She shook her head, looking at her baby but talking to me. “Can I get you anything?”

“You call him Papap.”

Little Robert stared at me. His mother wouldn’t. “I do. Kwame, too. We’ve called him that for years.” Then she turned: You have a problem with that? “That’s what he said you used to call him.”

“Ruth?”

“Not now, Joey. Maybe tomorrow. Okay?”

Then she went slack, some tendon cut. She hunched over, as if the baby had swelled to tremendous weight. She lowered herself to the foot of the bed. I sat next to her and put my arm on her back. I couldn’t tell if she wanted it there or not. She began to heave, her muscles lifting and falling in rhythm. Her shaking was tight and small, softer than winter branches scraping a roof. Only when little Robert began to cry, too, did she pull herself up into words.

“It’s so old, Joey. So old.” Her calm was forced. She might have meant anything. Every human nausea was older than she could say.

“The license plate was hanging down. He was driving back on Campbell on a Thursday night. Not even that late — nine-thirty-five. Not even in an especially bad neighborhood. Coming home from a council meeting. He was trying to get a shelter built. The man worked all the time. I was home with Kwame and…” She lifted little Robert, her face twisted. I pressed her shoulders: tomorrow would be fine. Or never.

“Two policemen pulled him over. One white, one Hispanic. Because the rear license plate was hanging down a little. Robert told me the day before that he was going to fix it. He got out of the car. He always got out when the police stopped him. He always wanted to take the issue back to them. He got out of the car to tell them he knew all about the license plate. But they knew all about the license plate, too. It came out at the hearing. They ran the number through their system while they were pulling him over. So what those two cops saw was a big, belligerent former Panther with a record coming out of the car at them. Robert always carried his wallet in his front coat pocket. Said he didn’t like to sit on his fortune. He reached into his coat pocket to get his wallet, and these two cops swung into covered positions behind their doors, guns drawn, yelling at him to freeze. He whipped his hand out of the coat to get it up in the air. I know it. He knew exactly…”

Ruth handed me the baby. She jerked her hands in the air in the oddest way. No place to put them. She wrapped them around her head and pressed, forcing back what was left of her brain.

“Why do I even have to say this? You know before I tell you. So old. Oldest song in the whole sick hymnal.” Her words were stale paste. I strained to hear her. “Nothing you can do with your life, but this country’s going to make you a cliché. The shining emblem of your kind.”

Little Robert began to shriek. I had no clue what to do. I hadn’t held a baby for twenty years. I bounced him, a dotted rhythm, and it helped a little. I hummed, long and low, a ground bass. My nephew put his hand to my chest in wonder. He felt the note there, and his wails turned into startled laughter. The sound brought Ruth back. She stood and traced small circles around the bed. Little Robert squealed, hand to my chest, demanding more.

“The thing was, Joey, they didn’t kill him. If they’d killed him, we might have had an uprising, even in Oakland. They did exactly what years of training primed them to do. They aimed for the legs with rubber riot-control bullets, and managed to shatter his right kneecap. Knocked him to the pavement, where he lay screaming. When he got through the pain, he started cursing them out with American history. They probably wanted to put a metal bullet through his skull just for naming them. The paramedics came. Twenty-two and a half minutes after they were called. They got him on the operating table and cut open his knee. According to the autopsy, he died of complications due to anesthesia.”

She stopped and took little Robert back from me. He started wailing again, reaching for my chest. He was ready to nose-dive out of her arms for a chance to feel those vibrations again. Only when Ruth hummed would he calm down. I listened to her notes. Untrained, a little hoarse. But full as the ocean when the moon pulled.

“The man didn’t die from complications, Joey. He died from simplifications. Simplified to death.” The last word fell off, near silence. “There was a hearing but no trial. Two-week suspension from the force for one, and three weeks for the other. No criminal charges. Justifiable precautionary measure in a high-risk situation. Meaning a war zone. Everybody knows. Every nigger coming at the law, reaching into his coat pocket…”

Her voice bottomed out. Had anyone put a gun in her hands, she could have gone into the street and used it without aim or emotion. Ruth toted her child in automatic circles around our dead uncle’s room, humming as the boy needed her.

“Everybody knows. Oldest song and dance there is. We can’t even hear it anymore, it’s so in us. Not a lynching, see? Just self-defense. Not murder; an accident. Not racism; just an unfortunate reaction that his profile created in… Tell me another one, Joey. One that doesn’t turn everyone in it into a… One of the cops sent me a grief-stricken apology by registered mail.”

“Which one?”

“Does it matter? The white. Does it matter? None of it…none of this would have happened if…” If this wasn’t this world. “What else you want to know, Joey? What else you want me to tell you?” She stopped pacing and faced me, a reference librarian handling a nuisance client. What else? About Robert’s death, about Robert, about the police, about the hearing, about Oakland, about the law, about the oldest song there is, the song of songs that trumps all others? How can you sing? How can you sing the things you sing? “Ask me. I know every detail. All the events I wasn’t there to live through. I’m trapped in it, Joey. Again and again. What am I supposed to do with this? What am I supposed to tell you?”

I thought she was breaking down. Then I realized that she wasn’t talking to me at all. These last two questions were for her son, who only smiled at me from the curl of her arm and tried to vocalize.

Ruth turned to me, numb. “You sleep.” The words branded me, an accusation. It was too late for me to change my ways now, this late at night.

Sleep was beyond imagining. I lay in bed at 2:00A.M., turning over a hundred times before the clock’s minute wheel turned over once. I couldn’t locate myself: upstairs, turning in bed, in the middle of a house whose banned image had run my life without my once being able to form it. When I did sleep, my dreams filled with sirens and gunfire.

I went downstairs at 5:30, unable to stay in that padded coffin another minute. I needed to sit, there at the hour before anyone else was alive, and steal my way back into this house I’d long ago lost. Going downstairs, I saw Jonah tearing up the steps behind our uncle Michael, with a boy not yet four struggling to keep up with them. A force of nature stood at the stair bottom, shouting, No running in this house! The house had shrunk, like a fetus in formaldehyde. Only the contour of these stairs remained, and the sound of our running.

I wasn’t the first awake. Dr. Daley sat at the kitchen table, hunched over last night’s newspaper. He had on a shirt and tie, changed from yesterday’s. He looked up at my footfall. He’d been waiting for me, whatever the hour. He studied me from his chair, his face demanding to know what we were to make of a waste so large. Who taught people to throw away the thing they most feared losing?

“Cup of coffee?”

“Please.”

“How do you take it?”

“I…”

The smallest hint of amusement staked out his mouth. “Milchkaffee? Halb und halb?”

“Something like that.”

He sat me down and brought me coffee, just right, as if he’d seen me make it. The color of my sister’s hand. Dr. Daley sat across from me and folded the paper in neat quarters. “Do you want to hear my definition of life? Of course you do. Harassment and coffee, day after day. All right. First. You talked to your sister?”

“Briefly.”

“So you know what you’ve come home to.” I nodded, but I knew nothing. All I could hear was that one-syllable locale. He held silent for the barest moment, giving a eulogy he’d had to give too often in his life. He tightened his lips and returned to the unlivable. Public again. “Now then. Your father.”

It took me a long sip before I realized he was asking a question. Then I couldn’t figure out what the question was. “I… My father?”

“Yes. David. How is the man?” He wouldn’t look at me. No one knew the first thing about anyone else.

“There’s no saying,” I said. And I couldn’t manage any more.

My grandfather looked up, diagnosing my answer. His chin made a tiny lift and fall. “I see. How long ago?”

“Ten years. I’m sorry — twelve. Almost thirteen. Nineteen seventy-one.”

“I see.” He pressed his hands against his face. Nothing more to outlive. “Your sister will want to know. You know that?”

“I’m not sure. Given everything.”

He stared at me, livid. “Of course she’ll want to know! Do you think a week has passed when she hasn’t thought about him?”

I felt what it must have meant to be this man’s child. We sat for a long time. I sipped; he glowered. At last, he snorted. “‘No saying.’” He nodded his head, smirking at my formulation. “Your brother?”

My brother. How much of a lifetime I’d spent answering that question. “He’s well. He’s happy living in Belgium. Singing early music.”

My grandfather didn’t bother to move his head. I’ve no time for your foolishness. The question’s a simple one. Do you mean to answer or not? “Am I going to see my oldest grandson again before I die?”

I felt my blood rising. “There’s…there’s never any saying with Jonah, either.”

Papap grinned grimly. “Still after his kind of freedom. I remember that from when he was six months old. Is he finding it, do you suppose?”

His tone held something of judgment, without the sentence. I had my private guess. “You have to hear him sing.” The only answer that answered him.

Dr. Daley rose and took my emptied coffee cup and saucer. I stood to help him and he waved me down. “It doesn’t seem as if I’m going to be granted that experience in this lifetime.” He washed my dirty dishes and, hands trembling, placed them in the strainer, next to his own. “I’ve tried more than once to tell your sister what came between us. Yes, the innate insanity governing all races. But don’t be misled. We put our personal stamp on it. Your father and I. Your parents…”

He came back to the breakfast table and lowered himself into his chair, where he’d taken breakfast for the last half a century. Same table, with everything else in existence around it changed.

“Your parents thought they saw some way out of the rule. The rule of the past.” He stared out onto the spring lawn, trying to picture what they saw. “They wanted a place with as many categories as there were cases. But they still had to bring you up here.” His voice was desperate, racing the clock. “They wanted a place where everyone was his own tone.” He shook his head. “But that’s blackness. There is no shade it doesn’t already contain. You weren’t any more double than any of us. Your mother should have known that.”

Footsteps came down the stairs, and my sister wandered in. She toted little Robert, and something heavier. She wore the same red robes and green-and-black West African headdress as she’d worn the day before. My sister the widow. Her face was bleary with the hour. “This child had me up all night.” On cue, the baby gurgled with pleasure. How could either of them live?

“That’s their job description.” Our grandfather, lifelong family practitioner, stood to make coffee for Ruth. It seemed an old ritual. To me, he said, “I made things worse.”

Ruth needed no program. She’d been listening on the stairs. She shook her head. “You did nothing, Papap. They were living a dream. Mama’s the one who married a white man. She chose her path.”

“I was too proud. Your mother always said so.” He froze in place. “I mean, your grandmother.” He brought Ruth her coffee — black, with a teaspoon of sugar. “I was afraid. Afraid of losing myself in their idea. The orienting righteousness. Afraid of—”

“Of whiteness’s whole sick trip,” Ruth interrupted. “Fucked-up. To a man.”

“Don’t swear.”

“Yes, Papap.” She bowed her head to this ninety-year-old, like a child of nine.

“I made your grandmother pay for my principles. I lost her her daughter, her grandchildren. I never got to see you come into…”

Ruth stood and traded him a cup of coffee for the baby. She took the cup and sipped. Then she started hot cereal and fruit mash for little Robert. “You didn’t make her, Papap.” The old man raised his hand to his head to deflect the words. “Grandma was with you all the way.”

“And who was I with?” Dr. Daley asked no one. No one who could hear him. “Hypodescent. You’re familiar with the word?” I nodded. I was the word’s boy. “It means a half-caste child must belong to the caste with the lower status.”

Ruth spooned food into little Robert’s mouth with one hand and stirred the air with her other. “It means white can’t protect its stolen property, can’t tell the owners from the owned, except by playing purebred. They’re pure all right. Pure invention. One drop? One drop, as far back as you can go? Every white person in America is passing.”

He thought a moment. “Hypodescent means we’re supposed to take everybody else in. All the rest.”

“Amen,” Ruth said. “Everyone who’s not insane with inbreeding is black.”

“Everyone. All the half-castes and quarter-castes and one-thirty-second-castes. We should have made room for you.”

“Don’t you blame yourself for what other folks went off and did.”

He didn’t hear her. “All of us! You think you three were alone?” His eyes begged me, as if only my nod might set the long wrong right. “You think you were the first in the world to live this line? Your grandmother, half white. My family. Right out of the slave owner’s loins. My family’s name. The whole race. One look at us. We’ve had the Europeans living in us for three hundred years. I’ve always wondered what America might have been had the one-drop rule worked the other way.”

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.

The voice swept outward, peeling off cloak after cloak until its light began to sear. All the while the full choir, steady as a heartbeat, swelled the refrain: “He leadeth me. He leadeth me.” And on into new keys: “He leadeth me.” Their gospel wall made, for the soloing girl, a rock-hard foundation from which to launch any praise at all. She rose up into the ear’s ionosphere, eyes alight, lifting in the humility of absolute delight, as close as the soul comes to knowing its own amplitude. I couldn’t believe she was improvising those huge aerial profusions with such certainty. Yet neither did I think for a moment that such fresh bursts could have been written out in advance.

The hymn built up in ever-breaking waves. Hands sprouted in the air around us. I was beside myself, unable to hold the beauty as it passed. I looked at Dr. Daley, shaken out of everything but the question: Who? He nodded gravely. “That’s Lorene’s baby.” I couldn’t marry the woman; she was my first cousin. “That’s Dee.”

I turned back to my sister at the sound of the name. Her smile was broken into scrap by the long way here.

“My God. What a voice. She needs the best training possible.”

My sister hissed, loud enough for those in the pew ahead of us to hear. “Asshole. You think that is some spontaneous jungle talent? She has had the best training possible. Can’t you hear?”

“Who? Where?”

“They’re falling all over her. At Curtis.”

After the service, we waited in the receiving line to meet the phenomenon. My cousin Delia recognized me as we approached. I guess I wasn’t too hard to pick out. Before Ruth could do introductions, the girl waved her off. She stared at me. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.” A knot of Sunday celebrants turned to study the commotion. “Coming in here, the picture of innocence. You got to answer for what you’ve done.”

The list formed in my mind. I was ready to sign it all and serve any penance. I felt the heat emanating from this woman. Ruth and Dr. Daley stood at my elbow, silent bailiffs. I knew what I’d done. My family had known, long before I did. There was no choice but to stand still and receive the awful sentence.

“Whose idea was it to do that Bach like that?”

It took me half the length of a chorale before I could even feel relief. And another half a phrase before I could answer, “Ah! Everyone has their own Bach.” She was still scowling, shaking her angry head. “Was it too small for you?” This had been our most faulted transgression: one voice per line. Thinking heaven might answer to the private call.

My cousin glared at me, smoldering like Carmen. “You owe me a car.”

“I…a car?” My checkbook ready already.

“I had your little motets on the tape player while trying to drive. Right through the red light at Sixteenth and Arch. Glorious! Didn’t even know I was in the intersection until this Ford Escort came through at nine o’clock and clipped my wings. Escorted me right back to this world, thank you. Sing Unto the Lord a New Song?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well, you did that all right. Umm- hmm. That one was righteous!”

I took forever to figure out the simplest things. “You like it? It suited you?”

“You owe me a car. Nice reliable Dodge Dart in a pretty red.”

Anyone but a musician might tell you that all silences sound the same. But Ruth’s silence, on the way home, modulated into a new song.

I heard Delia’s Bach not long after that. She soloed across town in a pan-Philadelphia performance of the B Minor Mass. Jonah might not have favored such high-powered magnificence. But even he, hearing this, would have been delivered. Delia’s Laudamus Te carried all the rapture that that Latin-writing Lutheran posted forward in it. Every note was faultless, as written. And yet it swung, kicking back and dancing like there was no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Ever. That eerie, unearthbound work had found its celebrant. Praise is praise, my cousin’s voice said. Music’s music. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Two nights later, I heard her sing Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brazileiras no.5. The piece had long ago become a theme-park poster for itself, as over-played and unhearable a monument as Wilson Hart’s adored Rodrigo, done in by too much love. But in Delia Banks’s sinuous, ethereal turns, it went desperate for me again, mystic, possessed, sexy, a single endless sequence spun out of one breath. It wasn’t even that I’d never heard it properly. I’d simply never heard it. Her version sighed past any of the scores of recordings I knew. And hers would never be recorded.

I had lunch with her, just the two of us, almost clandestine, in the same diner where my mother and grandmother had once secretly met. “Ghosts everywhere,” Delia said. “We’re lucky they’re so big on sharing.”

I didn’t know how to speak my pleasure. “You could have… Name the life you want.” Times had changed. Or would have to, for this woman. “You can have the international concert career of your choice.” I knew the odds, yet knew, too, how little I was exaggerating. A person could live his whole life chasing music and be lucky to hear one time-sent voice. I was near kin to two of them.

My cousin favored me with a high-watt version of her stage smile, the one that made her audiences love her before she opened her throat. “Thank you, sir. You say the sweetest things, for a lost soul.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.” The waitress came and Delia traded barbs with her. When the woman left, my cousin shook her head at me. “You ever sing at Salzburg?”

“Several times. A beautiful place. You’d love it.”

“I know. I’ve seen the movie. The one with that spinning nun? You ever sing at the Festival d’Art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence?”

“We once won a prize there.” As I answered, it dawned on me: Delia already knew.

“You happy?” She knew the answer to that one, too. “Ask me if I’m happy. Ask me what kind of career I want. I got everything in the world already, cuz. Got my church. Who’d need a bigger stage than that? I’ve got people I love singing with me, building the sound, taking me higher. Every piece we do, we make our own, whatever post office it came on through. I got a repertoire long enough to last me two lifetimes. One short and the other long.”

I went wily and virtuous all at once. “You owe it…to the source of your gift not to hide that light under a bushel. To bring that sound to as many people as possible.”

Delia thought about my words. They troubled her, a slip of evil moving about in the Garden. “No. This isn’t about bigger numbers. Are you happy? You can’t make anyone happy if you’re not happy yourself.”

She had my X-rays clipped up on the light box just to the side of our booth, and she didn’t at all like what she saw. I had to take the offensive, before she finished me off. “Are you afraid?”

The idea amused her. “Of who?”

I might have drawn her up a list: all the people who’d want you dead just for traveling on the only passport you get. She knew the costs, hidden and obvious, even just for singing across town. Avoidance might not be fear. It might be more like fear’s opposite. “Simple preference, then?”

“Oh, I’ll sing whatever glory’s sitting on the music stand.”

“But only religious music.”

Delia played with the salt and pepper shakers. “All music’s religious music. All the good parts anyway.” It was true: Even her languorous, sultry Portuguese siren song had seduced for a brighter flame.

“Well, I’ve heard what you did to that backwoods German cracker. So I know this isn’t about cultural ownership.”

“Oh, but it is.” As soon as she spoke the words, everything was. No culture without owners, without owned.

“You’re anti-Europe?” Sick, imperial, supremacist, and striving to please the eternal angels.

“‘Anti-Europe’?” Delia rolled her eyes. “Can’t very well be that. Though Europe has cost me more cars than we’re going to talk about today, honey. No, can’t be anti-Europe without doing more amputation than is good for a body. Every song we sing’s got white notes running through it. But that’s the beauty of the situation, cuz. We’re making a little country here, out of mutual theft. They come over into our neck of the woods, take all we got. We sneak over into their neighborhood, middle of the night, grab a little something back, something they didn’t even know they had, something they can’t even recognize no more! More for everybody that way, and more kinds of everybody.” She shook her head. A low mezzo growl of despite came out of her chest. “No. Can’t be anti-Europe when everyone’s part Europe. But got to be pro-Africa, for the same reason.”

Surely her church loved her too much to keep her to themselves. “Thousands could hear you. Hundreds of thousands.”

“As many as hear your brother?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out.

“You could change the way people think.”

“Change! You still waiting for music to cure us? Bach? Mozart? Nazis love them, too. Music never cured anyone. Look at your poor sister. Look at her man. Figure that out with music. Do you have a single song you can sing her to take care of her now? One single song that can do anything for her, that won’t shrivel up and die of helpless shame?”

It wasn’t too late for me to learn a trade. Some honest living. I could still type. Typing and filing for a pro bono law firm. I took a breath, went down into my bass days with Voces Antiquae, already ancient history. “The song is only as good as its listener.”

“Your sister. For her. For her.”

I looked for what I believed. “Maybe we sing for ourselves.”

“At least that. Nothing without that. But nothing if only that. We need a music that sings to anyone. That makes them sing. No audience!”

“AM radio.”

“Can’t hurt me with that.”

“Gospel sings to anyone?” I had another list for her, if she wanted it.

“Anyone with ears to hear.”

“That’s just it. Our ears only hear what sounds people get a chance to know.”

“Oh, people know. Listen. Every beautiful sound comes from saying what’s happened to us. Well, name someone who’s had more happen to them than us.”

“Us?”

“Yes, cuz.”

Her words blunted the ones that were loaded in my throat. I had no comeback but the one that shamed me most. “I’m greedy. I want to hear…” All those implicated, complicit, compromised old warhorses. She could work their salvation. Only a black voice could do that now. “I want to hear that music…redeemed.” Hear it be, at last, what it had always pretended to be.

Delia glowed a moment with the thought. But I was the devil, tempting her to turn stones into bread. “Cuz, cuz. You’re not getting this. I’ve got my church. My Jesus.”

“Doesn’t he come from Europe?”

She grinned. “Ours comes from a little south of there. Listen to me. I’ve got my work. I’ve got ours. You hear how glorious that word sounds? I don’t blame you for living your life. You were raised when we still thought the only way to get what they got is to copy their stuff. We’re us and ain’t never gonna be them, and where’s the pain in that? Just as big — bigger, given the whole story. Why you working so hard over something you can’t save and doesn’t want to be?”

For the same reason that makes us sing anything. I glanced around the restaurant. All shades imaginable. Nobody much cared that I was there or had any stake in my desperation. I looked at my cousin. The national color averaged out somewhere between us. “You’re saying separate but equal?”

“That’s right. Where’s the problem? Different cultures, equal status.”

“Equal status with the dominant culture?”

“They only dominate those they can.”

“I thought the whole point was that separate could never be—”

“There’s a big difference now. Now, it’s our choice.”

But if it were impossible — impossible to search for chords outside of us, impossible to find that scale, that tune that sang beyond this time and place… I wanted more than this invented moment and this enforced difference, more than this wary truce pretending to be the peace we’d always been seeking. I tried with everything in me. I turned her words around more ways than there were ways to turn. “You’re saying that you can only sing what you are?”

The coffee came. By the time the waitress left, they’d exchanged recipes, boyfriend grievances, and phone numbers. Then it was just the two of us. Delia wrapped her hands around her hot mug, drawing heat and horizon-wide pleasure. “Where were we again? No, no. I think it’s more like: You can only be what you sing.”

“My sister could have been a singer. She had a voice to convert anyone.”

“Joseph Strom!” I jerked my head up. For a moment, she was my mother, reprimanding a boy of nine. My cousin’s eyes were wet. She shook her head, horrified. “Listen to her, for once. Just listen.”

I did. It would have come to me, sooner or later. I joined Ruth one evening for her routine walk around the neighborhood. Our aunts and uncle told her she was crazy, taking her life in her hands. They didn’t even like to ride down the street with their windows rolled up. Her evening walks sent Papap into fits. She waved them all away. “I’m safer out here than I am standing in front of Independence Hall. I’d sooner trust my life to the worst crackhead than to any police officer in this country.”

Much of the neighborhood was out on their front porches, living in public, the way people lived in Ghent, the way few Americans above the poverty line lived. My sister greeted everyone we passed, sometimes by name. “I like to think about Grandma and Papap walking out here when they were young.”

“Do you ever think about Da’s parents, Ruth? I’m not fighting with you. I’m not… I’m just…”

She held up her palm sideways and nodded. “I’ve tried. I can’t even… You know, I’m addicted to the survivor accounts. I’ve seen every Holocaust documentary ever made. You’d have to be dead to have a memory big enough. The way I think about…our other grandparents? The supremacists got them, too.”

“Even though they were white.”

“They weren’t white. They weren’t even the same species. Not to the people running the ovens. We were sent along with them, what few of us were there.”

“‘We’?”

She heard, and nodded. “I mean the other us.”

One would have to be dead already to survive such inheritance. We passed a row of century-old houses, now carved up into rented rooms. Ruth hummed under her breath. I couldn’t make out the tune. When the tune changed to words, she seemed to speak to someone across the street. “Look, Joey. It’s easy. The easiest question in the world. If they come and start rounding us up, which line are you going to get into?”

“No question. Not even a choice.”

“But they’ve been rounding us up, Joey.” She spread her hands around the neighborhood. “They’re rounding us up now. They’ll keep rounding us up, for as long as there’s a calendar.”

I tried to follow her. When she spoke next, it reeled me back from Da’s deep-space catalog.

“You should have married that white girl, Joey. I’m sure she was nice.”

“Is. Is nice. But I’m not.”

“Incompatible?” I looked at her. Her mouth twisted into a crook of empathy.

“Incompatible.”

“Take two people.”

I waited. Then I realized this was the entire recipe. “Two people. Exactly.”

“Mama and Da would have had to divorce. If she’d lived.”

“You think?” The stories we told about their story no longer mattered to them.

“Of course. Look at the statistics.”

“Numbers never lie,” I said, in our old German accent.

She winced and grinned at the same time. Hybrid vigor. “Robert and I were incompatible. But it worked.”

“What about his parents?”

Ruth looked at me, seeing ghosts. “You never knew? Your own brother-in-law?” Blaming, taking the blame. “I never told you? Of course not; when could I have? Robert was raised in a foster home. White folks. Only in it for the aid checks.”

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?”

Every third yard was a pachyderm’s graveyard of shopping carts, washing machines, and stripped Impalas whose last highway would be four cinder blocks. A cluster of kids Kwame’s age worked a basketball in an empty lot, dribbling between the larger shards of glass, using oil drums for their picks and rolls, and chucking the ball at a rim that seemed made from an old TV antenna. Every square foot of concrete was garlanded in tendrils of graffiti, the elaborate signatures of those who were prevented from putting their names on anything else. The block housed more poverty per yard than even my sister could identify with. The furnaces of progress were busy burning all the fuel they could find.

Whatever dream my brother and I had been raised on was dead. Incredible to me: the 1980s. Uplift had fallen deeper than the place where it had started, back before hopes were raised.

My years in Europe opened my eyes to the place stamped on my passport. Three months before, with Voces, I’d toured the Adriatic, singing an old Latin monastic text: “Teach me to love what I cannot hope to know; teach me to know what I cannot hope to be.” Here I was, walking through a ruined Philadelphia with my sister, begging to be what I couldn’t know, trying to know what I couldn’t love. All song that didn’t hear this massacre was a lie.

My sister saw her own landscape. “We need control of our own neighborhoods. It wouldn’t solve things, of course. But it would be a start.”

Always another start. And a start after that. “Ruth?” I was willing to look at any misery around me, except my sister. “How long are you planning to stay around here?”

“You still on white people’s time, aren’t you?” I spun around, stiffening. Then I felt her arm slipping through mine. “Funny thing? My Oakland? It looks a lot like this.”

“You could move.”

She shook her head at me. “No, I couldn’t, Joey. It’s where all his work went. It’s where…he died.” We walked in silence, turning the last corner to Papap’s house again. Ruth stopped and blurted, “How am I supposed to do this, Joey? A ten-year-old on his way to hell and another little half-year-old with a murdered father.”

“What are you saying? Kwame’s in trouble?”

She shook her head. “You’ll go to your grave a classical musician, won’t you? A black boy in trouble. Imagine.” I pulled away from her, and she exploded, throwing her hands in the air. She brought them back down over her face, like falling ash. “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never make it.”

My first thought, God help me, was, Make it where? I closed the distance and put my hands on her shoulders. She threw them off. As quickly as her tears came, they stopped. “Okay. Okay. No crisis. Just another husbandless single sister mother. Millions of us.”

“How many of you got brothers?”

Ruth squeezed my arm, a frantic tourniquet. “You don’t know, Joey. You can’t begin.” She felt me flinch, and grabbed on tighter. “I don’t mean that. I mean what’s happened to us, since you took off. The bottom’s dropped out of the whole country. Like living through a lifelong air raid. For a boy, a little boy?” Her shudder passed through me. I’d never feel safe again. “You haven’t noticed it, in him? You really haven’t noticed?”

“Kwame? No. Well, he dresses…a little like a criminal.”

She barked in pained amusement and smacked the air. “All the kids do now. And half the adults, too.”

“And I’ve noticed he hates policemen.”

“That’s just common sense. Survival benefit.”

We stood still outside our grandfather’s house. I looked in and saw him at the window, pulling back a white curtain to look at us. Dr. Daley: the family practitioner under siege in the neighborhood he’d once served. He motioned violently for us to come in. Ruth nodded and held up a finger, bargaining for thirty seconds. Seeing no immediate emergency, he let the curtain fall and retreated.

Ruth leaned toward me. “Kwame’s not like Robert. He has Robert’s healthy resentment. But Robert always had a counterplan. He was always working on an answer. One more public education drive, one more demonstration. Kwame’s got the rage, but not a single answer for it. Robert used to keep him in line by challenging him. Used to say, ‘Best thing to do when you’re feeling mad is make something of yourself that’s not them.’ When Kwame explodes, I do what Robert used to do. I sit him down with a sheet of paper and colored pencils. Or park him in front of a box of paint. Kwame can make — oh! The wildest things. But since… The last few times I tried to sit him down…”

Then the boy appeared at the window, watching us. Through the glass, even with his headphones and their pounding pulse, he heard us talking about him. Fury and apathy fought for a controlling interest in his eyes. My sister looked back at her son, smiling at him through her panic. But what can you hide from a child who has already seen death? She turned and grabbed me just below the collar. “How much are we talking about, Joey? My portion of…the savings?”

Ruth’s third of the inheritance had been sitting in balanced investments, compounding for more years than her son had lived. It couldn’t match that boy’s compounded experience, but it was a usable sum. I gave her an estimate. Her face did its own skeptical calculation. “We have some, too, Robert and I. And Papap keeps offering — the piece Mama never got. We could get matching funds. There are sources — not many, but they’re there. It’s all Robert wanted. His last sustained plan before… He worked so hard on it, I can see the blueprints.”

I was afraid to ask her to make sense. She started up again, steering me toward the door. “Joseph Strom. How would you like to give your nephew music lessons?”

I pressed back, feeling her hand’s resistance. “Ruth. Don’t even joke. What could I possibly… He’d eat me alive.”

She laughed and shook her head, dragging me on toward the door. “Oh, Kwame’s nothing, baby. Wait until you get a classroom full of ten-year-olds! Wait until little Robert comes up through the ranks.”

That’s how I returned to Oakland with my sister and her sons. It was as easy as falling. As soon as Ruth described Robert’s school to me, I knew I’d been looking for a reason to keep me from returning to Europe. Something big enough to put up against the salvage of the past. Nothing else had claim over my life. My single problem lay in breaking the news to Jonah.

We called him from Philadelphia just before we left. I had trouble finding him at home, in Ghent. When he heard my voice, Jonah made it sound as if he’d been waiting for weeks at the side of the phone. “Damn it, Mule. I’ve been dying by inches here. What’s happening?”

“Why didn’t you just call if you wanted to hear from us?”

“That wouldn’t exactly be hearing from you, would it?”

“I’m going to California. Ruth’s building a school.”

“And you are going to…”

“Fucker. I’m going to teach for her.”

He thought a moment before saying anything. Or maybe it was the transatlantic lag. “I see. You’re quitting the group. You’re going to kill Voces Antiquae?” With the bull market in early music not even starting to peak, superlative, vibrato-free voices were springing up all over. I’d always been the ensemble’s weak link, the amateur latecomer. This was my brother’s chance to replace me with a real bass, a trained one, someone who could do justice to the others and lift them to that last level of international renown that had vaguely eluded us. He didn’t have to mourn the loss of my voice. He needed only to let me know how completely I’d betrayed him.

“Well, we had our run, didn’t we?” His was the voice of the future past. He sounded light-years away, anxious to get off the phone and start auditioning my replacements. “So how is your sister?”

“You want to talk to her?”

From the kitchen counter, where she’d been pretending not to listen, Ruth shook her head. Jonah said, “I don’t know, Joey. Does she want to talk with me?”

Ruth cursed me under her breath as I handed her the phone. She took the receiver as if it were a bone club. Her sound was small and flat. “JoJo.” After a while: “Long time. You old yet?” She listened, dead. Then she sat up, defending. “Don’t start this. Just…don’t.” After another pause, she said, “No, Jonah. That’s what you should do. That’s what you should fucking do.”

She lapsed into another listening silence, then handed the phone to Papap. He shouted into it. “Hallo. Hallo? Dieses ist mein Enkel?”

The words ripped me. They did worse to Ruth. She came over to me and whispered, so Europe couldn’t hear. “You sure about this? You had work. Maybe you belong over there.”

She just wanted noise from me. She couldn’t bear the sounds of that other conversation. We talked in a drone, drowning out Papap and listening in by helpless turns. He and Jonah talked for three or four minutes, nothing, everything — collapsing decades into a few hundred words. Papap grilled Jonah about Europe, Solidarity, Gorbachev. God only knows what answers Jonah invented. “When are you coming home?” Papap asked. Ruth tried to talk over the words, as if that would erase them. But that’s the thing about sounds: Even when they all happen at once, none of them cancels out the others. They just keep stacking up, beyond any chord’s ability to hold.

There was a silence, out of which Papap suddenly charged, enraged. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Behind the times. Come back and listen. Every song and dance in this country has gone brown.” Ruth and I quit our deaf show. She stared at me, but before I could even shrug, our grandfather was sailing. “You think you’re a traitor out there? You’re nothing but an advance scout. A double agent… Well, call it that, too, if you like. Name an immortal piece that wouldn’t sound better sung by the hired help. That little world you’ve been scouting is going to be overrun with black, once we show the least little bit of interest. Sie werden noch besser sein als im Basketball. ”

Ruth quizzed me with a look. I felt myself giggling bitterly. “Just like basketball,” I translated. “Only better.”

They improvised their good-byes and my grandfather hung up. “Interesting man, your brother. He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had a new leader.” He chuckled, his shoulders jarring loose from his body. “I’m not entirely sure he’d heard of basketball, either.”

“What did he say to you?” I asked Ruth.

“He said I should travel. Get my mind off the past.”

The whole family showed for our departure. My uncle Michael, my aunts Lucille and Lorene, most of their kids and grandkids — I still didn’t know all their names. They gathered the night before we left, to send us out. We sang. What else was there? Delia Banks was there, her sound as wide as a flowering chestnut and as delicate as sweet williams. She didn’t solo, except for an aerial twelve bars. Tunes fell in line, jumbling up and overlapping, talking to one another, taking themselves as their only topic. The Daley game, too, was Crazed Quotations, drawn from another well, the water colder and more bracing. Where do you think your mother got it from? The send-off had no sadness. We’d meet back here next year and the year after, we and all our dead, as our dead had been meeting here without us every prior year. And if not here, then that flatted-seventh somewhere else.

Late that night, after the last cousin left, Papap came into his dead son’s room, the room that for weeks I’d inhabited. He held a stiff, shiny square of paper. He sat in his boy’s ancient chair, next to where I stretched out. I scrambled to my feet, and he waved me back down.

“Your sister got most of the keepsakes. I gave what I had to her years ago. I didn’t know you’d be showing up. But I found these for you.” A Polaroid of my brother and me opening Christmas presents, a photo Da had taken and given to the Daleys. And an older Brownie photo of a woman who could only be my mother. I couldn’t stop looking. I took it in in long gasps, a suffocating man needing air. It was the first fresh look I’d had of her since the fire. In the tiny black-and-white print, a young woman — far younger than I was now — of uncertain tone but clearly African features looked back through the lens, smiling weakly, seeing on the exposing film everything that would happen to her. She wore a dress of midcalf length with wide, pointed shoulders, the height of fashion in the years before my birth.

“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.

I wasn’t alone, stranded in the standing present. My nephew Kwame never went to New Day School. He was too old by the time our alternative was under way. I saw him only once or twice a month, when I went to Ruth’s for Sunday dinner. Truth was, Ruth gave so much of herself to her concrete-defeating flower that her own boy ended up taking private lessons in latchkey school. He doubled in size from eleven to thirteen. His voice dropped through the floor and thickened so much, I had trouble understanding him. He started to scare me, just the way he hung and talked. Oakland came and found him out and solved his father’s death. Rhythm freed him: the trick it always promises. He dressed in rage, an apprentice criminal, yards of baggy black sailcloth for a shirt, sagging jeans, the bill of his Dodgers baseball cap tipped back onto his thickening neck, or, later, a stocking pulled over his head. He held his fingers splayed like chopsticks, rapper-style, slicing the air. All he needed was a snub-nosed gun.

I tried giving him piano lessons. They weren’t even a disaster. I was his uncle, whatever that meant. He felt his father’s ghost too strongly to dis me outright. But my chords were worthless to him. He couldn’t even slander me, so clueless did I come. My nephew’s hands could span a tenth on the keyboard with ease, magnificent. But ten minutes a week of practice was beyond him. Like asking someone to carry a stone around with him, just for the good it might do his soul.

Each lesson forced us more into the open. “This thing play ‘Dopeman’? This thing play ‘Fuck tha Police’?”

He couldn’t get to me; I’d been gotten to already, too long ago. “It plays anything you want. You just have to get good enough to tell it how.”

What owns us? What can we own? Kwame tried to plunk out his untranscribable rap. It was like doing sculpture with a trowel. The results only made him furious. He brought in a disk for us to work with. To spite me, really. “You’ll like this. Wreckin’ Cru. Old-time shit. Still uses keyboards.”

I looked at the date. Eighteen months old. He played me a track with a wild, irregular synthesizer riff. I ran it back for him, note for note. Took everything I had left in me.

“Damn,” Kwame said in a low, affectless monotone.

More out of curiosity than to impress him, I tried the line again, this time juked up, hammered out, fitted with a good Baroque figured bass. Then I tried to fugue it. Sampling the sampler. The whole system runs on theft. Tell me what hasn’t already been stolen?

When I finished, my nephew just stared at me, shaking his head. “You the illest, you know that?”

“I am aware.”

His was an act, but not an act — this gangsta son of a doctor of education. He went with the tune that best served him. Kwame’s at least had some angry fire that my dress-up had lacked. We go through our lives playing ourselves. Black is and black ain’t. Ten years on and he’d lose this music, too. Every affluent white kid from Vancouver to Naples would be playing him.

His two uncles had sung about that theft once, a wasted old tune and even older words. We’d performed it in a converted shipping house in The Hague that had amassed fortunes on the triangle trade: What we love is left us. Kwame rapped for me, songs about killing police or Koreans, about putting women in their place. He giggled over the words when I asked him. I wasn’t sure he knew what they meant. I didn’t. But his body knew, in every twitch of those sinuous slingshot rhythms: Here was all the room he had to live.

He came to lessons with his eyes red, his body heavy, the muscles in his face sluggishly amused at the entire white-owned world. His clothes held that sweet, acrid smell of burning rope I remembered from my brother’s forays in the Village a quarter of a century ago. Jonah had run his experiments for a while, then graduated. Kwame, I thought, would, too. I considered mentioning things to Ruth. But that would have killed what little trust her son and I had won.

Ruth came to my apartment late on a winter night in 1988, Robert in tow. The child was only four, but already smart enough to guess everything that adults really meant when they cooed at him. Now he stood tugging at his mother’s knees, trying to make her laugh. She didn’t even feel him there.

“Joey, the child wrecked my car. Wrapped the bumper around a telephone pole two blocks down my street. That thug friend of his, Darryl, was sitting next to him in the passenger seat with an open bottle of malt liquor. God knows where they stole it.”

“Is he okay?”

“Was until I got my hands on him. He’s lucky we got to them before the police did.” She paced around my tiny living room. I knew enough not to offer any comfort. All she wanted was a living ear. “I’m losing him. I’m losing my firstborn.”

“You’re not losing him. You know children, Ruth.”

“I’ve been losing him since Robert was killed.”

“It’s just kid’s stuff. Wildness of the times. He’ll grow out of it.” She shook her head, struggling with some holdout fact. “Tell me,” I said.

She twisted in place. “Tell you what?”

“Whatever it is you’re not telling me.”

She deflated. She sat down between me and her younger son. “He’s taken to calling me…names.” She fought to keep her voice. She looked at little Robert, who, on cue, walked off into my bedroom to play. Ruth leaned in toward me. “We argued. He called me ‘white.’ White! ‘You so white, woman. Little car wreck. Nigga don’t care ’bout no old hooptie.’ Where does that come from? The boy’s fourteen years old, and he’s holding his genes against me! Hating me for infecting him.”

Her body shook as if she were freezing. I had nothing for her. No consolation, even remote. “Wait,” I said. “Just wait a couple of years. Sixteen, seventeen. When it really starts.”

“Oh Jesus, Joey. No. If he comes up with worse than that, I’ll die.”

She survived. But not from Kwame’s lack of enterprise. Even as her school took off — winning awards, securing grants, appearing in a regional television feature — Ruth’s teenage son ran his own race. I never heard half the stories; Ruth was ashamed to tell me. I never saw Kwame anymore. He stopped coming by for the lessons that infuriated both of us. Six weeks after he quit showing up, Ruth asked how the lessons were going.

Kwame had the wordsBY ANY MEANS tattooed across his belly. He sculpted geometrical shapes into his cropped hair and wore a shirt readingSICK IS on its back andMY MUSE on its front. He came home with failing grades, strings of unexcused absences. The harder Ruth tried to get through to him, the deeper he tunneled.

Then Kwame and four friends — including his copilot Darryl — were caught in the school bathroom, next to a toilet with enough methamphetamine floating in it to kill a racehorse. It wasn’t clear which boys were the leads and which only sang in the chorus. Ruth argued at the school hearing that what her son needed most was meaningful discipline, something both he and his school could turn to real use. But after Kwame quoted an Ice Cube lyric in his own defense, the principal opted for expulsion.

Ruth found him a private school that took probationary cases. It was a boarding school, like his uncles had gone to centuries ago, but with a somewhat different curriculum. This one was strictly votech. Ruth couldn’t afford to send Kwame there, even with contributions from me. But keeping him out would have bankrupted her.

“Every night,” she told me, “it’s always the same. I dream someone in uniform is holding his head down to the concrete with a gun.”

It seemed to me his school was working. When I saw Kwame now, he felt lighter, less brittle, with less of that junked-up edginess. He still chopped the air with his crooked forearms and folded his fingers into his armpits defensively. But his humor flashed faster and his diatribes were more likely to include himself as a fair target. He and two friends formed a band called N Dig Nation. Kwame rapped and played the record player. “I do the ones and twos.” His rhythms were so dense and irregular, I couldn’t write them down, let alone clap them. The band played for pulsing gatherings of high school kids, each crowd larger and more hypnotically satisfied than the last.

I sent Jonah and Celeste cards every Christmas and birthday. I wrote a couple of real letters, telling him about our venture: Ruth’s endless energy, Kwame’s struggles, my teaching games, the current crop of genius first graders, the set of pitched percussion instruments we had managed to buy for my classroom. I didn’t mention my lingering emptiness. I sent everything off to the Brandstraat. For a year, I heard nothing back. I wasn’t even sure the man still lived in Europe.

He called me in March of 1989. Just after midnight. I picked up the phone and heard the great horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. After four notes, I was supposed to come in on the third below. I didn’t. I just listened to him sing another two measures before he crumbled away in scolding. “Shame, shame! We’ll have to give you a measure of pickup next time.”

“Or try another piece,” I said, only half-awake. “What’s up, brother?”

“You’re a cool cat, Joey. So I owe you some letters. I’m calling, okay? That’s what’s up.”

“Who’s dead?”

“Everyone I know or care for. We’re coming to the States. The group.”

“No joke? You? Here?”

“I’m calling before I come, so you won’t rag me.”

“Voces Antiquae does their first North American tour.”

“We could have done it years ago. All in the timing. Did you like the Gesualdo?” I paused so long, we both figured things out. “You never bought it. You never even looked it over in a music store? How about the stuff before that? The Lassus? The hocket song collection?”

I took a breath. “Jonah. Lassus? Hockets? Not where I live. Not in my neighborhood.”

“What do you mean? You live in the Bay, right? They don’t have music stores in Berkeley?”

“I’ve been busy. This teaching gig is two full-time careers. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been anywhere but the school, the grocery store, or the Laundromat. In fact, I can’t tell you the last time I was at the Laundromat. Berkeley might as well be Zanzibar.”

“What the hell? You teach music, don’t you?”

“You’d be amazed how big the field is. So what’s this tour about? I can’t believe you’re finally going to give your countrymen another shot at you.”

“Twelve cities, eight weeks.” He was really wounded, and fighting not to sound it. “I guess I’m lucky there are still twelve cities left in the States that book oldies acts, huh?”

“That’s counting Dallas and Fort Worth separately, right?”

“We’re playing your little backwater at the beginning of June.”

“My little… Not possible.”

“What do you mean, ‘Not possible’? You telling me I don’t know where we’re booked?”

“I’m telling you there’s no way you’re singing in Oakland.”

“Oakland, San Francisco. Same place, right?”

My laugh was like hot tea going down my windpipe. “You come out, I’ll show you around. So how’s everyone in the group? How’s Celeste?” Now his rest told everything. Too late, I asked, “How long ago?”

“Let’s see. Within the last year. It’s fine. Mutual consent. What do they call it? Amicable.”

“What happened?”

“You know these mixed marriages. They never work out.”

“Was there…someone else involved?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’” He spelled it out for me. Kimberly Monera, the blond, bloodless, anemic ghost, had tried to come back to him. Brown child in tow, Tunisian marriage smashed, famous father disowning her, she showed up in northern Europe. She hunted Jonah down and told him that he’d been lodged in the dead center of her imagination, with no one else even close, her whole music-ruined life. “I did nothing, Joey. Didn’t even touch her, except to turn her back around to face Italy and pat her shoulders good-bye.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You think I do?” His voice sounded as it had at fourteen. “As soon as I sent her away…nothing.”

“What do you mean, ‘nothing’?”

“I mean, I felt nothing. Zero. Total anesthesia. I didn’t even want to look at Celeste. I didn’t even want to sit in the same room with her. Don’t blame her for splitting. And it wasn’t just her. Sleeping, eating, drinking, playing, singing: everything that used to be pleasure. Gone.”

“How long did that last?”

“How long? What time is it now?”

I panicked, as if it were still my job to keep the show rolling. “But you’re still recording. Still performing. You’re about to do the debut American tour.”

“Funny thing. Get the discs. Have a listen. Somehow, it’s done wonders for my voice.”

I felt myself slipping back into his orbit. I had to lash out. “Send me one. You have my damn address. Send me one, and I’ll listen.”

He asked about Ruth, and then about his nephews. I gave him the short version. By the time he hung up, I was deep in all the numbness that had swallowed him. Our worlds had fallen off each other’s radar. His performance in San Francisco would have come and gone, and I’d never have heard about it, even in passing.

Three weeks later, a stack of discs arrived. Inside was a short note. “I’m having tickets sent out. For the four of you, or whoever you can scalp them to. See you in June.”

The picture on the Gesualdo CD shocked me. The whole of the newly reconstituted Voces Antiquae stood in a midrange shot in the portal of a Gothic church. They were all white. From that distance: every one of them. I got as far as getting the disc out of the shrink wrap and putting it in the player. But I couldn’t bring myself to listen.

“Go with me,” I begged Ruth. “Not for him. For me. When was the last time I asked you for anything?”

“You ask me for something every week, Joseph. You ask for more gear than my science teachers.”

“I mean for me.”

She picked up the cover of the Gesualdo. Her hands were shaking, as if he could reject her even through that object. Her eyes strayed across the group’s photo. Her mouth twisted a little. “Which one’s Jonah? Just kidding.” She pulled out the liner notes and read the first paragraph. The cadence of the words angered her, and she handed the disc back to me.

“What do you think? Just to hear.”

Her voice was ragged. “Go ask the boys.”

The real CD in a real CD jewel box did intrigue Kwame. This was before worldwide make-your-own. “I got an uncle in a crew? That’s dope. Put it on, brother. Let the brother do his shit.” My nephew didn’t last through the first hemiola. “You fuckin’ with my bean, ’Tween.”

Little Robert, next to him, squealed with delight. “Yeah! Don’t be fuckin’ our beam!” I stared at him. He smirked and clapped a hand over his mouth.

I went back to Ruth. “So what did they say?” she asked. For a moment, she seemed to be hoping for a yes.

“They’re going to wait for the video.”

She lifted her palms. “What do you expect, Joe? Not our world.”

“Our world’s anywhere we go.”

“They don’t want us there. So we don’t have time for it.”

“Can’t be both, Ruth. Can’t both them and us decide.” She said nothing. “He wants you to go, Ruth. He wants us all to be there.”

I held out the tickets Jonah had sent. She gazed at them without touching. “Forty-five dollars? Can we just take the cash instead? Think of all the subsidized lunches…”

“Ruth? For me? It’s eating me up inside.”

She considered it. She really did. But the last sadness in my life was minuscule compared to what still had hold of her. She smiled a little, but not at me. “Can you imagine Robert and me dressing up to go to a show like this? Not without a purse full of smoke bombs, honey.” Then, not looking at me, forgiving me my trespass: “You go if you want. I think you ought to.” I turned to go. “He can always come by here, if he wants.”

The Friday of the concert, I went alone across the bay to Grace Cathedral. I knew the drill well enough not to contact Jonah beforehand. Of course, he didn’t contact me. I sat unrecognized in the fake Île-de-France nave, amazed by how many people turned out for the event. All my life in classical music, the audience had consisted of the disaffected and the dying. Mostly the dying. Either the art truly belonged to another lost time or certain human beings woke one day, crippled with age and desperate to learn a repertoire that was heavier than the rest of existence, before death came and stripped us of all our tribes. Sounds almost as old as death itself, sounds that had never belonged to them, sounds that no longer belonged to anyone. For what could belonging mean to the dead?

But this crowd was young, vital, manicured — crisp with the next new thing. I listened to two couples behind me as the preconcert excitement gathered, comparing the virtues of the Tallis Scholars and the Hilliard Ensemble the way one might compare two subtle Burgundies. I couldn’t follow the discography. I’d been away too long. I twisted around to check the swelling crowd. No more than twelve black faces were in attendance. But of course that was a count no one could make just by looking.

The house went hushed and the group sauntered on. The applause bewildered me. The church was full of fans, people who’d been waiting years to hear this blending. A blast of panic: I wasn’t dressed. I didn’t know the program. There was no way I could get up onstage without humiliating myself. A second later, I was again blissfully no one.

The six voices — two of them unknown to me — wandered at random to their marks on the stage. They dressed more silkily than we had back when. Otherwise, they sought that same casual, choreographed shock. My brother stopped and turned, staring out over the heads of the audience. The others seemed ambushed by calm. They stood for an awful moment, as we must have stood, building the intake, looking inward. Then the first fifths crystallized out of them.

All six were past words. But Jonah floated above the stage. He sang like someone from beyond the grave who’d managed to return for one remembering moment to don again the surprise of flesh. Everyone in the cathedral fell back against their pews. My brother had confessed to me the source of that perfection when we’d spoken over the phone. He’d tapped into the pure, voluptuous power of indifference, the sound of how good all sounds will sound to us once we’re past them.

After the second burst of applause, he seemed to see me, ten pews back. But the smile was too small for even professional recognition. He gave no sign for the rest of the performance that he felt anything but disembodied grace. He’d gotten beyond not only race. He’d gone beyond being anything at all.

My impatience blotted out the second half of that rapturous program. The lovelier the sound, the more criminal I felt sitting and listening. By the second encore, John Sheppard’s In manus tuas, I replayed in my mind every petty betrayal I’d ever committed. The fiercely applauding audience made the group sing two more encores.

I was a wreck by the time I found my way into the receiving line. Jonah sprang forward when he saw me near the head of the queue. But the light in his face dulled a little as he approached me. “You’re by yourself? Sorry, Joey. That’s not what I meant.”

“Of course I’m by myself.” When were we ever anything else?

“They didn’t want to come?” It seemed to confirm his worst suspicions.

Every lie we’d ever told ourselves occurred to me. I spared him all of them.

We were surrounded by packs of envious people who just wanted to stand close to these singers who’d thrown off all chains and could make sounds others only dreamed of. All nearby heads appraised us with that look that listens while pretending not to. Jonah stared at me. “Why not? Why wouldn’t she? How long…” I lifted my palms, pleading. He pursed his lips. “Fine.” He put his hand around my shoulders and led me back to where the other antique voices stood. “So what did you think of that Taverner? Was that the closest thing you’ve ever heard to God?”

Then there were the others. Hans Lauscher greeted me with awkward affection. Marjoleine deGroot swore I looked younger than when I’d left. Peter Chance patted my back. “How long has it been?”

I smiled as well as I could. “Since at least 1610.”

Everyone wanted the reunion to end as quickly as possible. Jonah had to return to attending to his fans. He was grace itself. He signed programs and smiled for pictures with the heavy donors. Total strangers wanted to invite him to fancy dinners, introduce him to celebrities, throw parties in his honor. Although this was ensemble work of the most selfless order, even the tone-deaf could hear where the magic came from. The gentry of the silicon age wanted my brother to love them as they already loved him. I stood by and watched Jonah charm his admirers like some high-art faith healer. It was after midnight by the time we were alone.

“You promised me a tour of your backwater,” Jonah said.

“Not this late. They’ll shoot us. Come say hello to Ruth. Tomorrow morning.”

He shook his head. “She doesn’t want that.”

“She doesn’t? Or you don’t? Somebody has to go first, Jonah.”

He put his hands on my chest. “You’ve got some new forte hints in there, brother.” His smile died at my silence. He withdrew his hand. “I can’t. I can’t force myself on them.”

“Come to school on Monday. Meet the kids. She’ll be there. It’ll be easy.”

“I wish I could. We leave tomorrow.” It seemed almost to save him.

“Come over in the morning at least. No ambushes. I’ll buy you breakfast.”

“You’re on. Draw me a map.”

He came to the apartment. By the time I opened the door, he’d had a chance to compose his face. “We’ve lived in worse,” I reminded him.

“Beats where I’m living now, actually. Celeste kept the Brandstraat place.” He pored over every American commodity in my kitchen — peanut butter, corn on the cob, cold cereal. “Look at this!” He held a cardboard box of oat squares with a picture of two little mixed-race kids, their smiling faces labeledTWIN PACK.

“Multiracialism’s hot,” I told him.

“That was our problem, Mule, a million years ago. We didn’t have the right marketing!”

I took him to my habitual breakfast place, second-guessing the choice a hundred times. We walked. Jonah took in the blocks, crumbling or gentrifying, rising up or succumbing to a war fought house to house, a war he’d spent his life evading. He walked alongside me, nodding. I gave him running color commentary — who’d been evicted, who’d been bilked out, who’d gotten arrested. My neighbors waved or called out Saturday breakfast greetings. I called back, making no introductions.

“It reminds me of the old neighborhood,” Jonah said.

“What old neighborhood?”

“You know. The Heights. Our childhood?”

I stopped and gaped. “It’s nothing like New York. It couldn’t be further from our childhood if you—”

“I know that, Joseph. That doesn’t mean it can’t remind me.”

Milky’s was its usual Saturday-morning carnival. Parents of my students, my colleagues, my neighbors, the staff and regulars: Everyone asked about Ruth and the boys, how the latest school expansion plans were going, how I’d been, who the hell this foreigner was. Milky himself came to greet us in full green silk Chinese pajamas with a navy pea coat over them. “Your brother, you say? Never shit a shitter, Joe Strom.”

Only after we slipped into a booth did I get a chance to breathe. Jonah grinned from across the linoleum table. “You sly mother. You’re more famous than I am.” He insisted on ordering everything I did. “It’s Denver tonight. The Alps. I’m screwed for air supply already, the way it is.”

All breakfast long, he asked about his nephews. I gave him the facts: Kwame’s cage-rattling, word-battling rap. Little Robert’s lightning speed with reading, writing, and, most of all, numbers. Jonah kept nodding and pressing for details.

We passed through the greetings gauntlet again on the way out. By now, the funky foreigner with the ironed T-shirt and creased khakis was a regular, and all my friends urged him to come back next week.

“I’ll be here,” Jonah lied. Bald-faced. “Have my usual ready.” Milky and company laughed, and I hated my brother. Two weeks and he, too, might have belonged.

“Come to Ruth’s,” I said outside the diner.

“Can’t. I have to meet the group at the airport in fifty minutes.”

“You’ll never make it.”

“I’ll set my watch back.” We turned down my street, Jonah in thought. “So you’re good, then? This is it? This is all that you need?”

I nodded, ready to lie to him. Ruth, the school, my students: They were considerable. But they were not, in truth, all I needed. I was missing something I could not even name. Something in my past was waiting to be permitted. Some piece inside me needed scoring out, the one I’d once promised Will Hart I’d write down. But I could no longer hear where my notes were pointing. The chance to compose them had passed me by.

We stopped on the sidewalk in front of my building. I looked at my brother, his clothes flapping in that clement breeze. I was not good, not altogether. Not even close, in fact. I was still working for someone else. Some other blood-relation claim on me. But I wasn’t about to give Jonah the satisfaction of hearing as much. “Yep,” I said. “This is it. All anyone could ask for.”

“What are you teaching them? Your fourth graders. What kind of music?”

“K through three. And I’m teaching them everything.”

“Everything, you say?”

“You know. The good stuff. Pitches in time.”

“What kind of everything?” He eyed me. Too much to duck. He looked at his watch, already dashing.

“I give them what’s theirs. Their music. Their identity.”

“What’s theirs, Joey? If you have to give it… You give them their music? Their identity? Identical to what? Only thing you’re identical to is yourself, and that only on good days. Stereotyping. That’s what you’re giving them. Nobody’s anybody else. Their music is whatever nobody can give them. Good luck finding that.”

He wasn’t entirely dead yet. His soul’s handover deal had been signed and sealed but not yet delivered. I grabbed his elbow and slowed him. “Maestro. Chill, huh? I get them to teach me the songs they know. I trade them for a few old tunes. Stuff nobody else knows. I give them all kinds of noise — a little gospel swell, a little twelve-bar, even a little Pilgrim and Founding Fathers crap now and then. Theirs? Not theirs? Who the hell am I to say? It’s only music, for God’s sake.”

We’d gotten as far as my apartment. I motioned for him to come up for a moment. Jonah wagged his head. He looked around my neighborhood. “Unbelievable, Joey. You’re passing. You’re really passing. Remember how they used to call Jonah Strom the black Fischer-Dieskau?”

“Nobody ever called you that, Jonah. That was you.”

“Well, you’ve become the black Joseph Strom.” He cuffed my shoulder and turned to get back into his rental. There was pride; there was envy. Not dead yet. He had at least two out of the big seven covered. “Don’t worry, brother. Your secret’s safe with me.”

I couldn’t help watching for the reviews in New York, where the Voces Antiquae tour wound up. It was their hour onstage, or at least their fifteen minutes. The New York critics fell over one another declaring how long they’d been waiting for such a sound. Jonah sent me the clip from the Times —“All Ars Antiqua Is Nova Again”—afraid I might miss it. The piece singled him out as perhaps the clearest-voiced male singing early music in any country. No mention of color, outside the vocal. He’d clipped his business card to the corner of the rave and scribbled, “Warmest regards, your leading Negro recitalist.”

At last he had the vindication he’d so long sought. He had the listening world’s adulation, and he made a sound that stood for nothing other than what it was. But he and I both knew that the heat from that “nova” was thrown off from a core already burned through.

Yet his act had one more twist. Now that he stood for himself alone, he belonged to everyone but himself. His brilliance caught the moment’s buzz; his sound became anyone’s to interpret. Fame is the weapon of last resort that culture uses to neutralize runaways. A few months after his group made its North American tour, their Gesualdo recording won a Grammy. In December of 1990, they were named the oxymoronic “Early Music Performers of the Year.” I actually saw a poster of them, like a police lineup, on the wall of a music shop in downtown Oakland where I’d gone to buy mallets.

The kicker came half a year later, three months after Rodney King began being beaten nightly on ghostly videotape. Ruth showed up one morning in my broom-cupboard office at the school, waving the latest issue of Ebony. “I can’t believe it. I can’t take it.” She threw the magazine down on my desk, shaking all over. She pressed her lips to her teeth to keep from crying. I opened to the cover story: “50 Leaders for Tomorrow’s America.” I flipped through the list of scientists, engineers, physicians, athletes, and artists, testing each entry for its power to offend. I waded through the entire roster before I saw him. I raised my eyes to my sister’s. Hers were running in tears. “How, Joey? Tell me how.” She stamped the ground. “It’s worse than minstrelsy.”

I had to look down, back at the incredible page. “I don’t know how. Bastard’s not even in America. At least he’s buried down there in slot number forty-two, where he can’t hurt nobody.”

An awful sound escaped her. It took me two seconds to decide: Laughter. Maniacal. She reached out toward me. “Give it back. I have to show my sons.”

I was there at dinner that night, when she did. “Your blood relation,” she told them. “I knew this boy when he was no bigger than you. You see where you can go with a little effort? Look at all those stars he’s up there with. All the good they’ve gotten up to.”

“Half of them really white,” Kwame declared.

Ruth stared him down. “Which half? You tell me.”

“All those technocrackers. Look at this motherfucker: He don’t even know he’s nathan. CEO? That’s Casper the Ethnic Oreo.”

“This one?” little Robert said, pointing and smirking. “This one’s really white?”

“What makes them white?” Ruth challenged.

“This,” Kwame said, dismissing the whole magazine. “This caveboy noise. Whole white devil power shit.”

“What if I told you half the white race was walking around black and didn’t even know it?”

“I’d say you be bugging. Illin’ on your children.”

His mother shot me a silent appeal. “She’s right,” I said. “White’s got to prove white, all the way back. Who can do that?”

My nephew appraised me: hopelessly insane. “Wack. Don’t even know what I’m saying.”

Little Robert held up both arms. “The whole human race started in Ethiopia.”

Kwame took his little brother in a headlock and Indian-burned his scalp until the seven-year-old screamed with pleasure. “That’s right, bean boy. You all that. You my whole Top Fifty for Tomorrow, all rolled in one.”

Robert was the kind of child for whom his mother’s school was invented. He blazed through the day’s subjects, alarming his muzzy schoolmates. Every bit of learning that caught his eye, he set up in the sky like a glittering star. Stories left him dizzy with pleasure. “Is this real?” he’d want to know about every Reading Hour book. “Did this ever happen yet?”

He was his mother all over again, doing voices, tilting his head and squinting like the latest ridiculous adult. He built a walking robot out of Lego blocks that brought the whole first grade to a thirty-minute standstill. Math was his sandbox. He solved logic puzzles two grades above him. With nothing but poker chips and a world map, he designed games of complex trade. He loved to draw. History kept him sick with attention; he didn’t yet know that the stories were already over. He wept when he learned about the boats, the sealed holds, the auction blocks, the destroyed families. For Robert, everything that happened was still happening, somewhere.

But he could fly only so long as no one paid him any mind. The minute anyone fussed over him, he watched himself, and fell. The world’s praise of any black child carries an annihilating surprise. I’d grown up on it. Robert had only to hear that he might be doing something remarkable for him to stumble in apologies. He only wanted to be liked. Special meant wrong. In my class, he shone like the aurora. His voice anchored the whole alto section. But every time his marveling classmates mocked his skill, he hid his light back under a bushel for another several weeks.

For show-and-tell on the musician of his choice, he brought in the Ebony. It was months old, but he was still thinking about it. The room tittered as he spoke, and I hushed them, making things worse. All these black men making the future — fifty of them. And one of them was supposed to be Robert’s uncle, who’d changed the future of music a thousand years old. A brother, his mother had told him, might do anything. Robert spoke with that blast of pride already shot through with embarrassment and doubt.

Two weeks after the oral report, he came into my class with a sheaf of pages, each marked in a rash of colored-pen hieroglyphics. “This is mine. I wrote this.” He raced to explain the elaborate musical notation he’d devised, a system describing subtle changes in pitches and duration, notation that preserved many things lost in the standard staff. He’d written independent parts, thinking not only in running lines but also in a series of vertical moments. His chords made sense — delaying, repeating, turning back on themselves before coming home. His brother had sold for pocket change the little electric keyboard I’d given them. Ruth had no other instrument in the house. Robert had not only invented a system of notation from scratch; he’d written this whole work of harmony in his mind’s ear.

“How did you do this? Where did this come from?” I couldn’t stop asking him.

He shrugged and cowered, crumbling under my awe. “Came from me. I just…heard it. You think it sounds like anything?”

“We have to find out. We’ll perform it.” The idea made him pleasantly ill. “What’s it for?” He stood there, bewildered by the question. “I mean, what instruments?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about…instruments.”

“You mean you want it sung?” He nodded. First he’d thought of it. “Do you have words?”

He shook his head and axed the air. “No words. Just music.” Words out loud would poison it.

He taught the class to read his notation, and we performed the piece in school assembly. Robert conducted. So long as his music lasted, his soul climbed up into an ice blue sky on a bolt of mustard yellow. Five groups of voices chanted back and forth to one another, just as his notes said, clashing and cohabiting. His rowdy counterpoint came from another orbit, until then invisible. The sounds in his head kept him from hearing the din of the assembled gym. But the moment the piece was over, the noise broke over him.

The applause threatened to stop Robert from breathing. His eyes went wide, searching the room for a fire exit. Kids whistled and catcalled, teasing him. He bowed and knocked over the conductor’s stand. It brought down the house. I thought he might suffocate on the spot. Every muscle in his face worked to declare, Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. He flinched and fended off every admiration while jumping up to look out over the heads of his peers, trying to scout down the only opinion that mattered to him: his adored brother’s.

Kwame lumbered up afterward in his low-riding jeans. He’d skipped a day of his own school to be there. His arms made those little cartwheel jerks I couldn’t decode, half praise, half ridicule. His face screwed up to one side. “What you call that?”

Robert died by inches. “I call it ‘Legend.’”

“What legend? You think you’re a legend? No pump, no bump. Who you down with anyway?” Neither boy looked at me. They couldn’t afford to.

I thought the child would break apart, right there in front of the entire assembled New Day School. Kwame saw it, too. He puppy-cuffed his listless brother. “Hey. I said, Hey. It’s fresh. It’s slamming. You come marinate with me and my homies next time Dig’s in the house. See how you make some real G-funk.”

In his final year of votech school, Kwame’s band had grown to fill his entire horizon. They’d achieved a kind of mastery, one whose words entirely eluded me but whose pulse even I couldn’t deny. He had nothing else. Ruth tried to stay with his every evasion, keeping him accountable while propping him up without his knowing. “You thinking beyond school?”

“Don’t ride me, Mama.”

“Not riding. Helping you scout.”

“Me and the Nation. We can make it work. I don’t mean bank. Just making it.”

“You want to rap, then you need a battle. Just find something to hold yourself together while you make yourself the best.”

She unloaded on me privately. “God, I wish I weren’t an educator. I’d whack that child up side of the head until he got his life in order.”

In August, a car in a Brooklyn Hasidic rebbe’s motorcade ran a red light, hit another car, swerved onto the sidewalk, and killed a Guyanese boy Robert’s age. For three days, Crown Heights hammered itself. Kwame and N Dig Nation wrote a long rap that replayed the madness from every available angle. The song was called “Black Vee Jew.” Maybe it participated; maybe it revealed. You never know with art.

“Your grandfather was a Jew,” I told him. “You’re a quarter Jewish.”

“I hear you. That’s def. What you think of that noise, Uncle bro?”

Whatever the words, the song got the group its first airtime — real radio, all over the Bay. It intoxicated Kwame. “Beats the best method that bank can buy.” The band made five hundred dollars each. Kwame spent his on new audio equipment.

Late in September, Ruth called me up, out of control. All three members of N Dig Nation had been arrested for breaking into a music store in West Oakland and leaving with two dozen CDs. “They’re gonna finish him. He’s nothing but meat. They’ll kill him, and no one will know.” It took me a quarter of an hour to talk her down enough to get her to meet me at the station where Kwame was being held. Ruth came apart again when we got there and she saw her son in handcuffs.

“We weren’t biting nothing,” Kwame told the two of us. He sat behind a metal gun rail, a bruise covering the side of his face where the cops had held him to the wall. He was swaggering with the fear of death. “Just a little who ride.”

I thought Ruth might kill the boy herself. “You speak the language I taught you.”

“We buy stuff from the man all the time. His door was wide open. We were just gonna take a listen and bring all that noise back to him when we got done.”

“Records? You stole records? What kind of suicidal—”

“CDs, Mama. And we didn’t steal any.”

“What in the name of Jesus did you think you were doing, stealing records?”

He looked at her with an incomprehension so great, it was almost pity. “We’re on the way up. We have to drop science. Bust the bustas. Know what I’m sayin’?”

Ruth was brilliant at the sentencing. She asked for a punishment that might save a life, rather than waste it. But the judge pored over what he called Kwame’s “history,” and he decided that society was best served by putting this juvenile menace away for two years. He stressed the seriousness of breaking and entering, while Kwame kept saying, “We didn’t break.” Property was the heart of society, the judge said. The crime of theft tore out that heart. As his sentence was being read, Kwame muttered just loud enough for me to hear, “The man’s nathan. He’s not even dead.”

Two days later, my sister saw her son off to prison. “Your father was in jail once. You remember why. So what are you going to do with this? That’s what the world wants to know.” She was crying as she spoke, crying for everything that had ever happened to this boy, all the way back for generations before his birth. Kwame couldn’t hold his head up long enough to meet her eye. She lifted it for him. “Look at me. Look at me. You are not just yourself.”

Kwame nodded. “I hear you.” And then he was waving good-bye.

Once Ruth was alone with me, she fell apart. “White teen goes to jail, it’s a pencil entry on the C.V. Youthful foolishness. Something to laugh at down the line. Black teen goes to jail, it’s another fatality. Judgment on the entire race. A hole he’ll never climb out of. It’s my fault, Joseph. I put them here. I didn’t have to drag them back into the cauldron. I could have set them up in some sleepwalking suburb.”

“Not your fault, Ruth. Don’t crucify yourself for half a millennium—”

“You see what he’s done to Robert. Big brother’s going to be the hero of a lifetime. Prerolled role model. That child sits in his room inventing whole new schools of arithmetic on his interlocking knuckles. He’s taught himself plane geometry. But he won’t count to twenty without mistakes if his brother’s looking at him the wrong way. Doesn’t want to be anything he’s not supposed to be. And he could be anything. Anything he wants… ”

We both heard at the same time, as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Ruth looked at me, her nostrils flared. “Her son’s quit the country and her grandson’s in prison.” Then her throat caved in and she howled. “What have we done to her, Joey?”

Robert made his way through the third grade, toward his graduation from New Day School. He butted up against that age when it was murder for Ruth to encourage him in anything. Whatever she praised in him, he abandoned. With half his attention, he’d fill a sheet of blank newsprint with astonishing geometries. But if she hung it on the wall, he’d tear it down and burn it.

“I’m going to lose him, Joseph. Lose him faster than I lost Kwame.”

“You haven’t lost Kwame.” Kwame had, in fact, started a course in mechanical drawing at the prison.

We’d been to see him almost every weekend. “This place is for marks,” he told me. There was something incredulous about his insight. “Know what? They built this prison to fit us. Then they build us to fit it. Not me, Uncle. Once I stroll, this place can rot with my history in it.” He and his mother started a little ritual each time we said good-bye. How long? Not long. Meet you back in the new old world.

In early 1992, Jonah wrote to say he was coming through town in late April to sing at the Berkeley Festival. That’s how pointless separate continents had become. I wrote him back on a school fund-raising postcard: “ Iheard you last time.” And below the school’s address, I wrote out the date of his concert, the time 1:30P.M., and my class’s room number.

My class didn’t need any special audience. There was no audience now, where I came from. There was only choir, and we’d have gone on preparing our score whoever showed up or didn’t on any given day. I was a grade school teacher of music. I lived for it, and that’s exactly how my kids sang. And yet I had given Jonah the time and room number of my best lot — real air walkers, his unmet nephew Robert among them. I told them we might have a special visitor. Even that much felt wrong.

I worked hard to make that day the most ordinary that had ever been. No chance he could make it: I’d guaranteed that when choosing the date. He never did anything the afternoon before a concert. But if, in some parallel universe, he did, we were ready with a sound that would unmake him.

By the time I set up for that afternoon class, I was gripped by a stage fright more violent than the bout that had once almost cost us Jonah’s first major competition. Children sense everything, and mine broke out with bursts of teasing, all of them sung, per the class rule. I settled them down and started them in on scalar swells, our usual warm-up. “I’m still standing,” up to the top of their giggling ranges and gently down again. My brother didn’t show. He couldn’t. There was nothing left of him, outside the concert hall. He’d disappeared into consummation. My body began to feel the relief of not having to meet him this time around.

We rolled out our stuff. Not despite. Not even anyway. With no one to impress, we delighted ourselves: all we have, really, when everything’s figured. We followed the usual steps to daily ecstasy. First, we laid down the elementary pulse, what my father years ago called “the laws of time.” Two kids on toms gave us a groove good enough to stay in for as long as we could move. Then we layered on the beat, Burundi drumming, a long, relaxed twenty-four-pulse cycle, with another half dozen players on pitched percussion doing what they’d have done gladly for a living all life long, plus some.

When all the plates were in the air and spinning, we cracked open some tunes. My kids knew the drill. They had been through it often enough to bring it to elementary school perfection. I conducted from the piano, waving my finger in the air, landing on a girl in a mint jumper, her hair in cornrows, grinning, already picked before I even knew I was picking her.

“What are you thinking about when you wake up?” I tossed the question above the trance of cycling pulses. This girl, my beacon Nicole, was ready for it.

Breakfast is on, and

I’m gonna eat like a Queen!

Mayhem reigned, but the rhythm held. She soloed, then settled into a cycle of her own. We took her pitch as home and set up camp. I pointed to another favorite in the front row, lanky, eager Judson, his tapping cross-trainers the size of his chest. “What did you think about last night, falling asleep?” Judson already knew.

Man, I was running,

through a long silver tunnel,

faster than anyone.

The two of them spun around each other, finding their entrances, nudging their pitches and syncopations to fit. I took a few more in that pitch center. “Where’s your safest place in the world?”

There’s a spot on a hill

at the end of my street

where I can look out

over everything.

“What did you see on the way to school? When are you best? Who you going to be this time next year?” I brought them in, clipping a phrase, drawing another out, speeding or slowing them as needed to get the roux to set. Half a dozen singers hung on to one another in midair, constantly changing, unchanged. I hushed them into a diminuendo, then started up five more. I played out the new starting pitch, then built a group at the dominant. Your five favorite words. The dream Saturday afternoon. Your name if your name wasn’t yours. I waved them into an alternation: one-five, five-one.

Then came the leap into changes. I thumped a key and pointed, and three singers transposed their phrase to that new place in the scale. They still knew, at age eight: a pitch for every place we have to go.

My choir started smirking, but not on account of my conducting. The singers’ mouths gaped, huge as fish in an aquarium, at something over my shoulder. Keeping time, I turned, to see Jonah standing in the classroom door, his own mouth open, a lesson in how to make a throat wide enough for rapture. I couldn’t stop to greet him; my hands were full of notes. He gestured me to turn back around and keep afloat that feather on the breath of God.

I hushed the first two groups and took them both aside, readying a third to travel into the relative minor. The most scared you’ve ever been. Five words you’d rather die than hear. I traced my finger in the air, searching for someone to sing The heaviest weight pressing on you, and landed on Robert. He took only two beats. He, too, was waiting for me.

My Daddy is dead

and my brother’s in prison.

When is the zero of change, the spot in time when time begins? Not the big bang, or even the little one. Not when you learn to count your first tune. Not that first now that twists back on itself. All moments start from the one when you see how they all must end.

Robert drew his thread, looping it over and over, into the elementary pulse. A cloud passed over the choir, but our song already anticipated that change in the light. I now had all the chords I needed to get anywhere pitches could go. I brought the lines in and out, swelled and hushed, slowed, then sped, chopped and extended, plucking out a solo and pasting together quartets, moving the whole freely from one key to another.

My Daddy is dead.

And I was running.

To that spot on a hill.

Where breakfast is on and I can look out,

but my brother’s in prison.

They knew already how to make it go. They ceased to care about the strange adult or even notice him. We stayed in the swell, working our favorite rondo form, coming back, whenever we strayed too far, to a full choral shout of “I’m still standing.” I pulled out every stop, everything every student of mine had ever taught me about how music runs. It shamed me that I needed so badly to impress him. As if joy ever needed justifying, or could justify anything. And my shame stoked me to lift all my voices higher.

We rose as far as we ever had. We flowed back into ourselves, and I stirred the waters for one more full flood before returning to sea level. But as we crested one last time, I heard a ringing like a bell. Its attack was something only weather made. I hadn’t conducted it; it came from outside my students’ ranges, but nestled into their outlined harmonies, notes so sustained they were almost stopped. It took me an instant, forever, to place: my brother singing Dowland. The tune came from a life ago. The words from yesterday:

Bird and fish can fall in love.

I turned around to see, but Jonah waved me back again. He came alongside the end of the choir’s back row. The resonance he released rang like a gong. But my kids knew a good thing when they made one. I kept conducting, and they kept coming back in. I stole a look at Jonah. He lifted an eyebrow at me like he used to do, back in the day. And we were off.

Everywhere I brought my class, he found a way to follow. This time, I made him read my mind. Accompany me. Scraps of will-o’-the-wisp, poet love, songs of the death of children, the Dies Irae, old broken have-mercies: He fit them into the running chorus, changed by everything they harmonized. He gave them game. He sang in that high, clear, inevitable blade of light his whole lifetime had gone into perfecting. Even the children felt the power. Always the same seven words, scatting where he needed, as if born to it.

We circled on a giant updraft, drifting through the keys. His voice, joined to the voices of my children, was like a lamp in the night. We could have stayed up there for years, except for one accident. When he slipped into the classroom, Jonah failed to close the door. So every chant of “I’m still standing”— a little bit louder now; a little bit softer now — washed down the hall, the free property of anyone who heard. I didn’t realize we were disturbing the peace until the chorus joined in behind me.

A sober instructor of social studies came by to hush us up but then stayed on to sing. The woman who taught first grade math got everyone clapping. Kids pressed into the room until it was strictly SRO. Not one of them audience. The bigger the chorus grew, the faster it drew. Then our mountain of sound fell away for a measure, and not on my cue. I knew by the next upbeat what it had to be. I saw her in the doorway, even before I turned around: the school’s director.

I can’t tell what Ruth heard. Her face showed nothing. But there were her singing kids, small for the last time, and there was her brother, singing for her for the first time since we were small. Every stacked sound stayed whole in the changing chord. Then there was one more obbligato line. Who knew where the tune came from? She made it up. Improvised. The words, though, were given her:

But where will they build their nest?

Ruth’s voice went through me like death. Refusal, lament: the only answer to his holdout hope. I felt as I had when I’d heard her sing back in Philadelphia. Infinitely bereft. Her voice was lovely enough, even in ruin, to prove how the dream of music was never more than that.

One by one, I brought the lines back home. The cycles of rhythm came to rest, the pulse unwove, and the room erupted, applauding itself. Kids broke loose in all directions, a spontaneous uprising that declared the rest of the hour a national holiday. A ring formed around Jonah. “How’d you do that?” Judson grilled him. By way of answer, Jonah let loose with a bolt of Monteverdi.

My family cowered in the celebrating room. Robert drifted to his mother’s side, guilty, caught in the act. She slunk toward me, as if I, of all people, offered safety. “Robert,” Ruth told the boy, in that same weary fear with which she sent the bird and the fish, homeless, away, “that’s your uncle.”

“I know,” the boy scolded. He tried, in his excitement, to avoid the eyes of all adults. He pointed at me. “Your brother.”

Then Jonah stood beside us. “You hear that? Did you hear?” He reached to hug his sister.

Ruth stepped back. “Don’t! Too long. You can’t just…” She lost control of her voice. But she refused to cry.

Robert clenched, ready to protect her. Jonah grazed Ruth’s arm, deniable free comfort. Then he turned to clap my shoulder. “You’re a genius. The van Karajan of music. Now that’s using the stick.” He looked down at the half-sized figure at his waist. Recognition knocked him back. “Neph,” he said, exploring his own awe.

“What’s that?” Robert asked, a sucker for a puzzle. “Something like a nephew?”

Jonah nodded soberly. “A lot like a nephew.” He looked up at Ruth. “Amazing. He’s beautiful.”

“Why should that be amazing?” Cold as memory.

“That’s not. My luck is.”

Robert screwed his face up. “Your voice does funny things.”

“My standing here at all. My seeing you.”

Ruth snapped her head away. “You’re heavier,” she said. She looked back. Jonah held out his arms and looked down the length of his body. “I mean…” She traced her own throat.

“Don’t say heavier. Say richer.”

“Why are you here? Why did you come back?”

The child chorus drifted reluctantly from the room to their next assignments. My students. Jonah raced to the door to slap their hands. It bought him time. He came back, talking to Robert, gazing around the room. “Look at this! I had no idea. So this is your school!”

“My mama’s,” Robert said.

“Yours,” Ruth told her child. Tears now. But the voice was hers.

“Fantastic,” Jonah said. “I haven’t had so much fun with singing since…” He looked at Robert. “Since I was you. You heard what that sounded like? This is it. This is the next thing. People have never heard anything like this.”

Ruth’s laugh was incredulous. “Maybe not your people.”

“I’m serious. That was a sound. We could get there. Make this go. Play anywhere. I’m telling you. People need this.”

Ruth was shaking her head, her mouth pulling at her ears. “People have had this forever.”

“Not me.”

“Exactly.”

“Ruth. I’m here. I’m asking. You can’t leave me hanging.”

“You left us.”

“You have your work,” I said.

He dismissed me. “We’ve been on autopilot for almost two years. It’s pretty much over, antiquity. Heaven has played. I need something closer.”

“You?” I searched for irony, but he was grave. “You can’t quit. It’s a dying art. Who’s going to keep it alive if you quit?”

“Never fear. Western concert music is in the able hands of millions of Koreans and Japanese.”

Ruth felt it then, too. The bottomless well he’d fallen into. My sister held her son by the shoulders, armor in front of her. She reached out over Robert and cupped the back of Jonah’s neck. “Some folks die the way they were born.”

“All folks,” I said.

A smile ripped through Jonah. His sister was talking to him. Touching him. Didn’t matter what she was saying, how many barbs.

“Neph?” Jonah looked down at Robert. The future’s court of appeals. “Sing with me?”

“My mama says you’re a land unto yourself. You always make your own rules.”

“Where did you hear that?” Ruth said. “I never in my life…”

“You ever break the law?”

Jonah regarded his flesh’s half-sized image. “All the time. Me and your uncle JoJo here? We trashed them all. Major-league transgressors. We broke laws you never even heard of.”

Robert shot me a doubtful look. But his doubt floundered when he saw me remembering. “You ever go to jail?”

Jonah shook his head. “They never caught us. We were in the papers a few times, leading suspects. But they never caught up with us.” And he made a sign, swearing the boy to secrecy.

“You ever kill anyone?”

Jonah thought. No more hiding. “A couple times. Pushed a woman in an oven once. I wasn’t much older than you.”

The boy looked to his mother for help. Ruth pressed her hand to her shaking lip. Robert looked at me, sense’s last resort. I motioned toward the deserted room. “I need to straighten up here.”

Ruth wrestled free of herself. “And I’ve got a school to run. And you, young man. Don’t you need to be somewhere? Mrs. Williams, for math? Hmm?”

“Know what else you need?” I could hear it in Jonah’s voice. Desperate fishing. “An African name. Like your brother.”

It stopped them both, mother and son. Ruth stared. “How do you know about African names?” How do you know about his brother?

“Oh, please. I’ve been to Africa many times. On tour. Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire. They love us there. We’re more popular in Lagos than we are in Atlanta.” He took his nephew by the shoulders. “I’m going to call you Ode. Good Bini name. It means ‘Born along the road.’”

The child checked his mother. Ruth cast up her hands. “If the man says so.”

“What does Kwame mean?”

“Haven’t a clue. Ode is the only one I know. That’s what they named me, last time I was there.”

“Ode?” Robert asked, doubtful.

His uncle said, “Roger.”

“Ode,” Robert said, pointing at me. Got it?

I showed him my palms. “Fine with me. From now on. Until you tell me to stop.”

He dashed off to his last class, criminally late. The abandoned adults fell silent. Ruth and Jonah traded a few hostages, both trying hard to leap twenty years. She and I walked him out to the parking lot, where he grew eager all over again.

“Come on. Bird and Fish, Incorporated. Why not? Make a new species? Old wine in new bottles. Sing unto the Lord a new song. Be great for the kids. Talk about education. This thing could be the best thing ever for your school.”

“How would it do anything for this school?” Even Ruth’s suspicion sounded administrative. I looked at her through Jonah’s widening eyes.

He stared at her across confusion too wide to bridge. “Come on. Classics meets the streets. Make your baby hipper and smarter. There’s a ready market. The country’s been waiting for it.”

She hung her head and let it shake, awed by the distance. She couldn’t help snickering. “‘Waiting’? You really mean it, don’t you?” She tipped her face skyward. “Oh God. Where do I start?”

He smiled back, desperate. “Start by picking your top kids and letting me find us a promoter.”

“Where have you been living? Have you no eyes?”

“The eyes are only mediocre. But the ears are extraordinary.”

“Then listen, damn you. Listen, for once.”

“I did. It’s good, Ruth. Better than either. Better than identity. Hybrid vigor.”

She slumped in the face of his hopelessness. He wanted it to be capitulation. But he saw what it was. In an instant, he knew: This chorus was the thing he’d trained for his whole life. And somehow his life’s devotion — his uncompromising will, his wriggling free, always toward this unseen goal, untyped, note by note, perfecting his own line — was exactly what would keep this all-keys choir from ever being his.

When he spoke, he was a child, broken and bare. “You think about it. No rush. I’ll put some ideas together. I’ll call you before we head to L.A.”

Ruth might have killed him with the smallest-caliber monosyllable. But she didn’t. Jonah stood in front of her. “Twenty years. Why?” She bit her lip and shook her head — not at his question, but at him. He nodded. “Won’t be so long, next time.” She let him embrace her, and she held on, even as he pulled away. He didn’t embrace me; for us, it had been only three. Instead, he shoved into my hands an article he’d clipped from the previous day’s New York Times. April 24: “Scientists Report Profound Insight on How Time Began.”

“You have to read this, Joey. Message from Da, from beyond the grave.”

Jonah drove off. Ruth waved a little, after he was too far to see. She felt no need even to mention his scheme to me. We were our brother’s future. But he wasn’t ours.

He didn’t call us before he went to L.A. The press of performing tied him up. The Berkeley Festival was a resplendent conquest, by all paid accounts. He and Voces Antiquae flew down to Los Angeles on the second-to-the-last day of April. Their plane was one of the last to land at LAX before the outbreak shut down all incoming flights.

Ruth called first, that Wednesday night. She spoke so softly into the phone, I thought there was something wrong with the line. She kept saying, “Joey, Joey.” I was sure one of the boys was dead. “They let them all go. All four of them. Not guilty on every count. Beaten fifty-six times, on videotape, for the whole world to see, and it’s like nothing happened. It’s not possible. Not even here.”

Jonah’s article from the Times had been the first piece of news I’d read for months. I’d given up on current events. News was nothing to me, a cruel tease. It was nothing but the delusion that things were still happening. I’d dismissed it. All my news came down to New Day School. I’d forgotten the King verdict was even due. As Ruth told me of the blanket acquittal, I’d already heard the outcome, word for word, a long time before.

Now news took me in again. I flipped on my set while Ruth was still on the line. Aerial-reconnaissance video showed what I thought at first was King. But this was another man, the other color, pulled from his truck and stoned live for the cameras. “Are you seeing this?” I asked her. Something in me wanted her to hurt. To kill her self-possession as dead as mine. “You see where belonging gets us?”

“It’s never ending,” my sister kept saying into the receiver. And it was.

The staff of New Day kept a broadcast going in the teachers’ room all Thursday. Nobody was really teaching. We all kept slipping in to watch. Not even horrified. Just dulled, in that place that would forever return to claim us all. Plumes of fire streaked the skyline of the dying city, burning out of control. The police retreated, leaving the streets to looters of every persuasion. The National Guard assembled on their beachheads but couldn’t move out for want of ammunition. Shops went up in flames like shavings in a kiln. The body count climbed. One of the third-grade teachers turned on a set in a classroom, thinking it might be instructive. She turned it off again five minutes later, instruction outgrowing itself. The rout was total, and as darkness fell again the second day, hell spread so fast, it felt positively willed.

Ruth wouldn’t go home alone. She demanded I have dinner with her. While we ate, all hope burned. “What are they doing?” my nephew asked. “What’s happening there? Are they having a war?” My sister stared at the news feed throughout dinner, biting her lip. I’d never before seen her refuse to answer Robert’s questions.

“Where’s your brother?” she asked. “Why the hell doesn’t he call us?” I didn’t say he was lying on the pavement in South Central, sight-singing the sky. I let Ruth’s question, too, go unanswered.

He called, with answers, at 2:40A.M. Friday. I must have been dreaming, because I was talking to him before I heard the phone ring. He sounded thrilled, on the verge of some huge insight. “Joey? Mule? I’m here. Again.” I had to wake up enough to hear he was in shock. “You see what this means? Right back dead in the middle of it. I heard the whole thing, at least until they got my ear. Every line. Tell her that. You have to tell her.”

I pulled my head from out of sleep and tried to talk him down. “Jonah. Thank God you’re safe. It’s okay, now. They said on the news tonight. Things are returning to normal.”

“Normal? This is normal, Joey.” Shrieking: “This.”

“Jonah. Listen to me. It’s okay. Are you at the hotel? Just stay inside. The army—”

“Inside? Inside? You never had a clue, did you? Fool!” I heard the nakedness. He’d thought me a fool all our shared life. And he was right. But he blasted forward, unable to wait for either of us. He was struggling to breathe. “I’ve been out in the middle of this since yesterday afternoon. I went in, Mule. Looking for what I was supposed to do. Did everything I know. I stood on a burning corner and tried to form a pickup chorus of ‘Got the whole world in his hands.’ You have to tell her that. She’s wrong. Wrong about me. Don’t let her think what she thinks.” His voice was huge with the performance of a lifetime. He was drawing on that ancient lesson his lover-teacher once gave him: If you can’t be someone more than yourself, don’t even think about walking out on stage.

“I’ll tell her, Jonah.” I had to repeat it before he calmed down enough to make sense.

He tittered as he spoke. “They canceled the concert. I guess the early music crowd was afraid to come out for a Last Judgment. The Europeans were freaking. Trapped in the country of their worst nightmares. They barricaded themselves in the hotel. I had to go back, Joey. It was you and me, the night of our first recording.” The curve of his life was calling for him to come trace it, somewhere out there in the burning streets.

He headed into the violence, toward the pitch of maximum distress, with nothing but his overtrained ears to lead him on. “What did you look like?” I asked.

“Look? Like me!” It took him a moment; he was still reeling. “Chino pants and a teal Vroom and Dreesmann dress shirt. I know: total suicide pact. Oh. A solid black T-shirt underneath that saysFEAR NO ART. The limo wouldn’t take me past the I-Ten. I must have gone the last two miles on foot. Can’t remember everything. Out of my gourd, Joey. That crowd. You remember. I no longer meant myself. I was walking back into the sea. Taking my first voice lesson. Dum, dum, dum. There was nothing. Nothing but fires. Götterdämmerung on a two-billion-dollar budget. Mule. I thought opera was someone else’s nightmare. I never knew that someone else was me.

“I just followed the smoke. Kept looking around for you. I wound up in some flaming retail strip. Every sheet of glass for blocks around was lying on the pavement, sparkling like rosin. Palm-sized hunks of concrete, whipping through the intersection. Couldn’t count the sides. Latinos, Koreans, blacks, white guys in uniform. I might have been singing. Standing in the middle of the cross fire. This piece of paving stone size of my shoe heel hits me in the side of the head. Ripped into my temple. I just stood there snapping my fingers, first on one side of my head, then the other. Deaf in my left ear. Me, Joey. Can’t hear a damn thing! Listen!” He fumbled to switch the phone to his other ear. “Hear that? Nothing!

“That’s when I find myself. I start running. Blood is streaming out of my ruined ear. They can’t hit me twice. I figure I’m safe, right? They can’t come after me. Who knows what color I am? I’m nobody. Safer than I’ve been since… Something’s pulling me, like Brahms. Like this is going on again, for eternity. I’m back here for a reason. Across the street, at the end of the next block, these kids are pouring out of a hardware store, arms full. You remember? Power drills. A workbench. An electric saw. They see me just standing there. Score something, you choosy motherfucker. One of them stops, and I think he’s going to dust me. Shoot me. He stops and hands me this can of paint and a handful of brushes. Like he’s God, and this is just for me. I’m trying to pay him. To pay the sacked store. He’s just screaming and laughing at me.

“Like it was my calling, Joey. Out of my mind! I started walking around, marking people. Started with myself. I thought I was the angel of the Lord, putting a safe marker on everyone I could find. Passover. Everybody was going to be medium brown. That was the plan anyway. Somebody didn’t want to be painted. Smashed me into a wall and spilled what was left all over me. Next thing I know, policeman’s got my neck pinned to the concrete with a riot stick. They throw me into an armored van and haul me off to a station, where they take my statement. I should have lied to them. Told them I was someone else. They wouldn’t even fucking book me. I couldn’t even get myself arrested. They’re holding thousands of people for curfew violation, and they toss me back. Too many real criminals. You sing what? You live where? And they believed me. Figure nobody could make up that scale of madness. They send me to the fucking hospital! Damn them to hell. I didn’t stay. I came right back here and called you.”

He made me promise again to tell Ruth, first thing in the morning. I told him to go to the hospital and have his ear looked at as soon as we hung up. And to call me when he’d spoken with a doctor.

“Doctor, Joey? They’re all tied up. Real things. Death and such. Not some foreigner’s hurt ear.” He gasped for air. From the far end of a bad connection, he went into a suffocation fit. The one that all his youthful panic attacks had been all along remembering.

I talked him down, as I had done so many earlier times. I walked him around his hotel room. And then he was calm again, wanting to talk on into the night. I kept telling him to call for help, but he didn’t want to hang up on me. “Tell her, Joey. Tell her I’ve been there. Tell her nobody’s done. Everyone’s going somewhere else. Next time. Next time.”

I got him off the phone at last. “A doctor, Jonah. Your ear.” I tried to sleep but couldn’t. In my waking dreams, the shells that held us encased cracked open like chrysalises, and the fluid that was us flowed out, like reverse rain, back up into the air.

Hans Lauscher found him the next morning, a little after ten o’clock, when Jonah failed to show up for breakfast. He was stretched along the bed, still dressed, on top of the bedspread. The stream of dried blood down one side of his pillow made Hans think he’d hemorrhaged. But my brother had simply stopped breathing. The television in his hotel room was on, tuned to the local news.

Requiem

We buried Jonah in Philadelphia, in the family cemetery. A month later, Ruth and I flew out to perform at his European memorial. The service was held in Brussels, in half a dozen languages, all of them sung. There was no eulogy, no remembrance but music. Dozens of people sang, people Jonah had performed with throughout the last years of his life. Our piece was the most recent, and surely the rockiest. Ruth sang “Bist du bei mir,” that little song of Bach’s that Bach never wrote:

If you are with me, I’ll go gladly

to my death and to my rest.

Ah, how pleasant will my end be,

with your dear hands pressing

Shut my faithful eyes!

We sounded as if we hadn’t made music since our mother’s funeral. Like we were music’s shaky discoverers, the first to have stumbled across the form. Like we might never make it back to tonic. Like tonic was going someplace else, always a moving do. Like everyone would have to own every song, before the end. Ruth sang as she remembered him, no part of us barred. And he was in her voice.

It was the first time my sister had ever been abroad. She stood at the top of the Kunstberg, the Mont des Arts, crying over how every curbside banality struck her with wonder. For a long time, she couldn’t place the feeling that gripped her. Then, in the middle of the Grande Place, we overheard a light-skinned, angular-featured black couple marveling over the guildhalls in Portuguese.

“Nobody here has the slightest idea where I come from. Nobody cares how I got here. They’re not even trying to guess. I could be anyone.” The utter freedom terrified her. “We have to get back to America, Joey.” Our hellish utopia, that dream of time. The thing the future was invented for, to break and remake.

“How far is Germany?” I told her, and she shook her head, unsteady. “Next time.”

Little Robert identified himself to every stranger by his African name. It thrilled him to be asked if he came from the Congo. By the time we flew back to the Bay, he was chattering at the flight attendants in both French and Flemish.

If our father was right, time doesn’t flow, but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. But then, in such a world, who we are must be all things.

So I stand on the edge of the reflecting pool with my two nephews. We’ve left their mother, over her vocal objections, back at the Smithsonian. “I don’t see why I can’t just hang out there in the crowd, next to you. I won’t say a word.”

“We been over this a million times,” her eldest says again. “You promised me, before we started.”

“How much unity can this thing proclaim if the women have to stay home?”

“The women don’t have to stay home. The women get to go anyplace in our nation’s capital they want. Why don’t you go visit Howard? Didn’t your Papap…”

“Maya Angelou’s going to be there. She’s a woman. She’s going to give a speech.”

“Mama. You promised. Just…give us this?”

So it’s just we three men, there on the Mall. I’m going to be discovered and sent home. At any moment, my nephews will make me go wait for them, back in the hotel room.

Kwame stands in this runaway crowd, scared by its magnificence. A mild October, but he’s shaking. He’s wobbly on his pins, like a bamboo beach house in a heavy tide. This is his doing, his atonement, his escape plan, and he stakes himself on it working. Still, he’s staggered by how many other stakeholders have turned out for the day.

He has managed to stay in the free world for a full two years. One speeding ticket, one apartment eviction, but no more slavery. “It’s over,” he tells me. “That me is dead.” He’s been out for two years, and in that time he has worked four jobs and played with three different new bands. The jobs have gotten harder and the music a shade more melodic. Two months ago, he became a welder. When he landed it, he told me, “I’m staying with this one for a while, Uncle JoJo.” I told him I was sure he would.

He stands in the milling crowd, talking to a perfect stranger, a bronze man almost my age in a University of Arizona sweatshirt, with a son years younger than Robert. “Not sure I’m crazy about the man,” the stranger says, apologetic.

“Nobody’s crazy about the man,” Kwame reassures him. “The man’s a hatemonger. But this whole thing’s bigger than the man.”

“Did you know Farrakhan is a trained concert violinist?” I contribute this, even at the risk of irritating Kwame. A put-down and tribute. Remembering all passing things.

“Get out of here. No shit?” Both men are amused — the crediting and discrediting.

“How do you play a violin through a bow tie that size?” It’s the last thing our unknown friend says before the crowd swallows him.

Kwame watches the man disappear, holding his son’s hand. Delinquent, remembering, my nephew calls out a panicked “Robert!”

“Ode,” comes the angry voice from two yards behind him.

“Whatever, brother. You stay close, you hear me?”

“Hear you,” the sullen eleven-year-old answers. But only because his brother rules.

Kwame is the boy’s god, and the older boy can do nothing about it. When Kwame went to prison, little Robert was inventing complex number games, whole systems of calculation. When he returned, his little brother wanted nothing more than to follow him down to damnation. “School’s for fools,” the child told him. Resolute, proud, and as shrewd as the god he modeled on. “Fools and house niggers.”

“Who told you that? You give this field nigger the man’s address. I’m a have a little parlay with him.”

But the boy reads his brother’s every word as an initiation rite, a test of his downness. “You playing me. You like school so much, how come you’re not still in it?” You like caveboys so much, how come you got a record?

“Don’t you close that book, bean boy. Stop being so cat. Your father. Your father studied math, Beanie. Don’t you know that?” And your grandfather. Where do you think you got it from?

To this, his little brother only shrugged. The whole ascendant, world hip-hop culture exposed all the million futilities of such Tomming. That was then. This is now.

“Beanie. You’re my ticket onward. Don’t you think big no more?”

Ode only smiled, seeing through the psych-out. There was nothing bigger, in his eyes. Nothing bigger than his ex-con brother.

This is my oldest nephew’s penance, the reason we’re here. He wouldn’t have made us fly out to Washington, wouldn’t even have crossed the street for something so slight as self-affirmation, if not for his brother. Kwame knows what self is his. We’re here only for Robert, who every two minutes threatens to disappear into the crowd in search of the real action.

I turn around and stare down the length of the reflecting pond to the steps of the memorial. The woman who sang on those steps because she could not sing inside has died, two years ago, in April, just as Kwame left prison. An alto singing scraps of Donizetti and Schubert changed my nephews’ lives. No, that makes no sense. Her impromptu concert did not change them. It made them.

Kwame follows my glance back along the length of the Mall. But he can’t see the ghost. The sight of the Lincoln Memorial twists my nephew’s features. “Man’s a bald-faced nigger-hater. Why we still worship him? Freed the slaves? Mother didn’t free nothing.”

“We’ll see,” I say. Kwame just stares at me, as if I’ve finally gone over. I shake his shoulder. “Caught between a racist cracker and an anti-Semite minister of God. Between a piece of marble and one very hard place. What’s a brother to do?”

The brothers to our right throw us a look. Those in front of us turn around, smiling.

The podium comes to life and the signifying begins. At any moment, Kwame and Robert will ask to move up front, just a little, without me. Some tacit understanding: Nothing personal, Uncle bro, but this whole healing thing isn’t really about you. But in this life, even as I stiffen for it, the request never comes.

The papers will count a grudging couple of hundred thousand. But this is a million if it’s a man. Tens of millions; whole lifetimes of lives. I’ve never stood in a gathering so large. I expected claustrophobia, agoraphobia, the choke of old stage fright. I feel only an ocean of time. Things reaching themselves. The feeling grows, strange and magnificent and tainted as anything human, only many times bigger.

I can’t say what my nephews see. Their faces show only thrill. A million is nothing to them. Nothing alongside the size of their transmitted world, the giant screens, the monster concerts in international surround sound, the global transports that their world daily broadcasts. But maybe they’re right where I am, every bit as awed by this millionfold makeshift fix, this pressing to redeem. Maybe they feel it, too, how likeness has it all over difference, for sheer terror. If there’s no mix, there’s no move. This is what the million-man minister means, despite what he thinks he’s saying. Who is enough, in being like himself? Until we come from everyplace we’ve been, we won’t get everywhere we’re going.

Kwame cranes to see the podium and make out the speakers. Robert — Ode — wasted by all the talk, finds a friend his age. They size each other up and move into the aisle to teach each other moves. The celebrities, songwriters, and poets take their turns, then give way to the minister. He plays the crowd. He brings out Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. He takes a shot at Lincoln, at the Founding Fathers, and Kwame has to cheer him. He says how all prophets are flawed. He says how we are more divided now than the last time we all stood here. He starts to ramble, to invoke weird numerologies. But all the numbers come down to two. A long division.

“So, we stand here today at this historic moment.” The sound fans out, tiny and metallic, lost in the endless space it must fill. “We are standing in the place of those who couldn’t make it here today. We are standing on the blood of our ancestors.”

People on all sides of us call out names. Some massive church. My nephews know the drill anyway, by another path. “Robert Rider,” Kwame calls. His voice breaks, not because he remembers, but because he can’t. “Delia Daley,” he adds. He might go further back.

“We are standing on the blood of those who died in the Middle Passage…in the fratricidal conflict…”

Those around us name their dead, and because he feels me standing there, my nephew adds, “Jonah Strom.”

The notion’s so crazy I have to laugh. Transformed by death: my brother’s operatic debut at last. Then I hear little Robert bragging to his newfound friend, “My uncle died in the Los Angeles riot.” And I suppose, in some world, he did. His last performance on that long, self-singing vita.

“Toward a more perfect union.” The minister does not know whereof he speaks. Union will undo his every call to allegiance, if allegiance doesn’t do us all in first. I’m standing in this million-man mass, a billion miles away, grinning like the idiot my brother knew I was. An old German Jew proved it to me, lifetimes ago: Mixing shows us which way time runs. I have seen the future, and it is mongrel.

Kwame chooses that moment to whisper to me. “The man’s a chickenhead. Thing’s fuckin’ obvious to anyone who’s clocking. Only one place we can go. Everybody’s going to be a few drops everything. What the fuck? I say let’s just go do it and get it done with.”

I shake my head and ask him. “Where do you think you got that from?”

The minister is going for a record-breaker. But he has the crowd to help him. We wave our hands in the air. We give fistfuls of money. We embrace total strangers. We sing. Then the classically trained violinist tells us, “Go home. Go back home to work out this a-tone-ment… Go back home transformed.” We end like every other thwarted, glorious transformation in the past, and all the pasts to come. Home: the one place we have to go back to, when there’s no place left to go.

But our boy has other destinations, farther afield. The speeches break up and the crowd folds into itself, embracing. Kwame hugs me to him, an awkward promise. We part from the clinch embarrassed, and look around for Robert. But he’s vanished. We see the friend he was hanging with, but the boy has no idea where Robert has gone. Kwame shakes him, almost yelling, and the frightened child starts to cry.

My nephew descends into his worst recurrent nightmare. And mine. This is his doing. He’s brought his brother here, keeper-style, thinking to undo his own influence. He waved off all Ruth’s warnings. He promised her a thousand times: “Nothing can go wrong.” He’s kept the boy on the shortest of leashes, all through this mammoth crowd. And now, in the first dropped glance, we’ve lost the child, as if he were just waiting for the chance to break free.

Kwame is frantic. He runs in all directions at once, toward any half-sized figure, shoving men aside to get past. I try at first to keep up with him. But then I stop short, a sense of peace coming over me, so great that I think it will be fatal. I know where Robert has gone. I could tell Kwame. I have the whole piece, the whole song cycle there, intact, in front of my sight-singing eyes. The piece I’ve been writing, the one that’s been writing me since before my own beginning. The anthem for this country in me, fighting to be born.

I try to tell my nephew, but I can’t. “Don’t panic,” I say. “Let’s stay close by. He’s around here somewhere.” In fact, I know exactly how close the lost boy is. As close as a promise to a long-forgotten friend. As close as the trace of tune turning up in me at last, begging me to compose it.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kwame shouts. “I got to think.” My nephew can’t even hear himself. He runs through all the options that cloud his desperate brain. He plays out every scenario, sure that only the worst can ever happen, finally, to the likes of us. He’s lost his brother in a million dispersing men. This is his final punishment, for all he’s done and left undone.

And then his brother emerges from the underworld, there in front of us. He’s jogging toward us from up on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He waves smartly, as if he’s only been away on a prearranged outing, no more than five minutes, max. In truth, it can’t have been much longer. For Kwame, it’s been another jail sentence. Life.

Relief spills over into rage. “Where the fuck have you been, Bean? What are you trying to do to me?” Strung out, fatherless. At the mercy of every past. He’d slap the boy if I weren’t there.

The look of bewildered adventure falls from Robert’s face. He stares out on the place he’s come back to. He shrugs and folds up his arms like shields in front of his chest. “Nowhere. Just out talking. Meeting people.” The question that was bursting in him dies unasked. Kwame, too, his head sunk down, hears all the promises he has just made mocking him, as vain as any music.

“Well?” Ruth greets us, ready for all the stories. “How do you feel? Was it amazing?”

All three of us keep silent, each boy for his own reasons.

“Come on. Tell me. What did they say? Was it everything you…?”

“Ruth,” I warn.

Her eldest puts his chin on the crown of his mother’s head and cries.

Not until that long flight back across the continent does Ode ask. And then, not us, but his mother. It’s dusk when we get to the airport, and night for the length of the flight. We rise up over the layer of cloud, nothing above us but darkness. Kwame, across the aisle from me, is writing a song about the march. He needs to redeem it. The song is all in his head, committed to memory. He hands me the phones for his disc player. “Ay yo trip. New L.A. crew. Check out the bomb bass line.”

I place it in two notes. “Gregorian cantus firmus.” A Credo already a millennium old by the time Bach used it.

“No shit?” His eyes glint, fishing for me. “Motherfucker makes a def sample.” He takes the phones back, slaps his thighs in a haunted, broken rhythm. The day’s panic is already just a memory. All notes are changing again. “Me and my crew, we got to get jumpin’.”

This, too, is forever true. “Mine, too,” I tell him. My piece is inside me, ready for writing down — the same piece that has long ago written me. My crew is inside me, jumping at last. And the first jump they make will be, as ever, back.

Little Robert sits in the window seat, his mother next to him. He fidgets from Ohio to Iowa, craning to see something out of the square of window. But the pane refuses to reveal anything but an opaque black wall.

“What you looking at, honey?”

He stops, ashamed at being caught.

“What is it? You see something up there?”

“Mama, how high are we?”

She can’t say.

“How far are we from Mars?”

She’s never thought to wonder.

“How long would it take…? Mama?”

More questions than he’s asked her since he was seven. She sees his old sandbox love of math trying to reenter him. A signal, beckoning. She braces for the next question, praying for her sake that she won’t miss them all.

“Mama, wavelength’s like color, right?”

She’s almost sure. She nods slowly, ready to improvise if need be.

“But pitch is wavelength, too?”

She nods more slowly now. But still yes.

“What wavelength do you think they are — on other planets?”

Her face contorts. The answer struggles up from where she’s held it so long. Words pour into my sister, words I’ve forgotten years ago. Words waiting for the past to reach them. She jerks upright, as if she’ll stop the plane, turn around, parachute out over the Mall. No time to lose. “Where on earth…? Who did you hear that…?”

She feels her son coil back into his armor, and she breaks. An injured laugh, an uncompleted tune. Someone walking toward her who she thought was buried. Of course. The message was for him, her child. Not beyond color; into it. Not or; and. And new ands all the time. Continuous new frequencies. Where else could such a boy live?

She bends over him and tries to say it. “More wavelengths than there are planets.” Her voice is everywhere but on pitch. “A different one everywhere you point your telescope.”

Thee

The boy is lost, cutting back and forth in the indifferent crowd, on the verge of howling. A colored boy, one of hers. He runs in one direction, stops, hopeless, then cuts back. The crowd is not hostile. Only elsewhere.

Her German man, this helpless foreigner she has just said good-bye to forever, calls out. “Something is wrong?” And the boy almost bolts from them, lost for good.

“That’s all right, now.” Something old in her speaks. “We ain’t gonna hurt you.”

And he comes to them. As if his mother never once warned him about the danger of strangers. He comes to them, struck by a thing so strange, he can’t help himself. She can’t imagine what puts such astonishment in his face. And then, of course, she can.

He asks where she comes from. “Not far,” she tells him, knowing what he really wants to ask.

“My brother’s lost.”

“I know he is, honey. But we’re gonna help you find him.”

He tells her his name. One she has never heard of. She tries to get the child to show them where he lost his brother. But the long, receding lines of Washington, the drift of the dispersing crowd, and the boy’s growing fear dislocate him. He drags them to a spot, refuses it, and drags them off again.

It saves her from her own displacement. She walks uncertainly, still under the spell of Miss Anderson’s otherworldly power. The threads of that sound still coat her, like a cobweb she sweeps at but can’t comb free. Something anxious between her and this man, some tie they shared a moment ago that she doesn’t even want to think of straying near. No link but a common love of the repertoire. No force but the voice they’ve just lived through. But something more: the way he heard her singing along, aloud to herself, and felt it as a gift, a given. The shock of it, to be taken just this once, not as another species, nor as the identical same. To be heard simply as someone who knows and can hit the notes. Who has the right and the reason to produce them.

She’s glad they have this boy. His closer crisis holds them together a little longer. They have already said good-bye. The continent of this German’s ignorance, the sweet land of liberty that denies him the slightest toehold of comprehension, spreads out, uncrossable, in front of them. She can’t be the one to explain it to him. To tell him what wars he has fled into, replacing the ones he just escaped. The list of what they can never know of each other is longer than infinite. Curiosity must die, as always, in the cradle. But for just these few moments, they share this lost boy.

The German fascinates this Ode. Something he can’t make out, that stops all figuring. “Where you from?” he asks, and the man answers, deadpan, “New York.”

“My mama’s from New York. You know my mama?”

“I haven’t been there very long.”

The boy walks between them, a hand in each of theirs. Fear takes years off the child. Frightened, he seems no more than seven. He speaks with a mania that makes him impossible to understand.

“I would like very much to see you again,” David Strom says over the boy’s head.

What she has dreaded and known. Hoped against and held still for. “Forgive me,” she says, unable to do the same. “It’s impossible.” She wants to say, This is a law of matter, like the ones you study. Nothing to do with you or me. The physics of the world we belong to. The simplest is.

But the physicist makes no response. He points to the Memorial, where Miss Anderson’s words still ring. “That is where we need to go. Where we can see everyone, and they us. Underneath the statue of that man.”

Ode is shocked he doesn’t know Lincoln. Delia is shocked when the boy calls the Emancipator a racist. David Strom is too baffled to be shocked by anything.

They make camp on the steps. Her job is to scout for a frantic Negro searching for his lost kin. His job is to comfort the boy. This he does with an ease that stuns her. For the boy’s entertainment is every bit the man’s. Within a minute, they’re talking about the stars and planets, frequencies and wavelengths, distances so great, no message can cross them and be read, matter so dense that space collapses into it, places where the rules of length and depth get bent double and flipped about in the Creator’s trick mirror. She hears the man tell the boy, “Every moving thing has its own clock.” Then she hears him go back on himself, say there is no time, that time is simply unchanging change, no less and no more.

This so hooks the boy that for a minute, he forgets he’s lost. He fills with the million questions of boyhood — the rule-break of rocket ships, the speed of light, the curve of space, the unfolding flow, frozen messages skipping free. How? Where? Who? She watches the two of them hatch travels to any dimension. She flashes on her own prejudice: What’s a black boy want, wasting time with this? But then: Do whites own the heavens, too, like they own “O mio Fernando”?

The boy grows wild with ideas. She hears the man answer, not with impossibles, but with the same suspended maybe with which he listened to the impossible contralto. The same way he listened to Delia herself: notes first, tune after. She frowns: Of course there is no time. Of course there’s nothing but standing change. Music knows that, every time out. Every time you lift your voice to sing.

He sits on the steps in his rumpled suit, just talking to the boy. The simplest thing in the world. The most natural. And the boy lights up, leveling challenge after challenge in wondrous attack. She sees him like this for years to come, boys at a table, questions and answers. And then she sees him never. Her heart tightens round itself, closing up with a death so practical, she cannot counter it.

The boy jerks up from his pleasure, alarmed. “How come you two together? Don’t you know about black and white?”

She knows. Over the Potomac, a few hundred yards from where they sit, love between a white man and black woman is a crime worse than theft, worse than assault, punishable as harshly as involuntary murder. David Strom glances at Delia for explanation, the official adult line. She has none.

The boy shakes his head at her. She should know. “The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they gonna build their nest?”

Now the German jerks up, a shock beyond reflex. “Where have you heard this?” The boy cups his hands into his armpits, scared. “This is a Jewish saying. How have you learned this saying?”

The boy shrugs. “My mama sang it. My uncle.”

“Are you Jewish?”

The laugh rips out of Delia, before horror can stop it. This man’s eyes beg her for an explanation. She could end her own life now, easily.

The scientist can’t fathom it. “This is a Jewish saying. My grandmother used to say this. My mother. They meant people must never… They thought that time…”

But she knows what they thought. She knows this man’s people, without a word. All in his face: the end they have tried to stave off with this ban, and the ban that has come to end them anyway.

He’s undone by wonder. “How can you know this, unless… This is remarkable. You have this, too?”

All in his face, and hers: that danger so great that it forces this ban. There is no threat greater than extinction in closeness. The threat that drove the voice of a century out of doors. The threat of all singing. We do not fear difference. We fear most being lost in likeness. The thing no race can abide.

She remembers everything, all that must come to them. The sound is everywhere in her. Now it’s right in her range: my country, thee, thee. She knows this boy. He’s fighting to bring himself into being, willing them the way on.

“The bird and the fish can make a bish. The fish and the bird can make a fird.” He chants the words, raps them, a cantering, desperate rhythm. A continent rising. Syncopated pitches in time. All he wants is to go on playing. All available combinations. Go on singing himself into existence, starting up my piece, my song.

That fierce, haunted beat shakes the white man loose. He, too, places the boy. Who else? What else? The inevitable enters him with the full force of discovery. “The bird can make a nest on the water.”

My mother looks out on the long space spreading in front of them. “The fish can fly.” She drops her eyes and colors deeply.

“You are blushing,” my father exclaims. Already learning.

“Yes.” My mother nods. Agreeing, and worse. “Yes. We have this, too.”