The Time of Our Singing

My Brother as Hänsel

Did the boy soprano think he, too, was white? He didn’t have that name yet, nor the notion. Belonging, membership: What need had Jonah Strom for things that had no need of him? His self required no larger sea to drain into, no wider basin. He was the boy with the magic voice, free to climb and sail, changing as light, always imagining that the glow of his gift offered him full diplomatic rights of passage. Race was no place he could recognize, no useful index, no compass point. His people were his family, his caste, himself. Shining, ambiguous Jonah Strom, the first of all the coming world’s would-be nations of one.

“Geh weg von mir, geh weg von mir. Ich bin der stolze Hans!”He alone can’t see the figure he cuts, out there onstage, in the Dacron Alpine costume — permanent-press lederhosen and long socks, topped by a green felt elf’s cap — some Radcliffe costume designer’s fantasy of pre-Holocaust Grimm. A honey-amber southern Egyptian kid, a just-disembarking Puerto Rican plunked down into this Rhenish masterpiece of arrested childhood. Black Jewish Gypsy child with russet coiled hair, upstage left in a plywood hut as picture-perfect as it’s supposed to be poverty-stricken, singing, “Arbeiten? Brr. Wo denkst du hin?” But when he sings: when clever Hänsel sings! Then no one sees any seams, so lost are they in the seamless sound.

He can see his own arms and legs sticking out of the Schwarzwald fantasy costume. But he can’t glimpse the full-dress discord the audience must sort out. The costume feels good; the suspenders pull his shorts up into his crotch. The rub of the fabric as he dances fuses with the pull of his Gretel, alongside him, patiently teaching him the steps. His opposite these performance nights is Kimberly Monera, my brother’s first concentrate of desire. “Mit den Füsschen tapp tapp tapp.” The pull of her blondness draws him on. “Mit den Händchen klapp klapp klapp. Einmal hin, einmal her, rund herum, es ist nicht schwer!”

His sister-partner’s hold on him, the warmth that fuels his air supply courses through him in all three acts, a breadth underpinning his breath. Blinder Eifer: blind thrill in doses so large, they carry him through all the chance catastrophes of performance. He feeds off his sister’s instruction, the seed that will form his lifelong taste for the small and light. When his Gretel, sweet dancing teacher, stammers in a moment of stray stage bewilderment, he’s there to feed her back the courage she has lent him.

Any blondness might have done. But it’s with the Chimera that he lies down in this night forest, the warded circle where the spell first takes hold. She is his Waldkönigin, the queen of his woods, whose pale hand he holds, the one who comforts him on the dark stage of self-blinding childhood.

There is an evil in the woods. This is what the oblivious parents must discover with each new performance, after they send their unwitting children into the cursed place to make their own sighting. Eine Knusperhexe, baker of children, operator of her own child-ready ovens, hides in the copse, awaiting discovery. This is the doom the pair’s stage parents send them to, night after night, pretending to knowledge only after the fact.

Children, children?the forest asks. Are you not afraid? Some nights, when the cuckoo teases them with echoes from infinite space, clever Hänsel can feel the alarm pulsing from his Gretel’s flanks. The down on her arms dampens with fear, a fear more delicious than the rest of his life will ever succeed in recovering. The boy takes her fright through his fingertips, just touching her moistened arm hair. Her terror draws him inward, like a lens. How close they must huddle against each other, lost under these trees, their basket of berries eaten, darkness falling in their childish neglect, and no way on but under. She looks away from him, eyes forward, into the hall’s blackness, breathing hard, straining in her dirndl skirt and flower-embroidered white top, waiting again this evening for the wondrous pain, each new shape these accidental brushings take.

In that charm of darkness — a blue gel slipped over the megawatt spot — the little Arab child in his lederhosen grows more plausible. The amber boy and his blond, anemic sister grow to resemble each other in performance’s enchantment, splitting their difference in the falling dusk. They kneel in the dark, resorting to prayer, that version of magic already crusted with ancient protocols long before any word of the Semitic Savior reached these northern woods. Trembling Gretel folds her palms in front of her, cupped against her breasts’ slight buds. Her brother, kneeling alongside, plants his hand in the ravine running down the small of her back. Blocked from the eyes of the gazing audience, he lets it trickle south some nights, over the drumlin that tips up to meet it. Now I lay me down to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep. This is how my brother closes out his childhood, in a series of repeat performances. Asleep in the woods, wrapped against blondness, surrounded by protecting angels. Two stand here above me. Two stand there below me. What color are the angels? No one can say, here in the half-light. Years later, in an Antwerp art museum, killing time before a recital, he’ll glimpse the creatures that protected him, their wings all the hues in beating existence, bent out of the colorless air.

Only in opera do angels need skin. Only in opera and imagination. Among the fourteen singers in that angel umbrella is Hänsel’s brother, helping to weave a halo of safety around those twinned innocents. I am the darkest, nuisance angel, as wrong in my flowing white robes as my brother in his lederhosen. I can’t see my own face, yet I know how it must play. I can see its wrongness in the eyes of the seraph host: burlesque intruder, guardian of a forsaken tribe.

The boy we angels circle to protect curls up under this shield as if it is a universal grant of childhood: a walk in the woods, guarded by a chorus that takes up this wayward duet and propagates it, with rich, full harmonies, even while he and his Gretel lie in the thrilled simulation of sleep. The forest and its stolen berries are his; he and this girl can lose themselves in darkness, every night, with impunity. But there is hell to pay, in the final act. The mother from act one, the harsh mezzo, scarred by poverty and driven to punish her dancing children by turning them out of the cottage, comes back, in double casting, as the child-eating witch.

Clever Hans does all he can to keep our own blood parents from coming to see our operatic debut. He means to protect them from the twists of this production. Maybe he’s ashamed of his look, his role. “It’s not that great,” he tells them. “More for children, really.” But our parents wouldn’t miss this premiere for the world. Of course they must come see what their offspring have gotten themselves into. Da brings the foldout camera. Mama dresses up majestically in cobalt dress and her favorite feathered hat with veil. She does something to her face, almost like her own stage makeup. She smells like babies.

The edible cottage, the night they come, gleams as it has rarely done: a profusion of sugared offerings, a child’s glimpse of heaven. But with his parents in the house tonight, little Hans loses his appetite. He sees their silhouettes even over the glare of the footlights, this couple who can’t touch each other in public. He sees his real sister, nappy-headed, shocked by this candy beauty, wide-eyed under the forest’s curse, reaching out her hand in appetite or self-defense.

Hänsel’s real-life mother must sit still and watch the story transform all mothers into witches. His father must hold still and watch this German-singing Hexe try to trap his dusky child and force him into the order-making oven. The boy looks for comfort to his Gretel, but her dirndl-wrapped waist seems tonight a circlet of public shame. Yet he must stay by her, his stage sister, his albino woods mate, however much his agitation throws poor Kimberly off. When his distress at last overwhelms the girl and she comes in a major third below her note, clever Hans is there to hum her back to pitch.

When all the enchanted gingerbread children are freed again from their fixed, repeating nightmare, when the witch fries in her own device and the now-pious family reunites over her cremains, the curse of the role lifts from him. For the first time, he takes his bows capless, his curly russet hair bared for all to see. Something darkens in his face, his eyes. But he bows to fair enthusiasm, accepting the weight of this liberal love.

I look for my brother afterward. He is a pillar of indignation, racing through the boys’ dressing room. He tears away from the backstage admirers. He doesn’t wait for me to catch up. My brother Hänsel explodes out of the lobby, into the cove of our parents, his arms waving apologies, full of corrections, explanations: take-backs, do-overs. But our mother, crouched over, takes us both in her arms. “Oh my boys. My JoJo!” My father’s compensating smiles assure the passersby there’s no need to intervene. “Oh my talents! I want you to sing at my wedding. You’re going to sing at my wedding.” She can’t stop hugging us. This is her concert triumph, though not the one she trained for. “Oh my boys, my JoJo! You were both so beautiful!”

In Trutina

At the next summer recess, Jonah told Da they didn’t need to come up to Boston to take us back to New York. He said we wanted to take the train home. We were old enough; it would be easier and cheaper, he claimed. God only knows how the request played with our parents, or what they heard in it. All I remember is how thrilled Mama was when we stepped out onto the platform at Grand Central. She kept spinning me around in the waiting room, sizing me up, like something had happened to me that I couldn’t see.

Rootie wanted up on my shoulders. But she was growing faster than I was, too big to carry more than a few steps. “How come you’re getting weaker, Joey? The world is beating on you?” I laughed at her, and she got angry. “Serious! That’s what Mama says. She wants to know how many ways the world is going to beat on you.”

I searched my parents for an explanation, but they were fussing over Jonah, consoling him over the World’s Best Opera Plots clothbound edition he’d forgotten on the train.

“Don’t laugh at me.” Rootie pouted. “Or I’ll fire you as my brother.”

We sang together that summer, for the first time in half a year. We’d all gotten better, Ruth most dramatically. She held down moving lines, following along on the staff, getting rhythms and pitches together on only a couple of tries. She had succeeded in cracking the musical hieroglyphics earlier than any of us. She seemed different to me now, a kind of charmed creature. She rolled about, cackling at her luck in having her brothers around again. But she no longer needed us, nor thought to tell me the million discoveries she’d made in my absence. I felt shy around her. A year apart had made us forget how to be siblings. She performed for me, miming anyone I could name, from Da’s craziest ancient colleagues to her beloved Vee, our landlady. She could turn around and hood herself with her hands, and, when she turned back, have aged her face a century. “Don’t do that!” Mama shuddered. “It’s just not natural!” So Rootie did it more. It made me laugh every time.

The reunited Strom family quintet resurrected all their favorite bits of near-forgotten repertoire. With Ruth a real member now, we polished up the Byrd Mass for Five Voices, hanging on to the suspensions in the frail Agnus Dei, as if to keep it forever from the perjury of having to resolve. All my family wanted was to get each of our plates up in the air and spinning at the same time. We took our tempi from Jonah now. He had a dozen explanations why a piece should go faster or slower, places where it should broaden or swell. He dismissed the composer’s written indications. “Who cares what some poor sucker hundreds of years ago thought the piece meant? Why listen to him, just because he wrote the thing?” Da agreed: The notes were there to serve the evening’s needs, and not the other way around. At Jonah’s insistence, we made dirges of jigs and jigs of dirges, for no better reason than the pulse in his own inner ear.

He made us sing several of Kimberly’s treasures. My parents were game for any excursion, however otherworldly, so long as it somehow swung. But Jonah was not happy with simply dictating the night’s program. He wanted to conduct. He corrected Da’s technique, corrections that came straight out of János’s mouth. Da just laughed him off and continued manufacturing pleasure the best way he knew.

One evening toward summer’s end, just before Jonah and I returned to Boylston, he stopped Mama in midphrase. “You could get a smoother tone and have less trouble with the passaggio if you kept your head still.”

Mama set her sheet music down on the spinet and just stared at him. Movement was why we’d always sung. Singing meant being free to dance. What other point? My mother just looked at my brother, and he tried to hold her gaze. Little Root whimpered, flapping her sheet music back and forth and shaking like a dervish to distract attention. My father’s face drained, as if his son had just spouted a slur.

Solitude passed through my mother’s mind. In her hush, even Jonah wavered. But his chance to recant was lost in silence. My mother just studied him, wondering what species she had brought into the world. At last, she laughed, through a crook in her lips that wouldn’t seal. “ Passaggio?What do you know about passaggio? A boy whose voice hasn’t even broken yet!”

He had no idea what the word meant. Just another arcane trinket he’d stolen from the Monera girl. Mama looked out at him across the plain of estrangement he’d made, staring at her foreign offspring until Jonah wilted and bowed his head. Then she reached out and buffed his almond hair. When she spoke again, her voice was low and haunted. “You sing your song, child. And I’ll sing mine.”

All our heads moved through the next madrigal, Jonah’s most vigorous of all. But we never danced again with the same abandon. Never again without self-consciousness, now that we knew what we looked like to the conservatory world.

In August, back at Boylston, the headmaster decreed that I should bunk with Jonah and two older midwestern boys. By rule, the younger grades slept in long wards on the building’s top floor, while the smaller dorms below were reserved for the senior students. But we two had brought havoc into this orderly musical Eden. The parents of one classmate had already removed their boy from school, and two others threatened the same action if their children were forced to sleep in the same room with us. This was the year Brown allegedly beat the Topeka Board of Education. We didn’t have much of a social studies track at that school.

For whatever reasons, Boylston kept us on. Maybe it was the size of Jonah’s talent. Maybe they figured how much they stood to gain down the years, if they survived the gamble. No one ever told Jonah and me that we were putting the place to the test. No one had to. Our whole lives were a violation. As far back as we were anything, that’s who we were.

They put us in a cinder-block cubicle with Earl Huber and Thad West, two freshmen keener on rule busting than we ever were. Neither of those two would have wound up anywhere near such a school without strategizing and savvy stage-door parents. Thad’s and Earl’s parents gave the nod to their boys’ new roommates: We would at least keep their sons close to the spotlight. To Thad and Earl themselves, the Strom boys were golden outsiders, mud in the eye of apostolic Boylston, their ticket to open rebellion.

Our new room was a shoe box, but to me, it felt like a virgin continent. Twin pine bunk beds left only enough space for two half-sized writing desks, two chairs, and two cedar closets with two inset drawers each. The day we moved in, Thad and Earl stretched in their stacked bunks like ecstatic convicts, waiting for their black bunk mates to arrive. From the first words out of my mouth, I perpetually disappointed them.

They both came from one of those midsized C cities in Ohio. They were mythic creatures to me, like Assyrians or Samaritans: boys from magazine ads and radio dramas, sandy, groomed, and straight, speaking with flat tractor drones that cut in straight lines all the way to the horizon. Their half of the room overflowed with die-cast P-47 Thunderbolts, bottle cap collections, Buckeye pennants, and a Vargas girl who could flip over and become Bob Feller the instant there was a knock at the door.

Jonah’s and my side of the cell had only a wall shelf of pocket scores and an illustrated set of the Lives of the Great Composers pamphlets. “That’s it?” Earl said. “You cats call that home decorating?” Shamed, we hung up a photo that Da had given us, a blurry black-and-white print from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey, showing the North American nebula. For official housewarming and back-to-school music, Thad set his record player belting away on the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth. They were bad influences on us in every way but the one they wanted. Jonah picked up a red pen, and on the matting below the cloud of stars, he scribbled the full harmonization of the chorale. We checked the score. He made just two mistakes in the inner lines.

Earl and Thad dreamed of becoming jazz musicians, driven as much by a need to spite their folks as by their twitching love of rhythm. They thought of themselves as fifth columnists, deep behind enemy classical lines. “Swear it,” Earl always said. “If I ever start humming anything French? Mercy-killing time.”

Earl and Thad talked in what they took for state-of-the-art Village slang, passed through so many rounds of Telephone, it always came out sounding more greenhorn than Greenwich. “You’re the puma’s snarl, Strom One,” Earl would tell Jonah. “Absolutely top Guatemalan yellow-fingered fruit, at the moment. But you’re about to go over Niagara any minute, cool cat. Then we’re gonna hear you wail.”

“That’s right,” Thad punctuated.

“What do you think, Strom Two?” Earl never looked at me when he talked. It took me much of that first September to realize who Strom Two was. Earl would lie back on his bunk, playing his thighs like a trap set, patting the air for the cymbals, hissing an uncanny imitation of brushes, his tongue pressed against his front teeth. “Huh, baby? You think our man’s going to survive the Big Drop?” Earl reveled in his status as the school’s lowest voice, beating all comers by two full tones. “Look around. How many of last year’s thirteenies are still with us? Few and proud, my friends. Few and proud.”

“That’s right,” added Thad in his recently minted tenor, ever on cue.

Jonah shook his head. “You two are so full of hot air, you’re going to hit a power line and explode.”

“That’s right, too,” Thad conceded.

Jonah loved our roommates, the simple adolescent doting on difference that atrophies the instant that contact ends. He scoffed at their rube-hipster predictions. But he knew better than anyone that his vocal fall was coming. His voice stayed clean and crack-free through puberty’s first guerrilla uprisings, with no sign of the looming catastrophe. But his coming break was his constant terror. He stayed out of the sun, refused to exercise, ate only pears and oatmeal in minuscule portions, inventing new remedies daily in a desperate attempt to stop the unstoppable flow.

One night, he woke me up out of a dead sleep. In the derangement beyond midnight, I thought someone had died.

“Joey, wake up.” He spoke in a leaky whisper, to keep from rousing Earl and Thad. He wouldn’t stop shaking my shoulder. Something hideous had torn into our lives. “Joey. You’re not going to believe this. I’ve got two little hairs growing out of my nuts!”

He took me to the bathroom to show me the development. More than the hairs, I remember his terror. “It’s happening, Joey.” His voice was hushed, near-petrified. He had only these few moments to get out his last clear words before he turned werewolf.

“Maybe you should pluck them?”

He shook his head. “It’s no good. I’ve read about that. They’ll just grow back faster.” He looked at me, pleading. “Who knows how many days I have left?”

We both knew the truth. A boy’s voice before it breaks promises very little about what it will sound like after. The most spectacular caterpillar alive might host a moth. Magnificent tenors sometimes rose up out of hopeless croakers. But consummate boy sopranos often ended up average. János Reményi’s controversial program made boys sing right through the change, insisting on constant, coached use, all the way down to the settling point. I tried to assure him. “They’ll keep you another year at least, no matter what.”

Jonah just shook his head at me, condemned. He didn’t want to live anywhere beneath perfection.

Each day I’d quiz him with a glance, and each day he’d just shrug, resigned. He went on singing, reaching his zenith even as his light was already going out. Whenever Jonah opened his mouth, the faculty within earshot sighed, knowing the end had to be near.

The end came at the Berkshire Festival. Serge Koussevitzky had died a few years before, and one of the conductor’s lifelong friends now invited the Boylston Academy to sing in a massive memorial concert. To honor the dead champion of new music, Reményi had us do a few excerpts from Orff’s Carmina Burana. Back in that era, the heyday of show-trial morality, making young students sing the lyrics of debauched medieval monks might have gotten him deported. But Boylston had for years been a bastion of Orff’s teaching techniques. And no one, Reményi insisted, was better suited to sing Orff’s hymns to Fortuna than those whose fates were still being formed. Reményi hired several Cambridge instrumentalists and supplemental adult voices, and we were off to Tanglewood.

I made the cut for the touring chorus. I figured they picked me to keep Jonah happy. Reményi’s casting was masterful. He gave the drunken abbot of Cockaigne to Earl Huber, who sang it with the swagger of a Buckeye turned Beat poet. He assigned the song about the girl in the tight red dress who looks like the bud of a rose to Suzanne Palter, a seventh grader from Batesville, Virginia, who kept a Bible under her pillow so she could kiss it each night after lights-out. Latin was Latin, and Suzanne sang the shameless come-on with such robust chastity that even Reményi’s cheeks colored.

For Jonah, János reserved the simplicity of “In trutina,” that summa of ambiguous wavering:

In trutina mentis dubia

fluctuant contraria

lascivus amor et pudicitia.

Sed eligo quod video,

collum iugo prebeo;

ad iugum tamen suave transeo.

In the uncertain balance of my mind

lewd love and modesty

flow against each other.

But I can choose what I see,

and I submit my neck to the yoke;

to the delightful yoke, I yield.

In rehearsal, János coaxed Jonah up into a nimbus of sound. He took the song at half the speed it should have gone. Jonah floated into the phrase, hovering above the orchestra like a fixated kingfisher. This was two years before Sputnik, but the slow, lathelike turn he gave the line emanated from deep space. Any singer will tell you: The softer the sound, the harder to make. Holding back is more difficult than holding forth. But somehow, from the earliest age, my brother knew how to make a smallness larger than most singers’ big. And he took his shattering piano gift to “In trutina.”

Jonah hit his mark in every rehearsal except the first dress, when the ringer instrumentalists, who hadn’t been warned, stumbled with listening. The rest of the chorus knew that if we could get as far as Jonah’s number, we’d live. “In trutina” was the one sure spot in our overly ambitious program, the perfect, near-still climax that only music could give.

For the memorial, the Berkshires overflowed with more famous musicians than any of us had ever seen. Most of the Boston Symphony was there, as well as several composers and soloists whom Koussevitzky — via one rigged-up honorarium or another — had kept from starvation. Before the concert, Earl Huber ran over and tackled Jonah. “It’s Stravinsky! Stravinsky’s here!” But the man he pointed out looked more like the guy our parents paid to fix pipe leaks than the century’s greatest composer.

Even the hard-core pros who performed alongside us were rattled by the caliber of the audience. Jonah stayed by me, in the wings, before we went on. He never understood nerves. It scared him to see it in me. He himself never felt safer than when he had his mouth open with notes coming out. But there on the stage at the Berkshire Festival, he learned about disaster.

Reményi launched “In trutina” at the expansive tempo he’d always taken it in rehearsal. Jonah started into his line as if it had only just then occurred to him. He ended the first stanza on a crest of wonder — lust and lewdness struggling in the balance.

His voice chose that moment to break in one crashing wave. None of us heard even a squeak in tone in his first stanza. But as he prepared to sing “Sed eligo quod video,” the next pitch wasn’t there. Without a thought, he hit the words an octave lower, with only the slightest waver. He finished out the first stanza a soprano and came back in the second a fledgling tenor.

The effect was electrifying. For those few in the audience who knew Latin, the lyric found a depth it would never have again in any performance. Afterward, a few musicians even asked Reményi how he’d dreamed up the masterstroke.

Never again that high D, my brother’s hallmark, out beyond the planet’s pull. Never again the chaste mount up into airless altitudes, the ease of ignorance, the first tart rush of ecstasy, the ring of dazed bliss, as if he just that moment had discovered what climax might be and how he might bring himself to it anytime he liked. On the long bus ride back to Boston in the dark, Jonah said to me, “Well, thank God that’s finally over.” For the longest time, I thought he meant the concert.

Late 1843—Early 1935

Delia Daley was light. In the gaze of this country: not quite. America says “light” to mean “dark, with a twist.” By all accounts, her mother was even lighter. No Daley ever spoke of where their family’s lightness came from. It came from the usual place. Three-quarters of all American Negroes have white blood — and very few of them as a matter of choice. So it was with Delia’s mother, Nettie Ellen Alexander, Dr. William Daley’s radiant conjugal trophy, his high-toned lifelong prize. He met her down in Southwark, the part of town where his family, too, had originally lived. “Originally” stretched the matter some. But the Daleys had lived there far enough back, in the scale of memory, for the place to shade off into something like origins.

William himself was the great-grandson of a freed house slave, James. James’s owner, the Jackson, Mississippi, heiress Elizabeth Daley, after the death of her millionaire husband in 1843, was leveled by a revelation only a notch below the persecutor Saul’s on the road to Damascus. Picking herself up after the blow, Elizabeth discovered that she’d turned Quaker. She learned the truth firsthand from the Society of Friends: Owning human beings would do to her soul, in the hereafter, everything it did so roundly to the bodies of her property in the recalcitrant here and now.

Elizabeth Daley set about dispersing her husband’s plantation holdings as ferociously as he’d gathered them. She gave the bulk of the man’s fortune to those scores of involuntary stakeholders whose work had, in fact, made the fortune for him. All the freed Daley slaves but one took their windfall profit shares and headed for Cape Mesurado — Christopolis, Monrovia — that diaspora in a diaspora, care of the American Colonization Society. African resettlement promised to solve all problems — holders’ and slaves’ alike — by exporting them to the Kru and Malinke, whose lands became the ante for cascading displacement.

The lone Daley house slave to stay behind was light. Almost as light as his former owner. James Daley was not a traveling soul. He suspected that near-black in Liberia would be no softer a fate than near-white in his inflicted, only home. So he chose the shorter voyage, accompanying Elizabeth to Philadelphia, William Penn’s damaged experiment in brotherly love.

Elizabeth signed over to James a modest annuity. In almost every way, she treated him as her son, the sweetest available spite on the spirit of the man’s father. James must have inherited the family business sense, for he turned his fair share of the Daley capital into a working grubstake. James would never have abandoned Elizabeth, except for her constant imploring that he do so. She insisted he learn a trade. He apprenticed at a Negro barbering shop that catered to whites, not far from the heart of the old town. The work was overlong and underpaid, but James found it ludicrously lucrative, given his employment history. Elizabeth wept when he finished his training. She died shortly after James set up his own shop, cutting the hair of well-off whites down in the Silk Stocking district.

There were still too few Negroes in the city then to raise white alarm. And James had been born knowing how to blunt white fear. His customers stayed loyal to him, and even tipped. He never returned to the South, or to any record of his enduring enslavement, except each night, in the dark, when work couldn’t help him ward off memory. All night long, the waters cried to him.

While most of his race remained legal chattel, James Daley worked for himself, his only revenge on the ones he had once worked for. He cut hair from seven in the morning until nine at night. When the shop closed, he made deliveries, running his dray sometimes until sunrise. He did with little so that his sons might do with a little bit more. He tempered his boys in the furnace of his will. Free to be spit on, he taught them. Free to be legally cheated. Free to be beaten. Free to be trapped and swindled at every turn. Free to decide how to answer such freedom. Iron James and his steel sons fended off raids, dug in, pried open a little living space, and grew the business. After a shaky birth, it turned a modest profit every year of James’s life.

Daley Barbering and Grooming Shop clung to its lot, a fair walk from the banks of the Delaware. It went from one chair to two. The sons grew up indentured to the cutting of straight, sandy hair. They could not cut their friends’ or relatives’ hair in their own shop or even tend the hair of one another, except at night, with the shade drawn. They could talk to and even touch the white man, so long as they had a scissors in their hands. When they put their scissors down for the day, even a graze of shoulders was assault.

James’s second son, Frederick, kept even longer hours than his father. He lifted his head high enough to send his own son Nathaniel — like storming heaven — to Oxford, just outside the city, to attend the new colored college, Ashmun Institute, soon renamed Lincoln University. Nathaniel met his own tuition by singing with a jubilee. He returned, walking with a step his father couldn’t fathom and his still-enslaved grandfather couldn’t even see.

College didn’t close up the Daleys’ twoness; it tore it wide open. Nathaniel barnstormed through to his degree, talking of medicines, the healing arts — the old provenance of haircutters for centuries, when barbers doubled as dentists and even surgeons. “Doctors of the short robe,” he told his brothers, to their brutal mirth. But the idea lodged deep, hushing them. “That was what we did, once. That’s what we were. That’s what we’ll be again.”

Iron James died, bewildered by the distance of his life’s run. But before he passed from the earth’s fact, he saw his grandson trade in the family’s striped pole for a small pharmacy. This was decades before the Great Migration, when the Daleys could still sit anywhere on the trains, shop at department stores eager for their dollar, even send their children to the white public schools. Race was not yet all it would become. Daley Pharmacy served both races, each of which recognized good decoctions at the right price. Only after the southern flood did the clientele irreversibly divide.

Nathaniel Daley brought the family into the forms of legitimacy no Negro Daley had ever known. He shored up the business with the same legal tricks that crafty white folks used, folks who every now and then came by to knock the business back down some. Time passed, and the pharmacy survived every twist of white will. The Daleys began to think the game might almost be theirs to play.

William, the great-grandson, outstripped even Nathaniel’s curve of hope. He ventured out to Washington, that watchtower on the Old South’s border, to attend Howard. He came home almost a decade later, a doctor of medicine and certified member of the Talented Tenth. He never spoke of the years that twice landed him in a state of mental collapse. Medical school could break even those who weren’t being pecked to death by Jim Crow. But William outlasted the curriculum, learning the nature of each muscle, artery, and nerve that composed the godly anatomy of every human.

William Daley, M.D., completed his internship at that same Negro hospital where his family had long suffered as model patients. Black doctor: He met all looks of surprise and alarm with cool possession. More: He fought alongside the dozens of his rank throughout the city to take up staff positions at the institutions where they served out their peonage. Advance, he insisted, was just a matter of permanent slogging. But even William, some reflecting nights, found the air at his new altitudes a little thin and dizzying.

Though James had long since passed beyond the colorless veil, Frederick lived long enough to see his grandson establish a modest family practice in a mixed residential neighborhood in the Seventh Ward, south of Center City. That’s where the girl, Nettie Ellen Alexander, broke upon William like a womanly Johnstown flood. He neither searched her out nor made provision for her accidental arrival. She just appeared to torment him, merely twenty, yet finer in line than any creature of any color he’d ever properly seen. He hadn’t looked at women for the eight long years he’d been in school, anatomy texts aside. Now, chancing upon this girl, he wanted to make up for his years of lost looking all in one go, squeezing them into the first afternoon he laid eyes on her.

Nettie smiled at him before she properly knew him. Flashed him a whole rank of perfect ivories, as if to say, Took your time, didn’t you? Smiled at him because she didn’t know him, but knew she would. A whole mess of muscles in her face squeezed together with enough pleasure at the sight of him to galvanize his own helpless mouth into foolish reciprocation. Miss Alexander’s grin loosened a horde of silverfish inside him. Muscles that weren’t on any anatomy exam twitched worse than those dead men’s flexors on the dissection slab, brought back to life by that dry-cell practical joke beloved of medical students everywhere.

Medicine gave him no names for this condition. He found himself thinking of her upper thorax when thumping those of others. The dorsal surface of her scapula was something a sculptor might nick, sand, and polish for thirty years and still miss by a millimeter. Her sixth cervical vertebra’s spinous process sprouted from the base of her neck like some starter bud for a coming set of wings. Each time the woman breathed, William tasted raspberry liquor, though she swore she never touched a drop.

The air around her shone, even in the Alexanders’ parlor, where the couple sat, all the lamps doused, a conservation Nettie’s father employed to make ends meet from month to brutal month. Her eyes put William in mind of fireflies, or luminous deep-sea fishes, living so dark for so long, they had to make their own light just to do a little subsistence fishing. The doctor could not fathom her glow, let alone say how she made it.

Nettie was light. Some days, her paleness almost frightened him away. It startled him and it nattered at his poise. He could feel folks turning to inspect them— Those two? A pair? — each time they stepped out together. Her lightness left him lapsing into feats of erudition, donning learning’s armor each time he visited. He didn’t relish the thought of adding one more twoness to his birthright. He told himself that yellow meant nothing. Said that he had to look past her tone, to the shadings of her spirit. Yes the woman was light, but it came from that lamp that she carried around inside her.

Still it dazzled him, this high-gold blaze. Whether her skin’s shade or her hair’s wave, whether posture, curve, carriage, or something more ghostly and finer, Nettie Ellen was the one whom William recognized, the crown he didn’t know he’d been reaching out for until she stood sparkling in front of him, just past his trembling fingers.

But month after month, his hands panicked, afraid to close around so fine a thing. What if he were wrong? What if the lady’s spark shot out indiscriminately, on everyone? What if the warmth Nettie showed him was more amusement than desire? That seed of gladness she set in him certainly felt like proof. But surely this woman transfixed every derelict buck that her twin beams trained upon.

Around her, William rose up into highest seriousness. He adored her with a gravity that bordered on mourning. Dignity, he imagined, was the one gift he could give her that no other man would think to offer. He alone in all Philly knew the worth of this woman, this pearl’s rare price. His visits were reverential, his face creased with veneration.

Nettie thought the man a glowering rain cloud, but without the thunder or lightning. She suffered through a four-month courtship as sterile as any physician’s clinic. He dragged her to lectures and museums, always adding his own elevating commentary. He walked her over every acre of Fairmont Park, both sides of the river, hobbling her with self-betterment until she begged him to take up cribbage, at which she gleefully commenced whipping him.

But William knew this cribbage queen for something really regal. He found dignity even in the way shehorselaughed through a Bill Foster single-reeler picture. He described his practice to her, the work he did and hoped to do, the healthier future that modern medicine could bring to the hard-pressed folk of Southwark and Society Hill, once the poor and ignorant quit fearing it and let it in the door.

Worship needs a chapel, and William’s was Nettie’s parents’ parlor. The room spilled over with chintz and cut-glass bowls and wing-back chairs that sprouted so many antimacassars, William finally took the hint and cut back on his own hair slicker. At his visits, Nettie’s parents vanished into the back, leaving only a younger son chaperon for William to buy off with root-beer sticks or licorice. Then the room became their theater, their lecture room, their spiritual Oldsmobile, William holding forth, the solemn docent, while Nettie Ellen grinned at the man’s talk as if it meant something.

He was lecturing one evening on Dr. James Herrick’s recent clinical description of sickle-cell anemia — yet another scourge that plagued the black man with excess enthusiasm — when Nettie at last leaned across the backgammon board that served as their lone barrier and said to the good doctor, “Ain’t you never gonna make a grab for me?” Her voice filled with simple practicality; the night was cold, and Nettie’s parents were saving on the heat again. What good was a courter who wouldn’t even keep you warm?

The doctor hung stunned in space, his mouth imitating his tie’s opal stickpin. William Daley, uplift’s agent, sat paralyzed with bafflement. So the woman did what the situation called for, leaning over even deeper and attaching the M of her upper lip to his astonished O.

Once Nettie taught the fellow what he was after, the stroll of their courtship stepped up to a canter. Dr. William Daley and Nettie Ellen Alexander were married within the year. Afterward, the lecture load was more evenly divided between them. She nudged his speeches forward with strategic encouragements. The scope and variety of her instruction never failed to amaze the doctor.

William prized his magnificent specimen even more after landing her. His new wife furnished the house on Catherine Street, with its solid bay-windowed turret, and she installed herself at the house’s center, a genius of efficiency. At the end of the European war, she began to keep the books. With selfless efficiency, she set to work populating the household. She lost her beautiful firstborn, James, gave him up too quickly to God, who, after the Armistice, for His unknowable reasons, spread influenza around the world, settling into the Daleys’ neighborhood with a special vigor.

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

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

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

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

She worshiped her man and also worked him. Both came to the same thing. “I marvel at you, William C. Daley,” she declared, bringing a bromide to his office late one night. “What kind of studying you laying into now? Human Nature and Conduct. The Varieties of Religious Experience. The Such-and-So-ology of Everyday Life. James Joyce, Useless. Whoo-my. Fine black ship out there in all that cold white ice. Be careful you don’t hit something and go down with all hands.”

He rose up, a pillar of righteousness. “I am not black, any more than you are. The sole of my shoe is black. The coal we pay too much for every month is black. Look at me, woman. Look at yourself. Look at any brother of ours in the whole outcast race. You see black?”

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

“It’s the other side that makes us black. The other side wants to know what it feels like to be a problem.” For among all the treacherous white ice, he’d also read that light, mixed man, Du Bois. “Black’s what the world wants us to be. How can we even see ourselves to be ourselves?”

She waved him away. As always when they talked such things, Nettie just shook her head at his notions. “You’re whatever you want to be, I suppose. And whatever that is, Dr. Daley, you’re my one of a kind.”

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

And still the country raced madly ahead of him. The white man had some covert entry that didn’t even require Jim Crow to keep the Negro out. Dr. Daley studied the prosperity racket — the game of real riches, not the slow, hard-won advancement that had until then been his. The answer was there, staring at anyone who bothered to look: stocks. The country was gulping down equities like so much nerve tonic. Every thuggish son of an Irish immigrant knew the secret: Buy America. And finally, Dr. Daley did just that. He did so, over the scandalized Nettie’s howls, and later, without her knowledge. Stock picking was worlds easier than doctoring. Nothing to it, really. You bought. The price went up. You sold. You found another investment, a little more expensive, to shelter the compounded cash. The whole scheme kept feeding itself, as long as you wanted to ride.

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

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

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

And further: No man in God’s crapshoot had the right to profit from anything but the sweat of his brow. Labor was the lone human activity capable of creating wealth. Any other accumulation was just plantationism, disguised. That spring evening, taking the air, waving to his neighbors as they rocked themselves on their porch swings, William swore off not just the market but also banks, savings and loans, and any other institution that promised something for nothing.

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

Hardship saved its best for the colored man. Within two years, half of working Negro Philadelphia had no livelihood. The WPA, when it came, paid coloreds only a fraction of white wages, when it hired coloreds at all. Jobless, white America turned even more vicious than when the living had been easy. Lynchings tripled. They strung up Herndon and railroaded the Scottsboro boys. Harlem burned; Philly would be next. Catherine Street teetered, threatening to go the way of all Southwark.

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

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

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

“Nothing’s wrong with it, Daddy.”

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

“Nobody,” Delia would reply, sighing.

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

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

“No way it’s not going to happen.”

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

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

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

“Anything I want.”

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

“Ugh, Daddy. Never.”

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

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

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

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

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

Delia sang fearlessly. She threw back her head and nailed free-flying notes like a marksman nails skeet. She sang with such unfurling of self that the congregation couldn’t help but turn and look at the teenager, even when they should have been looking skyward.

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

Nettie Ellen shook her head and smiled. “When the people come for you, your choice is already made. All you can do is lift up the light God sets in your hand. That light don’t belong to you anyway. It’s not yours to hide.”

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

Delia could feel them as she sang, the hearts of the flushed congregation flying up with her as she savored the song’s arc. She sheltered those souls in her sound and held them as motionless as the notes themselves, in that safe spot up next to grace. The audience breathed with her, beating to her measure. Her breath expanded sufficiently to take her across even the longest phrase. Her listeners were in her, and she in them, so long as the notes lasted.

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

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

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

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

Delia asked her father about the magic name.

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

Daughter wanted more than knowing could contain. But already she was miles above her father’s lecture. Years. She built an image of that voice even before she heard it. When the radio finally played her the real thing, the real Miss Anderson’s sound did not match the one she’d imagined. It was the one.

“You want to sing?” her father told her after that broadcast. “There’s your teacher. You study that woman.”

And Delia did. She studied everything, devouring, whole, every scrap of music she could gather. She exhausted one neighborhood vocal teacher and demanded another. She joined the Philadelphia People’s Choral Society, the finest Negro choir in the city. She began going to Union Baptist, musical magnet of black Philadelphia, singing there every Sunday, rubbing shoulders with whatever enchantment had given Miss Anderson wings.

The move shattered her mother. “Taking up with the Baptists? What’s the matter with your real church? We’ve always been A.M.E.”

“It’s the same God, Mama.” Close enough, anyway, for human ears.

Too late, William Daley discovered what fire he’d lit in his daughter. He took to futile dousing. “You have a duty, girl. Abilities you haven’t even discovered yet. You have to make something worthy of your future.”

“Singing is worthy.”

“It has its use. But damn it. Only as something a person does to round out a real day’s work.”

“It is a day’s work, Daddy. My day. My work.”

“It can’t support a body. It’s not enough for you.” The long, careful upward Daley climb threatened to crash down all around him. “It’s not a life. You can’t make a living out of singing, any more than you can out of playing dominoes.”

“I can make a living at anything I want, Daddy.” She ran her fingers through the few remaining ripples of his retreating hair. He was a bull, ready to charge. But still, she stroked him. “My papa taught me that nobody’s going to stop my miracle from happening.”

Their battle turned fierce. He said there’d be no money for singing school. So in her junior year of high school, she got a job changing sheets in the hospital. “A maid,” William said. “The kind of work I’d hoped never to see any of my offspring ever do.”

He fell back on every feat of oratory he could raise. But he stopped short of forbidding her to follow the path of her choosing. No Daley would ever again have a master, even another of her own. His daughter’s life was hers to advance or to squander. A part of him — a tiny, grain-sized irritant — fell back, impressed that the flesh of his flesh could run so gladly to ruin, as determined as the most affluent, willful white.

She applied to the city’s great conservatory. The school scheduled her for an audition. Delia’s coaches and choir conductors did their best to prepare her. She brushed up those church recital songs that best showed off her slow, sustained control. For a showier complement, she learned an aria—“Sempre libera,” from La Traviata. She picked it up phonetically from an old 78, guessing at the more exuberant syllables.

Delia chose to sing a cappella, rather than risk being compromised by any fervent but finger-faulty accompanist. It seemed an act of bold self-confidence, of calculated risk. The professionals would doubtless shake their heads over her lack of training. But Delia could make up in pure sound what she lacked in finish. Her held high notes were her ace in the hole. They thrilled her to unleash, and they never failed to devastate every warm-up audience she tried them on, with the sole exception of her savage little brothers. She felt ready to face any trial, even the sight-singing, where she knew she was weakest.

She chose and vetoed half a dozen outfits — too formal, too plain, too sexy, too sacky. She settled on a deep blue flare-shouldered dress with white accents at the cuffs and collar: classic, with a hint of flash. She looked so good that a fretting Nettie Ellen took her picture in it. Delia showed up half an hour early at the institute, beaming at each stray body dragging through the foyer, sure that any one of them might be Leopold Stokowski. She approached the receptionist, faking a confident smile. “My name is Delia Daley. I have an audition with the vocal faculty at two-fifteen?”

She might have been the stone statue of the Commendatore, barging into Don Giovanni’s front room. The receptionist flinched. “Two…fifteen?” She flipped weakly through random paperwork. “Do you have a letter of confirmation?”

Delia showed the letter, her arms going cold. Not this. Not here. Not in this castle of music. Her explanations raced ahead, while reason stayed behind in the guilty vehicle, arrested.

She handed over the letter, forcing her numbed fingers to release it. The receptionist scoured a massive file, all polite efficiency. “Would you mind taking a seat? I’ll be with you in a moment.” She disappeared, her high heels a cut-time clip, down the music-riddled corridors. She returned with a stocky, balding man in tortoise-rimmed glasses.

“Miss Daley?” All grins. “I’m Lawrence Grosbeck, associate dean and a professor of voice.” He didn’t offer his hand. “Please forgive us. A letter should have gone out to you. All the positions in your range have already been offered. It looks, also, as if we’re probably about to lose one of our soprano faculty. You’re… You…”

The flush started in her abdomen and spread in waves. The burning rushed up to her cheeks, her eyelids, the fluting of her ears. Futile good manners, pointless self-preservation fought down the urge to do violence to this violation. Down the hall, the soprano ahead of her struggled through her set piece. At the desk, the soprano after her handed over her papers. Delia kept beaming at this man, this squat, enormous, impenetrable power. She smiled, still trying to win him over, all the while tucking her head in shame.

The dean, too, heard the evidence, teeming all around them. “You’re welcome, of course, to…to sing for us anyway. If you…like.”

She bit down the urge to damn him and his kind for all time. “Yes. Yes. I’d like to sing. For you.”

Her executioner led her down the corridor. She followed, stumbling and numb. She drew one covert finger along the paneled walls that she’d dreamed of. She would never touch them again in this life. Her ankles softened; she reached out to steady herself. She looked down on her body from above, her whole torso shaking. She lay in a deep snowbank under the January night, her body shivering, stupidly failing to realize she was already dead. Everything she’d worked for was lost. And she’d just agreed to give her destroyers one more chance to mock her.

As they reached the room appointed for her pointless, rigged hearing, her shaking undid her. Four white faces stared at her from behind a long table cluttered with papers, faces like clocks, each a passive mask of polite confusion. The dean was saying something to her. She couldn’t hear him. Her sight shrank to a cloud no more than a foot across. She fumbled for the piece she’d prepared and couldn’t remember it.

Then the sound came. Her voice faltered back to its first authority. Her singing stopped her auditioners, hushed their rustling. She slipped in pitch. She heard herself lose the consistent tone that had been hers in every rehearsal. Yet it tore out of her, her life’s performance. She sang beyond their power to disgrace, and forced recall upon her judges. This song; this one.

The Verdi aria sounded, for once, like the indictment it was, the condemnation hiding under its crazed hymn to pleasure. When she finished, the judges answered with silence. They went through their charade, giving her an aria from Handel’s Acis and Galatea to sight-sing: “As When the Dove Laments Her Love.” Delia nailed it perfectly, still hoping to reverse reality, smiling through to the double bar.

At last, Dean Grosbeck spoke. “Thank you, Miss Daley. Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

Emptied, she had no encore. “I’ve Been ’Buked” rose up into her mouth, but she bit down on it. No revenge but refusal. When she left the audition room, all the soprano positions still filled, she saw the eyes of one of her examiners, a frail white woman her mother’s age, spilling over, wet with music and shame.

She stumbled back across town, home. Her father sat in his study, reading in his red Moroccan leather chair.

“They turned me down before I even opened my mouth.”

Across her father’s face, every impotent recourse moved like a crew of migrant field hands: the blocked petitions, the denied lawsuits, the humiliating retries — next year, the year after, killed by the same standing refrain. He rose from his chair and approached her. He took her shoulders and looked into her, the last lesson of childhood, fired to a hard finish in that old furnace they now shared.

“You’re a singer. You build yourself up. You make yourself so damn good, they can’t help but hear you.”

Delia had stood through the afternoon’s ordeal. Now in her father’s caring gaze, she fell. “How, Daddy? Where?” And she broke down in that finishing fire.

He helped her find a music school that would hear her. One at least competent. He came to her admission audition and stood by, gripping the air, as she passed, with a scholarship. He staked her the balance of her tuition, although she kept her job, to pay for those extra lessons he couldn’t understand. He went to her every recital and was on his feet clapping before the last held tonic could decay. But both father and daughter knew, without ever admitting as much to each other, that she would never, now, be schooled at the upper level of her skills, let alone the lower reaches of her dreams.

A Tempo

Clever Hänsel’s voice has broken and won’t ever be put back together. “Breaking,” Da tells him, “is the arrow of time. It is how we can know which way the melody is running. Breaking is what turns yesterday into tomorrow. Soprano before; tenor after. Deep physical principle!”

This is our Da’s faith. All other things may change, but time remains the same. “Growing disorder: This is how we must tell time. Lunch is not only never free; it gets, every day, a little more expensive. This is the only sure rule in our cosmos. Every other fact, you will one day exchange. But bet against the Second Law, and you are doomed. The name isn’t strong enough. Not second anything. Not a law of nature. It is nature.”

He raises us to believe this. “Things fall down and get more broken. More mixed. Mixing tells us which way we point in time. This is not a consequence of matter or space. It’s the thing that gives time and space their shape.” Who knows what the man means? He’s his own independent country. All we know is: No one breaks the Second Law and lives. Like don’t take candy from strangers. Like look both ways before you cross the street. Like loose lips sink ships, a law I will never quite get until long after all my ships have sailed.

And yet our father’s unshakable faith is flawed. His science hides an embarrassment that absorbs him day and night, as if he’s God’s bookkeeper and can’t sleep until the columns balance. “At the heart of this beautiful system, a little heart attack. Eine Schande. Help me, my boychik!” But I can do nothing for him. The discrepancy drives him a little crazier every day. This scandal is his arrow, and shows him which way he runs.

I catch him working on it one evening, when I’m home for Christmas. He’s in his cave, perched over a sheaf of paper marked off into a grid of blue squares. Drawings all over, like a comic book. “What are you working on?”

“Working?” He always takes a moment to surface. “I’m not working on anything. This damn thing is working on me!” He likes to say that word, when Mama can’t hear. “You know what is the meaning of ‘paradox’? This is the biggest damn paradox human beings have ever built.” I feel guilty, responsible. “Mechanics, which I believe absolutely, says time can flow either way. But thermodynamics, which I believe even absolutlier…” He clucks his tongue and waves a finger in the air, a traffic cop. “Einstein wants to kill the clock. Quantum needs it. How can both these fine theories be right? Right now — whatever now means! — they don’t even mean the same thing by time. It looks bad, Yoseph. You can imagine. A big family fight in public. The dirty little secret of physics. Nobody talks about it, but everybody knows!”

He hangs his head in shame, leaning over his blue graph paper. Clowning for me, but suffering all the same. The world is full of snares. The Russians have the bomb. We’re at war with China. Jews are executed as spies. Universities refuse my father as a conference speaker. His marriage makes him a criminal in two-thirds of the United States. But this is the crisis in my Da’s Zeitgeist: this flaw, this blot on the whole clan of scientists, on all of creation, whose housekeeping they do. It turns him around in time.

Our family, too, is turned around. Jonah’s voice has fallen an octave. It lies broken at the bottom of a well. Mine teeters on the verge of the same fall. We’re home again, on what must be my second summer recess. Da’s in a deep, jovial gloom. My little sister sits in his study with him, sharing his excited misery, his graph paper, his drawing tools, her hands stroking her chin, her face pretending to think. Mama teases him, which tears me up, given Da’s obvious distress. Something in his proofs has gone horribly wrong.

“Why go on believing it if it upsets you?”

“It’s mathematics,” he thunders. “Belief has nothing to do with the numbers.”

“Fix the numbers, then. Make them listen to you.”

Da heaves a breath. “This is exactly what they will not do.”

I’m in hell. My parents aren’t even arguing. Worse. To argue, they’d have to understand each other. Our Da can understand nothing anymore. He’s come to the conclusion that there is no time.

“No time for what?” I ask.

He shakes his head, stricken. “For anything. At all.”

“My, my.” Mama laughs, and Da flinches at the sound. “Where has the time gone? It was here just a minute ago.”

It doesn’t exist, says Da. Nor, apparently, does motion. There is only more likely and less likely, things in their configurations, thousands, even millions of dimensions, hanging fixed and unmoving. We put them in order.

“We feel a river. In reality, there is only ocean.” And my father is at the bottom of it. “There is no becoming. There is just is.”

Mama waves him off and heads to the front room to clean. “Excuse me. Can’t keep my dirt waiting. Call me when you get the universe started up again.” She chuckles from the end of the hallway, a laugh lost under the roar of her upright vacuum.

I’m alone with Da in his study, but I can give him no comfort. He shows me the undeniable calculations. Everything spelled out in meticulous detail, like a full pocket score of an inevitable symphony. He speaks less to this lecture room of one desperate student than to some hidden examiner. “In mechanics, the film can run in reverse. In thermodynamics, it cannot. You would know at once, by the feel of the current, if you were swimming against the stream of time. But Newton wouldn’t. Neither would Einstein!”

“Don’t let them in the water,” I suggest.

He points out a tiny solo equation buried in his notes’ cluttered orchestration. “This is the timeless wave function of Schrödinger.”

He doesn’t mean timeless. Who knows what he means?

“This is the only way we have. The only thing for tying the universe to subatomic pieces. The only one to satisfy the constraints of Mach. The function that must connect the too big with the too small.”

It seems important to him that the thing move. But the universe’s wave function stands still. The score hangs in eternity, unable to progress from start to last except in imagined performance. The piece everywhere always already is. Our family’s musical nights have led him to this insight. Music, as his hero Leibniz says, is an exercise in occult mathematics by a soul that doesn’t even know it’s counting.

“We are the ones who make a process. We remember the past and predict the future. We feel things breaking forward. Make an order for before and after. But in the other hand…”

“ Onthe other hand, Da.” Forever teaching him.

“On the other hand, the numbers do not know…” He stops, baffled. But true to the sheets full of symbols, he rallies. “The laws of planetary motion say nothing about clockwise or counterclockwise. The year might be running summer, spring, winter, fall, and we wouldn’t be able to say! That bat driving the ball forward comes to the same thing as the ball driving the bat back. This is what we mean by a system being predictable. By a deterministic world. Time falls away, an unneeded variable. With Einstein, too. One set of reversible equations already fixes for us the whole series of unfolding time. Plug in a value for any moment of time, and you know the values for all other moments, before and after. We say that the present completely causes the future. But it’s a funny think?”

“ Thing, Da. A funny thing.”

“That’s what I said! A funny think, as far as the mathematics? We can say also the present has determined the past. One path, whether you walk down it or up.” His right-hand fingers cut a swathe across his left palm. Then his hands reverse. “It’s not even that fate has already been decided. Even that idea is itself still too trapped in the notion of flow.”

He still works on other, more movable things. He solves a thousand unsolved problems, important papers, where his name appears nowhere except in the acknowledgments. He keeps his colleagues publishing, long after his own flow stops. His colleagues marvel at him, so deep in his debt that they will never tunnel out. They say he doesn’t work forward from the problems they hand him. He jumps into the future, where he sees the answers. Then works his way back to the here and now.

“You could make a fortune,” they tell him.

“Ha! If I could take messages from the future, money would be the last thing I’d waste my time on!”

Mama says he can only solve problems for his colleagues, not for himself. “Oh, my love! You can’t crack the ones you care about. Or maybe you only care about the ones not even you can wrap your head around?”

He’s never once tried to wrap his head around what time is doing to us, to our family. He struggles, in his study, to do away with time. But the world will do away with all five of us before then, if it can. Da’s score of scribbles distresses him more than any slur ever leveled at him. He studies his pile of scrawl the way he reads those letters from Europe, the endless unanswering answers to the hanging questions he rewrites and resends, every year, to changing addresses abroad. He’s lost his family. His mother and father, his sister, Hannah, and her husband, who was not even a Jew. No one can tell Da that they’re still alive. But no one will tell him they’re dead.

Mama says they would have found us by now. If the German officials that Da writes to can’t say where they are, then that says everything. But Da says, “We cannot speak about what we do not know.” And beyond that, he doesn’t.

In Europe, he tells me, the horse races are run around the oval backward. I think: You give your winnings to the track, then wait until the race reaches its start to see how much you bet. I love the idea: Jonah and me, already with him, over in Europe, back before Da has even come to America to meet Mama. What a surprise we’ll be to her. I laugh at the idea of meeting all Da’s missing relatives, of them meeting us, before we’re even born, before they all go to the place Mama tells us they have almost certainly gone to.

But for the answers he needs, there is no certainty. Da gets another letter, emptied of all content but bureaucracy. He shakes his head, then starts another hopeless letter back. “Birthplace of Heisenberg,” he says. “Of Schrödinger’s cat.” In his same study, after another year, he tells me, “We have no access to the past. All our past is contained in the present. We have nothing but records. Nothing but the next set of histories.”

He holds his head while looking at the pictures he has drawn, the ones that kill time. He searches for the flaw in what he fears he’s just proved. He mutters about Poincaré’s recurrence, about any isolated system returning to its initial state an endless number of times. He speaks of Everett and Wheeler, of the entire universe budding off into copies of itself at every act of observation. Sometimes he forgets I’m there. He’s still at his desk half a decade later. I’m in college. Mama’s finished vacuuming for good, done with all cleaning. I stand behind Da, chopping his hunched shoulders. He hums with preoccupied gratitude, but in a minor key. Time may exist again, according to the numbers. He’s not sure. He’s even less sure if that would be cause for celebration.

Increasingly — time’s arrow — he makes no distinction between absurd and profound. His universe has begun to contract for him, time running backward toward some youngest day’s Big Crunch. There are secrets buried in gravitational relativity that even its discoverer had not foreseen. Secrets others won’t uncover for years to come. And he’s foreseeing them. He draws a picture of what quantum gravity will have to look like. He counts up all the curled-up dimensions that we will need just to survive the four we are already lost in.

Breaking is what gives the flow direction. Broken voices. Broken traces. Broken promises. Broken lives. Broken bonds. Whether it exists or not, time has been putting in overtime.

He works a private system, trancelike, lost in some nowhen, plugging variables into a hedge spread whose complexities he no longer bothers to explain to me. “Augustine said he knew what time was so long as he didn’t think about it. But the minute he thought about it, he did not know.”

He turns those thickening features on me, that cheerful look of mourning, the tunnel of those eyes hollowed out by every moment they have looked through. He gazes out at me from across the chasm of his intractable paradox. His four gnarled fingers on his right hand rise up to wipe his brow, tracing the same reflex path they’ve followed a hundred times every day of this life. His eyes gleam with the pleasure that each day’s impregnable strangeness gives them. If time, in fact, still exists, it must be a block, a resonance made by this standing wave’s equation. The lives he has yet to live through are already in him, as real as the ones he has so far led.

“A curve in configuration space,” he says. I don’t know if he’s found one, lost one, or is riding one. “Time must be like chords. Not even a series of chords. An enormous polytonal cluster that has the whole horizontal tune stacked up inside it.”

No time at all has passed — none to speak of. I look down at the man’s profile, the raised shield of a forehead, the prow of nose, the set chin as familiar to me as mine. The hair is mostly gone now, the eyes a sallow sag. But I can see the belief still lingering in the folds of his eyelids: The tenses are a stubborn illusion. The whole unholy trio of them have no mathematically distinct existence. Past and future both lay folded up in the misleading lead of the present. All three are just different cuts through the same deep map. Was and will be: All are fixed, discernible coordinates on the plane that holds all moving nows.

I’m pushing thirty. I don’t know where my sister is. My brother has abandoned me. Every large city in America has burned. The house is now some horror of a suburban Jersey tract home that none of us ever lived in. Da’s in his study, hunched over still more drawings. He works away furiously on the one problem I need him to solve. But as always, he can’t solve the ones he cares about. He’s telling me, “There is no such thing as race. Race is only real if you freeze time, if you invent a zero point for your tribe. If you make the past an origin, then you fix the future. Race is a dependent variable. A path, a moving process. We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all.”

He and I can’t possibly be related. No one who knows me or my family could possibly say this. But everyone else who might tell him as much has gone. Mama is dead, Jonah has emigrated, and Ruth is in hiding. It falls to me, my solo job, to remind my father of everything he has forgotten since he was my age, everything bright and obvious he’s broken away from, in the run of mathematical time. His ruined family. What ruined them. The woman he married. Why he married her. The experiment they ran. The odds against him surviving his own experiment.

But I can’t wrap my head around what he is trying to tell me. I bend down and drop my head on his shoulder. My hand goes up to his chest, to hold him back from this irreversible place he already half-inhabits.

He’s on his last bed, before the long one. In a hospital, back in Manhattan, ten minutes by cab from the study that he will never work in anymore. He’s talking to me about multiple worlds. “The universe is an orchestra that, at every interval, splits into two full ensembles, each one continuing on a different piece. As many whole universes as there are notes in this one!”

I need some proof that he’s still in control, there inside the smiling, wasted shell. Some proof that he did not put our entire future on the line — worse, our pasts — on something so tenuous as arithmetic.

“Ha!” Da barks, knocking my head up off his shoulder, startling my hand back into my lap. He’s found something, some disparity overlooked, some hidden term that smoothes all asymmetries. Or just some unbearable abdominal pain.

I wait for a day when there isn’t much suffering, and ask, “Did you ever decide who wins?”

He knows what I mean: mechanics or thermodynamics. Relativity or the quantum. The too big or the too small. The river or the ocean. Flow or standstill. The only problem he’s ever worked on. The one that occupies him, even in these last hours. He tries to grin at me, has to save up his strength for the monosyllable: “When?”

“At the end.”

“Ach! My Yoseph.” His wasted yellow arm tries to cuff my neck, reassuring. “If there is no beginning, how can there be an end?” I will go mad. The planes of his shoulder muscle slide over one another in a concerted churn beyond the reaches of the subtlest equation.

I’ll never get closer to him than now. He looks straight at my need but refuses to comfort or deny. He’s prepared for any outcome. Pleased, even, at the confusion he has created. The bets are all in. The results are unrolled. Somewhere, our future is already real, although we can’t yet know just how real, stuck as we are in the specious present. He shrugs again, his hand in the air, conducting. His eyes laugh at the world’s reel. His look wants to say, How do you want things to come out? What will you do if they don’t?

“A dead finish,” he says. “A photo finish. Down to the wire.”

We live through a chunk of moments as frozen as that photo. He gets no better. Doctors mill about us in a data-seeking daze, clinicians exercising every charm they know, trying to influence the outcome, already run. Da will leave, and I’ll be forever in the dark. This is my one certain prediction. The world will lead me through every available ignorance.

“Do you know what time is?” His voice is so soft, I think I’m making it up. “Time is our way of keeping everything from happening at once.”

I reply as he taught me, long ago, the year my voice broke. “You know what time is? Time is just one damn thing after another.”

August 1955

Now is a full summer’s end. The boy is fourteen, a shining child with a full, round face. No one in creation exudes more confidence. He walks down the aisle of a long southbound train, a spring in his step that he thinks is everyone’s God-given right. He glances out the slicing window, seeing the whole world strut along in the other direction, peeling away. He has grown up breathing the air of a large northern city. He imagines he’s free.

In the pocket of his natty trousers, he carries a photo from last Christmas: a newly minted teen posing with his radiant mother. In the picture, his hair is cropped, like all boys his age. His snazzy white Christmas shirt, crisp and concert-ready, still bears the traces of its department-store folds. Under the arrow points of crimped collar, a bright new tie pokes out, a golden stripe running down its middle. His face glows, a three-quarter moon with the earth’s shadow just slipping off its right side. His eyes light with confidence, as if he is the ring bearer at a large, loving wedding. All life lies in front of him. His boyish beauty makes him happy, or perhaps his joy makes him beautiful.

His mother, in the black-and-white photo, is in blue. Her dress is rimmed with a white lace collar and ruffled sleeves. A holiday necklace sparkles at her throat. Her hair spills in a hive of curls. Her right hand drapes across her son’s neck, resting on his shoulder. The boy looks dead-on into the camera, but the woman smiles off past the photo’s edge, beyond her boy, her soft, reddened lips a little lifted, her eyes sparkling, recalling the holiday surprise she has planned, later that afternoon.

This is the photo that flies along in the wallet in the trousers on the boy as he rushes down the aisle of the passenger train hurtling south. Another print sits in a silver frame on his mother’s dresser back home in the city, her keepsake from that magical Christmas eight months earlier. She has sent the boy off to visit his relatives in Mississippi, a last country vacation before he heads back to school.

By the time the train reaches his destination, the child owns it. Charmed strangers wish him well when he gets off at a tiny Delta town called Money. He steps off the platform into a crowd of boys, his instant friends. He appears to them as another species, a creature from another planet. His clothes, gait, accent: He walks among them full of jokes and boasts, floating on confidence, sharing nothing in the world with his blood relations. Except blood.

His mother has told him to mind his manners, so far from home. But so far from home, he no longer knows what minding manners means. This backwater town is slow and overgrown and easy to astonish. Everywhere he walks along these melting tar roads, he’s the center of a circle of boys, hungry for a performance they didn’t even know existed until his arrival. They call him “Bobo.” They demand a show. Bobo must sing for them, big-time songs, distant, urban kin of their own music they only barely recognize.

They want city tales, the stranger the better. Where I live, Bobo says, everything’s different. We can do anything we want. In my school? Blacks and whites have class together in the same room. Talk to each other, friends. No shitting.

His southern cousins laugh at this crazy-ass foolishness.

Here. Look!Bobo shows them a picture of his school friends, from his wallet, next to the Christmas photo. The Delta laughter crumples in confusion. The picture turns them stony. They can’t know that just this spring, the Supreme Court has declared that such craziness— with all deliberate speed — must become everywhere a fact. They haven’t heard the men who run the state capital in Jackson declare themselves, just this summer, to be proud criminals. For the boys on the dusty, weed-shot street in Money, this news is farther than the moon.

Look here,the boy Bobo says. He points out a girl with the nail of his thumb. Frail, blond, anemic — in a sickly way, almost beautiful. To the boys crowding around the photo, the face is animal, foreign. You could no more speak to such a thing than you could walk through fire. This girl here? Bobo tells his country disciples. This one’s my sweetheart.

The nigger’s gone mad. For all that he’s already overhauled their world, his audience can’t believe him. Bobo and this girl of straw: It sasses God. It breaks the damn law of gravity. What kind of city — even up north — is going to let this black boy near enough such a girl long enough to more than mumble an apology?

You a soul-damned liar. You joining on us. You think we all don’t know nothing.

Bobo just laughs. I tell you, this here’s my sweetheart. Who’s going to lie about a thing that nice?

His listeners can’t even sneer. No point even letting this mojo into your ears. The picture, the girl, the word sweetheart taunt like some hopping round of the dirty dozens. Not even the north could truck with such lawlessness. The boy’s got a match in one hand and a fat stick of gunpowder in his mouth. He wants to loose some real evil on them. The others step away from the picture, like it’s dope, pornography, or contraband. Then, like it’s all of those, they circle back for another, longer look.

They stand in the street in front of the tired brick box of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, twenty of them, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. It’s a stale late August Sunday, hotter than human thought and drier than a dust-coated dead mule. The boy and his first cousin have come into town for a snack, taking a break from the long day of church where the boy’s great-uncle preaches. The crowd he draws wants another look. The picture of the white girl passes from hand to hand. Whatever small part of them fears it might be true, they know it’s just another city-boy performance.

You a jiving fool.

Uh-uh.The boy laughs. Nothing like a fool. She look good in this picture? Looks even nicer in life.

Get on gone with you. Truth, now. What’s you doing with a picture of a white girl in your wallet?

And that round, cherubic confidence — all of life in front of him — just grins.

It drives the others wild. You think you something, talking to white women? Let’s see you go inside this store, talk up that Bryant woman who runs it. Ask that white woman what she doing tonight.

The northern boy just smiles his world-beating smile. That’s exactly where he was heading anyway. He nods at these rurals, pushes open the grocery’s screen door, and disappears underneath theDRINK COCA COLA signs on the white-pine overhang.

The boy is fourteen. The year is 1955. The store’s screen door slaps closed behind him, pure child on a dare. He buys two cents of bubblegum from the white woman. On his way out, he says something to her, two words—“Bye, baby.” Or maybe he whistles: a quick, stolen trophy to bring back to his friends outside, to answer their challenge, prove he’s his own owner. He bolts out the door, but the hilarity he thinks is waiting for him outside skids off into horror. The others just stare at him, begging him to undo what he just did. The crowd disperses, wordless, in all directions.

They come for the boy four days later, after midnight, when time turns inside out and all-powerful force goes dreamlike. They come to the home of Mose Wright, this Emmett’s great-uncle preacher. Two of them, potent, blunt. One is bald and smokes a cigarette. The other has a pressed, thin face that knows only rage and feeding. They wake the old preacher and his wife. They want the boy, the nigger boy from Chicago who did all that talking. The men have guns. The boy is theirs. Nothing in the world will stop them from taking him. They move with clipped authority, beyond the authority of states. The steady work, the cold, damp method of after midnight.

The boy’s great-aunt steps up to plead. He just a child. He ain’t from around here. That boy, he didn’t know nothing. He don’t mean nobody no harm.

The balding one smashes her across the temple with his gun butt. The two whites overpower the old man. They take the boy. This is how things operate. The boy belongs to them.

Bobo — Emmett — is the only one who’s calm. He’s from Chicago, the big city, up north. He did nothing wrong. He isn’t falling for this backwoods intimidation game, these couple of crazy crackers in their summer-stock play, banging around by the only light in which they can pull the performance off. They can’t hurt him. He’s fourteen; he’ll live forever.

The whites march Emmett across the night grass, twisting the child’s arm up behind his back. He tries to straighten, to walk normally. The snub-faced one knees him in the groin and the boy doubles over. He cries out, and the snub-faced one slams his gun down on the boy’s face. The skin above Emmett’s eye opens and rolls back. He puts his hand to the lake of his blood welling there. They tie him like a calf and throw him into the back of their pickup. The snub-faced one drives and the bald one rides in back, his boot pressing on the boy’s skull.

They ride him for hours on the potholed roads, his head banging against the metal truck bed. The boy can’t be properly corrected until he knows how serious a thing he did. They stop to pistol-whip him, beating him from his legs to his shoulders, setting wrongs to right.

Who did you think you were talking to?The question fills with fascination. The questioners have gained confidence all night, as the boy dissolves into a ball of blood and moaning. You blind? You think that woman was some black bitch? The snub-faced one’s eyes come alive under their flaps of turtle skin. That’s my wife, nigger boy. My wife. Not some little trash-black whore.

He savors the words— bitch, trash, whore, nigger, white, wife — punctuating each repeat of the lesson with a blow from his rod. He works meticulously, some stubborn stain of infidelity here he cannot beat out. He strips the boy, smashes him across his bare chest, shoulders, feet, thighs, cock, and balls. Every piece of this rule-breaking flesh must be made to respect his power.

We never had a problem with our niggers till you Chicago vermin come down to rile them up. Don’t you know nothing? Nobody never taught you can from can’t?

The boy has stopped answering. But even his silence defies them. The two men — the husband of the soiled woman and his half brother — work away on the naked body: in the truck, out of the truck, questioning, beating, questioning, patient teachers who’ve started their lecture too late.

You sorry about what you did, boy?Nothing. You ever going to do something so stupid again, the whole of what’s left of your life? More nothing. They look for compliance in his face. But by now, the impish bright oval from the Christmas photo has little face left. The boy’s silence drives the whites into whatever calm technique lies past madness. They poke their barrels into his ears, his mouth, his eyes.

They will tell it all later, to Look magazine, selling their confession for petty cash. They meant only to scare. But the boy’s refusal to feel wrong about anything drives them to their obligation. They throw him back into the flatbed and drive him out to Milam’s farm. They root around in the shed and turn up a heavy cotton-gin fan. Bryant, the snub-faced husband, begins to lift the fan into the truck. His half brother, Milam, stops him.

Roy, what the hell kind of work are you doing there?

Roy Bryant looks down and laughs. You’re right, J.W. I’m going crazy. It’s from not getting a good night’s sleep.

They make the boy pick it up. Bobo, who weighs little more than the fan. Emmett, whom the whites have beaten almost senseless. He staggers from the steel’s dead weight but manages to lift it, unaided, into the truck.

You know what this is for, don’t you, boy?

Still the boy refuses to believe. The drama is too broad, the cotton-gin fan too theatrical. They mean only to torture his imagination, to break him with terror. Yet lifting the heavy machinery is worse than everything he’s suffered until now.

Bryant and Milam make him lie down in the truck, naked, alongside the scrap metal. They drive him back into the woods, down by the Tallahatchie. In those last two miles, the boy lives through all creation. His thoughts collapse; no message can escape him to forgive the living. All law has aligned against him. Fourteen, and condemned to nothing. Even God gives him up.

The night is pitch-dark and filled with stars. They pull the truck far off the road, into a thicket by the river. Even now — the whites will tell the magazine that buys their confession — even now, they mean only to administer his due. They threaten to tie the fan around the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire. Bryant talks to him, slowly. You understand now, boy? You see how you’re making us do this?

Till says nothing. He has gone where no human need can reach.

Milam waves over the black water. We’re taking you out there, boy. Unless you tell us you’ve learned how to treat a white woman.

The boy didn’t show the proper remorse, they’ll tell the magazine. He refused to admit he’d done anything wrong.

Milam plays with the bloodied clothes while his half brother delivers the sermon. He wants to see what a black boy wears for underpants. He goes through Till’s pockets. He pulls apart the wallet and finds the picture.

Roy.Milam’s voice is metal. Look at this.

The men pass the photo back and forth, under a flashlight. Some unmeaning artifact. Some change in the fundamental laws. Bryant takes the photo to the riverside and forces it into the boy’s smashed face. How’d you get this, boy?

There’s not enough boy left to answer. The silence triggers another round of battering.

Who’d you steal this from? You better tell us everything. Now.

They might as well demand an answer from the earth they beat him into. Time melts like August road tar. The questions swell, each word unfolding its kernel of violent eternity. They hit him with a monkey wrench. Each blow is forever falling.

Who is this girl? What the fuck you do to her, nigger?

Emmett comes back from a place he shouldn’t have escaped. The house is burned, and it would be no use to him now, even if they let him live. The life they own means nothing to him. Sense has run down to a standstill. But somehow he comes back, finds the concussed brain, the caved-in throat.

She’s my sweetheart.

His crime swells past rape, worse than murder. It spits in the face of creation. What the whites must do, they do — no rage to their motion, no hysteria, no lesson. They exterminate by deep reflex, a flinch that comes before even self-defense. They put a bullet through the fourteen-year-old’s brain, as they might kill a rabid animal. A desperate protection, the safeguard of their kind.

They tie the fan around the corpse’s neck with the hank of barbed wire. They drop the body into the current, where it will never again threaten anyone. Then they return home to their families, a safety they’ve spent this night preserving.

When the boy doesn’t come home, Mose Wright calls the indifferent authorities. But he calls the boy’s mother, too, who phones the Chicago police. Pressed from outside, the law of Money moves. The local police arrest the two men, who say only that they took the boy but let him go after putting the fear of God into him.

On the third day, the weighed-down body rises from the river. It snags on the hook of a white boy, fishing, who thinks he has snared some primordial water creature. Landing the carcass, the fishing child needs several moments to recognize his catch as human. Every inch has been bludgeoned beyond recognition. Even Mose Wright can’t identify his grand-nephew until he sees the signet ring belonging to Emmett’s dead father, a keepsake the son wore on his slender finger, always.

The sheriff tries to rush a burial. But Emmett’s mother fights the police to get her son’s body returned to Chicago. Against the odds, she beats all obstructions. The body goes back north by train. Although the authorities order the casket permanently sealed, Emmett’s mother must have a last look, even in the Chicago station. She breaks the law, glances inside the casket, and faints dead away. When she comes to, she decides that the whole world must look on what it has done to her boy.

The world wants to look away, but can’t. A photo runs in Jet magazine and is reprinted throughout the black press and beyond. The boy has his white Christmas shirt on again, starched smooth, with a black jacket pulled over the top. These clothes are the only clue that the photo shows a human being at all. That the undertaker survived the corpse’s dressing is itself miraculous. The face is a melted rubber model, a rotting vegetable, bloated and disfigured. Below the midline, there’s nothing but a single flattened bruise. The ear is singed off. The nose and eyes have been returned to the face by hesitant guess.

This is the photo my parents fight over at the end, those two who never fought over anything. To a child raised on concord, every cross word is holy terror. A boy our age is dead. The fact leaves me, at most, confused. But our parents are arguing. And hearing their fight pitches me into the abyss.

“I’m sorry,” the one whispers. “No boy their age should be allowed to see such a thing.”

“Allowed?” the other says. “ Allowed?We have to make them look.”

Their voices whip back and forth like hushed scythes. These aren’t my parents, those two people who have trouble even singing the word hate in a chanson lyric.

Jonah hears it, too, the blade in their back-and-forth. Though he’ll remain a dutiful child for another year and a half, this crisis moves him to desperation. He ends their whispering the only way he knows how. While our parents argue over the photo, he goes to the magazine and looks.

So the fight sinks, weighted, underwater. We’re a family again, looking together, at least the four of us. Ruth, my parents agree, is too small to see. We’re all too small, even my father. But we look, together, anyway. That’s what the mother of the boy — the boy in the photo — wants.

“Is this real?” I ask. “Really real?” I would rather have them arguing again, anything but this. “A real human being?” I see only a macabre rubber mask, two months too early for Halloween. My mother won’t answer. She’s fixed by the image, petitioning the invisible, asking the same question. But she’s not asking about the boy.

My mother is crying. I can’t say anything, but I must say something. I need to keep her with us. “Are you related to him?” I ask. It’s just possible. I have much family on my mother’s side, whom she and Da say I’ll someday meet. But Mama won’t answer me. I try again. “Are you friends with—”

She waves me away, mute, broken, before I can find how to reach her.

I ask my father. “Do we know this boy or something?”

But he, too, gives only a distracted “Sha. Sei still, Junge.”

He comes for me at night, the thing they say is a boy. This happens more nights running than I can count. He lies decked out in that black suit, that perfect starched shirt, topped by the grotesque mushroom that ought to be his face. Then he sits up. His body pinches in the middle and he flips forward, his face zooming up to mine. He springs up to get me, the pulped mouth smiling, trying to befriend me, to speak. I try to scream, but my own mouth melts into another rubber mask as fused as his. I wake up wet, a moan leaking out of me, more cowlike than human. The moan wakes my brother, on the bunk above me. “Go back to bed,” he snaps at me. He doesn’t bother to ask what’s wrong.

The child’s funeral in Chicago becomes a national event. Da asks if Mama wants to go. “We could go together. I have not been out to the University of Chicago since Fermi died. I could get an invitation. We would be right there, on the South Side.”

My mother says no. The funeral of a stranger? She has her students, and there’s Ruth’s day school to think of. But even at thirteen, I know: She can’t go to this funeral, not this one, on the arm of a man my father’s color.

Ten thousand people turn out to mourn a boy only a hundred of them knew. Each shows up locked in a private eulogy, humming a whole hymnal of explanations. Unlucky boy, backwoods regional madness, the relic of a nightmare history: This is the funeral white America thinks it attends. But black Chicago, black Mississippi, friends of the boy’s mother, or last week’s mother, or next week’s, grab the mourning suit out of the closet — haven’t even had time to iron it — and go to the mountain again.

The coffin stands open throughout the service. The public files by for a last look, or a next-to-last, a second-to-next. The crowds show up again, back in Mississippi, for Bryant and Milam’s trial. All three infant television networks are there, and the newsreels, too, holding their audience repulsed but mesmerized.

A northern black member of the House of Representatives comes down in person to the county courthouse in Sumner. The bailiff refuses to let him in the room. Nigger says he’s a Congressman. At last they admit him but restrict him to the back, with the press and the handful of colored witnesses the law requires.

The courtroom is an oven. Even the judge strips down to his shirt-sleeves. The case prosecutes itself. The grooves in a cotton gin are unique, cut by only one fan. The fan tied with barbed wire to Emmett Till’s neck belongs to the gin still sitting in J. W. Milam’s barn. The prosecutor asks Mose Wright if he can see anyone in the courtroom involved in his grand-nephew’s abduction. The sixty-four-year-old preacher rises up alone against the world’s collected power and points at Milam. His finger arcs up and out, like the hand of God whose awful indictment created the first man. “Dar he.” Two words start up the irreversible future.

Where the prosecution is direct, the defense is ingenious. The body floating up out of the river is too disfigured to recognize, too decomposed to have lain submerged for just three days. Perhaps the signet ring was placed on the mangled body by some northern colored-loving group, eager to raise trouble where they don’t belong. Perhaps the boy is still alive, hiding up in Chicago, part of a conspiracy against a couple of men who wanted only to protect their womenfolk. Throughout, the defendants sit by their family, smoking cigars, their faces edged with defiant smiles.

If Bryant and Milam are found guilty,the defense attorney asks the jury, where, under the shining sun, is the land of the free and the home of the brave?

The jury is out for only an hour and seven minutes. They wouldn’t have taken even that long, one juror tells a reporter, if the twelve whites hadn’t lingered to drink a soda pop. The verdict comes down: Innocent on all counts. Milam and Bryant have done no wrong. They go free, back to their women and families. The whole trial is over in four days. The magazines run another picture: the killers and their mates, cheering their victory in the courtroom.

Jonah and I don’t hear this outcome. We’re back at our private conservatory, growing into our new voices, learning the lower lines in a vast choral fantasy about how all men are brothers. We’re deep in our own improvised lives, carrying snapshots around in our own wallets. We set aside the nightmare boy, the unforgettable photo, too disfigured to be anything but a ruined clay model. We never ask our parents what happened at the trial, and they never tell us. For if there’s one thing we need protection from, even more than this crime, it’s this verdict.

I do not learn the final verdict until adulthood, the adulthood Emmett Till never reaches. One child dies, and another survives only by not looking. What other protection could they offer us, our parents, who stripped us of all protection when they chose to make us? For after this country, there is no safety.

But here is the part I can’t get past. It’s twelve years later, 1967. Jonah and I are in a room on the eleventh floor of the Drake, in Chicago, in town a dozen years too late for the funeral. I’m at our window, trying unsuccessfully to peer past the fire escapes to something the map calls the Magnificent Mile. My brother lies on one of the double beds, paralyzed with agitation. We’re here for his Orchestra Hall debut, that night.

We’ve at last broken free from the wilds of Saskatchewan and the rain-leaking concert barns of Kansas. Jonah is streaking like a meteor across what is left of classical music’s sky. High Fidelity has named him one of their “ten singers under thirty who will change the way you listen to lieder.” And the Detroit Free Press has called him “a tenor who sings like a planet-scouting angel carrying back word of a place rich and strange.” He has recorded a successful disk with a small label and is about to do another. There’s talk of his signing a long-term contract with a larger house, perhaps even Columbia. He has only to keep from smoking and a triumphant life is all but guaranteed.

But triumph shows its first catch. A leading intellectual, whom Jonah has never heard of, has just ambushed him in print. It’s only a passing line, in Harper’s, not a venue likely to cause his career much lasting harm. Jonah keeps reading the line out to me until we both have it memorized. “Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.” And the intellectual goes on to name a famous modern dancer, an internationally acclaimed pianist, and Jonah Strom. The piece, of course, makes no mention of me, nor any of the thousands of lesser-skilled but loyal little brothers.

Everything in the accusation is true. People are dying, and the streets are on fire. Newark is an inferno. A river of flame runs through downtown Detroit. From the eleventh floor of the Drake, it doesn’t yet feel like civil war. But the evidence is everywhere, and my indicted brother has become addicted to it. In each new city we barnstorm through, in every pastel hotel room, we watch the bewildered news recaps — riots with the sound turned down — as Jonah runs through his scales and I tap out pantomime finger warm-ups on the tabletops.

It’s August, as it was for Till, only twelve years later. The nation again looks on, wanting to believe that the worst has passed. Everything has changed, but nothing is different. A black man sits on the Supreme Court. The rest are in prison, trapped in burning cities, or dying in Asia’s jungles. On the television in the Drake, a camera tracks down an avenue of commercial buildings, block after block of gutted brick. My brother stops in midarpeggio, three tones shy of the top of his usual workout range.

“You remember that boy?”

We’ve almost doubled in age since that day. Since my nightmares, we’ve never once spoken about the photo. Nor can I remember thinking about it. But the thing our parents fought over, the false hope of protection, has worked away inside us. I know in a beat who he means.

“Till,” my brother says, just as I say, “Emmett.” My brother falls quiet, calculating. He can be thinking only one thing. Once upon a time, I was this boy’s age. But now I’m twenty-six, and he’s still fourteen.

The dozen years since the boy’s death open in front of us, like an empty concert hall ten minutes before curtain. I look on that year, the one I couldn’t see when I lived there. Twelve years too late, I hear what our parents argued about that night. I hear our mother crying for this boy she didn’t know. On the muted hotel TV, the camera pans across men shivering in doorways along what might as well be Lenox, a handful of blocks from the house we grew up in.

“She didn’t want us to see. She didn’t want us to know.”

My brother stares at me. The first time he has looked me in the eye in over a week. “What do you mean?”

“The picture.” I wave at the screen, where club-swinging police and their white-fanged German shepherds wade into a screaming crowd. “She thought it might damage us, to see what…they did to him.” I snort. “I guess it did.” Jonah looks at me as if I’m another species. I can’t believe the idea has never occurred to him. “She was a mother, first, before…anything. We were her babies.” My brother is shaking his head, denying. I start to gutter, so I press on, harder. “But your father, the scientist: ‘What do you mean, too young? If it’s a physical fact, they have to know.’”

“Your memory has totally fucked this up.”

My face swells as if beaten. I’m ready to wheedle with him, to beg. At the same time, my fists clench. I’ve devoted myself to accompanying him, spent my whole life making sure that the real world won’t defeat him. I’ve carried my brother for a quarter of a century. I’m only twenty-five. “Me? My memory? You’re full of shit, Jonah. You don’t remember them—”

“Don’t try to swear, Mule. It’s even less convincing than your Chopin.”

“What are you saying? You think she had some other reason? You think she was—”

“You’ve got it backward. Da was the one. Didn’t want us even to hear them arguing. Wanted to keep our dreams musical and clean. Wanted to think the boy was a fluke; deviant history. Never going to happen anymore. You and me and Rootie? Our generation? We’d be the fresh start. Don’t tell us, and there’d be no scars.”

I shake my head, short wipes of denial. He might as well be telling me we’re adopted.

“I’ll tell you what. Mama was furious. Said he didn’t have the first idea in hell what was going on. I remember her wailing. ‘Whatever you think these boys are, the world is going to see them as a couple of black boys.’ We had to get ready. Had to know what people wanted to do to us.” Jonah gazes at the TV, at the Harper’s article, there, as always, on his bed stand, within reach. “Da tried to tell her it was just the South, just a couple of death-deserving animals. He’s the one who said it would only fuck us up to look at it.”

I can’t wrap my head around his words. The people he describes: I don’t know them. My mother couldn’t have said those things to my father. My father couldn’t have thought such stupidity.

“You know what happened? You know how things turned out?” Jonah looks up at me, smiles, and waves his hands in the air. “I mean, with the killers?”

My brother, the near illiterate, has been reading, behind my back. Or he’s learned the facts on some civil rights documentary, the kind of show that airs at a harmless hour late at night, on educational TV, when all good citizens, like me, are safe in bed.

“The whites. The murderers. They sell their confession to some picture magazine a few months after their acquittal. The trial’s barely over, and they’re telling the whole country exactly how they killed the kid. Make a quick couple of bucks, pocket money. The kid forced them to do it, apparently. Of course, they can’t be tried twice for the same crime.” Jonah’s face, in the hotel room light, looks almost white. “Did it do anything to you? That picture?”

“Nightmares for weeks. You don’t remember? I used to wake you up, with the moaning. You used to scream at me to shut up.”

“Did I?” He shrugs and waves, forgiving me for angering him. “Only weeks? I was seeing him for years. Fourteen, you see. That’s what was going to happen. They were coming for me. I was going to be next.”

I look at him and can’t see. My fearless brother, who wrapped the world around his little finger. My brother lies back on the bed. He splays both palms as if to break his fall. He closes his eyes. The bed rushes up beneath him. “A little trouble breathing, here, Mule. I think I might be having an attack.”

“Jonah! No. Not tonight. Get up.” I talk to him like he’s a small child, a puppy on the furniture. I walk him around in slow, relaxed circles, all the while rubbing his back. “Breathe normally. Nice and easy.”

I walk him over to the window. The noise of the Loop, the lazy tangle of commerce below, helps ease him a little. Jonah collects himself. His shoulders drop. He starts to breathe again. He tries to smirk at me, his neck pulled back: “What the hell’s your problem, buddy? What’s with all the physical contact all of a sudden?”

He tweezers my hand off his shoulder, twisting my wrist to steal a look at my watch. He, of course, doesn’t wear one. Nothing distracting or weighty allowed to touch his body. “Jesus Christ. We’re late,” he says, as if I’m the one who has been malingering. “Our big night, remember?”

He flashes a performer’s bitter smile and heads toward the bathroom, where his tux has been hanging in steam. He goes through the whole ritual: hot towels around the neck, eucalyptus rub and lemon wedges, vocalizing as he ties his white tie. I pull the curtains and dress out in the room, between the two beds. Jonah calls downstairs for his concert shoes, which come up to the room reflecting light like a pair of obsidian mirrors. He tips the bellhop obscenely, and the man beats an apologetic, resentful retreat.

We go take our debut turn at Orchestra Hall, the songs of Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Brahms. The white culture game. Nerves and overlearning get us through in a splash of color. There’s an edge to Jonah tonight, the radiant glow of a tubercular patient about to die. The Chicago crowd — all North Siders and suburbans — feels present at the birth of a wondrous discovery.

Afterward, after the Schubert encore, when it seems we have more than survived, we join hands onstage and walk off to wild applause, two brothers, split at the fork in what, until today, was our identical past.