“That’s not a place,” she hissed. “That’s not a future.” I waited for her to finish the thought. She already had.
“If Da thought for one minute that someone…” I wasn’t sure what I meant to say. “Whatever he told us or didn’t tell us about the fire, I’m sure he was just trying to honor her memory.”
Ruth put her palms out to stop my words. She’d had enough of me and my kind. She pulled away from her husband’s petting, ran her hands through her globe of hair, and blotted both eyes with a wadded napkin. When she took the napkin from her face, she was composed again. Ready for all the world’s work her parents had failed to tell her about. She grabbed her satchel and rose, speaking more to her wristwatch than to me. “You’ve got to give the man up, Joey.”
“The man? Give him up?”
“He’s done nothing but exploit you. From the beginning of time.”
“Da? Exploit me?”
“Not Da!” Her mouth twisted with agony. She wouldn’t say his name.
“Jonah?” I waved toward her satchel, the evidence. “Jonah doesn’t know anything about this. He can’t reject your theory if you never even—”
“Jonah,” she enunciated like a Met radio announcer, “doesn’t know much about anything beneath his perch.” Robert chuckled. I would have, too. Little Rootie had always been the perfect mimic.
“He’s doing what he can. What he does best in the world.”
“Being white, you mean?” She waved me off before I could counter. “You don’t have to defend him, Joey. Really, you don’t. So he’s got a secret. I ain’t gonna tell no one!”
“We could use a voice like that.” The way Robert said this made me guess: She’d slipped him into a concert. He’d heard his new brother-in-law sing, and the memory of that sound left even him a little ashen. “Whole world’s on fire. We could use everyone.”
“He’d end up using us,” Ruth said. She hated him. I couldn’t even admit it long enough to ask why. “Well, brother?” She pulled out her wallet and rooted for some dollars. I wondered what she was doing for money. I didn’t even know what my new brother-in-law did for a living. “You’ve heard all the evidence. The facts of what really happened to us. Make your own choice.”
“Ruth. What choice? You make this sound like some kind of cosmic showdown.” She tilted her head at me and lifted her eyebrows. “What choice am I supposed to make? I can play the piano, or I can help you save our people?”
“You can make a difference. Or not.”
“For God’s sake. You won’t even tell me where you’re living. You won’t even tell me what you’re involved in. Are you running guns or something? Bombing buildings?”
Robert’s massive hand came across the table and landed on my wrist. But softly, certain. Too graceful to frighten. He’d have made a magnificent cellist. “Look. Your sister and I have joined the Party.”
“The Party? The Communist party?”
Ruth chuckled. She pressed her palms into her cheeks. “Hopeless. The boy is hopeless.”
A Morse code smile flicked across Robert’s face. “Panthers.” He leaned forward. “We’re helping set up a New York chapter.”
Ruth was right. I was the white man’s nigger. Just the sound of the word scared me. I sat for a while, turning the name over in my head until it disintegrated. “Where’s the black leather jacket?”
“Left it at home.” Robert grinned, released my wrist, and waved outside. “I thought it was going to rain.”
Had she grown radical out of love, or fallen for the man out of politics? “You going to shoot at people?” I asked my little sister.
I meant it as a nervous joke. Ruth answered, “They’re shooting at us.” I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even breathe without betraying some blood relation.
My sister saw my agony. She stiffened, ready to go to war. But her husband shifted between us, softening. “Land, bread, education, justice, and peace. That’s all we’re talking.”
“And the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”
Ruth laughed. “Joey! You’ve been reading the newspapers. White newspapers, of course. But still.”
Robert nodded. “We’re fighting that bill, yeah. We have to. Police want us empty-handed. Whites want us to be the only ones without arms. Then they can keep doing anything they damn please to us.” It sounded like madness to me. As terminally mad as the streets of Watts. And yet, aside from that one nightmare evening, I knew my life to be a far crazier, far more sheltered dream. “A man has a right to defend himself,” my brother-in-law was saying. “So long as the police go on killing us at will, I’m holding out for that right. They’ve got the choice: the Whited States of America or the Ignited States.”
His words were empty of theater. The sound died in the room’s background chatter. I saw what Ruth responded to in the man. I, too, needed his approval, and I didn’t even know him. Ruth pulled at her husband. “Come on, Robert. Joey’s busy. Too busy for the facts. Too busy for what’s coming.”
“Ruth!” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “You’ll kill me. What does any of this have to do with…?” I waved at her satchel.
“With how your mother died? I thought it might help you decide whose son you are. That’s all.”
My mammy’s own bairn.I spoke slowly, trying to find the beat. “My mother married my father. They raised us as they thought right. She died in a fire.” The fire didn’t kill her.
“Your mother died in what was more than likely an act of racial hatred. Every day, someone somewhere dies the way she did.”
“Your mother…” And I couldn’t anymore. Neither of us owned her. She was lost to us both. I looked at Ruth for a last moment. “Mama sang a mean Grieg.”
She didn’t reply. A look crossed her face. I saw it clearly, but I couldn’t read it. She threw too much money down on the table and the two of them left. I wanted to stand up and follow them, at least for a street or two. But I was stuck to the booth, worthless, without belief.
I didn’t tell Jonah I saw her. If he guessed, he never said as much. I never asked about his seeing her. I never even hinted at the meeting to Da. My loyalty to Ruth was greater than anything I owed either man, if only because I’d betrayed her so badly already. Each time I spoke to my father now, I saw a sheaf of photocopied police reports hidden away in his memory’s files. Did he know what they contained? Could he say what they meant? I couldn’t even form the questions in my head, let alone ask him. But Da sounded different to me now, filtered through all the things he’d never told me, whether they were his to tell me or not.
The year has become an operatic blur. Three astronauts burned alive on the launchpad. A South African surgeon put one man’s living heart in another man’s body. Israel ran through the assembled might of the Arab armies in six days, and even my anti-Zionist father feared something biblical in the lightning victory.
A play where a turn-of-the-century black boxer kissed his white wife onstage scandalized audiences worse than the real-life boxer had, half a century before. Tracy and Hepburn struggled with the prospect of a black son-in-law. A black man took his place on the Supreme Court, and I wondered if my sister’s husband took any pleasure in the event. Marshall’s appointment seemed, even to me, too little too late. Seventy separate riots spread through more than a dozen cities over the course of the year. The country turned upon itself, twisting on two simple words: Black Power.
Jonah, surprisingly, loved the phrase. He loved the disarray it sowed in the ranks of those good Americans, just minding their own business. He thought of it as guerrilla theater, just as aesthetically unsettling as the best of Webern or Berg. He walked about the apartment brandishing a dark tan golf-gloved fist over his head, shouting, “Mulatto Power! Mulatto Power!” for no one’s benefit but mine.