He stood and put his arms over his head, bent them back behind him and touched his shoulder blades, the sockets of his pruned wings. When I listen to that second disk now, this is how I see him. A glow in his eyes, about to launch into some tune that will mean the end of self.
“But you know what, Mule? They don’t. Don’t move. White won’t move, and black can’t. Well, white moves when black buys a place in the neighborhood. But beyond that, race is like the pyramids. Older than history and built to outlast it. You know what? Even thinking there are four choices is a joke. In this country, choice isn’t even on the menu.”
“Ruth’s married a Panther.” This, too, he somehow already knew. Maybe she’d told him when they’d met. All he did was nod. I carried on, stung. “Robert Rider. She’s joined, too.”
“Good for her. We all need to find our art.”
I flinched at the word. “She has the police reports. No, I mean for the fire. She and her husband… They’re sure. They say if the — if Mama had been white…”
“Sure of what? Sure of everything we already knew. Sure of what killed her? You’ll never know. That’s blackness, Mule. Never knowing. That’s how you know who you really are.” He did a horrible little minstrel-show shuffle. Years ago, I might have tried to talk him down, to bring him back from himself. Now I just looked away.
“If Mama and Da both wanted family more than…” The bile backed up my throat. “Why the hell don’t we even have our family?”
“Who? You mean Mama’s?” He held still, scanning the past. He alone was old enough to remember our grandparents. “Same reason Ruth took off, I guess.”
“Not the same reason.”
Jonah smiled at my open treason. His folded hands, steeple-style, touched his lips. “There was an argument. You remember. I told you, Mule. We can’t know. Didn’t I tell you? Race trumps family. It’s bigger than anything. Bigger than husband and wife. Bigger than brother and sister…” Bigger than objects in the sky. Bigger than knowing. And still there was one thing so small, it could slip past race without notice. Jonah put his arm around my shoulder. “Come on, brother. We’ve got work to do.”
We went back into the studio and recorded “The Crow” in one take — the only time in the entire recording session we hit a song perfectly on a single try. Jonah listened to the master tape again and again, probing for the smallest flaw. But he could find none.
A crow was with me
As I made my way from town.
Back and forth, all the way to now
It has flown around my head.
Crow, you strange creature,
Won’t you leave me be?
Are you waiting for prey here, soon?
Do you mean to seize my corpse?
Well, there isn’t much farther
To go upon this journey.
Crow, let me finally see
A faith that lasts to the grave.
He kept his laser-guided pitches, but all the while his voice dissolved the notes, sliding into them with a whiff of Billie Holiday wandering across the remains of a lynching. He sang the words into their final mystery.
The night we finished taping, we shook hands with the technicians and stepped out into the strangeness of our hometown. Midtown was a blaze of fossil fuel. We walked down Sixth Avenue through the thirties, mixing into the brittle after-hours crowd. A siren cut through the air from ten blocks away. I grabbed Jonah. I practically jumped on him.
“Just a cop, Joey. Nabbing some second-shift robber.”
My chest was wound up tighter than Schubert’s organ-grinder. I’d been conditioned. I was waiting for the return loop, for some part of the city to ignite. I knew what happened whenever we laid down his voice into permanence. We walked all the way from the studios to the Village. New York had as many alarms that night as any. I flinched at every one, until my brother’s amusement turned into disgust. By the time we hit Chelsea, we were quarreling.
“So Watts was my fault? This is what you think?”
“That’s not what I said. That’s not what I think.”
At Fourth Street, he gave up on me and took off alone. I went to the apartment and waited up for him all night. He didn’t show until the next day. When he did, the topic was off-limits. I wasn’t to ask him anything of consequence, ever again. Nor did he ever ask how I knew about Ruth. She, too, was now off-limits. All the things we couldn’t talk about left me endless time to replay the things I’d told him. I convinced myself I hadn’t betrayed Ruth. She wanted me to tell. She’d sworn me to secrecy the way Jesus banned his disciples from telling anyone he was going around working miracles.
Every time the Panther Party made the news, I had the sick feeling she or Robert was going to be a footnote casualty. Huey Newton, the Party’s founder, was arrested for killing a police officer in Oakland. Ruth had about as much connection to the man as I had to President Johnson. But I dragged through two weeks, feeling as if she’d somehow helped to pull the trigger. A man has a right to defend himself. So long as the police go on killing us at will. Part of a state government building up in Albany collapsed, the result of building-code violations. No one was hurt, and there was no sign of tampering. But jumpy politicians tried to tie the collapse to a shrill call for rights put out by the New York Panther chapter, the group Robert and Ruth Rider were helping to organize.
The world had never made much sense to me, much less my life. But now it was Meyerbeer without subtitles. My sister would write me. She and her husband, after a tour of the militant battlefield, would remember themselves. They’d go and work for Dr. King. So I fantasized, most days, without ever daring to believe. But other days, performing fey hundred-year-old music for well-off folks who loved hearing two Negroes staying out of trouble, I thought Ruth must be waiting for a letter from me.
Mr. Weisman called Jonah a month after we’d finished recording. He had an offer from the Met. Jonah took the news over the phone, as if he’d known all along it was coming. “Great.” He might have just been offered half off on his next dry-cleaning bill. “What are they thinking about?”
Weisman told him. Jonah repeated the offer out loud, for me to hear. “Poisson, in Adriana Lecouvreur?” I shrugged, clueless. The opera was some vehicle for stupendous sopranos. Diva Drivel, we’d always called the genre. Neither of us had ever bothered to listen to it. “What’s the part?” Jonah called into the phone, his voice rising.
The part, Mr. Weisman told him, didn’t matter. My brother, at twenty-seven, would be singing on the same stage with Renata Tebaldi. He, a lieder singer with almost no orchestral experience, had wanted to break into opera. And the world of opera was willing to let him try.
Jonah got off the phone and interrogated me. I was worthless. We pulled the World’s Greatest Opera Librettos off the shelf. We ran out to the Magic Flute record shop and grabbed a remastered 1940s budget recording with a distinguished cast and listened to the whole thing at one go. The music ended. “You call that a role?”
I didn’t know how to handle him. “Other people have to break in, you know.”
“Other people can’t do what I do.”