“Who are you hurting by taking this part?”
“Which part? The Negro? ”
“There’s a difference, Jonah.”
“No doubt. Between what and what?”
“Between…chickenshit deference and artistic cooperation. Between deciding your own life and making the world follow your own rules.” I was going to humiliate myself in front of him, all to get him to take a role I didn’t even want him to take. “Jonah, it’s okay. Okay to be a part of something. To choose to be one thing or the other. To come home, somewhere. Belong.”
“Belong? Belong with all the other Negro leads? A leading light unto my people, maybe? An exemplar?” His voice was horrible. He could sing anything now. Any role or register.
“To be something other than yourself.”
He nodded, but not in agreement. I wasn’t to talk until he’d decided the best way to annihilate me. “Why is the Met offering me this part? I mean this part?”
You’ll never know. That’s what being the Negro means.I dug in. “Because you can sing it.”
“I’m sure they have several dozen limber leads in their stables who can sing it. Men with operatic experience. Why not use them? They do Otello in blackface, don’t they?”
I heard a tiny, translucent, almost blue little girl ask, Are you two Moors? She never existed. We’d invented her. “Would you take Otello if they offered it?” They’d have to darken Jonah’s face, too, just to make him believable.
“I refuse to be typecast before I’ve sung a single role.”
“Everyone’s typecast, Jonah. Everyone. That’s how the human brain works. Name a singer who doesn’t stand for some… No one is just himself.”
“I don’t mind being a Negro. I refuse to be a Negro tenor.” He reached down to the keyboard and felt out four measures of what sounded like Coltrane. He could have played piano like a king, if he hadn’t sung so well.
“I don’t get you.”
“I won’t be the Caruso of black America. The Sidney Poitier of opera.”
“You don’t want to be mixed-race.” I was sitting with him at the top of the subway stairs in Kenmore Square, Boston. “That’s what you mean.”
“I don’t want to be any race.”
“That—” I was going to say, That’s your parents’ fault. “That is something nobody but a purebred white person could want to get away with.”
“‘Purebred white person’?” He laughed. “Purebred white person. Is that like a well-modulated soprano?” He prowled around the cage of our front room. It might have been a concrete cubicle in the Bronx Zoo, a mat of straw, a watering trough. He scraped his fingers back and forth in the mortar lines between the wall bricks. He might have rasped them raw if I hadn’t grabbed his wrist. He slunk back to the piano bench. The instant his mass touched wood, he was up again. “Joey. I’ve been an absolute idiot. Where are all the men?”
“What men?”
“Exactly. I mean, we have Price, Arroyo, Dobbs, Verrett, Bumbry — all these black women pouring out of every state in the union. Where the hell are the men?”
“George Shirley? William Warfield?” It sounded like clutching at straws, even to me.
“Warfield. Case in point. Brilliant voice, and opera’s basically locked the man out. Start out singing Porgy, and that’s all anybody’s going to be able to hear you do.”
“It’s not in the culture. Black man wants to be an opera singer? I mean, really.”
“It’s not in the culture for the women, either. And they’ve come up from nowhere — from Georgia, Mississippi, One hundred eleventh Street. They’re stealing the show, out of all proportion…”
“There’s the whole diva thing. That doesn’t work for men. Think of you at Juilliard. The recital stuff was fine. But nobody there was helping you over into the opera theater.”
“Exactly, exactly. Exactly my point. And why? The door’s kicked in, and the Man’s finally dealing with the whole thing, and there they are up onstage, this white guy and this black woman, kissing and cooing and, well, that’s kind of yummy, in a nice old-fashioned, time-honored plantation way. Same old domination by another name. Then there’s this big black man and this white woman, and what the hell? Who let this happen? Blow the whistle, wave the play dead. It all comes down to who’s doing the fucking and who’s getting—”
“Jonah.” All I could do was blink at him. “What difference does it make? Why do you need this role? You already have a career. More career than most singers of any color even dream of.”
He broke out of his pacing and stood behind me. He rested his hands on my shoulders. It felt like the last time he’d ever do that. “What do I have, Joey? Maybe fifteen years of prime voice left?” The figure shocked me, a crazy exaggeration. Then I did the math. “I just thought it might be good to go make some noise with other people. A little harmony, while I’m still in form.”
He turned down the offer to play the Negro. He was the one who said no, in the full knowledge that no one ever got a third try. But then, saying yes might have left him even more enslaved. This way, he kept at least one of his hands on what he thought was the rudder.
He was right about everything. The Met, their first choice gone, ended up not producing The Visitation. The opera did come to town, with the premiere cast that had triumphed with it in Hamburg the year before. Just as Jonah predicted, the New York critics slaughtered it. They accused the libretto of irrelevance at best and of stilted falseness at worst. If one wanted civil rights, one should read the papers or hop a bus down south. One came to the opera, on the other hand, for the passion and drama of the tragic self. The tickets were too expensive for anything else.
The first American staging of The Visitation went west, to the San Francisco Opera. They mounted their premiere with a tenor named Simon Estes in the leading role. They performed the expressionist drama just across the Bay from where Huey Newton and the police had had their shoot-out. Every staging of a work is a new universe. San Francisco was farther from New York than Kafka was from civil rights. The West Coast critics adored the show, and it launched Mr. Estes, several shades darker than my brother, on his distinguished, singular career.
Not that Jonah’s career stood still. Only time did that. Our second record came out, and for weeks afterward, I waited, flinching. I didn’t give a damn about critics or sales: I wanted the whole thing to sink without notice. Jonah heard me holding my breath and just laughed. “What is it, Joey? What evils have we unleashed on the world this time?”
A month went by, and nothing happened. No earthquake from our own trivial tremor. The Kerner Commission released its report on the violence across the country: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white, separate and unequal.” But this time, even the cities where our record sold well remained quiet.
Gramophonemagazine reviewed the new LP, proclaiming that a man so young and callow had no earthly right to sing Schubert’s wintry trip “until he’s within earshot of that season.” The reviewer was that great judge of vocal talent, Crispin Linwell. Linwell’s review was so dreamily brutal that it touched off what passed, in classical musical circles, for a street brawl. The controversy fed on itself, and the record got written up in more big-city dailies than I thought possible. A few outraged protectors of world culture hid behind the Linwell name and dismissed Jonah’s effort as at best premature and at worst impudent. A few other writers, themselves too young to know what they were wading into, found Jonah’s youthful rethinking of the cycle as thrilling as it was spooky. One reviewer, reviewing the battle as much as the recording, pointed out that Jonah Strom was only a few years younger than Schubert was when he wrote the thing. When these reviewers talked about the singing at all, they tossed around the word perfection as if it were a mild reprimand.