The first to mention race was a writer in the Village Voice. The proper way to serve up Schubert was hardly that paper’s stock-in-trade. The reviewer admitted up front to being a jazzer who could listen to lieder only under the influence of artificial enhancement. But Schubert, the writer said, wasn’t the issue. The issue was that the white cultural establishment was trying to skewer a gifted young black singer not because he was too young to sing the masters but because he was too uppity. The reviewer proceeded to list half a dozen European and American white singers who’d tackled the work to acclaim at ages even younger than Jonah’s.
I showed the piece to Jonah, expecting rage. But when he got to the end, he just cackled. “Is it him? It has to be. The smart-aleck style? The bit about being able to listen to lieder only while stoned?” I hadn’t even checked the byline. Jonah handed me back the issue. “T. West! Who else could it be? Thaddy boy. That white Negro bastard.”
“Should we call him? I’ve a number for him from…awhile ago.” Old broken promise. But Jonah shook his head, reticent, almost scared.
T. West’s accusation blew our little winter’s journey wide open. Crispin Linwell was all over himself in a Gramophone response, hotly denying that race had anything to do with the way any classical performance is received. He’d worked with tens of black artists and even hired one or two. The papers that ran follow-up squibs generally made the same claim: Race simply wasn’t an issue in the concert scene. Talent was all. The monuments of classical music were color-blind, never troubling with such ephemera. Anyone who wanted to could worship at the altar.
“That’s what your father and mother believed,” Jonah said, and kept reading.
An editorial in the Chicago Defender thanked the white cultural establishment for being so color-blind: “And it must be so, for the cultural elites to be able to look out on classical music audiences and declare that race is not an issue when dealing with eternal verities. But then, nobody can see much color when the lights are down so low.” Even this editorial didn’t talk about Jonah’s singing, except to declare it, for whatever the phrase meant, “a constant astonishment.”
For weeks, our record sold as well as if it had been released on a major label. We got letters telling us to stick to jig music. We got letters — militant, enthusiastic — from faceless, raceless listeners who told us to keep reviving the dead stuff, forever. But by then, who knew what music anyone was hearing in our sounds? I hated the notoriety, and still thought that once the fuss blew over, we could return to the realm of simple performance. Right up to the last, I imagined such a place existed.
But the Linwell flap also seemed to break our curse. I’d been braced for riots, our repeat punishment for trying to stop time again. This precious little tempest, played out in small-circulation magazines catering to a dying art, was all the riot our recording would touch off this time. I was a slung-assed fool. I felt the size of my vanity, the old animistic belief that the world lived or died by what cracks I stepped on.
Then King was killed. He died on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a few blocks south of Beale Street, the day after he went up to the mountaintop. That voice for reconciliation met its only allowable end. He’d been leading a strike by garbage workers and now he was over. How long? Not long. I heard the news on FM radio while cleaning the apartment. The dazed announcer broke in on the highlights from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. He forgot to fade the music down, instead just clipping it off and tearing into the garbled news. He didn’t seem to know what to do next. Going back to Donizetti was impossible, even though it was one of Dr. King’s favorites. The silence grew so long, it made me wonder if the station had gone off the air. In fact, the announcer had simply walked away, into the station’s record library, to root around for the right eulogy. For whatever private reason, he settled on William Billings’s crude, haunted originary wail, “David’s Lamentation”: “Would to God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.”
I shut the radio off and went out. It was already evening. I turned, by instinct, uptown. The streets seemed so matter-of-fact, so unchanged, though most of the passersby must already have known. I walked at random, looking for Jonah, hurrying to tell him.
The firebombs started in Memphis, an hour after the shooting. By the end of the week, 125 cities were at war. The fires in Washington burned worse than they had since 1812. The Battle of Fourteenth Street required thirteen thousand federal troops to suppress it. The city set a curfew and declared martial law. Chicago’s mayor ordered his forces to “shoot to kill.” The governor of Maryland announced a lasting state of emergency as a quarter of Baltimore burned. In Kansas City, police lobbed gas canisters into a crowd enraged by the decision to keep schools open through Dr. King’s funeral. Nashville, Oakland, Cincinnati, Trenton: uprising everywhere.
Four straight summers of violence: The revolution had come. And Jonah and I stood by watching, as if from mezzanine boxes at a matinee performance of Verdi’s Requiem. Our concerts in Pittsburgh and Boston were canceled and never rescheduled, casualties in a conflict where music wasn’t even the smallest thing at stake. How could a little song and dance compete against the country’s supreme art form?
For some months, our life had looked increasingly unreal. Now I lost all sense of what real was supposed to look like. Jonah knew. “Here we go. All out in the open now. Straight-up tribalism — everything anyone wants. Something solid to believe in. We’ve been killing one another over imaginary membership for a million years. Why change this late in the day?”
My brother’s take on the human species had never been complicated. Now it was simplifying down to a single perfect point. People would rather die in invented safety than live in invigorating fear. He’d seen enough. Jonah turned his back on the whole time frame of earthly politics, and I could no longer call him back. Every passing day only confirmed him. None of us knew how to live here, at the rate of life we were given.
The two of us were running up to an engagement in Storrs, Connecticut, in a borrowed Impala — just a shade too pale to be pulled over and frisked — when Jonah, in the passenger seat, leaned toward me and confided, “I know why they killed him.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“They killed him because he was coming out both barrels against Vietnam.”
“Viet — That’s insane.”
He waved his hand in front of the dash, the whole panorama of interstate. Danger on all sides. “His attacks, last year. ‘America’s the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.’ Sending out blacks to kill yellows. Come on. You show me the person in power who’s going to let some darkie preacher shut down a game like that.”
I checked my speed. “You’re saying the government… The CIA…” I felt like a fool just pronouncing the letters.
Jonah shrugged. He didn’t care which acronym had pulled the trigger. “They need the war, Joey. It’s like housecleaning. Forces of good. Making the world safe. Onward, upward, oneward.”
The skin on my neck turned to scales. He’d gone the way of the country at large. My brother, always grandiose, had taken that last little baby step upstream. But something in me relaxed at his words. If he’d arrived here, too, then there was no conflict. Ruth could come back. I could tell her what had happened to him. We could be together, the three of us again, as we had never been. No enemies, aside from everyone. I’d believe whatever the two of them told me.