Some night, a life will arise that has no memory of where it came from, no thought of anything that has happened on the way here. No theft, no slavery, no murder. Something will be won then, and much will be lost, in the death of time. But this night is not yet that night. William Daley looks on these small boys, doing their chorale tumbling act. In that look lies every chord that music doesn’t speak. He shakes his head in wide, fact-denying arcs. The boys think he’s pleased, maybe even amazed, as every adult who has ever heard them has been. They lower themselves off the bench and toddle off to other discoveries. William turns to his daughter and stares at her, the way he once stared at his son Charles for playing coon songs on the parlor upright back home. The look sinks into her: accomplice, accuser. Anything you want. Wasn’t that the creed? The equal of any owner. The owner of all you would equal. Dr. Daley’s head shakes to a terrible stop. “What are you going to do with them?” He might mean anything. Anything you want.
Delia rises and starts to clear the table. “David and I have decided to school them at home.” She’s almost in the kitchen by sentence’s end.
“Is that so?”
“We’ve thought about it, Daddy.” She swings back to the table. “Where can they get a better education? David knows everything there is to know about science and math.” She waves toward her husband, who bows his head. “I can teach them music and art.”
“You going to give them history?” In the whip crack of his voice, there’s all the history he means. His fingers clamp around his water glass to keep his daughter from stealing it from him. “Where are they going to learn who they are?”
She slips back into her seat without a sound. She wraps herself in this role, the way Mr. Lugati trained her to do onstage. We work hard during countless rehearsals, so we can be inside ourselves, free for that one performance. She reaches down to find that column of breath. “Same place I learned, Daddy. Same place you learned.”
His eyes flash gunmetal. “You know where I learned who I am? Where I learned?” He turns toward David, who learned elsewhere. And that, Delia sees, is his unforgivable crime. “You asked about the conference? You wanted to know how the conference went?”
David just blinks. No longer sulfa drugs. No more antibiotics.
“I wish I could tell you. You see, I missed the better part of it. Detained downstairs in the lobby, first by the hotel dick, and later by a small but efficient police escort. A slight misunderstanding. You see, I couldn’t, in fact, be Dr. William Daley of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because Dr. Daley is a real medical doctor with genuine credentials, while I’m just a nigger busting his woolly head into a civilized meeting of medical professionals.”
“Daddy. We don’t use that word in this house.”
“You don’t? Your boys are going to have to learn it, between their pretty four-part hymns. Full dictionary definition. Count on it. Home school!”
Her walls are in flames. “Daddy, you… I don’t understand you. You raised me…”
“That’s right, miss. I raised you. Let’s agree on that.”
She sees her lightness in the almond of his eyes. Has he forgotten? Does he think she has gone over, over to something as invented as the one laid down upon them?
“‘You are a singer,’” she says. “‘You lift yourself up. You make yourself so damn good that they have to hear you.’”
His palms flash outward. Look! “You’ve been out of school for half a decade. Where’s your career?”
She falls back from him, smashed in the face.
“She has been very busy,” David answers. “She is a wife and a mother of two. With one more coming.”
“How has your career been? Family obligations haven’t kept you from tenure.”
“Daddy.”The scale of the warning, in the back of Delia’s throat, startles even her.
He won’t be humbled, not again this day. He wheels on her. “I’ll tell you where your career is. It’s waiting out back of the concert hall, in the alley. The Coloreds Only entrance. Which just happens to be boarded up for the foreseeable future.”
“I haven’t really taken any auditions.”
“What do you mean, ‘haven’t really’? Either you haven’t or you have.”
“I’ll do more after the boys are older.”
“How long does a voice last?”
So many accusations come at her at once that she loses count. Smartest baby ever born, either side of the line, and she hasn’t become a lawyer, run for Congress, become even a mediocre concert artist. Hasn’t moved the race down the line. All she has done is raise two small boys, and that, apparently, not well.
Her father drops into deep bass, a tone she’s never heard him use. The sound silts up with her mama’s yellow clay-bed Carolina, a place he’s not been, aside from one unwilling visit, for more than fifteen years. Forget tobacco, forget cotton: land too bleak for anything but the most pitiful beans and peanuts. Land too poor to pay its own rent. His voice comes out a note-perfect mock of his own battered-down father-in-law, the one Delia met just three awkward times in this life. Only the voice isn’t mocking. “Those people ain’t never gonna let you sing.”
“They let Miss Anderson sing.”
“Sure. They let her sing, up at the Big House, on Novelty Night. Do a little dance, too, if she likes. Entertainment! Dogs on bicycles. Just make sure she gets back down to the darkie quarters when the act is over.”
Delia sits, hands frozen on the half-cleared table. Some street gangster has taken over her daddy, the man who worked his private way through Ulysses, who corresponds with university presidents, who demanded David’s explanation of Special Relativity. The man who has spent his adult life easing the sick. Stripped of his clinic, separated from his wife, taken from the neighborhood where he has for years been a healing god, fingered in a hotel lobby and held like some petty crook or dope fiend. What the world sees will always destroy what he rushes to show it. There is no counter but that collapse that, in time, takes everyone. Identity.
Dr. Daley walks over to the spinet. He plays the boys’ chorale from memory. He gets the first four bars, more or less as the backwoods cantor wrote them. It shocks Delia how good he is. He plays like one who has lost his native tongue. But he plays. She has never heard him play much of anything but snippets of Joplin. “That baby’s crying seemed to be,/Somewhere near the Sacred Tree.” A little broken boogie-woogie at Charlie’s memorial. Now this. By ear. Nothing but ear.
William’s hands pull away from the saw-toothed Lutheran chords as if the piano lid just bit them. “You know what I hear when I hear that music? I hear, ‘Cursed be Canaan.’ I hear ‘White — all right: Brown — hang around: Black — get back.’”
His daughter raises her blasted eyes to his. She tries for piano. Soft is harder than loud, as Lugati always said. “I’m sorry they were idiots at the conference, Daddy.” More reason, she wants to add, to beat them at what’s theirs.
“Mount Sinai. Not idiots. Best there is.” His eyes test the extremes of punishment not yet visited on him. Stripped so easily, he knows no bottom. Held and humiliated for an hour: It cost him nothing. Laughable. Dust yourself off and walk away. But if that, why not locked up in the coat check, chained to the shoe-shine stand in Penn Station, kept illiterate, driven out of the polling place, beaten up for turning down the wrong alley, or hung from a ready sumac? Even the most stubborn self in time will be identified.