“‘Past color’?” The doctor sounds out the words, saying them out loud the way he repeats his patients’ symptoms. “You mean you’re going to raise them white.”
The boys have lost interest, if they ever had any. They wander back to the piano to try another chorale. Delia hushes them. “Not right now, JoJo. Why don’t you two go play in your room?”
She has never before told them to stop making music. Jonah starts plunking the keys at high speed, double, quadruple time, racing through the entire chorale before the prohibition can take effect. His brother looks on, horrified. Delia sweeps to the bench, lifts up the lawbreaker, swings him like the bob of a pendulum, then lowers him to the floor and starts him scampering toward the boys’ room. She grazes his bottom for good measure, and the offender howls down the hallway, his little brother crying behind him in sympathy, limping in remembered pain.
Past color.My mother speaks these words to my grandfather in late September of 1945. I’m three years old. What can I hope to remember? My brother lies on his belly in our room’s doorway, spying on adulthood down the hall. He’s thinking about just one thing: how to get back to that piano and make some noise. How to recover the throne of sound that alone rights the world and sets him at the center of love.
My parents and grandfather crouch in a globe of light in the middle of edgeless shadow. They should know this, how small their circle, how big the surrounding dark. But something drives them on, something that isn’t them but says it is. Something they need wants them so completely that they turn on one another to avoid losing it. I see them down the hall, a ball of burning sulfur in a borderless dark bowl.
Mama says, We have to get there, somehow. Somebody has to jump.
Papap says, Beyond color? You know what beyond color means? We’re already there. Beyond color means hide the black man. Wipe him out. Means everybody play the one annihilating game white’s been playing since—
The world is ending. Jonah and I know this already, and we know almost nothing. My brother will run out into the middle of them, seduce them back home with a song. But even Jonah has fallen under the spell of revenge. His wrong is private, and deeper than the world’s. Scolded unfairly while playing.
Papap says, What do you think they’ll learn the minute they set foot out of your house?
Mama says, Everybody’s going to be mixed. No one’s going to be anything.
Papap says, There is no mixed.
Da says, Not yet.
Papap says, Never will be. It’s one thing or the other. And they can’t be the one, not in this world. It’s the other, girl. You know that. What’s your problem?
Mama says, People have to move. What world do you want to live in? Things have to break down, go someplace else.
Papap says, They’ve been breaking down black from day one. Sending it someplace else.
Mama says, White, too. White is going to change.
Papap says, White? Break down? Never, short of gunpoint.
Mama says, They will; they’ll have to.
And Papap answers her: Never. Never. What happened this morning is all the future any of us is ever going to get.
Then the real storm. I can’t remember how it comes on, any more than I can remember myself. They’ve been talking a long time. Jonah falls asleep on the floor in the doorway to our room. I can’t, of course, not with the grown-ups so badly wrong. Papap is pacing the dining room, a giant in a cage. He slams the walls with his palm. Beyond color, beyond your own mother. Beyond your sisters and brothers, beyond me!
Mama, dead still. That’s not what it means, Daddy. That’s not what we’re doing.
Whatare you doing? What does it say on the birth certificate? You think you can override that?
More words I can’t hear, can’t get, can’t remember. Something heated, between the two men. Worse than anger. Words sharpened to a point small enough to break the skin. And then my grandfather stands in the apartment’s doorway. The door is open on September there in front of them, a gaping, heatless nothing. Never, he starts. And where can he go from there? Your choice, not mine. Beyond me, he says. And Mama says something, and Da says something, and Papap says, How dare you? And then he’s gone.
I remember only my parents turning from the slammed door, both of them shaking. I see them seeing me, standing in the doorway with my ice bag. Holding it up for whoever might need it.
Mama is ill for a long time afterward. She’s big with another baby. I watch her eat, hypnotized. She sees me see her, knows what I’m thinking, and tries to smile. She decides to have a baby, then starts eating for two. And the baby is down there in her stomach, grabbing half the food.
Something has left our lives and I don’t know what. I think the baby will bring it back in. That’s why they wanted to have it. To get Mama’s happiness back, and fix what has broken.
I ask what the baby will be. What do you mean? they ask. You mean a boy or a girl? They say nobody can know what the baby is going to be yet. I ask, Isn’t it something already?
It is. They laugh. But we can’t get to it. We have to wait. Wait and see what’s coming.
We wait until October, then November, strange territories with stranger names. I’m as miserable as I’ve ever been. Isn’t it here yet? Isn’t it ever going to come?
Perhaps tomorrow,they say. We have to wait until tomorrow.
And several times a day, I ask, Is it tomorrow yet?
For weeks, it’s never tomorrow. Then overnight, it’s yesterday. All yesterday, too far back to reach. And my father is dying on a bed in Mount Sinai Hospital. The only thing I need to know from him is what happened that night. But he’s too sick, too medicated, too full of gravity — and then, too free — to remember.
Songs of a Wayfarer
Jonah left the United States at the end of 1968. No high-art gossip column reported the departure. At the moment when almost every other black singer, performer, artist, or writer cheered the birth of nationhood, my brother abandoned the country. He wrote from Magdeburg. “They love me here, Joey.” He might have been Robeson, on his first visit to the Soviet Union. Everything there made a mockery of everything here. “The East Germans look at me and see a singer. I never understood that stare Americans always gave me, until I got away from it. Nice to know what it feels like, for a while, to be something other than hue-man.”
The Magdeburg Festival sounded like high-art boot camp. “Living conditions are a bit Spartan. My room reminds me of our dorm at Boylston; only here, I don’t have to pick up your shit.” This from a man whose laundry I did every year we lived together. “Food consists of your more recalcitrant vegetables boiled within an inch of their lives. Making up for all hardships, however, is a steady stream of music-loving women. Now that’s what I call a culture.”
He marveled at the scope of the musical gathering, all the world-class singers the celebration brought together. Several clearly put the fear of God in him. But he seemed to come alive on the challenge of ensemble singing. He was a kid who’d shot backyard hoops his whole childhood, finally playing full-court ball. He reveled in the thrill of reading a dozen other musicians at once and fusing with these perfect strangers.
The European reporters demanded to know why they’d never heard of him before. He didn’t dissuade them from publishing reports of American racism. He had offers to sing in a dozen cities, including Prague and Vienna. “Vienna, Mule. Think of the possibilities. More work than a short-order cook in Lauderdale during spring break. You simply have to come. That’s my last word on the matter.”
His letter took weeks catching up to me, because I’d moved. I couldn’t afford to keep our Village apartment alone. I briefly put up with Da in Fort Lee, to his delight and daily surprise each evening when he came back to Jersey and found me still there. I heard him wandering the house in the middle of the night, chatting away with Mama, who seemed a better conversationalist than his son would ever be.