“People hate us,” I tell her.
“Not you, JoJo. They hate themselves.”
“We’re different,” I explain.
“Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?” I think about this, but she doesn’t really expect an answer. She cups us both by the crowns of our heads. “People who attack you with can’t are afraid you already can.”
“Why? How can that hurt them?”
“They think all good things are like property. If you have more, they must have less. But you know, JoJo? Everybody can make more beauty, anytime they need.”
Months later: “What do we do if they attack?”
“You’ve got a weapon stronger than anyone’s.” She doesn’t even have to say it anymore, she’s said it so often. The power of your own song. I don’t correct her. I no longer tell her that I don’t know what that means.
I come home one day, my upper-right canine knocked out by a boy three years older. I don’t tell my mother. It would only hurt her. When she sees my new gap, she shouts. “You’re getting so big, JoJo. So big so fast.” But the new tooth is weeks coming in. I smile at her, every chance I get. Once, she looks away, crying in what I think is shame at her gap-mouthed boy, grinning his obliging toothlessness. I’ll take fifty years learning to read her.
Why do we need to go out at all? This is what we boys want to know. Why can’t we stay in and read, listen to the radio, pitch pennies or skip rope in the cellar for exercise, like Joe Louis does? My parents can read each other’s minds. They always give the same answer to these questions. They practice in advance. They know when the other has already built up a boy’s will or countered a boy’s won’t.
“This family’s not fair,” Jonah says. “Not a real democracy!”
“Yes, it is,” Da tells him. Or maybe Mama. “Only, big people get two votes.”
They complete each other’s sentences and finish each other’s half-sung phrases. Sometimes, humming out loud over breakfast or housecleaning, they land on the same downbeat of the same tune, a piece neither has sung for weeks. Spontaneous unison. At the same tempo, in the same key.
I ask Da, “Where do we really come from, Germany or Philadelphia? What language did we speak before we learned English?”
He studies me to see what I’m really asking. “We come from Africa,” he says. “We come from Europe. We come from Asia, where Russia really is. We come from the Middle East, where the earliest people came from.”
That’s when Mama chides him. “Maybe that was their summer home, sugar.”
I know ten names: Max, William, Rebecca, Nettie, Hannah, Charles, Michael, Vihar, Lucille, Lorene. I see family pictures, but not many. On bad nights, when Ruth is ill or something has broken between Mama and Da, I send these names messages.
Jonah asks, “What color was Adam?” He smirks, knowing he’s breaking the law.
Mama looks at him sideways. But Da brightens. “This is a very good question! On how many issues do science and religion give exactly the same answer? All of the peoples on earth must have the same ancestors. If only memory were a little stronger.”
“Or a little weaker,” Mama says.
“Think of it! Arising once, in one place.”
“Except for those Neanderthal stallions jumping the fence.”
Da blushes, and we boys laugh, too, no clue except the general silliness. “Before that, I mean. The first seed.”
Mama shrugs. “Maybe that one blew in the window. From outdoors.”
“Yes,” Da says, a little startled. “Probably you are right!” Mama laughs, nudging him in scandal. “No, truly! This is more likely than native-grown. Given the earth’s youth, the size of all outdoors!”
Mama shakes her head, her mouth bunched up on one side. “Well, children. Your father and I have decided. Adam and Eve were little and green.”
We boys laugh. Our parents have gone mad. Speaking total nonsense. We can’t understand a word. But Jonah understands something I don’t. He’s faster, with a long head start. “Martians?”
My mother nods gravely, our great secret: “All of us, Martians.”
All the world’s people: We get them in geography, history. Tens of thousands of tribes, and not one of them ours. “We have no people,” I tell my parents one night before bed. I want them to know. Protect them, after the fact.
“We are our people,” Da says. Every month he writes letters to Europe. Searching. He’s been doing that for years.
Mama adds, “You’re out front of everyone. You three just wait long enough, everybody’s going to be your people.” We cobble up a national anthem out of stolen parts.
“Do we believe in God?” I ask.
And they say, “Let each boy believe in his own fashion.” Or something like that, just as unhelpful, just as impossible.
My mother sings at churches. Sometimes she takes us with her, but Da, never. The music is something she knows and we don’t. “Where does it come from?” Jonah asks.
“Same place all music does.”
Already, Jonah isn’t buying. “Where’s it going?”
“Ah!” she says. “Back toward do.”
We stand next to her in the pews, hands to the flat of her hips, feeling the vibrations coming through her dress, the deep fundamentals that surface from her with such clear power that people can’t help but turn around and stare at the source. We go to churches where everyone pretends not to look. We go to churches where the sound is ecstatic, cheered and clapped every which way, picked up and rolled into a dozen unplanned codas. We go to a place where the thundering, swaying, bliss-swelling choir sends a heavy woman in front of us into convulsions. She leans over, and I think she’s pretending to be sick. I laugh, and then I stop. Her body switchbacks side to side, first in time to the music, then cut time, then triple double. Her arms work like a sprinter’s, and her breasts fly out like counterweights to her heaving. A girl, maybe her daughter, holds her and sways with her, still singing to the music that mounts up from the choir. “Day is coming. Day is coming. When the walls will all come down.” The woman next to her, a perfect stranger, fans her with a handkerchief, saying, “That’s right; that’s all right now,” not even looking. Just following the mountain of music.
Maybe she’s dying. My mother sees my first-time terror. “She’s all right, JoJo. Just coming through.”
“Through to where?”
My mother shrugs. “To where she was before she came here.”
Every church we visit has its own sound. My mother sings them all, running beyond the roll of the notes. Shining like that far horizon, where all notes go. What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.
At night, we sing. Then music envelops us. It offers us its limited safety, here on our street, however long a way it has come. It never occurs to me that the sound isn’t ours, that it’s the last twitch of someone else’s old, abandoned dream. Each piece we do springs into being right here, the night we make it. Its country is this spinet; its government, my mother’s fingers; its people, our throats.
Mama and Da can sing right off the page, songs they’ve never seen before, and still sound like they’ve known them from birth. We sing a song from England: “Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite.” Soon we all climb up that scale together—“to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die”—building step by step until we pull back at the peak, the “die” at the top of the phrase just a plaything sound we fondle, tuning to one another. Five phrases, sparkling, innocent, replaying the courtiers’ party game from the day of this tune’s making, that festive beauty, financed by the slave trade.