“I was too proud. Your mother always said so.” He froze in place. “I mean, your grandmother.” He brought Ruth her coffee — black, with a teaspoon of sugar. “I was afraid. Afraid of losing myself in their idea. The orienting righteousness. Afraid of—”
“Of whiteness’s whole sick trip,” Ruth interrupted. “Fucked-up. To a man.”
“Don’t swear.”
“Yes, Papap.” She bowed her head to this ninety-year-old, like a child of nine.
“I made your grandmother pay for my principles. I lost her her daughter, her grandchildren. I never got to see you come into…”
Ruth stood and traded him a cup of coffee for the baby. She took the cup and sipped. Then she started hot cereal and fruit mash for little Robert. “You didn’t make her, Papap.” The old man raised his hand to his head to deflect the words. “Grandma was with you all the way.”
“And who was I with?” Dr. Daley asked no one. No one who could hear him. “Hypodescent. You’re familiar with the word?” I nodded. I was the word’s boy. “It means a half-caste child must belong to the caste with the lower status.”
Ruth spooned food into little Robert’s mouth with one hand and stirred the air with her other. “It means white can’t protect its stolen property, can’t tell the owners from the owned, except by playing purebred. They’re pure all right. Pure invention. One drop? One drop, as far back as you can go? Every white person in America is passing.”
He thought a moment. “Hypodescent means we’re supposed to take everybody else in. All the rest.”
“Amen,” Ruth said. “Everyone who’s not insane with inbreeding is black.”
“Everyone. All the half-castes and quarter-castes and one-thirty-second-castes. We should have made room for you.”
“Don’t you blame yourself for what other folks went off and did.”
He didn’t hear her. “All of us! You think you three were alone?” His eyes begged me, as if only my nod might set the long wrong right. “You think you were the first in the world to live this line? Your grandmother, half white. My family. Right out of the slave owner’s loins. My family’s name. The whole race. One look at us. We’ve had the Europeans living in us for three hundred years. I’ve always wondered what America might have been had the one-drop rule worked the other way.”
Ruth shushed him. “Papap, you’re going senile at last.”
“A mighty nation. As good as its best myth about itself.”
“Wouldn’t be the U.S. That’s for damn sure.”
Dr. Daley watched his granddaughter feed his great-grandson, a soul too grabbing and exploratory to survive the world. “I let that madness break my family.”
“They broke mine anyway,” Ruth said.
We sat silent. Only the baby had heart enough to make even the simplest sounds. Soon, even he would know. Everything was laid down for him, before he even spoke his own name: his father, his grandmother, his broken line all the way back to the start of time. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t go back to the pretty sleep of Europe. I’d been raised to believe in self-invention. But any self I might invent would be a lie.
Ruth had beaten me to this future. She knew long ago that one day I’d have to catch up with her. “Funny thing about one drop? If white plus black makes black, and if the mixed-marriage rate is anything above zero per year…” Ruth’s eyes rallied on the kind of thought experiment her father had loved. The old slaveholder’s property protection was now its victims’ only weapon. Blackness was the arrow of time, the churning tribe that gathered itself while purity chose its privileged suicide. “Follow out the curve. Just a matter of time, and everybody in America will be black.”
“I thought…” My voice sickened me. “I thought you were against black marrying white.”
“Honey, I’m against anyone marrying white. Mixed marriage mixes you up something permanent. But so long as people are fool enough to try it, I’m fool enough to be the beneficiary.” She looked at our grandfather. He was shaking his head in great arcs of fatal resignation. “What? You got a problem with that math?”
“Ain’t gonna work.” The only time the man ever slandered the rules of grammar. “As soon as they see it coming, they’ll repeal the rule.”
A sound like thunder broke loose, confirming him. My nephew Kwame appeared on the stairs, a silver box in his hands and two wired foam-lined cups strapped to his ears. Vibrations pulsed out of him, staggered syncopations I couldn’t follow or score. Under the beats was a cadence of rhythmic berating. The pulse pounded the air around him. I gasped at what it was doing to the insides of his head.
Papap gestured his great-grandson to remove the phones and kill the tape. The boy did, in a cloud of venomous grumbles that no adult could hear or interpret. The doctor rose up, an Old Testament prophet. “If you want to scramble your brains, go bang your head against a wall.”
“Don’t dis my tracks,” Kwame answered. “My music’s def.”
“If you want deaf, just poke sticks in your ears. You call that music? It doesn’t even have pitches. It’s not even savage.” Our grandfather turned to Ruth for backup.
“Oh, Papap! We’ve been over this. That’s our sound. Comes right out of all the salvation we’ve ever made for ourselves. Right down from the old dirty Dozens.”
“How do you know about the Dozens?” Ruth blanched, and the old man patted her arm. “Don’t mind me. I know. Same place I learned it. Some cultural prophet, desperate to preserve our heritage.”
Ruth howled. “Don’t you worry about preserving our heritage! Every white boy on five continents wants a piece of this.”
“They biting our lines,” Kwame said. “Totin’ their own Alpines. Wiggas can’t cope, our sound so dope!”
He swiveled his head, jutting it right and left with fluid pride. His little brother giggled and reached. Kwame went back under the headphones, lost to us. Ruth, baby mash all over her, put her arm around our immaculate grandfather. He suffered its stains. “You’re worse than my own father. He used to get on me all the time about my music. I swore I’d never do that to any child of my own.”
“He did?” I asked, incredulous. “He used to ride you about music?”
She groaned as if whipped. “All the time. James Brown. Aretha. Anything that had the least power. Anything of any use to me. He wanted me to go your route, his route. Why do you suppose the street hates your tunes, Joey?”
For the same reason that those tunes had been the street’s salvation once — because they’re useless. Our grandfather groaned, too, a soft old gospel subito, remembering old judgments, shattered trusts, allegiances killed in the honoring. He stared on his own headstone and read the things he’d said to his daughter, written there in granite. He held Ruth by the wrist, flashing a look of desperation. “What’s music, that anyone should wreck their life over it?”
“When did he die?” Ruth asked, late that day.
I thought, for one mad beat, we’d switched lives. “He? Not long after I saw you last. I tried reaching you every way I could think.”
“You didn’t think of this way.” She simply stated the fact, helping me catch up to her past. Her tears were quiet and cast away, no comfort for anyone. She cried to herself, not caring that I overheard. All her mournings gathered together. It was a long time before she spoke again. “Such an oblivious bastard. You think he ever knew what he did to us?”
I felt no need to fight over the man’s identity. I couldn’t even do that for my own, anymore.
“What did he die of?” I must have stayed silent longer than I realized. “I have a right to know. It might have some bearing on my sons.”