“Black people always know.”
“Hell with you, too, baby.”
My sister fought back her smirk. “Don’t swear in church, Joey. Wait until we’re back out in the parking lot. In fact, not only is she black; she’s kin of yours. Don’t ask me exactly how. Some third cousin once removed.”
Not surprisingly, the choir sounded much like jubilee night with the Daleys. But not until the anthem did I learn why I was there. The tune was that old nineteenth-century warhorse, “He Leadeth Me,” the solo line sung by a fresh-faced woman with a tight Afro who was several years my junior. The first verse came off pretty straight, the way it’s written down in the old Methodist hymnal. Yet the soloist was so brilliant, even Kwame, busy practicing his graffiti signature on every inch of a mangled church bulletin in advance of spraying it all over Oakland, looked up to see who made such glory.
By the second verse, I was just about standing. The girl had pipes that could drain Alaska. Her pitch was something NASA used to guide satellites. She lifted up the hobbled tune and spun it about on her outstretched fingers, passed it between her legs and behind her back, and floated it over her head. Every tone in the waterfall spray was its own cut lapidary. I swung around to Ruth for explanation, but she stared straight ahead, smirking, pretending not to notice.
The voice swept outward, peeling off cloak after cloak until its light began to sear. All the while the full choir, steady as a heartbeat, swelled the refrain: “He leadeth me. He leadeth me.” And on into new keys: “He leadeth me.” Their gospel wall made, for the soloing girl, a rock-hard foundation from which to launch any praise at all. She rose up into the ear’s ionosphere, eyes alight, lifting in the humility of absolute delight, as close as the soul comes to knowing its own amplitude. I couldn’t believe she was improvising those huge aerial profusions with such certainty. Yet neither did I think for a moment that such fresh bursts could have been written out in advance.
The hymn built up in ever-breaking waves. Hands sprouted in the air around us. I was beside myself, unable to hold the beauty as it passed. I looked at Dr. Daley, shaken out of everything but the question: Who? He nodded gravely. “That’s Lorene’s baby.” I couldn’t marry the woman; she was my first cousin. “That’s Dee.”
I turned back to my sister at the sound of the name. Her smile was broken into scrap by the long way here.
“My God. What a voice. She needs the best training possible.”
My sister hissed, loud enough for those in the pew ahead of us to hear. “Asshole. You think that is some spontaneous jungle talent? She has had the best training possible. Can’t you hear?”
“Who? Where?”
“They’re falling all over her. At Curtis.”
After the service, we waited in the receiving line to meet the phenomenon. My cousin Delia recognized me as we approached. I guess I wasn’t too hard to pick out. Before Ruth could do introductions, the girl waved her off. She stared at me. “You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve.” A knot of Sunday celebrants turned to study the commotion. “Coming in here, the picture of innocence. You got to answer for what you’ve done.”
The list formed in my mind. I was ready to sign it all and serve any penance. I felt the heat emanating from this woman. Ruth and Dr. Daley stood at my elbow, silent bailiffs. I knew what I’d done. My family had known, long before I did. There was no choice but to stand still and receive the awful sentence.
“Whose idea was it to do that Bach like that?”
It took me half the length of a chorale before I could even feel relief. And another half a phrase before I could answer, “Ah! Everyone has their own Bach.” She was still scowling, shaking her angry head. “Was it too small for you?” This had been our most faulted transgression: one voice per line. Thinking heaven might answer to the private call.
My cousin glared at me, smoldering like Carmen. “You owe me a car.”
“I…a car?” My checkbook ready already.
“I had your little motets on the tape player while trying to drive. Right through the red light at Sixteenth and Arch. Glorious! Didn’t even know I was in the intersection until this Ford Escort came through at nine o’clock and clipped my wings. Escorted me right back to this world, thank you. Sing Unto the Lord a New Song?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, you did that all right. Umm- hmm. That one was righteous!”
I took forever to figure out the simplest things. “You like it? It suited you?”
“You owe me a car. Nice reliable Dodge Dart in a pretty red.”
Anyone but a musician might tell you that all silences sound the same. But Ruth’s silence, on the way home, modulated into a new song.
I heard Delia’s Bach not long after that. She soloed across town in a pan-Philadelphia performance of the B Minor Mass. Jonah might not have favored such high-powered magnificence. But even he, hearing this, would have been delivered. Delia’s Laudamus Te carried all the rapture that that Latin-writing Lutheran posted forward in it. Every note was faultless, as written. And yet it swung, kicking back and dancing like there was no tomorrow. Which there isn’t. Ever. That eerie, unearthbound work had found its celebrant. Praise is praise, my cousin’s voice said. Music’s music. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Two nights later, I heard her sing Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brazileiras no.5. The piece had long ago become a theme-park poster for itself, as over-played and unhearable a monument as Wilson Hart’s adored Rodrigo, done in by too much love. But in Delia Banks’s sinuous, ethereal turns, it went desperate for me again, mystic, possessed, sexy, a single endless sequence spun out of one breath. It wasn’t even that I’d never heard it properly. I’d simply never heard it. Her version sighed past any of the scores of recordings I knew. And hers would never be recorded.
I had lunch with her, just the two of us, almost clandestine, in the same diner where my mother and grandmother had once secretly met. “Ghosts everywhere,” Delia said. “We’re lucky they’re so big on sharing.”
I didn’t know how to speak my pleasure. “You could have… Name the life you want.” Times had changed. Or would have to, for this woman. “You can have the international concert career of your choice.” I knew the odds, yet knew, too, how little I was exaggerating. A person could live his whole life chasing music and be lucky to hear one time-sent voice. I was near kin to two of them.
My cousin favored me with a high-watt version of her stage smile, the one that made her audiences love her before she opened her throat. “Thank you, sir. You say the sweetest things, for a lost soul.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.” The waitress came and Delia traded barbs with her. When the woman left, my cousin shook her head at me. “You ever sing at Salzburg?”
“Several times. A beautiful place. You’d love it.”
“I know. I’ve seen the movie. The one with that spinning nun? You ever sing at the Festival d’Art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence?”
“We once won a prize there.” As I answered, it dawned on me: Delia already knew.
“You happy?” She knew the answer to that one, too. “Ask me if I’m happy. Ask me what kind of career I want. I got everything in the world already, cuz. Got my church. Who’d need a bigger stage than that? I’ve got people I love singing with me, building the sound, taking me higher. Every piece we do, we make our own, whatever post office it came on through. I got a repertoire long enough to last me two lifetimes. One short and the other long.”
I went wily and virtuous all at once. “You owe it…to the source of your gift not to hide that light under a bushel. To bring that sound to as many people as possible.”
Delia thought about my words. They troubled her, a slip of evil moving about in the Garden. “No. This isn’t about bigger numbers. Are you happy? You can’t make anyone happy if you’re not happy yourself.”