“‘We’?”
She heard, and nodded. “I mean the other us.”
One would have to be dead already to survive such inheritance. We passed a row of century-old houses, now carved up into rented rooms. Ruth hummed under her breath. I couldn’t make out the tune. When the tune changed to words, she seemed to speak to someone across the street. “Look, Joey. It’s easy. The easiest question in the world. If they come and start rounding us up, which line are you going to get into?”
“No question. Not even a choice.”
“But they’ve been rounding us up, Joey.” She spread her hands around the neighborhood. “They’re rounding us up now. They’ll keep rounding us up, for as long as there’s a calendar.”
I tried to follow her. When she spoke next, it reeled me back from Da’s deep-space catalog.
“You should have married that white girl, Joey. I’m sure she was nice.”
“Is. Is nice. But I’m not.”
“Incompatible?” I looked at her. Her mouth twisted into a crook of empathy.
“Incompatible.”
“Take two people.”
I waited. Then I realized this was the entire recipe. “Two people. Exactly.”
“Mama and Da would have had to divorce. If she’d lived.”
“You think?” The stories we told about their story no longer mattered to them.
“Of course. Look at the statistics.”
“Numbers never lie,” I said, in our old German accent.
She winced and grinned at the same time. Hybrid vigor. “Robert and I were incompatible. But it worked.”
“What about his parents?”
Ruth looked at me, seeing ghosts. “You never knew? Your own brother-in-law?” Blaming, taking the blame. “I never told you? Of course not; when could I have? Robert was raised in a foster home. White folks. Only in it for the aid checks.”
We covered two blocks. We were hit up twice for cash, once to help get a car out of hock to drive a wife to the hospital and once to tide a man over until an accident at his bank could be ironed out in court. Both times, my sister made me give them five dollars.
“They’re just going to buy booze or dope with it,” I said.
“Yeah? And what world-fixing were you getting up to with it?”
Every third yard was a pachyderm’s graveyard of shopping carts, washing machines, and stripped Impalas whose last highway would be four cinder blocks. A cluster of kids Kwame’s age worked a basketball in an empty lot, dribbling between the larger shards of glass, using oil drums for their picks and rolls, and chucking the ball at a rim that seemed made from an old TV antenna. Every square foot of concrete was garlanded in tendrils of graffiti, the elaborate signatures of those who were prevented from putting their names on anything else. The block housed more poverty per yard than even my sister could identify with. The furnaces of progress were busy burning all the fuel they could find.
Whatever dream my brother and I had been raised on was dead. Incredible to me: the 1980s. Uplift had fallen deeper than the place where it had started, back before hopes were raised.
My years in Europe opened my eyes to the place stamped on my passport. Three months before, with Voces, I’d toured the Adriatic, singing an old Latin monastic text: “Teach me to love what I cannot hope to know; teach me to know what I cannot hope to be.” Here I was, walking through a ruined Philadelphia with my sister, begging to be what I couldn’t know, trying to know what I couldn’t love. All song that didn’t hear this massacre was a lie.
My sister saw her own landscape. “We need control of our own neighborhoods. It wouldn’t solve things, of course. But it would be a start.”
Always another start. And a start after that. “Ruth?” I was willing to look at any misery around me, except my sister. “How long are you planning to stay around here?”
“You still on white people’s time, aren’t you?” I spun around, stiffening. Then I felt her arm slipping through mine. “Funny thing? My Oakland? It looks a lot like this.”
“You could move.”
She shook her head at me. “No, I couldn’t, Joey. It’s where all his work went. It’s where…he died.” We walked in silence, turning the last corner to Papap’s house again. Ruth stopped and blurted, “How am I supposed to do this, Joey? A ten-year-old on his way to hell and another little half-year-old with a murdered father.”
“What are you saying? Kwame’s in trouble?”
She shook her head. “You’ll go to your grave a classical musician, won’t you? A black boy in trouble. Imagine.” I pulled away from her, and she exploded, throwing her hands in the air. She brought them back down over her face, like falling ash. “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll never make it.”
My first thought, God help me, was, Make it where? I closed the distance and put my hands on her shoulders. She threw them off. As quickly as her tears came, they stopped. “Okay. Okay. No crisis. Just another husbandless single sister mother. Millions of us.”
“How many of you got brothers?”
Ruth squeezed my arm, a frantic tourniquet. “You don’t know, Joey. You can’t begin.” She felt me flinch, and grabbed on tighter. “I don’t mean that. I mean what’s happened to us, since you took off. The bottom’s dropped out of the whole country. Like living through a lifelong air raid. For a boy, a little boy?” Her shudder passed through me. I’d never feel safe again. “You haven’t noticed it, in him? You really haven’t noticed?”
“Kwame? No. Well, he dresses…a little like a criminal.”
She barked in pained amusement and smacked the air. “All the kids do now. And half the adults, too.”
“And I’ve noticed he hates policemen.”
“That’s just common sense. Survival benefit.”
We stood still outside our grandfather’s house. I looked in and saw him at the window, pulling back a white curtain to look at us. Dr. Daley: the family practitioner under siege in the neighborhood he’d once served. He motioned violently for us to come in. Ruth nodded and held up a finger, bargaining for thirty seconds. Seeing no immediate emergency, he let the curtain fall and retreated.
Ruth leaned toward me. “Kwame’s not like Robert. He has Robert’s healthy resentment. But Robert always had a counterplan. He was always working on an answer. One more public education drive, one more demonstration. Kwame’s got the rage, but not a single answer for it. Robert used to keep him in line by challenging him. Used to say, ‘Best thing to do when you’re feeling mad is make something of yourself that’s not them.’ When Kwame explodes, I do what Robert used to do. I sit him down with a sheet of paper and colored pencils. Or park him in front of a box of paint. Kwame can make — oh! The wildest things. But since… The last few times I tried to sit him down…”
Then the boy appeared at the window, watching us. Through the glass, even with his headphones and their pounding pulse, he heard us talking about him. Fury and apathy fought for a controlling interest in his eyes. My sister looked back at her son, smiling at him through her panic. But what can you hide from a child who has already seen death? She turned and grabbed me just below the collar. “How much are we talking about, Joey? My portion of…the savings?”
Ruth’s third of the inheritance had been sitting in balanced investments, compounding for more years than her son had lived. It couldn’t match that boy’s compounded experience, but it was a usable sum. I gave her an estimate. Her face did its own skeptical calculation. “We have some, too, Robert and I. And Papap keeps offering — the piece Mama never got. We could get matching funds. There are sources — not many, but they’re there. It’s all Robert wanted. His last sustained plan before… He worked so hard on it, I can see the blueprints.”
I was afraid to ask her to make sense. She started up again, steering me toward the door. “Joseph Strom. How would you like to give your nephew music lessons?”