I pressed back, feeling her hand’s resistance. “Ruth. Don’t even joke. What could I possibly… He’d eat me alive.”
She laughed and shook her head, dragging me on toward the door. “Oh, Kwame’s nothing, baby. Wait until you get a classroom full of ten-year-olds! Wait until little Robert comes up through the ranks.”
That’s how I returned to Oakland with my sister and her sons. It was as easy as falling. As soon as Ruth described Robert’s school to me, I knew I’d been looking for a reason to keep me from returning to Europe. Something big enough to put up against the salvage of the past. Nothing else had claim over my life. My single problem lay in breaking the news to Jonah.
We called him from Philadelphia just before we left. I had trouble finding him at home, in Ghent. When he heard my voice, Jonah made it sound as if he’d been waiting for weeks at the side of the phone. “Damn it, Mule. I’ve been dying by inches here. What’s happening?”
“Why didn’t you just call if you wanted to hear from us?”
“That wouldn’t exactly be hearing from you, would it?”
“I’m going to California. Ruth’s building a school.”
“And you are going to…”
“Fucker. I’m going to teach for her.”
He thought a moment before saying anything. Or maybe it was the transatlantic lag. “I see. You’re quitting the group. You’re going to kill Voces Antiquae?” With the bull market in early music not even starting to peak, superlative, vibrato-free voices were springing up all over. I’d always been the ensemble’s weak link, the amateur latecomer. This was my brother’s chance to replace me with a real bass, a trained one, someone who could do justice to the others and lift them to that last level of international renown that had vaguely eluded us. He didn’t have to mourn the loss of my voice. He needed only to let me know how completely I’d betrayed him.
“Well, we had our run, didn’t we?” His was the voice of the future past. He sounded light-years away, anxious to get off the phone and start auditioning my replacements. “So how is your sister?”
“You want to talk to her?”
From the kitchen counter, where she’d been pretending not to listen, Ruth shook her head. Jonah said, “I don’t know, Joey. Does she want to talk with me?”
Ruth cursed me under her breath as I handed her the phone. She took the receiver as if it were a bone club. Her sound was small and flat. “JoJo.” After a while: “Long time. You old yet?” She listened, dead. Then she sat up, defending. “Don’t start this. Just…don’t.” After another pause, she said, “No, Jonah. That’s what you should do. That’s what you should fucking do.”
She lapsed into another listening silence, then handed the phone to Papap. He shouted into it. “Hallo. Hallo? Dieses ist mein Enkel?”
The words ripped me. They did worse to Ruth. She came over to me and whispered, so Europe couldn’t hear. “You sure about this? You had work. Maybe you belong over there.”
She just wanted noise from me. She couldn’t bear the sounds of that other conversation. We talked in a drone, drowning out Papap and listening in by helpless turns. He and Jonah talked for three or four minutes, nothing, everything — collapsing decades into a few hundred words. Papap grilled Jonah about Europe, Solidarity, Gorbachev. God only knows what answers Jonah invented. “When are you coming home?” Papap asked. Ruth tried to talk over the words, as if that would erase them. But that’s the thing about sounds: Even when they all happen at once, none of them cancels out the others. They just keep stacking up, beyond any chord’s ability to hold.
There was a silence, out of which Papap suddenly charged, enraged. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Behind the times. Come back and listen. Every song and dance in this country has gone brown.” Ruth and I quit our deaf show. She stared at me, but before I could even shrug, our grandfather was sailing. “You think you’re a traitor out there? You’re nothing but an advance scout. A double agent… Well, call it that, too, if you like. Name an immortal piece that wouldn’t sound better sung by the hired help. That little world you’ve been scouting is going to be overrun with black, once we show the least little bit of interest. Sie werden noch besser sein als im Basketball. ”
Ruth quizzed me with a look. I felt myself giggling bitterly. “Just like basketball,” I translated. “Only better.”
They improvised their good-byes and my grandfather hung up. “Interesting man, your brother. He didn’t know that the Soviet Union had a new leader.” He chuckled, his shoulders jarring loose from his body. “I’m not entirely sure he’d heard of basketball, either.”
“What did he say to you?” I asked Ruth.
“He said I should travel. Get my mind off the past.”
The whole family showed for our departure. My uncle Michael, my aunts Lucille and Lorene, most of their kids and grandkids — I still didn’t know all their names. They gathered the night before we left, to send us out. We sang. What else was there? Delia Banks was there, her sound as wide as a flowering chestnut and as delicate as sweet williams. She didn’t solo, except for an aerial twelve bars. Tunes fell in line, jumbling up and overlapping, talking to one another, taking themselves as their only topic. The Daley game, too, was Crazed Quotations, drawn from another well, the water colder and more bracing. Where do you think your mother got it from? The send-off had no sadness. We’d meet back here next year and the year after, we and all our dead, as our dead had been meeting here without us every prior year. And if not here, then that flatted-seventh somewhere else.
Late that night, after the last cousin left, Papap came into his dead son’s room, the room that for weeks I’d inhabited. He held a stiff, shiny square of paper. He sat in his boy’s ancient chair, next to where I stretched out. I scrambled to my feet, and he waved me back down.
“Your sister got most of the keepsakes. I gave what I had to her years ago. I didn’t know you’d be showing up. But I found these for you.” A Polaroid of my brother and me opening Christmas presents, a photo Da had taken and given to the Daleys. And an older Brownie photo of a woman who could only be my mother. I couldn’t stop looking. I took it in in long gasps, a suffocating man needing air. It was the first fresh look I’d had of her since the fire. In the tiny black-and-white print, a young woman — far younger than I was now — of uncertain tone but clearly African features looked back through the lens, smiling weakly, seeing on the exposing film everything that would happen to her. She wore a dress of midcalf length with wide, pointed shoulders, the height of fashion in the years before my birth.
“What color is this dress?” I heard myself ask from a long while off.
He studied me. He saw my hunger, and it threatened to kill him. He tried to talk but couldn’t.
“Navy blue,” I told him.
He held still for a time, then nodded. “That’s right. Navy blue.”
We said good-bye to Papap. He wouldn’t let us pretend we’d ever see him again in this life. Ruth took her leave of our grandfather as if he contained all those people she had never gotten to say good-bye to. And he did. He came out onto the lawn as we got in the car, suddenly frailer than ninety. He took my hand. “I’m glad to have met you. Next life, in Jerusalem.”
My grandfather was right: Every music in America had gone brown. Our drive across the continent proved it. The car took me back to those days, Jonah and I crisscrossing the United States and Canada. The place had gotten infinitely bigger in the intervening years. The only way to get across a place so huge was still by radio. Every signal our receiver found — even the C and W stations drifting across the Great Plains — had at least one drop of black sloshing around in it. Africa had done to the American song what the old plantation massas had done to Africa. Only this time, the parent was keeping custody.