Ruth and I took turns driving and looking after little Robert. “You make this almost easy,” she said. “The trip out was hell.”
“I helped, Mama,” Kwame shouted. “I did the best I could.”
“’Course you did, honey.”
The driver got to choose the station, although Kwame’s need for a shattering bass beat usually dictated. He liked the ones whose rhythms were like Chinese water torture, the ones that forced the chords into your auditory canal with a syringe.
“What’s this called?”
“Hip-hop,” Kwame said, giving even those two syllables a rhythm I’d have to work at.
“I’m too old. Too old even to listen from a distance.”
My sister just laughed at me. “You were born too old.”
The country had strayed into musics beyond my ability to make out. I could only take them in contained doses. Now and then, during the three-day marathon of my belated education, I backslid and trolled for my own old addictions. The flood of now — the music that people really used and needed — had risen so high that only a few scattered islands of bypassed memory remained above water. When I managed to find classical stations at all, they beamed out a continuous stream of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Soon there would be only a dozen pieces left from the last thousand years of written music, pressed into anthologies suitable for seduction, gag gifts, and raising your baby’s IQ.
“Does this make my people an oppressed minority?” I asked Ruth.
“We’ll talk when they start shooting at you.”
Culture was whatever survived its own bonfire. Whatever you held on to when nothing else worked. And then, it didn’t, either.
Somewhere past Denver, driving, I chanced upon a clear signal of a chorus that, within three notes, I pegged as Bach. Cantata 78. I peeked at the backseat, where my nephew twisted and fidgeted. A look passed across his face, not even engaged enough for contempt. The music might have come from Mars, or farther. This was the boy, and hundreds like him, who I was now supposed to teach about music.
The opening chorus died away. I knew what was coming, though I hadn’t heard the piece for ages. Two beats of silence, and then that duet. “Wir eilen mit schwachen, doch emsigen Schritten.” My brother at ten, Kwame’s age, had bounded along that upper line with eager steps, lost in the euphoria of his own voice. The soprano this time was another boy lost in time, as good as my brother had been, as drunk on the notes. The lower voice, now a countertenor, came alive in the game of harmonic tag, rejuvenated by trying to keep up with the boy he, too, must once have been. The two of them were high, clear, and fast as light. I looked at Ruth to see if she remembered. Of course, she couldn’t have. The boys flew, the music was good, and my life bent back on itself. I flew alongside these notes, racing myself toward what they wanted me to remember, until the flashing red lights in my rearview mirror stopped me. I looked down at the speedometer: eighty-nine miles an hour.
By the time I pulled over and the squad car nosed up behind us, Ruth was in pieces. She shrieked, “Don’t get out of the car. Don’t get out.” Kwame crouched on the backseat, pressed up against the door, ready to leap out and grab the cop’s gun. Little Robert started to wail, as if that terror really did start in race’s womb. My sister struggled to comfort him, calming and wrestling him down.
“This is it,” Kwame said. “We dead.”
The police car sat behind us, running our plates, toying with its food. When the officer got out of the car, all three of us let out our breath. “Thank God,” Ruth said, not believing. “Oh God, thank you.” The man was black.
I rolled down the window and fed him my license before he could ask. “You know why I pulled you over?” I nodded. “Is this car yours?”
“My sister’s.” I waved toward Ruth. She had one hand on the baby and the other stretched across the seat, restraining Kwame.
The officer pointed. “Who’s that?”
I looked down to where he pointed: the radio, Cantata 78 still pouring out of it. In the panic of the moment, I’d forgotten it was even on. I looked back at the policeman and smiled apologetically. “Bach.”
“No points for the obvious. I mean, who’s singing?”
He took my license and retreated to his car. Two lifetime prison sentences later, he returned and handed it back to me. “You have better things to do with your hundred and twenty bucks?”
Kwame understood the question before I did. “Build a school.”
The policeman nodded. “Keep it below allegro next time.”
Twenty miles down the interstate, Ruth burst out cackling. Nerves. She couldn’t stop. I thought I’d have to pull over. “You damn honkies.” She sucked air between her hysterical sobs. “They let you walk, every single time.”
Deep River
This is how time runs: like some stoked-up, stage-sick kid in his first talent show. One glance at that audience out there past the footlights and all those months of metronome practice vanish in a blast of presto. Time has no sense of tempo. It’s worse than Horowitz. The marks on the page mean nothing. I hit Oakland, and my life’s whole beat doubled.
I moved into the second story of a chewed-up gingerbread house ten blocks from my sister’s, near the interstate. I could walk to Preservation Park in twenty minutes. But then, I could also see the North Star on clear nights with my naked eye. De Fremery was a lot closer. The park’s old Panther Self-Defense outreaches were history, but the rallies went on, as timeless as the crimes they countered.
I passed through the East Bay like a masked figure through some Act Four costume party. For the first weeks, walking home through my new neighborhood at night, I felt every conscience-stricken terror my country had trained me to feel. I saw how I looked, dressed, sounded, and moved. I’d never been more conspicuous, even in Europe. Even I would have singled myself out to hit.
But no one sees anyone else, in the end. This is our tragedy, and the thing that may finally save us. We steer only by the grossest landmarks. Turn left at bewilderment. Keep going till you hit despair. Pull up at complete oblivion, turn around, and you’re there. After six months, I knew all my neighbors’ names. After eight, I knew what they needed from the world. After ten, what I needed from them. It might have taken longer, but I’d been born into an outsiders’ club. The only surprise about Oakland was how huge and shared outsideness could be.
From the beginning, Jonah’s and my performance had been whiteness, the hardest piece to make both believable and worth listening to. Now I entered another concert, the block party of the ticketless, where they had to let you in if you only so much as showed.
We heard from Uncle Michael before that first year was out. Dr. Daley had died in his sleep, just shy of his ninety-first birthday. “The first thing he ever did that didn’t take work,” Michael wrote.
As for me, nothing I do will ever be effortless again. I feel like I’m twelve and helpless. His age ends with him. We’re all drifting now… Lorene said he’d waited until he got a chance to make the acquaintance of his missing grandchildren… We’ll spare you all the surprises we found while going through his belongings. Nobody dies without telling everything. But one thing we found, you’ll want to hear about. You remember that mahogany desk he worked at in his study, Ruth? We wanted to save it, with the other pieces in the house worth saving. When we pulled the thing away from the corner, we found a yellowed folder, tucked between a piece of panel and the wall. It was all your clippings, Joseph, all the reviews of you and your brother. He’d been keeping them for years, hiding them from Mama. He kept them back there so long, he forgot they were there…