If that much hasn’t made you hang yourself yet, here’s the awful part. I helped the girls clean out Mama’s dresser two years ago, when she died. She kept a hidden clippings file, too. Secret keepsakes. We never told the man. You see how blood feuds go. Do white people do this to themselves, too?
The letter felt like lung surgery. A man and a woman joined together for decades, their own nation, and my parents’ experiment had split them. No one was left to beg forgiveness from. I had no one to atone to but myself. I lay in bed much of the weekend after reading the letter, unable to get up. When I did, I was filled with the need for real work.
For that, Ruth provided. She’d raided the Unified School District for a dozen of the most urgent teachers in the Bay Area, all old acquaintances. They were waiting for her, as much victims of contemporary education as the most hardened dropout. Her board had so much combined experience that theory could find no hiding place among them. They turned up sums of money hidden under rocks and tucked away in widowers’ mattresses. They were not above crackpot grant applications, community begging, rummage sales, and the common shakedown. One large anonymous no-strings gift helped seed a permanent endowment. We set up camp in an abandoned food store leased to us for little more than the insurance and taxes. New Day Elementary School — K through 3—opened in 1986 and was fully accredited within three years. “The first four years are everything,” Ruth said. Tuition depended upon means. Many of our parents paid in volunteer work.
She took me on probation, until I got certified like everyone else. I taught days and went back to school nights. I got my master’s in musical education just as Ruth completed her Ed.D. In every working week, my sister astonished me. I never imagined I could help make something happen in the actual world. It had never occurred to Ruth to bother doing anything else. “It’s a little thing. Flower coming up through the concrete. Doesn’t break the rock. But it makes a little soil.”
I learned more in my first four years teaching for New Day than I’d learned in the forty years before that. More about what happened to a tune on its way back to do. It seemed I had some time left after all to sample the sounds that weren’t mine, to study their scales and rhythms, the national anthems of all the states I couldn’t get to from my place of origin. At New Day, we came into an idea that was simplicity itself. There was no separate audience. There were no separate musics.
We had words and phonics and sentence cadences. Numbers and patterns and rhythmic shapes. Speaking and shouting. Birdsong and vibration; tunes for planting and protection; prayers of remembering and forgetting, sounds for every living creature, every invention under the sky and each of that sky’s spinning objects. All topics talked to all others, through pitches in time. We rapped the times tables. We chanted the irregular verbs. We had science, history, geography, and every other organized shout of hurt or joy that’s ever been put on a report card. But we taught no separate cry called music. Just song everywhere, each time any child turned his or her head. The occult mathematics of a soul that doesn’t know it’s counting.
“I’m not looking for miracles,” Ruth told me. “I just want more kids reading at grade level than we have families living at the median.”
We didn’t have much money for instruments. What we lacked, we made. We had steel drums and glass harmonicas, cigar-box guitars and tubular bells. We wrote out our own arrangements, which each new wave of children learned afresh. Every year had its composers, its choruses, its prima donnas, its solid, no-nonsense sidemen. My kids howled for me almost as they might have, had I not been there. I did nothing but give them room.
Ruth challenged me once. “Joey, let me take you to a record store. It’s like the year you went to Europe, you stopped listening to—”
“No more room, Ruth. My scores are all full.”
“Nonsense. You’ll love what’s going on. And your kids will be much—”
“Hold up. Here’s the deal.” She could see me shaking, and she took my arm. I dropped several decibels. “Here’s what I can do for you. I am giving these kids something that no one else in the world is ever going to give them. No one. But me.”
She stroked me, as scared as I was. “You’re right, Joey. I’m sorry. You’re the music teacher. And I’m not the cops.” It was the only time we struggled over curriculum.
I might have married, now. The picture of Mama that Papap had given me sat framed atop my bookshelf full of music-education texts: The woman I’d spend my life with, the ghost that had kept me from marrying Teresa was returned home. I lived surrounded now by women who’d been everywhere my mother had, who’d passed auditions beyond the one Mama had been turned away from, women who might wake me from nightmares I didn’t even know I was having, women whose split lives might dovetail perfectly with mine. But I had no time to meet and court a wife. All I had time for was my children and their songs.
I was putting in more hours working for Ruth than I had working for Jonah. The job took all I had, and for the first time in my life, I did work that wouldn’t have been done if I wasn’t doing it. It should have been enough, everything that was lacking in my life in Europe. But it wasn’t. Something in me still needed out. The place I had come from was dying, for lack of a way of getting to where I was.
I wasn’t alone, stranded in the standing present. My nephew Kwame never went to New Day School. He was too old by the time our alternative was under way. I saw him only once or twice a month, when I went to Ruth’s for Sunday dinner. Truth was, Ruth gave so much of herself to her concrete-defeating flower that her own boy ended up taking private lessons in latchkey school. He doubled in size from eleven to thirteen. His voice dropped through the floor and thickened so much, I had trouble understanding him. He started to scare me, just the way he hung and talked. Oakland came and found him out and solved his father’s death. Rhythm freed him: the trick it always promises. He dressed in rage, an apprentice criminal, yards of baggy black sailcloth for a shirt, sagging jeans, the bill of his Dodgers baseball cap tipped back onto his thickening neck, or, later, a stocking pulled over his head. He held his fingers splayed like chopsticks, rapper-style, slicing the air. All he needed was a snub-nosed gun.
I tried giving him piano lessons. They weren’t even a disaster. I was his uncle, whatever that meant. He felt his father’s ghost too strongly to dis me outright. But my chords were worthless to him. He couldn’t even slander me, so clueless did I come. My nephew’s hands could span a tenth on the keyboard with ease, magnificent. But ten minutes a week of practice was beyond him. Like asking someone to carry a stone around with him, just for the good it might do his soul.
Each lesson forced us more into the open. “This thing play ‘Dopeman’? This thing play ‘Fuck tha Police’?”
He couldn’t get to me; I’d been gotten to already, too long ago. “It plays anything you want. You just have to get good enough to tell it how.”
What owns us? What can we own? Kwame tried to plunk out his untranscribable rap. It was like doing sculpture with a trowel. The results only made him furious. He brought in a disk for us to work with. To spite me, really. “You’ll like this. Wreckin’ Cru. Old-time shit. Still uses keyboards.”
I looked at the date. Eighteen months old. He played me a track with a wild, irregular synthesizer riff. I ran it back for him, note for note. Took everything I had left in me.
“Damn,” Kwame said in a low, affectless monotone.