More out of curiosity than to impress him, I tried the line again, this time juked up, hammered out, fitted with a good Baroque figured bass. Then I tried to fugue it. Sampling the sampler. The whole system runs on theft. Tell me what hasn’t already been stolen?
When I finished, my nephew just stared at me, shaking his head. “You the illest, you know that?”
“I am aware.”
His was an act, but not an act — this gangsta son of a doctor of education. He went with the tune that best served him. Kwame’s at least had some angry fire that my dress-up had lacked. We go through our lives playing ourselves. Black is and black ain’t. Ten years on and he’d lose this music, too. Every affluent white kid from Vancouver to Naples would be playing him.
His two uncles had sung about that theft once, a wasted old tune and even older words. We’d performed it in a converted shipping house in The Hague that had amassed fortunes on the triangle trade: What we love is left us. Kwame rapped for me, songs about killing police or Koreans, about putting women in their place. He giggled over the words when I asked him. I wasn’t sure he knew what they meant. I didn’t. But his body knew, in every twitch of those sinuous slingshot rhythms: Here was all the room he had to live.
He came to lessons with his eyes red, his body heavy, the muscles in his face sluggishly amused at the entire white-owned world. His clothes held that sweet, acrid smell of burning rope I remembered from my brother’s forays in the Village a quarter of a century ago. Jonah had run his experiments for a while, then graduated. Kwame, I thought, would, too. I considered mentioning things to Ruth. But that would have killed what little trust her son and I had won.
Ruth came to my apartment late on a winter night in 1988, Robert in tow. The child was only four, but already smart enough to guess everything that adults really meant when they cooed at him. Now he stood tugging at his mother’s knees, trying to make her laugh. She didn’t even feel him there.
“Joey, the child wrecked my car. Wrapped the bumper around a telephone pole two blocks down my street. That thug friend of his, Darryl, was sitting next to him in the passenger seat with an open bottle of malt liquor. God knows where they stole it.”
“Is he okay?”
“Was until I got my hands on him. He’s lucky we got to them before the police did.” She paced around my tiny living room. I knew enough not to offer any comfort. All she wanted was a living ear. “I’m losing him. I’m losing my firstborn.”
“You’re not losing him. You know children, Ruth.”
“I’ve been losing him since Robert was killed.”
“It’s just kid’s stuff. Wildness of the times. He’ll grow out of it.” She shook her head, struggling with some holdout fact. “Tell me,” I said.
She twisted in place. “Tell you what?”
“Whatever it is you’re not telling me.”
She deflated. She sat down between me and her younger son. “He’s taken to calling me…names.” She fought to keep her voice. She looked at little Robert, who, on cue, walked off into my bedroom to play. Ruth leaned in toward me. “We argued. He called me ‘white.’ White! ‘You so white, woman. Little car wreck. Nigga don’t care ’bout no old hooptie.’ Where does that come from? The boy’s fourteen years old, and he’s holding his genes against me! Hating me for infecting him.”
Her body shook as if she were freezing. I had nothing for her. No consolation, even remote. “Wait,” I said. “Just wait a couple of years. Sixteen, seventeen. When it really starts.”
“Oh Jesus, Joey. No. If he comes up with worse than that, I’ll die.”
She survived. But not from Kwame’s lack of enterprise. Even as her school took off — winning awards, securing grants, appearing in a regional television feature — Ruth’s teenage son ran his own race. I never heard half the stories; Ruth was ashamed to tell me. I never saw Kwame anymore. He stopped coming by for the lessons that infuriated both of us. Six weeks after he quit showing up, Ruth asked how the lessons were going.
Kwame had the wordsBY ANY MEANS tattooed across his belly. He sculpted geometrical shapes into his cropped hair and wore a shirt readingSICK IS on its back andMY MUSE on its front. He came home with failing grades, strings of unexcused absences. The harder Ruth tried to get through to him, the deeper he tunneled.
Then Kwame and four friends — including his copilot Darryl — were caught in the school bathroom, next to a toilet with enough methamphetamine floating in it to kill a racehorse. It wasn’t clear which boys were the leads and which only sang in the chorus. Ruth argued at the school hearing that what her son needed most was meaningful discipline, something both he and his school could turn to real use. But after Kwame quoted an Ice Cube lyric in his own defense, the principal opted for expulsion.
Ruth found him a private school that took probationary cases. It was a boarding school, like his uncles had gone to centuries ago, but with a somewhat different curriculum. This one was strictly votech. Ruth couldn’t afford to send Kwame there, even with contributions from me. But keeping him out would have bankrupted her.
“Every night,” she told me, “it’s always the same. I dream someone in uniform is holding his head down to the concrete with a gun.”
It seemed to me his school was working. When I saw Kwame now, he felt lighter, less brittle, with less of that junked-up edginess. He still chopped the air with his crooked forearms and folded his fingers into his armpits defensively. But his humor flashed faster and his diatribes were more likely to include himself as a fair target. He and two friends formed a band called N Dig Nation. Kwame rapped and played the record player. “I do the ones and twos.” His rhythms were so dense and irregular, I couldn’t write them down, let alone clap them. The band played for pulsing gatherings of high school kids, each crowd larger and more hypnotically satisfied than the last.
I sent Jonah and Celeste cards every Christmas and birthday. I wrote a couple of real letters, telling him about our venture: Ruth’s endless energy, Kwame’s struggles, my teaching games, the current crop of genius first graders, the set of pitched percussion instruments we had managed to buy for my classroom. I didn’t mention my lingering emptiness. I sent everything off to the Brandstraat. For a year, I heard nothing back. I wasn’t even sure the man still lived in Europe.
He called me in March of 1989. Just after midnight. I picked up the phone and heard the great horn blare from the third movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. After four notes, I was supposed to come in on the third below. I didn’t. I just listened to him sing another two measures before he crumbled away in scolding. “Shame, shame! We’ll have to give you a measure of pickup next time.”
“Or try another piece,” I said, only half-awake. “What’s up, brother?”
“You’re a cool cat, Joey. So I owe you some letters. I’m calling, okay? That’s what’s up.”
“Who’s dead?”
“Everyone I know or care for. We’re coming to the States. The group.”
“No joke? You? Here?”
“I’m calling before I come, so you won’t rag me.”
“Voces Antiquae does their first North American tour.”
“We could have done it years ago. All in the timing. Did you like the Gesualdo?” I paused so long, we both figured things out. “You never bought it. You never even looked it over in a music store? How about the stuff before that? The Lassus? The hocket song collection?”
I took a breath. “Jonah. Lassus? Hockets? Not where I live. Not in my neighborhood.”
“What do you mean? You live in the Bay, right? They don’t have music stores in Berkeley?”
“I’ve been busy. This teaching gig is two full-time careers. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been anywhere but the school, the grocery store, or the Laundromat. In fact, I can’t tell you the last time I was at the Laundromat. Berkeley might as well be Zanzibar.”