“Everything, you say?”
“You know. The good stuff. Pitches in time.”
“What kind of everything?” He eyed me. Too much to duck. He looked at his watch, already dashing.
“I give them what’s theirs. Their music. Their identity.”
“What’s theirs, Joey? If you have to give it… You give them their music? Their identity? Identical to what? Only thing you’re identical to is yourself, and that only on good days. Stereotyping. That’s what you’re giving them. Nobody’s anybody else. Their music is whatever nobody can give them. Good luck finding that.”
He wasn’t entirely dead yet. His soul’s handover deal had been signed and sealed but not yet delivered. I grabbed his elbow and slowed him. “Maestro. Chill, huh? I get them to teach me the songs they know. I trade them for a few old tunes. Stuff nobody else knows. I give them all kinds of noise — a little gospel swell, a little twelve-bar, even a little Pilgrim and Founding Fathers crap now and then. Theirs? Not theirs? Who the hell am I to say? It’s only music, for God’s sake.”
We’d gotten as far as my apartment. I motioned for him to come up for a moment. Jonah wagged his head. He looked around my neighborhood. “Unbelievable, Joey. You’re passing. You’re really passing. Remember how they used to call Jonah Strom the black Fischer-Dieskau?”
“Nobody ever called you that, Jonah. That was you.”
“Well, you’ve become the black Joseph Strom.” He cuffed my shoulder and turned to get back into his rental. There was pride; there was envy. Not dead yet. He had at least two out of the big seven covered. “Don’t worry, brother. Your secret’s safe with me.”
I couldn’t help watching for the reviews in New York, where the Voces Antiquae tour wound up. It was their hour onstage, or at least their fifteen minutes. The New York critics fell over one another declaring how long they’d been waiting for such a sound. Jonah sent me the clip from the Times —“All Ars Antiqua Is Nova Again”—afraid I might miss it. The piece singled him out as perhaps the clearest-voiced male singing early music in any country. No mention of color, outside the vocal. He’d clipped his business card to the corner of the rave and scribbled, “Warmest regards, your leading Negro recitalist.”
At last he had the vindication he’d so long sought. He had the listening world’s adulation, and he made a sound that stood for nothing other than what it was. But he and I both knew that the heat from that “nova” was thrown off from a core already burned through.
Yet his act had one more twist. Now that he stood for himself alone, he belonged to everyone but himself. His brilliance caught the moment’s buzz; his sound became anyone’s to interpret. Fame is the weapon of last resort that culture uses to neutralize runaways. A few months after his group made its North American tour, their Gesualdo recording won a Grammy. In December of 1990, they were named the oxymoronic “Early Music Performers of the Year.” I actually saw a poster of them, like a police lineup, on the wall of a music shop in downtown Oakland where I’d gone to buy mallets.
The kicker came half a year later, three months after Rodney King began being beaten nightly on ghostly videotape. Ruth showed up one morning in my broom-cupboard office at the school, waving the latest issue of Ebony. “I can’t believe it. I can’t take it.” She threw the magazine down on my desk, shaking all over. She pressed her lips to her teeth to keep from crying. I opened to the cover story: “50 Leaders for Tomorrow’s America.” I flipped through the list of scientists, engineers, physicians, athletes, and artists, testing each entry for its power to offend. I waded through the entire roster before I saw him. I raised my eyes to my sister’s. Hers were running in tears. “How, Joey? Tell me how.” She stamped the ground. “It’s worse than minstrelsy.”
I had to look down, back at the incredible page. “I don’t know how. Bastard’s not even in America. At least he’s buried down there in slot number forty-two, where he can’t hurt nobody.”
An awful sound escaped her. It took me two seconds to decide: Laughter. Maniacal. She reached out toward me. “Give it back. I have to show my sons.”
I was there at dinner that night, when she did. “Your blood relation,” she told them. “I knew this boy when he was no bigger than you. You see where you can go with a little effort? Look at all those stars he’s up there with. All the good they’ve gotten up to.”
“Half of them really white,” Kwame declared.
Ruth stared him down. “Which half? You tell me.”
“All those technocrackers. Look at this motherfucker: He don’t even know he’s nathan. CEO? That’s Casper the Ethnic Oreo.”
“This one?” little Robert said, pointing and smirking. “This one’s really white?”
“What makes them white?” Ruth challenged.
“This,” Kwame said, dismissing the whole magazine. “This caveboy noise. Whole white devil power shit.”
“What if I told you half the white race was walking around black and didn’t even know it?”
“I’d say you be bugging. Illin’ on your children.”
His mother shot me a silent appeal. “She’s right,” I said. “White’s got to prove white, all the way back. Who can do that?”
My nephew appraised me: hopelessly insane. “Wack. Don’t even know what I’m saying.”
Little Robert held up both arms. “The whole human race started in Ethiopia.”
Kwame took his little brother in a headlock and Indian-burned his scalp until the seven-year-old screamed with pleasure. “That’s right, bean boy. You all that. You my whole Top Fifty for Tomorrow, all rolled in one.”
Robert was the kind of child for whom his mother’s school was invented. He blazed through the day’s subjects, alarming his muzzy schoolmates. Every bit of learning that caught his eye, he set up in the sky like a glittering star. Stories left him dizzy with pleasure. “Is this real?” he’d want to know about every Reading Hour book. “Did this ever happen yet?”
He was his mother all over again, doing voices, tilting his head and squinting like the latest ridiculous adult. He built a walking robot out of Lego blocks that brought the whole first grade to a thirty-minute standstill. Math was his sandbox. He solved logic puzzles two grades above him. With nothing but poker chips and a world map, he designed games of complex trade. He loved to draw. History kept him sick with attention; he didn’t yet know that the stories were already over. He wept when he learned about the boats, the sealed holds, the auction blocks, the destroyed families. For Robert, everything that happened was still happening, somewhere.
But he could fly only so long as no one paid him any mind. The minute anyone fussed over him, he watched himself, and fell. The world’s praise of any black child carries an annihilating surprise. I’d grown up on it. Robert had only to hear that he might be doing something remarkable for him to stumble in apologies. He only wanted to be liked. Special meant wrong. In my class, he shone like the aurora. His voice anchored the whole alto section. But every time his marveling classmates mocked his skill, he hid his light back under a bushel for another several weeks.
For show-and-tell on the musician of his choice, he brought in the Ebony. It was months old, but he was still thinking about it. The room tittered as he spoke, and I hushed them, making things worse. All these black men making the future — fifty of them. And one of them was supposed to be Robert’s uncle, who’d changed the future of music a thousand years old. A brother, his mother had told him, might do anything. Robert spoke with that blast of pride already shot through with embarrassment and doubt.
Two weeks after the oral report, he came into my class with a sheaf of pages, each marked in a rash of colored-pen hieroglyphics. “This is mine. I wrote this.” He raced to explain the elaborate musical notation he’d devised, a system describing subtle changes in pitches and duration, notation that preserved many things lost in the standard staff. He’d written independent parts, thinking not only in running lines but also in a series of vertical moments. His chords made sense — delaying, repeating, turning back on themselves before coming home. His brother had sold for pocket change the little electric keyboard I’d given them. Ruth had no other instrument in the house. Robert had not only invented a system of notation from scratch; he’d written this whole work of harmony in his mind’s ear.