“How did you do this? Where did this come from?” I couldn’t stop asking him.
He shrugged and cowered, crumbling under my awe. “Came from me. I just…heard it. You think it sounds like anything?”
“We have to find out. We’ll perform it.” The idea made him pleasantly ill. “What’s it for?” He stood there, bewildered by the question. “I mean, what instruments?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking about…instruments.”
“You mean you want it sung?” He nodded. First he’d thought of it. “Do you have words?”
He shook his head and axed the air. “No words. Just music.” Words out loud would poison it.
He taught the class to read his notation, and we performed the piece in school assembly. Robert conducted. So long as his music lasted, his soul climbed up into an ice blue sky on a bolt of mustard yellow. Five groups of voices chanted back and forth to one another, just as his notes said, clashing and cohabiting. His rowdy counterpoint came from another orbit, until then invisible. The sounds in his head kept him from hearing the din of the assembled gym. But the moment the piece was over, the noise broke over him.
The applause threatened to stop Robert from breathing. His eyes went wide, searching the room for a fire exit. Kids whistled and catcalled, teasing him. He bowed and knocked over the conductor’s stand. It brought down the house. I thought he might suffocate on the spot. Every muscle in his face worked to declare, Nothing special. Nothing out of the ordinary. He flinched and fended off every admiration while jumping up to look out over the heads of his peers, trying to scout down the only opinion that mattered to him: his adored brother’s.
Kwame lumbered up afterward in his low-riding jeans. He’d skipped a day of his own school to be there. His arms made those little cartwheel jerks I couldn’t decode, half praise, half ridicule. His face screwed up to one side. “What you call that?”
Robert died by inches. “I call it ‘Legend.’”
“What legend? You think you’re a legend? No pump, no bump. Who you down with anyway?” Neither boy looked at me. They couldn’t afford to.
I thought the child would break apart, right there in front of the entire assembled New Day School. Kwame saw it, too. He puppy-cuffed his listless brother. “Hey. I said, Hey. It’s fresh. It’s slamming. You come marinate with me and my homies next time Dig’s in the house. See how you make some real G-funk.”
In his final year of votech school, Kwame’s band had grown to fill his entire horizon. They’d achieved a kind of mastery, one whose words entirely eluded me but whose pulse even I couldn’t deny. He had nothing else. Ruth tried to stay with his every evasion, keeping him accountable while propping him up without his knowing. “You thinking beyond school?”
“Don’t ride me, Mama.”
“Not riding. Helping you scout.”
“Me and the Nation. We can make it work. I don’t mean bank. Just making it.”
“You want to rap, then you need a battle. Just find something to hold yourself together while you make yourself the best.”
She unloaded on me privately. “God, I wish I weren’t an educator. I’d whack that child up side of the head until he got his life in order.”
In August, a car in a Brooklyn Hasidic rebbe’s motorcade ran a red light, hit another car, swerved onto the sidewalk, and killed a Guyanese boy Robert’s age. For three days, Crown Heights hammered itself. Kwame and N Dig Nation wrote a long rap that replayed the madness from every available angle. The song was called “Black Vee Jew.” Maybe it participated; maybe it revealed. You never know with art.
“Your grandfather was a Jew,” I told him. “You’re a quarter Jewish.”
“I hear you. That’s def. What you think of that noise, Uncle bro?”
Whatever the words, the song got the group its first airtime — real radio, all over the Bay. It intoxicated Kwame. “Beats the best method that bank can buy.” The band made five hundred dollars each. Kwame spent his on new audio equipment.
Late in September, Ruth called me up, out of control. All three members of N Dig Nation had been arrested for breaking into a music store in West Oakland and leaving with two dozen CDs. “They’re gonna finish him. He’s nothing but meat. They’ll kill him, and no one will know.” It took me a quarter of an hour to talk her down enough to get her to meet me at the station where Kwame was being held. Ruth came apart again when we got there and she saw her son in handcuffs.
“We weren’t biting nothing,” Kwame told the two of us. He sat behind a metal gun rail, a bruise covering the side of his face where the cops had held him to the wall. He was swaggering with the fear of death. “Just a little who ride.”
I thought Ruth might kill the boy herself. “You speak the language I taught you.”
“We buy stuff from the man all the time. His door was wide open. We were just gonna take a listen and bring all that noise back to him when we got done.”
“Records? You stole records? What kind of suicidal—”
“CDs, Mama. And we didn’t steal any.”
“What in the name of Jesus did you think you were doing, stealing records?”
He looked at her with an incomprehension so great, it was almost pity. “We’re on the way up. We have to drop science. Bust the bustas. Know what I’m sayin’?”
Ruth was brilliant at the sentencing. She asked for a punishment that might save a life, rather than waste it. But the judge pored over what he called Kwame’s “history,” and he decided that society was best served by putting this juvenile menace away for two years. He stressed the seriousness of breaking and entering, while Kwame kept saying, “We didn’t break.” Property was the heart of society, the judge said. The crime of theft tore out that heart. As his sentence was being read, Kwame muttered just loud enough for me to hear, “The man’s nathan. He’s not even dead.”
Two days later, my sister saw her son off to prison. “Your father was in jail once. You remember why. So what are you going to do with this? That’s what the world wants to know.” She was crying as she spoke, crying for everything that had ever happened to this boy, all the way back for generations before his birth. Kwame couldn’t hold his head up long enough to meet her eye. She lifted it for him. “Look at me. Look at me. You are not just yourself.”
Kwame nodded. “I hear you.” And then he was waving good-bye.
Once Ruth was alone with me, she fell apart. “White teen goes to jail, it’s a pencil entry on the C.V. Youthful foolishness. Something to laugh at down the line. Black teen goes to jail, it’s another fatality. Judgment on the entire race. A hole he’ll never climb out of. It’s my fault, Joseph. I put them here. I didn’t have to drag them back into the cauldron. I could have set them up in some sleepwalking suburb.”
“Not your fault, Ruth. Don’t crucify yourself for half a millennium—”
“You see what he’s done to Robert. Big brother’s going to be the hero of a lifetime. Prerolled role model. That child sits in his room inventing whole new schools of arithmetic on his interlocking knuckles. He’s taught himself plane geometry. But he won’t count to twenty without mistakes if his brother’s looking at him the wrong way. Doesn’t want to be anything he’s not supposed to be. And he could be anything. Anything he wants… ”