We both heard at the same time, as soon as the words came out of her mouth. Ruth looked at me, her nostrils flared. “Her son’s quit the country and her grandson’s in prison.” Then her throat caved in and she howled. “What have we done to her, Joey?”
Robert made his way through the third grade, toward his graduation from New Day School. He butted up against that age when it was murder for Ruth to encourage him in anything. Whatever she praised in him, he abandoned. With half his attention, he’d fill a sheet of blank newsprint with astonishing geometries. But if she hung it on the wall, he’d tear it down and burn it.
“I’m going to lose him, Joseph. Lose him faster than I lost Kwame.”
“You haven’t lost Kwame.” Kwame had, in fact, started a course in mechanical drawing at the prison.
We’d been to see him almost every weekend. “This place is for marks,” he told me. There was something incredulous about his insight. “Know what? They built this prison to fit us. Then they build us to fit it. Not me, Uncle. Once I stroll, this place can rot with my history in it.” He and his mother started a little ritual each time we said good-bye. How long? Not long. Meet you back in the new old world.
In early 1992, Jonah wrote to say he was coming through town in late April to sing at the Berkeley Festival. That’s how pointless separate continents had become. I wrote him back on a school fund-raising postcard: “ Iheard you last time.” And below the school’s address, I wrote out the date of his concert, the time 1:30P.M., and my class’s room number.
My class didn’t need any special audience. There was no audience now, where I came from. There was only choir, and we’d have gone on preparing our score whoever showed up or didn’t on any given day. I was a grade school teacher of music. I lived for it, and that’s exactly how my kids sang. And yet I had given Jonah the time and room number of my best lot — real air walkers, his unmet nephew Robert among them. I told them we might have a special visitor. Even that much felt wrong.
I worked hard to make that day the most ordinary that had ever been. No chance he could make it: I’d guaranteed that when choosing the date. He never did anything the afternoon before a concert. But if, in some parallel universe, he did, we were ready with a sound that would unmake him.
By the time I set up for that afternoon class, I was gripped by a stage fright more violent than the bout that had once almost cost us Jonah’s first major competition. Children sense everything, and mine broke out with bursts of teasing, all of them sung, per the class rule. I settled them down and started them in on scalar swells, our usual warm-up. “I’m still standing,” up to the top of their giggling ranges and gently down again. My brother didn’t show. He couldn’t. There was nothing left of him, outside the concert hall. He’d disappeared into consummation. My body began to feel the relief of not having to meet him this time around.
We rolled out our stuff. Not despite. Not even anyway. With no one to impress, we delighted ourselves: all we have, really, when everything’s figured. We followed the usual steps to daily ecstasy. First, we laid down the elementary pulse, what my father years ago called “the laws of time.” Two kids on toms gave us a groove good enough to stay in for as long as we could move. Then we layered on the beat, Burundi drumming, a long, relaxed twenty-four-pulse cycle, with another half dozen players on pitched percussion doing what they’d have done gladly for a living all life long, plus some.
When all the plates were in the air and spinning, we cracked open some tunes. My kids knew the drill. They had been through it often enough to bring it to elementary school perfection. I conducted from the piano, waving my finger in the air, landing on a girl in a mint jumper, her hair in cornrows, grinning, already picked before I even knew I was picking her.
“What are you thinking about when you wake up?” I tossed the question above the trance of cycling pulses. This girl, my beacon Nicole, was ready for it.
Breakfast is on, and
I’m gonna eat like a Queen!
Mayhem reigned, but the rhythm held. She soloed, then settled into a cycle of her own. We took her pitch as home and set up camp. I pointed to another favorite in the front row, lanky, eager Judson, his tapping cross-trainers the size of his chest. “What did you think about last night, falling asleep?” Judson already knew.
Man, I was running,
through a long silver tunnel,
faster than anyone.
The two of them spun around each other, finding their entrances, nudging their pitches and syncopations to fit. I took a few more in that pitch center. “Where’s your safest place in the world?”
There’s a spot on a hill
at the end of my street
where I can look out
over everything.
“What did you see on the way to school? When are you best? Who you going to be this time next year?” I brought them in, clipping a phrase, drawing another out, speeding or slowing them as needed to get the roux to set. Half a dozen singers hung on to one another in midair, constantly changing, unchanged. I hushed them into a diminuendo, then started up five more. I played out the new starting pitch, then built a group at the dominant. Your five favorite words. The dream Saturday afternoon. Your name if your name wasn’t yours. I waved them into an alternation: one-five, five-one.
Then came the leap into changes. I thumped a key and pointed, and three singers transposed their phrase to that new place in the scale. They still knew, at age eight: a pitch for every place we have to go.
My choir started smirking, but not on account of my conducting. The singers’ mouths gaped, huge as fish in an aquarium, at something over my shoulder. Keeping time, I turned, to see Jonah standing in the classroom door, his own mouth open, a lesson in how to make a throat wide enough for rapture. I couldn’t stop to greet him; my hands were full of notes. He gestured me to turn back around and keep afloat that feather on the breath of God.
I hushed the first two groups and took them both aside, readying a third to travel into the relative minor. The most scared you’ve ever been. Five words you’d rather die than hear. I traced my finger in the air, searching for someone to sing The heaviest weight pressing on you, and landed on Robert. He took only two beats. He, too, was waiting for me.
My Daddy is dead
and my brother’s in prison.
When is the zero of change, the spot in time when time begins? Not the big bang, or even the little one. Not when you learn to count your first tune. Not that first now that twists back on itself. All moments start from the one when you see how they all must end.
Robert drew his thread, looping it over and over, into the elementary pulse. A cloud passed over the choir, but our song already anticipated that change in the light. I now had all the chords I needed to get anywhere pitches could go. I brought the lines in and out, swelled and hushed, slowed, then sped, chopped and extended, plucking out a solo and pasting together quartets, moving the whole freely from one key to another.
My Daddy is dead.
And I was running.
To that spot on a hill.
Where breakfast is on and I can look out,
but my brother’s in prison.
They knew already how to make it go. They ceased to care about the strange adult or even notice him. We stayed in the swell, working our favorite rondo form, coming back, whenever we strayed too far, to a full choral shout of “I’m still standing.” I pulled out every stop, everything every student of mine had ever taught me about how music runs. It shamed me that I needed so badly to impress him. As if joy ever needed justifying, or could justify anything. And my shame stoked me to lift all my voices higher.