“How far is Germany?” I told her, and she shook her head, unsteady. “Next time.”
Little Robert identified himself to every stranger by his African name. It thrilled him to be asked if he came from the Congo. By the time we flew back to the Bay, he was chattering at the flight attendants in both French and Flemish.
If our father was right, time doesn’t flow, but is. In such a world, all the things that we ever will be or were, we are. But then, in such a world, who we are must be all things.
So I stand on the edge of the reflecting pool with my two nephews. We’ve left their mother, over her vocal objections, back at the Smithsonian. “I don’t see why I can’t just hang out there in the crowd, next to you. I won’t say a word.”
“We been over this a million times,” her eldest says again. “You promised me, before we started.”
“How much unity can this thing proclaim if the women have to stay home?”
“The women don’t have to stay home. The women get to go anyplace in our nation’s capital they want. Why don’t you go visit Howard? Didn’t your Papap…”
“Maya Angelou’s going to be there. She’s a woman. She’s going to give a speech.”
“Mama. You promised. Just…give us this?”
So it’s just we three men, there on the Mall. I’m going to be discovered and sent home. At any moment, my nephews will make me go wait for them, back in the hotel room.
Kwame stands in this runaway crowd, scared by its magnificence. A mild October, but he’s shaking. He’s wobbly on his pins, like a bamboo beach house in a heavy tide. This is his doing, his atonement, his escape plan, and he stakes himself on it working. Still, he’s staggered by how many other stakeholders have turned out for the day.
He has managed to stay in the free world for a full two years. One speeding ticket, one apartment eviction, but no more slavery. “It’s over,” he tells me. “That me is dead.” He’s been out for two years, and in that time he has worked four jobs and played with three different new bands. The jobs have gotten harder and the music a shade more melodic. Two months ago, he became a welder. When he landed it, he told me, “I’m staying with this one for a while, Uncle JoJo.” I told him I was sure he would.
He stands in the milling crowd, talking to a perfect stranger, a bronze man almost my age in a University of Arizona sweatshirt, with a son years younger than Robert. “Not sure I’m crazy about the man,” the stranger says, apologetic.
“Nobody’s crazy about the man,” Kwame reassures him. “The man’s a hatemonger. But this whole thing’s bigger than the man.”
“Did you know Farrakhan is a trained concert violinist?” I contribute this, even at the risk of irritating Kwame. A put-down and tribute. Remembering all passing things.
“Get out of here. No shit?” Both men are amused — the crediting and discrediting.
“How do you play a violin through a bow tie that size?” It’s the last thing our unknown friend says before the crowd swallows him.
Kwame watches the man disappear, holding his son’s hand. Delinquent, remembering, my nephew calls out a panicked “Robert!”
“Ode,” comes the angry voice from two yards behind him.
“Whatever, brother. You stay close, you hear me?”
“Hear you,” the sullen eleven-year-old answers. But only because his brother rules.
Kwame is the boy’s god, and the older boy can do nothing about it. When Kwame went to prison, little Robert was inventing complex number games, whole systems of calculation. When he returned, his little brother wanted nothing more than to follow him down to damnation. “School’s for fools,” the child told him. Resolute, proud, and as shrewd as the god he modeled on. “Fools and house niggers.”
“Who told you that? You give this field nigger the man’s address. I’m a have a little parlay with him.”
But the boy reads his brother’s every word as an initiation rite, a test of his downness. “You playing me. You like school so much, how come you’re not still in it?” You like caveboys so much, how come you got a record?
“Don’t you close that book, bean boy. Stop being so cat. Your father. Your father studied math, Beanie. Don’t you know that?” And your grandfather. Where do you think you got it from?
To this, his little brother only shrugged. The whole ascendant, world hip-hop culture exposed all the million futilities of such Tomming. That was then. This is now.
“Beanie. You’re my ticket onward. Don’t you think big no more?”
Ode only smiled, seeing through the psych-out. There was nothing bigger, in his eyes. Nothing bigger than his ex-con brother.
This is my oldest nephew’s penance, the reason we’re here. He wouldn’t have made us fly out to Washington, wouldn’t even have crossed the street for something so slight as self-affirmation, if not for his brother. Kwame knows what self is his. We’re here only for Robert, who every two minutes threatens to disappear into the crowd in search of the real action.
I turn around and stare down the length of the reflecting pond to the steps of the memorial. The woman who sang on those steps because she could not sing inside has died, two years ago, in April, just as Kwame left prison. An alto singing scraps of Donizetti and Schubert changed my nephews’ lives. No, that makes no sense. Her impromptu concert did not change them. It made them.
Kwame follows my glance back along the length of the Mall. But he can’t see the ghost. The sight of the Lincoln Memorial twists my nephew’s features. “Man’s a bald-faced nigger-hater. Why we still worship him? Freed the slaves? Mother didn’t free nothing.”
“We’ll see,” I say. Kwame just stares at me, as if I’ve finally gone over. I shake his shoulder. “Caught between a racist cracker and an anti-Semite minister of God. Between a piece of marble and one very hard place. What’s a brother to do?”
The brothers to our right throw us a look. Those in front of us turn around, smiling.
The podium comes to life and the signifying begins. At any moment, Kwame and Robert will ask to move up front, just a little, without me. Some tacit understanding: Nothing personal, Uncle bro, but this whole healing thing isn’t really about you. But in this life, even as I stiffen for it, the request never comes.
The papers will count a grudging couple of hundred thousand. But this is a million if it’s a man. Tens of millions; whole lifetimes of lives. I’ve never stood in a gathering so large. I expected claustrophobia, agoraphobia, the choke of old stage fright. I feel only an ocean of time. Things reaching themselves. The feeling grows, strange and magnificent and tainted as anything human, only many times bigger.
I can’t say what my nephews see. Their faces show only thrill. A million is nothing to them. Nothing alongside the size of their transmitted world, the giant screens, the monster concerts in international surround sound, the global transports that their world daily broadcasts. But maybe they’re right where I am, every bit as awed by this millionfold makeshift fix, this pressing to redeem. Maybe they feel it, too, how likeness has it all over difference, for sheer terror. If there’s no mix, there’s no move. This is what the million-man minister means, despite what he thinks he’s saying. Who is enough, in being like himself? Until we come from everyplace we’ve been, we won’t get everywhere we’re going.
Kwame cranes to see the podium and make out the speakers. Robert — Ode — wasted by all the talk, finds a friend his age. They size each other up and move into the aisle to teach each other moves. The celebrities, songwriters, and poets take their turns, then give way to the minister. He plays the crowd. He brings out Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. He takes a shot at Lincoln, at the Founding Fathers, and Kwame has to cheer him. He says how all prophets are flawed. He says how we are more divided now than the last time we all stood here. He starts to ramble, to invoke weird numerologies. But all the numbers come down to two. A long division.