Richard Powers (100 page)

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.

“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… ”

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.