The Songs
‘To you O Lord I lift up my soul, In you I trust O my God’.
We sang and smiled as my mother played. I loved Sunday’s and this one, like any other had culminated in the three of us, Mama, John and me sitting around the piano, singing to God. Life had been tough on my mother, raising two sons alone in ..Harlem.. in the late sixties wasn’t easy, and in turn she was tough on us. But on a Sunday, we were a real family. John and I would spend the morning helping Mama prepare the vegetables. We would eat well and spend the evening stood around the piano together, singing to God before eventually, Mama would send us up to bed. The hours spent this way on a Sunday afternoon were what we all looked forward too. They provided a momentary relief from everything. A musical escape. My mother was a great lover of the piano and of gospel music, and though usually a stern woman, all that seemed to disappear when she played. It was as though some deep emotion was forcing its way out from her, every drop of passion and soul would force its way up through her slender body and out from her mouth in a voice as warm and rich as the colour of her skin. It flowed down her tired arms, through her hardened, dry fingers, and caressed the keys. She used to tell us that singing brought us closer to God, and closer together. That there was something magical about music, something that momentarily devoured pain and resonated in your soul. Every Sunday when we sang, I hoped the songs would never end.
I asked the taxi driver to pull over. I wanted to walk from here. As I crossed the park that John and I had spent endless afternoons on as kids I felt the sun burning the small bare patch at the back of the top of my head which stood out like the pot holes which scattered the adjacent roads.
As I rounded the corner of the street I had grown up on, the reality of what was happening dawned on me properly for the first time. It had only been four days since I had learnt of my mother’s death and I had barely stopped since then. My life now was a world away from the life that I remembered, growing up on this street. I had travelled thousands of miles in the last two days to return here from ....India.... for the first time in over fifteen years. I gazed down the row of terraces and picked out my house, halfway down the street. The walls of the newsagents at the bottom of the road were still covered in graffiti, the air still had that inner city density and the distant whir of a siren was still audible somewhere in the distance. If I closed my eyes I could have been ten years old, lying in bed with my window open, taking in the smells and listening to the sounds of ..Harlem.. rushing by.
Since I had met Nina sixteen years ago my relationship with my mother had fallen apart. She was, at heart, a good woman. She had worked hard to bring John and I up and although finding work and making money hadn’t always been easy, she always said, as long as we were a family and we were true to God, we would be ok.
‘God has blessed me with two sons, and for that I am eternally in his debt’ she used to say. ‘And I will make it my life’s work to ensure that they grow up to be thankful of him for life and that they devote theirs to his name’. She tried to follow that promise right to the very end, sadly. It was her unwavering religious faith and a sense of tradition that had been drilled into her by the life she had been brought up in that would later serve to be the thing that drove me away and kept John too close.
My brother had been born with mild learning difficulties, which had worsened as he had aged. He had clung to my mother since the very beginning and not let go since. My heart ached when I thought about how her death would have affected him. He never really had the opportunity to grow. Largely because of his condition, John had hated school and when he was eight Mama had agreed to take him out of it and teach him herself. As always she acted with the best intentions but like so many other times, in trying to do what she believed best for us, she was furthering the suffering of one of her sons. John needed school, and she needed to let go.
Even though we had gotten on well as kids I knew that falling out with Mama would mean losing contact with John too. By this time, Mama did most of John’s thinking for him. Despite this, somehow I felt that he had always silently empathized with my situation. As boys, his tall, stocky frame, dark brown skin and tightly curled black hair lumbered over me by the time he was eight and I twelve. He had always looked out for me back then and I liked to think that he would have done the same for me now if only he knew how. Sadly, unlike the boys who ran riot on our streets all those years ago, my mother was not someone who would have backed down to someone because they were bigger than her. I had needed someone to step in front of me and silence Mama like John had done when the older boys were taunting me, the day I had brought Nina home for the first time with the news of Isabelle being conceived.
‘What are you trying to do to me Ray?!’ Mama pulled me from the dining room closing the door behind me, leaving Nina sat at the table with John.
I knew what was coming. I had dreaded it for a long time. I had found excuses not to introduce Nina to my mother for over a year now and this was exactly why.
‘You told me that you’d met the love of your life….’
‘I have…!’ I tried to interject, ‘And I thought you would be happy for me!’
‘You told me that you’d met the love of your life Ray. I was happy for you! But this?!’
‘I don’t know what to say Mama, I love this woman!’ Knowing exactly what she was thinking I looked at her with hurt in my eyes, and she stared back in reciprocation.
‘If you had even the least bit of respect for me or God Ray you wouldn’t have brought that woman here today. You wouldn’t have gotten her pregnant and you wouldn’t be living the life that your living!’
‘Mama, I’m not looking for your consent here. I am understanding of your beliefs but they wont alter my actions’.
‘Understanding of my beliefs?!’ her voice grew louder.
‘Mama please…’
‘Please nothin’ Ray’, she silenced me with her tone through gritted teeth, and a look that as a young boy would have put the fear of God in me, ‘If your so understanding of my beliefs then explain to me what you’re doing bringing that Indian woman into my house and telling me that she will be birthing my first grandchild into the Lord’s good earth as a bastard?!’ She was almost shouting now, ‘I simply will not let you do this! How can you do this to me? Or to God?’
I was certain that Nina would have heard every word and certain that my mother would have meant her too.
‘Mama, I’m a grown man, you can’t decide what I can or can’t do, and I’ve long since given up any faith in a God that wouldn’t respect my decision’, I replied.
‘Don’t put me in this position son’ she said, bringing her voice back down and trying to fight back tears, ‘don’t make me choose between you and God, I have known him many more years than I have known you.’
‘I’m not putting you in any position Mama’ I replied in earnest, ‘you’re putting yourself there.’
‘Ray, I have worked myself to the floor, day in, day out for you and your brother since the day you were born. Nobody in the world wants you to be happy more than I do, but this? I can’t stand by and watch you do this’.
Nina and I had left immediately after the row and that had been the last time I had seen either my mother or John. Despite numerous, continued attempts to make contact with them, all I had heard since was a letter from my mother that I received two weeks before Nina and I left for India where we planned to bring up our child. She told me that for as long as I was ‘living an atheist life with an Asian wife and bringing up her bastard grandchild thousands of miles away’ I was no longer considered a part of the family that she had worked so hard to keep together. The family was built on love for each other and for God, so choosing Nina over her and John was unforgivable.
I climbed the steps to the front of our house and paused for a moment before ringing the bell. I was unsure of how John would react. Of course, I hadn’t chosen Nina over them but I was sure that Mama wouldn’t have allowed John to believe that.
The door opened and John looked at me quizzically for a moment, almost as if trying to work out who I was. He had grown into a heavily built man, with a gentle, inquisitive and innocently simple face. It saddened me but he resembled almost uncannily the young boy brother I used to know, trapped in the body of a fully grown man. His hair had been forced haphazardly to one side and his shirt buttoned unevenly.
The house was just as I remembered it, the narrow hallway harboured the same smell and the swirly, blue carpet in the lounge had faded but kept well.
‘Mama said that you don’t care about us anymore because the devil has your soul’, John said, as we sat down.
‘Well Mama wasn’t always right about everything John’, I replied.
His big brown eyes had glazed over and he looked vulnerable. He had accepted Mama’s word as the gospel for the past twenty years.
‘Mama said that she wanted us to be a family again, she was sad Ray’, he looked up at me.
‘Well I’ve been sad too John, to not be accepted by your own family because of who you are isn’t easy’.
He looked down at his lap and pulled on a loose string on his trousers.
‘I’m going to have a little wander round if you don’t mind John?’ I waited a few seconds for a reply, but he continued to fiddle with his trousers in silence so I got up and left the room quietly. I paced around the house I had grown up in, I didn’t know how to feel. As I walked from room to room I felt episodes of my life flash up. I was eight, chasing John up the stairs, eleven, doing homework in my bedroom and suddenly twelve, singing gospel songs after dinner.
I heard the sound of the piano coming from downstairs. I heard it being played in a way I hadn’t since those Sunday afternoons, with the soul of its player freeing itself upon its very keys. It struck me, like a club to the back of the head. In a daze, I walked down the stairs, my heart beating faster and my eyes glazing over. I stopped in the doorway of the hall, looking into the lounge where John was sat with his back to me at the piano. I stood, motionless and watched as he played and sung. It was as though my mother was in the room. I felt awash with emotion, I had never seen John so much as sitting at the piano before, his spoken words were stuttered and unsure but the gentle warm sounds that were leaving his mouth now were filled with confidence. I wanted to hold John, to tell him that everything would be ok, that I would look after him. I wanted to hold my mother and for her to see Isabelle. I felt my mother in the room and I felt her understand everything that she couldn’t understand in life. She would have been so proud. Just as it had done all those years ago, the music was momentarily lifting us out of life and bringing us all together. For the first time in over twenty years I felt at one, with myself and with my family.