The Violin Conspiracy(19)
And none of that mattered. No matter how nice the suit, no matter how educated his speech or how strong the handshake, no matter how much muscle he packed on, no matter how friendly or how smart he was, none of it mattered at all. He was just a Black person. That’s all they saw and that’s all he was.
He would always—always—be seen as only half as good as everyone else.
All this time he’d lied to himself, or had he just been naive? Mr. Stinson, that jerk of a music teacher, didn’t ignore him because Ray was poor, couldn’t afford an instrument, couldn’t afford private lessons like all the white kids did: no, Mr. Stinson ignored him because he was Black. Mark Jennings—the only other really good player in the orchestra—called him “ghetto” and taunted him not because Mark Jennings thought of Ray as a rival, but because Ray was Black.
Being Black was why Aiden had never asked him to play before—because why would you want a reliable Black guy when you could sit around waiting for an unreliable white one? Black people just couldn’t play this kind of music. Ray was ridiculous to think that he could.
Everything written by James Baldwin and Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and all the other writers that he’d read in school was true: racism was real, and it was about him.
Today he had learned two things, and these two things were intertwined in his head and in his life. First, he learned that he could make money playing in front of an audience, and that he loved playing in front of an audience: his listeners spurred him to play better, to dig deeper inside himself, to trust his fingers and their innate sense of where the music wanted to go. Second, he learned that doing what you loved may not be enough, that all the passion and perseverance that roared like blood within you could be trumped by factors that you could never control—factors like the color of your skin, or the shape of your eyes, or the sound of your voice.
The world had been telling him these things over and over, and he’d just been too dumb to hear it.
Finally, after walking for months, for decades, he reached those elaborate wrought-iron gates that he had passed a billion years before. Only then, when he’d returned to the world with cars thundering past and a 7-Eleven on the corner advertising $1.50 Slurpees and an open-late Wendy’s just beyond that, did he sit down on the curb and text Aiden: Outside gate pick me up on your way out.
He’d get that $200 to show his mother.
Chapter 7
Grandma Nora
November
Ray couldn’t wait to see Grandma Nora. Holidays with his family could be particularly brutal, but Grandma Nora, his only surviving grandparent, was the one saving grace. Even though she lived an excruciating eight-hour drive away, the trip was always worth it. This year especially, after the wedding incident, he was desperate to see her.
He had no one to talk to about what had happened. He hadn’t said anything to Aiden—he was too embarrassed. Part of him thought that by telling Aiden, Aiden would somehow agree with Uncle Roger and not invite him to other gigs, would see Ray as a liability instead of a great musical partner. He had no close friends to confide in. Telling his mother, or his siblings, seemed equally impossible.
When he’d come home from the wedding, he’d handed his mother the ten twenty-dollar bills, and stitched together for the twins the brief glimpses he’d had of the house and grounds—its high ceilings, cut flowers on every conceivable surface, oriental rugs like something out of Aladdin. He hadn’t told any of them about Uncle Roger: he didn’t want to hear “You ain’t got no business being there anyways” from his mother, and the twins were too young.
Grandma Nora, though, would listen. She wouldn’t think less of him.
He’d played several gigs with Aiden since the wedding—he’d made close to a thousand dollars during the past month, and given $850 to his mom. He’d bought a better practice mute and a shoulder rest, and was saving for a car. He hadn’t talked to his mom yet about not going to work at the grocery store or getting his GED—she seemed to have forgotten, which wasn’t too surprising. If she did remember, he was hoping that she would relent if he showed her how much money he was making by playing his “noise.”
He’d talked Aiden into playing at some clubs when they didn’t have gigs. The money could be really inconsistent, but he loved having another excuse for performing. Tucked into the corner of the Alibi Club with Aiden and the rest of the quartet, serenading the white-haired old ladies from the Charlotte Flower Club as they forked up their Chicken Cordon Bleu or their Eggs Benedict, he felt weightless, almost as if he were about to levitate off the floor. No Uncle Roger: just the music—a mix of lite classical and arrangements that Aiden had found online of the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Barbra Streisand. Ray could play and no one would tell him to stop—and they’d actually pay him for having fun.
When his mom’s Toyota pulled into Grandma Nora’s driveway a little after 3:00 p.m., there Grandma Nora was, standing on the porch, waving to them in her floor-length pink house dress, holding on to the walker that never seemed to slow her down. How she knew they would arrive right when they did was always magical, and she’d just laugh when Ray would ask her how she’d known: Ray’s mom never called her ahead of time. Ray struggled out of the car, jittery from the drive, ears ringing from his brother’s video game and his mother’s complaints, and before he even hit the porch the scents of the freshly baked pies hit him: sweet potato, pecan, and blueberry. Grandma Nora would tell Ray that she baked the blueberry just for him. The blue tint of her thinning silver hair caught the November sunshine.