There There - Tommy Orange Page 0,71

on with everyone else in your family for anyone to notice you should probably have done something else with your fingers and toes than tap, with your mind and time than knock at all the surfaces in your life like you were looking for a way in.

* * *

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You’re headed to a powwow. You were invited to drum at the Big Oakland Powwow even though you’d quit drum classes. You weren’t gonna go. You didn’t wanna see anyone from work since you got fired. Especially anyone from the powwow committee. But there’s never been anything like it for you—the way that big drum fills your body to where there’s only the drum, the sound, the song.

The name of your drum group is Southern Moon. You joined a year after you first started working at the Indian Center as a janitor. You’re supposed to say custodian now, or maintenance person, but you’ve always thought of yourself as a janitor. When you were sixteen you went on a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit your uncle—your mom’s brother. He took you to the American Art Museum, where you discovered James Hampton. He was an artist, a Christian, a mystic, a janitor. James Hampton would end up meaning everything to you. Anyway, being a janitor was just a job. It paid the rent, and you could have your earphones in all day. No one wants to talk to the guy cleaning up. The earphones are an additional service. People don’t have to pretend to be interested in you because they feel bad that you’re taking their trash out from under their desk and giving them a fresh bag.

Drum group was Tuesday nights. All were welcome. Not women though. They had their own drum group Thursday nights. They were Northern Moon. You first heard the big drum by accident one night after work. You’d come back because you’d forgotten your earphones. You were just about to get on the bus when you realized they weren’t in your ears when you most wanted them, for that long ride home after work. The drum group played on the first floor—in the community center. You walked into the room and, just as you did, they started singing. High-voiced wailing and howled harmonies that screamed through the boom of that big drum. Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through these hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.

You went back every Tuesday for the next year. Keeping time wasn’t hard for you. The hard part was singing. You’d never been a talker. You’d certainly never sung before. Not even alone. But Bobby made you do it. Bobby was big, maybe six four, three fifty. He said he was big because he came from eight different tribes. He had to fit all of them in there, he said, pointing at his stomach. He had the best voice in the group, hands down. He could go high or low. And he was the one who first invited you in. If it was up to Bobby, the drum would be bigger, would include everyone. He’d have the whole world on a drum if he could. Bobby Big Medicine—sometimes a name just fit right.

Your voice is low like your dad’s.

“You can’t even hear it when I sing,” you’d told Bobby after class one day.

“So what? Adds body. Bass harmony is underappreciated,” Bobby told you, then handed you a cup of coffee.

“The big drum’s all you need for bass,” you said.

“Voice bass is different than drum bass,” Bobby said. “Drum bass is closed. Voice bass opens.”

“I don’t know,” you said.

“Voice can take a long time to come all the way out, brother,” Bobby said. “Be patient.”

* * *

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You walk outside your studio apartment to a hot Oakland summer day, an Oakland you remember as gray, always gray. Oakland summer days from your childhood. Mornings so gray they filled the whole day with gloom and cool even when the blue broke through. This heat’s too much. You sweat easy. Sweat from walking. Sweat at the thought of sweating. Sweat through clothes to where it shows. You take off your hat and squint up at the sun. At this point you should probably