The Time of Our Singing

In The Time of Our Singing, Richard Powers explores changing racial identities and the struggle against racism in America through one family’s history. The three Strom children (two sons and one daughter) have a German Jewish émigré physicist father and a black American singer mother. As is the case with many children brought up in a big city, they have both a public and a private life. At home, their parents protect them by ignoring the racism in the world that surrounds them. On the streets, they face the adopted prejudice of other children. The racism they experience as children is transposed onto a national stage as they grow to be adults.

The two sons make their way in the world of music, moving between, first, American and then European cities. The opportunities open to them and the perspectives that the narrator (the second son) uses to understand such opportunities are constrained both by social attitudes and family history. The daughter follows a different path, first, on the run as an urban guerrilla and then as a social activist setting up a school in a depressed inner-city district. And it is she who becomes the better adjusted character, providing a role model for the narrator, while the older brother first avoids the American reality and then dies while observing a street riot.

A recurrent theme behind the stories of the individuals is that of culture and identity. Is the music that the two mixed race boys play and sing that of a foreign culture? What does it mean to be “mixed” race in a context in which one race is self-evidently more powerful? And what is the meaning of freedom within an urban location? A freedom that simultaneously provides opportunities for individual ambition and constrains these opportunities, insidiously and emphatically.

And at the heart of the story lies a history of human connection in the twentieth century – a history that is a legacy for many urban citizens as we pass into the twenty-first century. On the one hand, families provide an enduring set of bonds that offer emotional stability and practical support. On the other, towns and cities offer multitudinous possibilities for new connections, relationships that bring together individuals from widely differing groups, creating new sets of social meanings, together with new individual and collective possibilities and realities.