By then she’d learned to respond with total silence. “Hazard a guess . . . Well, while God was drowning the world, he fell into the water and shrank. Here’s a second reason: Noah, seeing how God had destroyed his own creation, removed the second ‘o’.” Now hardly any noise came from his room, and when music did, it was likely to be jazz: Coltrane, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Mingus, Wynton Marsalis, Oscar Peterson . . . Gone was the gangster rap. I complimented him on the change. He said that music must be more than rain on a tin roof or banging on steel pipes. “I’m off lyrics for now. I want to learn to hear what those geniuses are saying with their instruments. It’s taxing, but I’m listening and learning. I wish I’d continued to play pan.” One Saturday, Beatrice, Anna’s co-worker and church sister — tall, half-white, grey-eyed, tomboyish, voice tremulous like the older Katherine Hepburn’s — came to the house and was helping Anna make pone.
