A Story of Race, Music, and Family
By Daniel Bergner
Late
in Daniel Bergner’s deeply moving new book, “Sing for Your Life” — an
incisive portrait of a young black man from a poor and constricted home
in southeastern Virginia who comes to possess, of all things, the
potential for greatness at the highest levels of opera — there is a
small scene that conveys the maddening odds against ever truly slipping
through the cage of other people’s perceptions. Ryan Speedo Green,
Bergner’s 6-foot-5, 300-pound protagonist, stands in the Manhattan
living room of an influential Metropolitan Opera patron, beside a piano
and little portraits of Napoleon and his family. His hostess and her
guests would like Ryan to perform an encore for them. He politely
declines. He has only prepared the one Broadway tune he just sang. “Oh,
you should do ‘Ol’ Man River,’ ” the elderly black pianist suggests,
referring to a humiliating number about the unceasing misery of being
black. It is a song white audiences have lapped up — and demanded of
black vocalists — since it was first staged on Broadway in 1927. Green
both knows it by heart and detests it; he is black, but he is also a
student of Verdi and Mahler.
At
times like this, “Ryan seemed utterly alone,” Bergner writes. The
hostess and her husband as well as their guests “formed a white chorus,”
cheering Green on to recite the demeaning song. “And here he was in a
room packed with well-meaning people who did not see him, who perhaps
were incapable of seeing him, who possibly refused to see him, and who
were eager to have him inhabit an object of pity, to hear him be that
pitiable object with every note that rose from behind his ribs and from
within his throat, to gather around the big brawny black man and listen
to him lament his oppressed and thwarted and minuscule life.”
Valerie
beat Ryan “with a belt, hit him in the stomach with closed fists,
knocked him down and kicked him, according to state records,” Bergner
writes, “though years later, with me, he said that he did not remember
the kicking; . . . it was too painful to believe that she would assault
him in this particular way.” It got so bad that, after another beating
when he was just a sixth grader, Ryan pulled a knife on his mother. When
Valerie subdued him, she noticed a drawing on the floor titled “my
killing plan,” depicting her with a severed head. She called the police
and had Ryan committed to the DeJarnette Center, a juvenile detention
facility where he spent two horrific months, often in solitary
confinement.
Bergner
is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine who has
written a novel and several books of nonfiction, covering subjects as
diverse as female desire and war in Sierra Leone. He expanded “Sing for
Your Life” from his 2011 Times Magazine article of the same title.
Through painstaking reporting and surprisingly candid interviews with
Valerie and other family members, teachers and mentors conducted over
several years, he intersperses the past and present into a
stranger-than-fiction bildungsroman of Green’s excruciating childhood
and improbable early adulthood. It is a journey that ricochets from
various troubled homes, including a two-traffic-light trailer-park town
in rural Virginia, to the nightmarish DeJarnette Center, to a
dilapidated shack in a drug- and-crime-addled shantytown, and eventually
to the cutthroat finals of the National Council Auditions at the
Metropolitan Opera, a talent search open to any singer between the ages
of 20 and 30. As a result of his showing there, Green was the sole
finalist to receive an invitation to audition for the Met’s prestigious
Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, an intensive multiyear
incubator that would polish him.
But
to reach that stage, both literal and metaphorical, Ryan would have to
overcome limitations few, if any, of the other contestants could
imagine. “I have to be more special with less,” is how he put it, an
enormous understatement. Despite the fact that he was at the time of the
competition a 24-year-old graduate of the conservatory at Florida
State, “not only did Ryan appear incapable of reading music with
rudimentary fluency, let alone with any appreciation for Mozart’s
nuances,” Bergner writes, “he didn’t know the basics of Italian, one of
opera’s most essential tongues.” “He couldn’t read the recipe, let alone
cook,” one of the Lindemann instructors said. Yet Green’s natural gifts
were undeniable; they included humility, a relentless work ethic,
personal charisma, acting ability — an increasingly prized asset — and
what appeared to be a once-in-a-generation vocal capacity: “Ryan’s
voice,” Bergner writes, “covered more than twice as many notes as an
average person’s.”
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