Someday We’ll All Be Free
someday we’ll all be free
THIS CHAPTER HAS A SOUNDTRACK
Someday We’ll All Be Free by Donny Hathaway
alyssa
The sound stopped both of us. Julian and I were in his kitchen on Belmead.
He was loading the dishwasher; I was rummaging through his freezer.
We were deep in an argument about ordering takeout or figuring out what to cook, when we heard it.
Random notes on a piano. The sound of a child finding keys and banging on them to see what they did.
We looked at each other.
“Micah?” I called out.
No answer, just more notes. Julian’s face fell. He wasn’t confused like I was; he recognized what it was and didn’t look happy about it. He set down the dish he was rinsing, very slowly.
“Where’s that coming from?”
He didn’t respond. Just started walking, and I followed him down the hallway as the sound got louder.
Past his home office, his family room, media room, and bathrooms, to a door at the end of the first floor of his home.
It was a door I had spent months registering as a permanently closed door.
I’d assumed storage and had never asked what was there.
The door was half open and he paused at the threshold for a moment. Then he pushed it all the way open and walked in.
Micah sat cross-legged on a bench in front of a piano half out from under a dust sheet, pressing keys one at a time with the delight of a child who has discovered something magical.
“Micah!” I yelled, moving into the room. “What are you doing? You can’t just go into rooms without asking permission.”
He looked up, startled. “I was just exploring, and then I found this awesome piano under this blanket thing.”
“That doesn’t matter.” I felt embarrassment rise. I turned to Julian. “I’m so sorry, Julian. Micah, apologize right now!”
“It’s fine,” Julian said, but his voice had moved somewhere far away. He stared at the piano with an expression I couldn’t quite read.
Micah, oblivious, scrambled up. “Whose piano is this? It’s so cool! Look at all these decorations!” He ran his small hands along the ornate details.
I looked around and started taking in the room.
It was nothing like the rest of the house.
The rest of Julian’s house was lived-in but curated; modern, clean lines, the order a man imposes on a space when he’s had his life under control for a long time.
This space felt frozen in time. Several trunks pushed against one wall, cardboard boxes labeled in faded handwriting, stacks of photo albums and a shelf filled with VHS tapes and DVDs, and in the corner, an old record player, and a cassette/CD combo player, both sitting on wooden stands surrounded by vinyl albums, CDs, and cassette tapes.
But the piano dominated the room. Even partially covered, I could see it was extraordinary.
A baby grand, but unlike any I’d ever seen.
The mahogany wood was carved with intricate musical motifs, treble clefs and flowing staves that wrapped around the legs, and danced across the surface.
The music stand was decorated with hand-carved roses intertwined with lyrics in elegant script.
This wasn’t just an instrument. This was a work of art.
“This is beautiful,” I breathed, moving closer. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It was my father’s. My mother had it made for for him.”
Micah perked up immediately. “Your dad was a musician?”
“Yes.” Julian approached the piano slowly. “He was. He did a lot of things. Played piano, guitar, wrote music, sang.”
“Can you play it?” Micah asked with the direct curiosity only children can pull off.
Julian’s hand hovered over the keys. “I used to.”
“How come you stopped?”
I watched Julian’s face move like he was editing his thoughts before they became words.
“Got busy,” he replied finally. “Other priorities.”
Micah was already tugging at more of the cloth covering. “Can I see the rest of it? Please? I promise I’ll be careful.”
Julian looked at me, then at Micah. “Okay. Let me help you.”
Together, they pulled away the rest of the covering, and I had to catch my breath.
The piano was even more stunning fully revealed.
Every surface told a story: carved vines wrapping around it, inlaid mother-of-pearl accents catching the afternoon light filtering through the single window in the room, and along the fallboard, an inscription in flowing script:
For my Zay. Let’s keep making music together. Forever yours. Your Niecy.
I gasped. “Your parents,” I said softly.
Julian nodded, running his finger along the inscription.
“Can you play something?” Micah asked, bouncing with excitement.
Julian shook his head. “It’s been a really long time,” he said finally.
“But you’ve kept it,” I observed quietly, because looking closer, I could see the piano was in perfect condition. No dust, no scratches. Tuned. The wood gleamed like it had been recently polished.
“I have someone come by,” Julian admitted. “Every few months.”
“Please can you play? This piano is so cool!” Micah asked again.
Julian looked at me. I gave my head a small shake. I didn’t want to push him. Whatever was happening in that room was happening in him, and it wasn’t mine to open.
He looked back at the piano, then sat down on the bench.
His hands hovered over the keys, then he pressed middle C.
It rang clean. He pressed it again, then his left hand found a chord and his right hand found the rest, and what came out of that piano was not a man rediscovering an instrument.
It was a man whose hands had not forgotten a single thing they knew.
I watched his posture change, his shoulders drop, his breathing deepen. Like watching someone remember who they used to be. His fingers started to move more confidently, and a melody emerged, tentative at first, then more sure of itself.
His hands danced across the keys, coaxing sounds from the piano that seemed to fill not just the room but something hollow in my heart I didn’t know was empty.
The melody built, and I realized I knew the song.
He hadn’t named it, and I don’t even think he actually chose it. His hands just went, but I recognized it by the second bar.
Someday We’ll All Be Free by Donny Hathaway. The slow open chords of it, the ache built into the architecture of the song.
I didn’t consciously decide to sing at first. It came out of me as a hum, then I found the melody and began to sing the words.
His head came up to look at me. His hands did not stop.
I sang the song low. I knew all of it, the phrasing, the long-held notes, the place where the song aches and then lets go. As I continued to sing softly, Julian’s voice finally joined mine. Tentative, then stronger as he found the harmony.
Our voices blended together, his deep rich tone complementing my lighter one, filling the room with a warmth that made Micah sit perfectly still, transfixed. For these few minutes, we were creating something beautiful together.
When the last note faded, the silence that followed felt profound. Sacred.
“That was beautiful,” I whispered, afraid to break the spell.
Julian blinked, like he was coming back from somewhere, and his hands lifted from the keys slowly.
“Whoa,” Micah scrambled to his feet, still buzzing with excitement. “That was so cool! Can you teach me to play like that?”
“Maybe we can find you some lessons,” Julian said without committing to anything.
“Yes!” Micah yelped. “Can I have a snack?” Because he was eight, and eight-year-olds don’t know they’ve just stood in a room while a grown man cracked himself open.
I didn’t answer, still stuck on what had just happened.
“Can I?”
“Get some fruit,” Julian said. “Kitchen.”
Micah ran out, and we stayed. He sat with his hands resting on the keys he hadn’t covered yet. I leaned against the side of the piano. He didn’t look at me for a moment, and then he did.
“Julian, you are amazing. I mean, the way you play, it’s… and then your voice… I mean you are so talented. It’s incredible.”
“Just fooling around,” he said, his voice returning to its usual controlled tone, as he closed the piano lid.
“Fooling around? No, Julian, you play like a true musician. Sing like a talented artist. That was professional quality. Why don’t you–”
“I don’t have time for that anymore.” He cut me off, reaching for the cloth to cover the piano again. “I’m in music every day. The business side. That’s what matters.”
“But you loved it. I could see it in your face—”
“Alyssa. The real answer? My parents taught me how to sing. My pops taught me how to play.” He looked down at his hands. “Then my mother died, and my father left, and it just became a thing I didn’t do.”
“That’s what grief does,” I said. “It puts pieces of you in a room and closes the door.” I hadn’t meant to say it like that; it came up out of the same place my singing had.
“Mm.” He didn’t look at me. “We should think about dinner. Getting late.”
He finished drawing the sheet over the piano, and the most alive thing in the house went back to being furniture under a sheet.
He held the door for me as I walked out, and closed it behind us.
julian
Late that night, my house was too quiet. I usually liked the quiet, but that night it pressed.
Alyssa’s voice was still in the room with me. The sound of it, laid over the notes my hands had made on a piano I had not touched in eighteen years. I could not pull the two of them apart.
I poured a glass of bourbon I didn’t really want and sat down on the couch. The piano was covered again, and the door was closed. But it did not feel closed.
She sang. She knew the song.
I had prepared myself, when Micah asked me to play, for my hands to have forgotten, reaching for a thing I had not let them feel in nearly two decades. I had not been prepared for her to open her mouth and find what I was playing.
I didn’t choose what I was playing. My hands did. They went where they used to go on Sunday evenings, after the cooking was done and the kitchen was clean, and my mother would sit in the chair by the window with her eyes shut and her hand keeping time on the armrest. Play me the freedom one, Jules.
Donny Hathaway. She loved his music so much you would think she was related. She used to say he sang about being free like a man who knew he was never going to be.
Alyssa sang one of my mother’s favorite songs and had no idea what she was holding.
Her voice had stitched itself through my hands tonight, and then she leaned against my father’s piano and told me the truest thing anyone had said to me in eighteen years.
That’s what grief does. It puts pieces of you in a room and closes the door.
The grief came up, and I let it for just a moment.
What choice did I have? It was already up.
I reached for the thing I’d told myself for years: there’s no use for this, you don’t have time.
The thoughts came out worn, like a key that had stopped fitting its lock.
I said them to myself anyway, finished the bourbon I didn’t want, and went up to bed.
But the door at the end of the hall did not feel closed. And I lay in the dark for a long time, hearing Alyssa’s voice laid over my mother’s song, and the grief I’d kept behind that door for years would not go all the way back behind it.