Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  With him hunkered into his angle at the table she came to know his seasoned intelligence. I’ve had some dealings with the planters, I’ve been there, I’ve seen. (Who can prove one place more than another?) Surely there must be something they share beyond that? And then he said something else to her, and she spoke back, the table becoming conversation where nothing had been. She felt grateful and grounded as they lived against each other, their talk widening and widening. Indeed, she did what she could to hold him at the table as long as she could. He gentled the long afternoon by sitting with her. Her feet twitched. And her hands. They took the evening as it came. Darkness moving under the table and along the walls. Aware of the smell of burning wax, the heat of the flames, the cool night air. She ate her supper, and he watched her. (The orphan pleaded with him to sup too, but he would not.) They sat in the dark until she got up to light the candles. What was the conversation about for three hours, for all evening?

  Her head cleared in the hard morning light. She watched the wind fall back across the water and birds caught in midair by her own wonderment. Watched them drift through layered currents like white lace torn away from a dress. And rake their claws into the ocean. She had to bend and twist—oh her aching back—to register these clear occurrences of Nature. A few notes from a piano floated across the water—she heard it—a flat sound on the waves, music that suggested some gathering in the distance, and she seemed to remember something that she thought long forgotten.

  But before memory could resurface, yet another orphan called upon her. Ma’m, you are wanted in the chapel. The orphan’s voice joyous in telling her this. He gave her his brightest smile. So she followed him, her footsteps attached to those of this boy who preceded her, her gaze held by the narrow openings into the classrooms and workshops side by side with one another—none of the rooms connect—crammed full with children and piled high with books, tools, and materials (leather, brick, iron), orphans at their desks working on their letters and numbers. (She likes the sound of words doing what they do.) At their workbenches and anvils, sewing machines and looms, side-glancing her as she passes them. (Mamma, she could hear them whisper. Mamma.)

  When they entered the chapel she saw that the vast open stage was crowded with Mr. Tabbs and the men she had come to know over the previous days as Mr. Ruggles, Lieutenant Drinkwater, Deacon Double (a tight smile on his face), and Reverend Wire, along with other men she had not met and did not recognize against the big wooden cross, the Bible (bound in animal hide) open on the podium at the center of a stage and the humiliating glare and polish of other objects she could not name on the altar. And there he was (the ocean air and light found his form), a man-boy clearly outlined against the piano shaped like a spreading stain (puddle). She saw him and thought, That can’t be him. That can’t be my Thomas. My Tom. Long white tunic with buttons big as medals and gold fringe on the chest. White trousers with black stripes down the sides. His shoulders as broad as Mingo’s. And a string of other features she can no longer remember. (What she saw.) She opened her mouth to speak, but only muddled sound stumbled out. So she moved toward him to feel what remained, but at her touch, he peeled his bulky frame away from her skin.

  Are you her? he said.

  Seeing the trouble, Reverend Wire laid his hands firmly on Thomas’s head in the same steady manner that she was to see time and time again.

  Finding speech, she thanked the Reverend for his intervention, although inside she was locked up in a curious double mood: angry (would that be the word?) that her reunion with Thomas had assumed this public form, the anger even more so, even more acute after she had been forced (no other way to put it) to live in pause for a week waiting for this reunion, no reason given, no apologies offered.

  And all of this was true. Still, that first day back in their chambers she was delighted. She had her Thomas back with her at last. (Praise be His name.) But as time went on—the next day and the day after that and the others that followed—he remained detached from her in the guessing silence. Not that it troubled her. She told herself that if Tom remained deaf (to her) that was only because she had not tried hard enough, spoken loud enough. So those first weeks, she tried so hard, would say whatever words drifted onto her tongue. But still he said nothing and kept her firmly at a distance. Silence on the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the nose in the palms of her hands. In fact, he gave no indication that he could even hear the sound of her voice—had he become deaf?—continued to shrink and shrivel away, only a little bread each day to keep the taste of the world on his tongue. Feed me banks of light. Perhaps he was sick. Perhaps he needed a doctor.

  Meeting her concern, Reverend Wire, a man of the cloth and a healer (two hats, two-heads), examined him. Dr. Wire watched Thomas’s chest rise and fall, put his ear to Thomas’s chest and listened as if to a broken watch, held down his tongue with two fingers and looked into his throat, picked up each hand by the wrist, counted the pulse of his blood.

  His body is perfectly fine, the two-headed preacher-doctor said. But this business of reunification is too much for him, too upsetting, a shock to what he knows and expects. You must give him time. The return to himself will take time.

  A return she is still waiting for. In this life I have heard your promise and I am ready to serve. Waiting for Thomas her Thomas to emerge from this man. She spends each day looking for ways to fill in the hours, to stretch them out so that they can run into each other. How bout we play our game now? Waiting is one thing a nigger knows how to do. So she can wait a little longer. Time on her hands. All the time in the world. She reserves all of patience and tolerance for Thomas as she did at Hundred Gates so many years ago. I am the only one. She feels justified in her determination, thinking only about the person he can become, she can become. But each day rebuilds itself like the one before. Tomorrow he will install himself there onstage before the piano at his body’s insistence and so will she on this same pew. So have all the days been and perhaps they shall be for a long time to come. How deeply must he be touched to enter?

  Now she hears it, a breath breaking open, almost like a strangled cry that comes again and again—listen to it—huh, huh, huh. His mouth causing the shape of his face to change, some new face trying to be born. She falls under the spell of the cadences of her son’s breathing, the two of them sounding as one, until his breath quiets after a final whistle.

  The bell rings, signaling the end of instruction for the day, the orphans released from learning and labor. Time now for an orphan to escort them back to their quarters—as if they don’t know their way by now, as if they will get lost in the halls—and for her and Thomas to retire their troubled skin until tomorrow. The strangeness of light between Thomas and his piano, the fine edge gleaming around his body. He is touched with heat, flushed—could it be?—a little red even. She sees the reflections of his hands in the piano’s laminated shine, hands that are useless on Edgemere. Thomas, leave that piano be. What will put them back into motion?

  Let us join hands in prayer, Reverend Wire said.

  Your hand hot, Thomas said. Fire. A faggot of fire.

  Now she hears it, her breath a flat tune limping its way out of her mouth. She cannot trust what even her own body tells her. The thing she is feeling now fits nothing she knows. Pain but she can’t say where. Now she understands that this is a new hurt, an all-over hurt happening beneath the skin, the grinding friction caused by two bodies, past and present, moving up against each other inside one skin. (That accounts for why she feels so heavy all of the time.) Or is his silence taking her apart nervewise? (No, that can’t be it.) So she starts to say what she has actually wanted to say but had put off saying because it had seemed premature, begins to remind him (again?) about the blackberry patch that grew wild off the road to Hundred Gates, the crooked tree with its white peeling bark, the horse behind the rock quarry, the hills like beached whales, all the rises and curves of the land, the sloping riverbank, the minnows wheeling in the shallows—even now there’s some
thing she keeps trying to say that never comes out right; what is the language that will keep their past as it should be?—the earth odors and rock odors and plant odors and animal odors. (His spirit lives for her in such odors.) The light on Sunday mornings, those Sunday mornings. She sees his face move, sees it go sideways on his neck, tracing a movement from one end of the keyboard to the other then back again, and so on, as if he were reading a book. But nothing manifests. She feels blocked about saying anything else. Perhaps her words come too late. She can admit the letdown to herself.

  She looks at his face, his lidded-over eyes, and something in her unhouses itself. Now she understands. He does not remember because he cannot remember. What the eyes see is preserved in the orbs themselves, where sight is stored in the seeing. Tom cannot see; hence, he cannot remember, has nothing to see to remember. Something opens between them. Who is she to want to hang back there? None of that matters anymore. It is less a question of where and when—the hills that go doubling back, the bedding straw piled to one side—and more of how and what—she knows the why—her useless nostalgia draining away. She must create the right conditions. Unless she does something now, right now, tomorrow will be the same, him up there and her down here. Is it possible for her to learn to do what he does? (What better way?) The space for it exists in her, now that she has been freed from Hundred Gates, freed from labor, her time and body her own. (If you have a song to sing then sing it right this minute.) Not that she could ever get music the way he got it, from the getting place. Called. Marked. Sounds planted deep inside him. (Why he moves the way he moves, walks the way he walks). A story foretold.

  She can pinpoint the day when music claimed him. The day when in the haze of a rainy afternoon a wet wind, with him still unborn in her womb, she stumbled into the center of town, Broad Street, more relaxed than she should have been for someone expecting a child. She might have been six months belly-round then. She had been sent on some errand—sweep the floor into the fire, shake the dust into the wind—but she can no longer recall who sent her or for what reason. The first thing she remembers seeing: niggers bent over or kneeling cleaning up a wagonload of apples that had burst open on the road. The wind brought the sound of whistles, drums, and fifes. She let her gaze float in the direction of the sound just as a brigade of woogies and niggers in plumed regalia came marching into view at the other end of the street. She stopped walking and stood facing fixedly this disturbance. Eight musicians in all—if memory serves—two whistles and two fifes and two bass drums and two kettledrums that kept them in stride. What was the occasion, the reason for the jubilation? The nodding accepting crowd granted the band passage. Wagons and carriages halted to let them through. For some reason she remembers more about the woogies and niggers who were walking on the sidewalk and in the street that day than she can about the individuals who made up the brigade, can actually picture one bent woogie head after another concealing a grim gaze, heavy heads under bright parasols—so was it some sad occasion? a mourning?—and a nigger herdsman (all the herdsmen were niggers) driving his bell-tinkling flock—cows? goats? Sheep?—down the street. High-stepping, the brigade paraded their bannering sounds from one end of Broad Street to the other, then circled back again. Then the fife players called out a line, and the drummers whooped and moaned in response, and they all began to dance and sway. And so did she.

  The air smells faintly of burning—leaves, refuse, and shit (donkey), never the smell of kerosene or coal since Edgemere has neither—is sweet with the pugency of wood fires. Will she get to go out into the open today? She lifts her eyes, frets to see through the high high windows. Maybe if they actually leave the chapel, leave the Home—she has hardly gone out of the asylum the two or three months she’s been here on Edgemere—to knock along the shore. They will walk and sing—singing shortens the road, lessens the distance—his hand with its heat and bones just so around her, the measure of the sweetest promise, as the dhows drift inland. What a good idea. So they will get up and go now.

  She leans back and hears (feels) her bones crack. The sound severs whatever it is that anchors the stage in place and yanks it free of its moorings. The stage begins to drift about the room. Thomas panics, afraid of drowning. Reaches out with both hands and grabs the rim of the piano in the gap between the soundboard and the cantilevered lid and he sits there with the piano fastened to his long outstretched arms.

  What has she done? Then something clatters into the air. She turns at the sound. Can barely make out slow-moving figures crawling along the floor, tunneling between pews, row after row, and coming up for space and air, the hide and seek of laughing faces, one boy almost connected caterpillar-like to the boy in front or behind him, their shadows sealed together.

  Yall better get up from there.

  …

  You heard me.

  Ah, Mamma. We ain’t doing nothing.

  We jus come to see.

  Ain’t nothing to see, she says.

  …

  You ain’t hear me?

  Faces and bodies sprout up from between the benches. Four, five, six.

  Look at that blind nigger.

  He yo son?

  Yall get. Gon now.

  Hey, Mamma. We jus lookin.

  Is he gon play that pianer?

  When he gon play it?

  I bet you he don’t even know how to play it.

  Yah had better gone.

  We jus want to see him play that pianer.

  Yeah. Ain’t nobody botherin you.

  I ain’t gon tell you again.

  What?

  I ain’t gon tell you again.

  Mother, ain’t nobody scared of you.

  Wit yo old ass. The boy’s lips draw down in a sickly sneer.

  She grabs her bowie knife by its bone handle and gets up from her chair. The boys scatter, their eyes bright with terror. They had better. Let them tremble and beware. Where she comes from stab is another word for knife. Slit another word for throat. Shank another word for dead.

  Get up on I the one.

  What? she asks. Thomas has slurred something. Thomas—my Tom—what did you say? And the more she doesn’t say. Go ahead. Don’t stop now. Cat got your tongue? Speak to her as if he is the past. Thomas, please tell me—

  Then, as if this is the sign (word) he has been waiting for, he breaks into movement, starts fingering the ivories hard and with purpose, and just like that he is Little Thomas again, the Blind Tom that the world knew. A three-headed song—how many melodies can the air hold?—that pulls him this way and that, and that pulls her into the circle of melodies. See, silence could not hold him forever, because he is who he is, a Wiggins (not a Bethune), her and him both, one, same blood, like to like.

  Then his fingers stop making sense. Why has he stopped playing?

  Why you stop?

  The ox is on my tongue.

  What? What did you say? Willing herself futilely to be calm. In fact, she can hear the calmness of her own voice as if from a distance. Thomas, please tell me—

  Take me. The only one.

  Thomas?

  But the words wilt right there. He turns wordlessly back to the piano. Holds up his big hands and shows her them, front then back, knuckles on display. She has no idea what this gesture means. Tom gathered in his own arms.

  Wire thinks back to last night when the ocean claimed so many, passengers busy underwater, their mouths and throats full like overflowing chalices even as their eyes were burning, red. Not that he could see them in full detail really since he could only make out the contours of bodies trying to keep above the waves and the ferry hanging on the horizon as if pinned to the sky before it was carried under. And then he was being drawn down too and could hear his fellow passengers, the wet groaning language of his brethren and sistren through his soaked skin, the ocean wild around him with foam and glitter and swarming colors. In unison they upped and downed and scissored their arms and legs. Then as the light began to fan out and open up and land and sky began t
o assemble themselves around him, he realized with astonishment that he was as much excited by what he had dreamed as he was terrified. Why?

  Defined against the sky, the dhows consume him with their overwhelming presence, teetering and tottering under the constant force of water and wind, bewitched currents that dance light and wood to their own needs. Only yesterday he had blessed the boats to start the fishing season. May you open your eyes to water and may the creatures of the sea open their mouths to hooks. The serenity and calm in the ocean, in the land, and in the heavens, even in the straight still trees, is almost enough to distract him as he makes his rounds through the camps, but once inside an encampment with its dark little tents and stooped figures in rags, misery in drabness is thrown back to him, tells him where he is. The tents turn around to look at him and the refugees mutter suitable thanks and praises, their attention commanded (he tells himself) through his simple unadorned presence rather than his height, his learning, his profession, his verses and prescriptions and treatments and medicines. The refugees line up in a long queue, as if they have come to present their lives—well, in a sense they have, haven’t they?—his hands active and his eyes full. One by one he takes the measure of them. Each person he examines tenses up and assumes odd angles like a model sitting for a portrait (study). The human body dazzles the imagination with existence from crown to heel bone, from the brain riding in the head to the winding provinces of the intestines and the heart that branches with its wild arteries and the muscles of the back that somehow remain steady and strong under stress and strain. These Freedmen suffer in silence, try to hide their hurt (sorrow just sits and rocks), although here in the camps heartache and sorrow have nowhere to hide.