Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  How are you feeling? Which part is paining you? Are you able to eat?

  They kill his ears with their barely audible words. So he composes habits for the camps so that these Freedmen’s expectations will be neither gluttonous nor starved. Liniments and elixirs that can bring the blood back to the cheeks and heat to numb digits and limbs. His method of strengthening and enlarging the circulatory and respiratory systems by diet, rigor, and breathing. (See Avicenna.)

  The refugees burrow their bodies under damp blankets, settling in for the night. (The thought of them that evening in the camp.)

  Now the song calls him.

  Oh for three words of honey, and two strips of fatback

  that I might tell but one wonder of thy wedding night

  That seems to be the song of the moment in the camps, can’t miss it, it is everywhere, and he makes a record of it in his head for future reference, no telling how the information may prove useful down the line—words you say to show that you are one of them, words to put in a sermon. So let them sing. (Sing yourself to where the song comes from.) Whenever he is lost deep within himself their songs call him out. The children follow him around the well, singing. Dear water, clear water, playful in all your streams.

  Who does not love to hear them and see them, perfect in music and movement? With his listening funnel, he hears the way history sounds in a chest—Into the air, as breath into the wind—the lungs taking up their work. Judges the force of circulation with just the lightest touch along the wrist, feeling the sequence of intervals—loud and soft, regular or irregular—as they abide in the pulse, the blood banging in the body. He finds the true extension of himself in them, in all of the refugees, these Freedmen, but the landscape (what he sees) is inexact in its slant of figures, facts of the flesh suggesting fewer souls than are actually here. The city still has nowhere to place them all despite the makeshift and quickly constructed houses put up on new streets. And so much is in short supply. Victuals, medicine, clothing, soap, tents, blankets and bedding, lamps, kerosene. The provisions of food and other necessities made available to them through the Bureau and through the Christian goodwill of the Red Cross, Action Now, and the League of Churches dwell in awkward distribution inside their silos. The body is owned by hunger. So the body says. But not even these shortages can spoil the children. Take this as proof: a group of boys have made glassless spectacles from orange rinds. It is your own self you hunger for. How clever.

  In the last camp on his rounds—each day this human coming and going into the camps—the refugees are busy with grief. They carry a coffin high above their heads and move in equal pace, swaying from side to side. They believe in giving the coffin a dance, action that is not work, but matter itself through which the work navigates, the commandments of metal and wood. Once the coffin is comfortably tucked into the freshly dug grave, he says his say then they pour their libations. (All in man that mourns and seeks.) And he trembles inside himself, undone for a moment by the three or four things that can happen to a man in the camps. He and the mourners turn away.

  For whatever reason, he looks back to see bored children leaping over the grave.

  Ah, that dead nigger is going off to glory.

  Around their wood fires the refugees melt into light, but there is nothing luminous about this. (In the fading light does the sound of the water also darken?) Holy is that dark which will neither promise nor explain. He is no fool. Knows that their bodies, as the bodies of us all, are promised to something more certain than Emancipation or Liberty or Happiness: Death. However, the trouble with them—his people, us—is that we are always preparing to die.

  Body, ain’t you lonesome?

  Lay down a little while

  Body, ain’t you tired?

  Lay down a little while

  The challenge (always) is to win their hearts and their minds and change the way they view themselves and their situation. He has to both kill the nigger (slave) inside and bring the African out. Such are the selves they struggle with and are struggling out of.

  What pains have we not felt? What suffering have we not known? (The thoughts of a wise man in the language of common African folk.)

  Who understands better than he does their hunger and desperation? Slavery taught them the ways of doubt so that they may believe. Life knows no time or limits. Even death makes life.

  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

  Jehovah has double blessed him with the gift of gab (mouth) and the gift of healing (hands), talking and touching his way into the truths these professions require. Once more he put his hands upon the man’s eyes, and his sight was restored and he saw everything clearly. So illuminate he can and illuminate he will until every single person in the camps, until each refugee in the cell of himself is convinced of his freedom.

  Brothers and sisters, the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. But behold, I tell you that we stand at the edge of centuries facing a new era of ten thousand years, and He, Almighty Jehovah, stands with us. It all comes together here, all there ever was is now. Soon you will rise and walk away from this life. You and I both, together, will rise and enter a holy house, on this earth, not in the heaven above. Until then hold on.

  His heart beyond both worry and anguish: Light breaks where no light was before, where no eye was prepared to see, and animals rise up to walk.

  These ideas have their satisfaction. They turn a rambling and brutal chronicle of bondage and pain and abuse and injustice into a neatly structured story of triumph where the African (black sheep) awakens to the fullness of his strength and inherits a plentiful earth, some forty thousand acres along with a million mules.

  Bright stars fixed in thick light in the black night sky beckon. Jehovah willing, he can now go home and take a moment to grieve, catch some shut-eye, then rise fresh and resume work on Sunday’s sermon, “God Has a Hand in It.” Holding on to God’s unchanging hand. My people—

  My people? People don’t belong to you. You belong to them, but only if they let you. So let me. Whatever it takes, he will do, he is willing. By any means necessary.

  Doctor Reverend. Mr. Reverend. Pastor, Doctor, sir. Reverend Doctor. Pastor, sir.

  I’m listening, he says. Tell me what you have to say. He can’t help thinking that there is something mysterious about the way the boy accosts him.

  The boy speaks his piece. Them soldiers paid me this quarter, the boy says. The boy holds it up so he can see it, as if he needs convincing.

  He wishes he could pay the boy two quarters or a dollar, bargain some sum that will relieve him of the obligation to travel to the soldiers’ camp in Central Park. He can’t. The hour of his seeming quiet has passed. So he dismisses the boy and simply stands there waiting for his second wind—is he struggling for breath?—and diligently gauging his own mood, not proud about what he is thinking. God means to impose impossible tasks on him and others like him until they breathe their last.

  Central Park is a distance he can cross by foot, and he will cross it by foot no matter how tired he is, moving hesitantly as if he fears stepping into a hole. He sees big gashes in the sidewalk, unusual colors showing through, and has the distinct impression that the buildings are sinking into their foundations, dwellings freighted with the city’s past, year upon year. His eyes seek out something else. (The city does not tell its past.) Outside of him—way back, beyond—are others of unknown number. He knows that they are watching him even if the city to him is his own tongue. Is it possible for him to forget the rank and rancid odors that wafted across the ocean into Edgemere after he had taken up exile there? Most terrible of all in those first months were the rumors, yet to be proven these many years later, circulating among the fellow exiles on Edgemere (and even a few of the natives) about profitable new industries on the mainland, hats and ties and vests and chaps and belts and shoes made from African skin, which, for a tim
e at least, surpassed the same products made from chupacabra leather; vials filled with the semen of hanged men—sales surpassing (supply and demand) gourds filled with morning dew and wineskins filled with Italian, French, or Spanish water—and tea made from weeds that had sprouted up where men had pissed themselves moments before death. Is memory (the facts and rumors and the speculations created by the facts and rumors) what spurs him on?

  Trees at a wet and dripping distance mark his progress across the Main Lawn of Central Park. Grass sprouting from the ground underfoot. (The landscape is something he moves across.) What is that large feeling he notices spreading in the air even before he reaches the guard-(gate)-house? The entire bivouac gripped by an apprehensive energy. The blocky house is stark, self-announcing, and though the room is austere and cramped inside, it is oddly partitioned into two distinct apartments with rifles and bayonets and trunks of ammunition in the first, and a table-dominated sitting area in the second, where the men, veterans of the war to free the Negro, are engaged in voluble discourse, gazing into each other’s eyes as they talk. Aggression holds everything together: room, arms and ammunition, table, the light coming from kerosene lamps that casts murals on the walls from the shadows of the animated men, the afterimages of light. He has long been curious. They have killed. They have killed white men. But he has never said anything to them about it and they have said nothing to him. Still, they are part of something, and he is part of it with them, a simple allegiance.

  With cognition of his presence the room plunges into complete silence. He walks briskly to his usual place at the table, although he knows that there is no reason for him to hurry. Why are you hurrying? And before he has even gotten fully comfortable in his seat he is wholly given over to their troubles—it would seem that the city has demanded that they relinquish their arms—all talking at once—in their urgency they forget to thank him for coming—voicing ideas that strike him as unacceptable.

  He feels a little dizzy with the cacophony and also because the table has been wiped down (polished) with kerosene to keep the flies away. (This act performed much earlier in the day, for surely they know that flies don’t fly at night.) The entire room smells like fuel, like burning, smoke, fire.

  Wait, someone says. God damn it. I said wait. Have you loss your hearing or something? Well, shut your goddamn mouth.

  Around the table all of the men in uniform follow Drinkwater’s lead, hands gathered together on the white surface of the table along with the bottles and glasses. Although he is a lieutenant, Drinkwater is a man of silence who is happier listening to others than leading the conversation himself. He accepts a glass of whiskey—emancipated from some dead Confederate’s pantry (the planters are all dead)—and seeks the face of the soldier who puts it in his hands.

  You think I want to sit here listening to all that jawing and whining? Sound like a bunch of women. I want to hear what Reverend Wire has to say. But yall carry on if you like.

  Drinkwater is an intense young man but pleasant usually, easy to see how he became a lieutenant.

  Now that Drinkwater has commanded silence, the veterans are all waiting on him, Wire, so he says, Do I have to be the one to say it? then frowns noncommittally.

  Yes, Reverend, you do. Deacon Double looks him in the eye. Several of the soldiers nod their heads in approval. Until that moment the Deacon had escaped his notice, just another shadow blending in with the other shadows on the wall, but sitting there now—his sun-touched skin and his hair close and curling as if he has all he can take. Is there any reason why you should not?

  In the expression on Drinkwater’s face Wire detects a hint of unease, as if Double’s question conceals some other question, both provocative and wounding.

  He wants to give wise advice without forcing it on anyone. Be that as it may, he says, because they have already inked it into law. They did not deliberate. They did not survey our thoughts and recommendations. Because they know full well that we can put up no challenge to their laws since they hold suzerainty over all articles and declarations and ordinances and codes and decrees.

  With his impassive face Double looks like he has nothing better to do than to sit there and listen to him say what he already knew he would say. Does any man here care about their laws?

  God damn they law.

  Spit on every one of they laws.

  Piss.

  Shit.

  What law?

  I got they law. I got they law right here.

  And they are all talking at once again. He tries to think above their shouts to and at each other. He goes deep into himself for a visit to his own knowable connections to them. (Move in memory.) Even in later years he will encounter by chance some man of the Race who will stop him on the street and remind him that it was he, Wire, who had recruited him to the war cause so many decades ago. The campaign to put men of color in uniform and on the battlefield had required herculean efforts, a crusade sown with false starts and sidesteps and humiliations and betrayals and failures.

  Mr. President, in order to prevent enrollment of Negroes in the rebel services, and induce them to run to, instead of from, the Union forces, the government, you, Sir, must undertake the commissioning and promotion of Negro men now in the army, according to merit. How, you might wonder, can you overcome the inevitable objections of white officers and conscripts to the commissioning of Negro officers? I have the remedy, Mr. President. It is my most important suggestion to you. And I think it is just what is required to complete the prestige of the Union army to penetrate through the heart of the South, and make conquests, with the banner of Emancipation unfurled, proclaiming freedom as they go, sustaining and protecting the freed men, leaving a few veterans among them when occasion requires, and keeping this banner unfurled until every slave is free, according to the letter of your proclamation. I would also take from those men already in the service all who are competent for commissioned officers, and establish at once in the South a camp for instructions. By this we could have in about three months an army of forty thousand Negroes in motion, the presence of which anywhere would itself be a power irresistible. Mr. President, you should have an army of Negroes commanded entirely by Negroes, the sight of which is required to give confidence to the slaves, and retain them in the Union, stop foreign intervention, and speedily bring the war to a close …

  Yours, subscribed,

  Penning and talking the flashy errands of his dreams into existence. (Word anything into being.) A thousand bodies he made active by one slogan or another—White people must learn to listen. Africans must learn to talk—although, truth to tell, the men he had approached required little persuading. In the future when he encounters a man that he had recruited, he and the former soldier will exchange the usual kind of polite talk before the latter begins to interrogate Wire about his present life—a doctor still? a man of the cloth? the name of his church? wife? Seed? grandseed? names, ages, and number?—at which point Wire will find some reason to excuse himself. Not that he will feel either guilty or ashamed about his past actions and deeds. Indeed, he will still be able to hold his head high about the things he had tried to do.

  So how can he back away, back out of this now? Up to his eyes in it. I have heard a lot of talk, he says, plenty of talk, although in theory he has nothing against talking for the sake of talking. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you are looking for.

  Go tell them no, we won’t give up our arms.

  Yes, Reverend. Put it to them.

  I ain’t givin up what’s mine. I don’t care what their law say.

  Yeah. They want my rifle, let them come here and take it from me.

  He notices a murky exchange of glances between Drinkwater and one of his men, his second-in-command.

  What about my house? Drinkwater says. I haven’t heard them say one word about that. They want my rifle, they give me back my house.

  Our day is our loss, Double says.

  I understand how you feel, Wire says. I k
now what you feel. You don’t think that I feel the same way? I feel the same way. Am I not one of you? I am one of you. But you know these people. I don’t need to tell you, I don’t need to tell any man seated at this table. You know these people. They will invoke some statute or decree and demand notarized deeds. He can see his gloomy words move like black slugs over the bodies of the men seated around the table.

  So we invoke, Double says. We demand. We bargain, exchange.

  The right to return.

  What they took from us. What they owe us.

  You put it to them, Reverend.

  Eyes bright, Double is looking with a question, a challenge, as it seems he was born to do. Always both for you and against you at the same time. A contradiction.

  Wire hears in the silence that follows their desire for his approval and thus his support, advocacy, agency, his willingness to author acts on their behalf. Who will speak for them (us) if he doesn’t? He belongs to them.

  Although the hour is late, the first thing he does when he arrives at the Home is to go visit with the boy Tom and his reserved mother in the rustle of fine fabric that Tabbs has provided her (at considerable expense).

  Preacher, Tom says, you smell like dirt.

  Bird That Never Alights on the Trees

  (1849–1856)

  “… gossiping with two hands.”

  HE CAN’T SEE IT, CAN ONLY FEEL ITS WARMTH ON HIS SKIN, feathers of light and shadow. Steady light. Everything waits to be seen, wants to be seen, and remembered. The world taunts him with its sights. But touch is his primary means of witnessing the world. Taking stock. Fingers the patterned ridges of tree bark, which reveal less of what is actually there—weight, density—offering only the skeletal outline of some longing.

  Sound too. Birds warbling in motionless air. A barking dog. Snakes in tree branches that repeat the same songs. And frogs that croak slowly in day and crickets that chirp quickly in night. And ants that dance a frenzy over a meal. And the crackling noise of a flame.