Seven observes it all with a sudden idleness—the possible danger of watching—a patience that comes from a routine hungering, a hearing beyond these failed notes nicking his ears. Listening to Tom with unhesitating faith. Tom’s errors, his stammering and hesitation, somehow make him more striking, strangely heighten his endowment. (Glows.) Fragments of perfection Seven can believe in. Much still is possible, but he might be convinced—he is already convinced—to deem the continuous tapping on the keys some sort of private code between Tom and the instructor. And he is privy to it, this secret language, even if he doesn’t understand it. The little his body enjoys in this moment he regards as a privilege, for God has granted Tom something withheld from him and Mr. Oliver and legions of others: music.
On another afternoon, Tom says, We want to sing.
Shimmering in the light from the window, the instructor begins singing in a language that Seven has never heard before. Seven goes cold, an unfamiliar thrill running up and down his body. He regards the instructor’s tongue as if for the first time. He knows that mankind is an entity made up of tongues, tongues taking on names like German, French, Spanish, although the only tongues he’s ever heard are nigger and Anglo-Saxon. And Indian. (Almost forgot.) Seven pictures these tongues as so many strands of leather attached to a whip handle, thin strips of hardened skin that might all have come from the same bull, reunited after death, or that might have come from many different bulls, a hodgepodge of hoof and horn. Just as a single tongue leaves the darkness of the mouth and produces words on contact with the air, the many-portioned whip whooshes forward and snaps out a word, nine strips say, all speaking the same word in nine different languages. Snap!
Seven has even heard that it is possible to trick your natural-born tongue into sounding foreign words. But this music instructor is the first man he has actually witnessed perform the feat. Little more than a hard-to-believe rumor before now. But it doesn’t end there.
Seven witnesses something even more incredible. When the instructor finishes singing, Tom takes up the tune, singing it in the same foreign tongue while his native hands provide accompaniment at the piano. Seven sinks into serene amazement. (The instructor’s eyes go wide for a moment.) Seven can feel his heart beating, slowly, steadily. Tom and the instructor shine in the fresh light, in the brilliance of this startling peace called music. Seven studies Tom’s face for every trace of shifting emotion. He was right the entire time. Right indeed. In fact, he is quite sure that he detects a third sound lingering in the space between the sung note and the melody that accompanies it, some sound issuing forth from Tom’s body—a wheezing, a humming, a cooing, a purring—an interaction of the vocal and respiratory musculature, which mix to form a third sound combining the two. As if Tom’s tongue or lungs are stuck between one motion and another. Three sounds coming out of this one nigger body.
Tom never wants the lesson to end, the piano to cease. The instructor has to enforce a strict time frame.
I’ll imagine you want to be getting back, the instructor says. He sees Seven and Tom to the door. He leans kindly toward them and expresses one final sentiment before he lets them leave. Guidance, he says. You are in need of guidance. Hard to say if he sounds glad or sorry or worried. Seven searches his face for the fun, for the teasing that might suggest he means something other than what he says. But he is also surprised by the note of sincerity in the instructor’s voice. You have much to learn, the instructor says. How can Seven disagree?
Tom has developed the habit of throwing his hat onto the table in order to free his hands. Some days Seven will simply take the hat and put it in its proper place to spare himself the necessity of further struggle. Not today.
Tom, hang your hat on the knob beside the door, Seven says. Tom sits at the table with a look of relief spread across his face. Seven stands his ground. Tom, hang your hat on the knob beside the door. Tom gets up from the table and hangs his hat on the knob. Once he returns to the table, Seven dashes forward and fastens the inside bolt on the door. No one can get in or out without his express assistance. They sit at the table. Seven can hear the sound of his own breathing. No one comes. No feet in the hall. No one knocks on the door. No one unlocks the door—or tries to anyway—and opens it wide. Tom accepts everything and smiles and is quiet. For everyone else Tom is absent from the world at this moment.
Do you like your instructor, Tom?
I like Mr. Howard. Seven, do you like your instructor?
What he witnessed earlier causes him to wonder about the countless bones supporting a tent of black skin and muscle, the blind blood blowing through. (The light inside which he sings.) Bone and blood and flesh shown to be remarkable. Mouth and teeth that can sit here and eat food and imbibe milk like any other any ordinary mouth and teeth, while knowing—trickery, deceit—that they are anything but ordinary. He thinks he can still hear the foreign words—he has yet to assign them a name—behind the voices coming from the neighbors’ apartments mingled with many more familiar sounds. Who can hear any of it really?
Exciting flesh. Even if there is little for them to do but sit here in silence. They have fought or not fought their battle over the hat. They have eaten their supper. (The milk thick and sweet.) Nothing to do now but sit here and pass the seconds until Mr. Oliver arrives home. No telling how long he may be. No telling how long they’ve already been waiting. The mouth holds. The breath carries. He has lost track of time. (When did the room start stirring?) Fatigue comes on him with a rush. Careful or he may fall toward sleep out of sheer waiting. He keeps tossing his head to drive away drowsiness.
The best meat is sweet, Tom says.
Seven hears Tom but doesn’t hear him.
The best bread comes from the flesh, Tom says.
Tom, what are you gabbering about? I dread hearing you go on like that.
The book speaks like a nigger, Tom says.
Seven doesn’t have the slightest idea what Tom has in mind.
Jesus speaks like a nigger, Tom says. The Hebrews speak like niggers.
Seven doesn’t know the source for this sudden religious outpouring, although it is not unusual for Tom to slap the mind awake with some sudden nonsensical statement.
The pharaoh speaks like a nigger. Moses speaks like a nigger. Adam speaks like a nigger too.
One day the music instructor has reason to leave Seven and Tom in the room alone. Seven asks Tom to exchange places with him on the couch so that he may seat himself at the piano. Moves his hands and head and feet the way he has seen Tom move but without actually touching the keys or pedals, a silent mimicry.
The firewood is stacked like a fragile shrine, ready to topple, rolling gods across the floor. Laboring hands, Tom takes great pleasure in handling the logs and kindling. Arranges some of them before him at the table, as if they are his true companions, neglected and vulnerable and misunderstood. Seven’s understanding that the blind must first smell or touch a thing to know it.
Tom seems to be counting but loses track.
See this cricket in my neck, he says.
What can Seven do but service him? His fault that he allowed Tom to do something he shouldn’t have. (He gives in here and there.) He goes over to his charge and begins to run his fingers over Tom’s neck.
It’s in two shoulders, Tom says.
Seven takes his hands from Tom’s neck and moves them to his shoulders, to the afflicted spots, and massages the areas.
Damn it, Tom says. They’re in my knees.
Seven massages his knees.
Frogs in my shoes, Tom says.
Seven removes Tom’s shoes, the toes curled like toads ready to hop. He kneads and massages Tom’s feet, only for the stiffness to return to Tom’s neck. Tom’s body appears to be breaking. Seven puts in a whole half hour or more of tending, of restoring and keeping together, scurrying about from this elbow to that heel, from that ear to this toe. Frogs, crickets, spiders. Tom only stops complaining once he has fallen asleep.
Massaging done, S
even settles into his seat, hoping to alleviate his out-of-jointness before Mr. Oliver’s return. Just his luck that Mr. Oliver comes in—how did he undo the latch?—before he has gotten a breather. He steps into the middle of the room and looks around, blinking, seeing Seven but seeming not to actually recognize him, his eyes and face attesting to another hard day. He takes his chair, asks about the lessons. Seven gives him a full report, but Mr. Oliver says nothing. Is he pleased or isn’t he?
Then Mr. Oliver says, Tomorrow, I should look in for myself. He hurries off to his room.
Nothing in their life is incidental. En route to the instructor’s house each afternoon he finds time to stop the surrey and purchase the newspaper. No hurry. Plenty of time to get there. Plenty. No hurry at all. The air hangs unmoving over the streets so that the trees are gray like decaying flesh.
It looks like rain, Tom.
Rain fall and wet Becky Lawton.
Who is Becky Lawton?
Becky Lawton.
Yes, Tom.
Rainwater.
Seven lets it go. He likes to let things come out Tom’s own way. No danger in that, even if he is perhaps too long accepting of it.
Inches separating them on the driver’s platform, Seven in his place and Tom in his, two birds perched on a vibrating limb. Tom leans his shoulder into Seven. Seven shrinks back. But the second time he does it, Seven lets him. Tom requires touch. Touch settles him, a long easy ribbon of sound coming from his mouth.
Driving past the labor-loud fields Tom turns his head and cocks his face. A nigger is a fine instrument, he says.
Seven thinks about it some. Tom, how does it feel to be blind?
Some bread is better than no bread.
And how does it feel to be a nigger?
A nigger is a thing of no consequence.
Seven knows nothing about the part of town where the instructor lives. (A few half-remembered facts.) He makes it his business not to know. They ride through the streets, scattering wind, the surrey rolling them directly under the sun, Seven narrowing his eyes against one bright street after another under his Paul Morphy hat. Driving slowly to keep the dust off their clothes. Straight through the open eye Seven sees Howard’s house. Here again. He parks the surrey and hitches the horse. Tom does not step down from the wagon.
Get out of the wagon, Seven says, muttering it softly, making sure to stay out of earshot, although the instructor’s house is a good ten yards off.
Yesterday comes like today, Tom says. He gets out of the surrey. Seven is already thinking Go in his head, but Tom kneels down on all fours and starts feeling about in the dirt with his hands, like a person who has lost something.
Tom—
Looking, Tom says.
What?
Tom proceeds to crawl up under the horse. And there he remains, on all fours, his head directed toward the horse’s belly, his tongue lolling.
Too stunned for words, Seven simply stands there looking, caught up in the wrong dream. Tom.
You’d better get back, Tom says. For what I’m doing there’s light enough.
What are you doing?
Studying the niggers.
What niggers?
The only ones.
You don’t understand, do you?
I understand, Tom says. Now you understand.
I understand, Seven says. Yes, he tells himself, he understands. Voice is the sight of the person who cannot see.
Seven feels himself yielding to Tom’s way of thinking, the quick and instinctive compliance that comes when someone is shaken awake to uncertain surroundings. Recognition—plain sight—the holdout, slowing down that part of him that wants to give in. Long enough for the weight of mere witnessing to stop him altogether, cause him to disregard, to reverse his feelings. To look at Tom looking that way. This is his own hand posed to reach for Tom’s hat, for his shirt, for his collar. No, don’t touch him yet. Perhaps he should say something first. What are the correct words he needs to speak? If he understood him, he would know how to help him. He needs help. No force behind him but his own. Difficult to admit. Crying out could bring rescue, but it would also mean announcing his weakness as well. No way he can let that happen. He’ll deny what is going on here should anybody happen to chance upon them. Much of what we see is not really what it looks like.
Just then the light brightens like a compromise. He stoops all the way down and speaks to Tom and Tom crawls out cat-quick from under the horse into the new sun, the dirt where he is kneeling reuniting behind him, as if it has never been disturbed. Seven uses his handkerchief to clean Tom as best he can. Business as usual.
Tom is changing. Everything about Tom is changing—voice, posture, expression. Is that what Mr. Oliver wants?
When he pens his history in the future, Perry Oliver will withhold one important fact, that it was the Music Professor who drafted the sworn proclamation attesting to the authenticity of Tom’s genius, although his subscription was withheld, the words W. P. Howard never appearing on either the original statement or the various reproductions of it that Perry Oliver went on to have published in one newspaper after the next.
Dear Sir, The undersigned desire to express our thanks to you for the opportunity afforded them of hearing and seeing the wonderful performances of your protégé, the blind boy pianist, Tom. We find it impossible to account for these immense results upon any hypothesis growing out of the known laws of art and science.
In the numerous tests to which Tom was subjected in our presence, or by us, he invariably came off triumphant. Whether in deciding the pitch or component parts of chords the most difficult and dissonant; whether in repeating with correctness and precision any pieces, written or impromptu, played to him for the first and only time; whether in his improvisations, or performances of compositions by Thalberg, Gottschalk, Verdi and others: in fact, under every form of musical examination—and the experiments are too numerous to mention or enumerate—he showed a power and capacity ranking him among the most wonderful phenomena in musical history.
Accept, dear sir, the regards of your humble servants.
B. C. Cross
John M. Beck
K. Blandner
R. L. Stern
Paul Swann
Samuel Harris
Ross Necknor
Carl Rose
Paul Grace
J. A. Alfred
Elijah George
Witherspoon Enright
And several others.
The signers—Perry Oliver had met all of them about town at one time or another during his dealings; and despite their rebuffs and refusals he would have made a conscious effort to be cordial on encountering them in the street, raising his hat to them had it been his custom to wear one—had received a flat fee of one hundred dollars each for their troubles and the Music Professor twice that amount. Any man is worth buying, for in Perry Oliver’s eyes distinction is a thing wholly independent of social position. Several weeks earlier, he had asked Howard to approach every available music scientist in town and induce them to convene for the express purpose of listening to Tom so as to issue a notarized document of witness. The proposal—the very asking—would bring about the certainty of the Music Professor being in disgrace with his colleagues. No way around that. Although he should take some consolation in knowing that the one in a position to ask a favor holds greater power than the one who can only accept or decline, a fact that should thus enhance his prestige in the eyes of the world. (Perry Oliver feeling the need to extract this idea since he did not wish to exclude the possibility of a happy alternative.) Of course, his colleagues can like what they hear or not like it—the Music Professor has his own authority and his own views—but let’s be clear, Perry Oliver needs them to endorse Tom, to recommend him to the public. And when he had consulted with the people, he appointed singers unto the Lord, and that should praise the beauty of holiness, as they went out before the army, and to say, Praise the Lord; for his mercy endureth forever. Money might help re
assure them about their choice, help them arrive at a happy medium between their bestowing praise on a nigger and any slight reduction in their racial position in the world because of it. As well—turn it around—Tom’s supporters might delight in the knowledge that they will take a mental share in Tom’s rise to prominence, should that rise occur. (It will.) A dangling carrot: the prospect of fame being of far greater importance than the fear of ostracization, a dynamic that should gratify their self-esteem, at least in the short term. He removed fourteen hundred dollars in fresh notes from his wallet and held it out, choice hovering. The situation didn’t merit much thinking, but the Music Professor made the thinking last as long as possible. Once Perry Oliver put the money in his hands, he pocketed it immediately.
He tells the Music Professor what he wants—this and that; some suggestions about the wording of the missive—guessing cleanly how far he will go. Now all he has to do is wait. The deference that he owes to Howard imposes on him the reciprocal obligation to do nothing that might render Howard less worthy of his colleagues’ regard. (Empathy in recognizing that both the asking and the accepting will open doors of suffering.) Fortunately the Professor’s colleagues had recourse to principles entirely in line with those that Perry Oliver intended (expected) them to adopt when the time came for them to form an estimate of Tom.
When Seven presented him with the letter several weeks later, Perry Oliver could not help but gaze at it with a blend of congratulation and irony. Now he can look forward to enjoying the fruits of the Music Professor’s splendid connections. Not that he isn’t grateful. Perry Oliver for weeks feeling bound to thank the Music Professor in person but as of yet unable to make the trip. Internally (to himself), he pleads the pressures of work. The moments steadily accumulate. Still so much to do before Tom’s premiere.
Blind Tom. So it came to him. He does not waste time asking himself where it came from, but is only surprised at its slowness—he stood still, unable to move—at how the first word—language the material upon which we have to work—had been so slow in appearing, as were those that followed it. How he found that the thought I must change his name was already there, the idea having traced itself on his mind much earlier, somewhere or other, his mind heavy with its half-remembered weight. Only the words Blind Tom were missing, the initial forgotten thought (idea) coming back and passing between him and the image the name conjured up when he uttered the words Blind Tom Exhibition out loud, listening to his own voice uttering the words as if they had come from someone else. How well he understands now that identity is not a disposition but an accomplishment. Tom today, Blind Tom in the by and by of history.
Song of the Shank Page 33
