Tom, do you like talking to us? the journalist asks.
I am surrounded by friends, Tom says.
Are you looking forward to your concert tonight?
It will be better tomorrow. Tomorrow we will really begin.
And why is that?
It is the design of my head.
Will you play “Moses in Egypt” tonight?
I don’t know what I can do. I promise nothing complete.
Tom, how does a person stand up under all of the traveling you do?
I am standing now.
Do you ever suffer from fatigue?
I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.
Hurry up. He coming.
Voice that brings faces to the windows.
Yall better hurry up.
Doors opening, pouring Negroes out into the afternoon, so many faces brown and beaming bright, cheeks swollen with pride. Oh happy day! Tom puts words into their mouths and movements into their bodies. In parade formation, they cross a Japanese bridge above a dark yellowish brown stream of open sewage into a field of flowers—gladioluses, petunias, tulips, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers—on the other side, and march on into the grove of Japanese cherry blossom trees in full bloom on the White House lawn.
There he is.
He looks bigger in person.
Praise be.
They look up at the sky to see if God is watching too.
Tom, would you like to say a few words to the people?
Yes, Tom says. I am Blind Tom, and so are you.
He sounds just like the Lord.
Praise be.
Tom walks right past President Buchanan, positions himself before the Chickering full grand piano, and starts to play. About the first song, the president’s niece is heard to say, I never felt that song as I did just now. About the second song, a prominent senator in attendance will remember majestic rivers winding over the floodplains, while his wife will opine, Away flew the notes. Of the many journalists present, one will later sum up the recital this way: Music broke out on Blind Tom like the smallpox.
Even before the applause for his last song has ended (no encore), Tom makes his way over to the members of the Japanese delegation. Says, You don’t understand our music.
Outside the White House, more journalists with their paper, pens, and questions. Tom, you’re a big boy.
Yes. I’m a behemoth.
The photographer. His heavy plates, black scrim, flash. The camera he must carry tortoise-like on his back. He crawls inside the black scrim. The shutter falls, a puff of blinding smoke.
Tom says, A photograph is a mirror that remembers.
Where to now, Tom?
Tom is off to glory.
In the first place he will represent the Southern army leaving home to their favorite tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which you will hear in the distance, growing louder and louder as they approach Manassas (the imitation of the drum and fife). He will represent the Grand Union Army leaving Washington City to the tune of “Dixie.” You will recollect that their prisoners spoke of the fact that when the Grand Union Army left Washington, not only were their bands playing “Dixie,” but their men were also singing it.
He will represent the eve of battle by a very soft sweet melody, then the clatter of arms and accoutrements, the war trumpet of Beauregard, which you will hear distinctly; and then McDowell’s in the distance, like an echo at first. He will represent the firing of the cannons to “Yankee Doodle,” the Marseilles Hymn, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” With “Dixie,” you will hear the arrival of the train cars containing General Kirby’s reinforcements, which you will all recollect was very valuable to General Beauregard upon that occasion after their arrival of which, as you will hear, the fighting will grow more severe (shouts and yells, and the imitation of horses, musketry, and death).
A tribute to genius, presented to Tom, the blind colored pianist, by Messrs Knabe & Co, Baltimore, Front Street Theater July 3, 186—
Testimonial:
I well remember in Charleston where a party of us had him with us on and off for two or three months, and a young lady sat down at the piano and began to play. Tom was at the dark end of the chamber, spinning upon his hands and heels, and mumbling to himself. He caught the sound of the instrument and stood for a moment still and upright. Then, like a wild animal, he made a dash and swooped down upon her. Terrified, the poor girl shrieked and ran, while the rest of us held him writhing and trembling with what seemed to be rage. “She stole my harmonies,” he cried over and over, “she stole my harmonies.” And never again did he allow her to come near him. If she were even in the room he knew it somehow and became restive and angry.
Attaining his zenith, the height of public regard, Blind Tom is a sun setting everything in the world ablaze, radiating excellent reviews, parades in his honor (the clamor, the sureness of gesture and step, the rousing speeches, the swells of fellow feeling), delighted and devoted concertgoers, invitations and entreaties from worthy personages and distinguished delegations who seek a private audience with this singular phenomenon of Nature (the decorum of Tom’s hosts), the journalists who want to exchange a few words with him, and the many ordinary and cheerful well-wishers who go out of their way to simply catch a glimpse of Blind Tom in the flesh during those lapses and lulls when he is not onstage or otherwise on display. Open the gates of heaven, for everything in the world is either outside or inside Tom. Tom the everything in everything. Never before has Perry Oliver felt so recognized, so understood, so vindicated. Free.
So why then day after day this troubling disquiet that came upon him without warning several months ago—where were they then, in Seattle? Chicago? the war benefit in Charleston?—and that never seems to leave him? He sits up at night with his ledger of water-stiffened pages, trying to plan (order? predict?) the future in his clean penmanship, trying to escape the feeling that he is being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant.
That feeling even more so after he starts to notice three weeping women in black at every concert. Three weeping women dressed in black. Seated next to each other in the blue-black dark, tears flowing and mouths stunned open. Each woman assumes a distinct set to her body. The first with her face tilted to one side. The second woman holding the sides of her face. The third forehead gripped in the vise of her right hand. He watches their heaving bosoms without hearing their sobs, drowned out by the music perhaps. Sees them swallowing deep breaths then spilling the breaths out again. They become a familiar presence, concert after concert, city after city, three weeping women in black. They seem to have no idea that their gestures are extreme—bawling, wringing their hands, shouting meaningless phrases over and over. Do they assume that no one hears them? From the stage he searches out their countenances, trying to detect features around their expressions of penitence and grief. Strange remote faces. How old are they? Are they sisters of the Race? (This brutal looking into.) That’s when he begins to notice that the faces actually change at each concert. Never the same three women, but always a set of three women in black, comely or ugly, young or old or of indeterminate age. Perhaps these women are all part of some union of the female sex a thousand members strong. Ten thousand. Besides their black garb, one fact holds true from concert to concert: although they are weeping he can see that their eyes are alive, registering and interpreting, taking in everything.
Then the night when red moon and red sun compete in the same sky above fog that rides low to the ground. He closes the curtains, canceling light, and starts fingering the keys in the dark. And he continues to finger them. An owl hoots in the ghosted air and he hoots back. In no one’s name but his own let this long night end.
He dreams. Covered in dirt, the planters are hacking the earth with broad flat plates, no cutting edge. Their crops ground underground, down into the earth. What tool can reach them?
You just can’t take him from me, Perry Oliver says. With no fair warning.
But, sir. Perry Oliver loosens the clasp joining the two ends of his string tie. All these years I put in. All those years.
And you prospered.
Yes, I have. Is that what this is about? You want more money, a percentage? That can easily be—
No.
Then what, sir? You are an honorable man, having spilled blood and directed others to spill blood, including their own.
Mr. Oliver, General Bethune says, no matter how self-activated, every man finds himself caught in the grip of forces that hold suzerainty over every vessel of his person and every aspect of his life, small to big. Despite his uniform—his medal-decorated chest, the heavy epaulets perched on his shoulders like upturned birds’ nests, his sleeves thick with insignia, his legs leathered in black boots up to the knee—General Bethune is an ailing old man now it seems, beard and hair completely gray, a gaunt man now, hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes, his arms and legs thin, grotesque twigs, his hands brittle and weightless, bone on bone.
Perry Oliver speaks a reply, his voice quiet and serious, but his words seem to drop midair and plunge to the floor, exhausted, doomed.
I cannot put you before my family, Mr. Oliver.
Nor would I expect you to.
No, you wouldn’t. But you are, Mr. Oliver. Do you see now? You are asking me to elevate you above my family. Understand, this is a family matter, not a matter of commerce.
I understand. But we helped the cause again and again.
We all did our part.
But we did more than most. More. And we can still—
Your country will recognize and thank you. You have my word and assurance. There is sadness then tenseness (worry, anger) on the General’s face. A meager music hovers in the air (somewhere). The fireplace is trying to flame. In his gray suit General Bethune seems the focus of darkness in the room, under the ceiling repellent of light. Perry Oliver can’t talk back to the other man’s power.
But why now, just when—? Something has gone out of his voice.
You don’t see it, do you, Mr. Oliver? But of course you do. The South will fall, no two ways about it. As a military man I can tell you that there is no chance for us to win this war. So what I am supposed to do: lose everything?
Perry Oliver removes his tie. Free now, unguarded, the tie coiled around his fist like a constrictive serpent. His tongue is equally constricted, trying to form words but curling up to the roof of his mouth and getting stuck on his teeth. So Seven knows at that moment that he has to speak for him, utter words that can save Mr. Oliver, save Tom, save himself. All he has to do is tell the General what he himself feels. That he is closer to Tom than to any person he has ever known. Tom sees what he sees, feels what he feels. Each of them is alone in the world. If he tells it just like that then the General will understand and let them be. All there is to it. As simple as that. Now if he can just say it, cover this gap of the silence with speech.
Now, look. I have nothing more to say. I have given you reasonable explanation for the termination of our contract. That is the only explanation I need give you. So let’s get on with it.
No, Perry Oliver says.
What? General Bethune speaks a bit more savagely, his face unguarded about what it reveals, and Perry Oliver’s mouth flinches. So stop me. There ain’t a goddamn thing that a person like you could do ever to stop me. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not never. Now, remove yourself from my presence. Go buy a farm. Go build a factory, or go do anything else you want with your worthless life.
The General’s words go deep and draw out Perry Oliver’s history like a splinter in a finger. Seven is appalled. He vows: never (again) will he put himself in a position where he can so easily be humiliated, hurt, shamed, treated like a nigger.
On the train afterward—after it is done, Tom relinquished, Tom gone—Perry Oliver keeps his gaze directed on the coach window, looking out at the passing world with a vision smudged with grief. (Seven looking as he looks, looking through his eyes.) Looking through not-tears at houses and barns, hills and valleys, lakes and rivers (the South, Confederacy, Dixie), scrolling countryside, birds untroubled in the sky, sunlight fractured by the thin trunks of tilting trees. Seven tries to hold the thought of Tom in his mind. Then the train takes a bend, and he can see through the window one coach linked to the next like sausages. Where does one begin and the other end? All those months moving together, all those years gone. (So the earth moves to make time.) And thinking thus sees the past shrink to a black dot behind them, him and Perry Oliver.
Never forget. Never forgive.
The Celebration of the Living Who Reflect upon the Dead
(1867)
“Only the mistakes have been mine.”
MANAGER OF THE PERFORMANCE WHAT THEY CALL HIM, Seven. What he calls himself, although he has never felt easy with the term. Nothing unusual about the title, nothing striking or distinctive. The few or many he has known in his twenty-plus years of existence who’ve carried it, including Perry Oliver. And now him, Seven. (Mr. Seven to some.) Dreaming (still) out of that slow ship that carried him here to the city a many, oh a many months ago, years ago. Manager of the Performance. What it means: he must spend hours of negotiation in a room he won’t be able to describe a minute after leaving it, this negotiation a slippery process of transforming the spoken into the written (a contract) through word and look, things said, things accepted or disputed through nods or shakes of the head, but mostly by what’s unsaid, looking, listening, holding his ground, seeing down to the other man’s base self, his breaking point, Seven’s mouth curled slightly in dismissive disgust to give the impression that he is ready to walk out the door at any minute and do commerce with a rival across town or across the river. Hemmed in, but hemming in too, wearing the mask of civility while fighting against any moral urge (need) to be fair because that’s what he is expected to do, and do it all for a banknote or two more or less. The hard sale. The soft coaxing. The planning and patience. The structure and discipline required to see a nine-month season through from start to finish, to frame a design and make it an actuality, to make words become music.
Juluster’s voice floats out from some unseen place inside the apartment and echoes around Seven. The same phrase shouted over and over again, climbing each time into a higher more hysterical register, making Juluster sound abandoned, marooned, cast away where nobody can reach him. (Where is Vitalis?) Seven remembers (many many years ago) how he would let Tom talk until he ran out of words. That gift for gab he had, even if much of it was gibberish. Rambling. No wrong in that. Delight in the listening. The sound would slap into Seven’s skin and once it had him, pull him into the flow—come along—and carry him off to a place where no one could reach him.
Now Seven hears Juluster wandering through rooms and halls, the sound of his feet dragging cautiously across the floor and his body bumping into walls and other solid objects, his breath repeating like a weapon. To judge by the sound of him—sighs, sucks of the teeth, grunts and moans and groans, curses, these expressions of puzzlement and frustration—he is getting more and more upset. Seven should do something. If there’s anybody who can answer his needs, direct him to what he wants, that anybody is Seven. But Seven holds his tongue and comes back to the thing he knows. Here is his body, sitting in this chair, trembling and sweating, marinating in doubt in this city he has made his o
wn. For better or worse Juluster is all he has, the closest approximation he has come across, and he must tolerate Juluster’s petty annoyances. It happens very often that a man does something, that a man has something in him, and he does a thing again and again. So Seven must.
Seven needs Juluster. And everything that comes with that need. Each day is an achievement. Each day makes it harder to desist, to turn back, not that he has any intention of doing so. The greater the discouragement the keener he is to press on.
He lifts his gaze, surprised, because the air buzzes around a clean form that emerges into the day’s expectations. The clear light keeps falling on Juluster—teetering tottering he has found his way into the room—on his shut eyes and hunched neck—what saddens him now?—shawling around his shoulders. He displays a forlornness resembling Seven’s own. Still, it’s hard to feel sorry for Juluster since Seven is forever aware of his agile body beneath all those well-tailored clothes, a body forced to bend in so many ways that eventually nothing comes naturally, Juluster’s blankness offering nothing that links him with his other, Tom. He is Tom at the same time that he is too preposterous to be Tom. (Root distinction, difference: Juluster is a rare one, but he belongs. Tom never belonged. Tom never could belong. A challenge—what blind person isn’t?—Juluster is both cooperative and independent in ways that Tom never was, never could be.) He looks somewhat like Tom. A pure and simple brute, this negro with a narrow and sloped forehead, who bears in the middle section of his brain the signs of certain grossly powerful energies. The thinking faculties are poor or even null; therefore, he is possessed by his desire and also by his will, of an often terrible intensity. (What does Tom look like now? Has the richness of his darkness faded from his skin?) And physical differences between Tom and his double can be put off to aging—who will remember anyway? The public has not seen Tom for more than five years—although Juluster is Tom’s senior by a decade (more), having already reached thirty years of age. No. Even that is a lie. On his last birthday he achieved his Jesus year. But he still believes in his youthfulness. More importantly, he believes in the role that Seven has given him to play—game for the game—a role Seven mentally scripts moment by moment from memory—lait—selling the shadow to support the substance. Since Juluster is game for the game teach him his name. The body is a habit he can break. Even now his flesh quivers, every inch of it, the skin coming unhinged. He seems to be drifting out of himself, becoming other, becoming Blind Tom.
Song of the Shank Page 36
