Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Separate from Tom, the piano looked like something foreign, something that didn’t belong, a sea creature washed up onto a beach. She remembered herself. Thought about the trapped bones of her own body. In the months to come, she would have plenty of time to weigh both her suffering and her hatred, for wishing damnation upon the sea. (There to remind her, the city’s sins resurfacing in the water, never under for long.) Right here, right now, she was content, taken with the strangely tangible impression that something had come to an end. She could feel it in her face. Knew that she and Tom were either at the start or finish of a life. Eliza and Tom, new to each other.

  Tom sits at the piano in postsupper stupor amid long shadows in the gathering dusk, tugging at his belt, trying to wrestle his waist in place, a body slumping at the edges, slowly losing the pattern of its own dimensions.

  The windows glitter with faint fluorescent shapes, lines of fading sunlight shimmering on the walls like the red strings of a guitar. The piano holds the sunset’s color. She hears light drumming on the keys now, like shells rattling in a boiling pot. Thousands of tiny tinkling hollow echoes. The boats seem to move in time to the music, at the mercy of the rise and fall of Tom’s hands. They continue their forward advance, moving farther and farther away until they are about to fade from view, an ever-widening wake, but they will never arrive, reach their destination, caught, under Tom’s control. Must slumber a new course. That sonata he is playing, each controlling finger made to lift alone. She listens with inward breath to the way he pushes deeper into the keys, so many notes overlapping in this room, so that no note ever sounds alone.

  For a long time she goes on listening. He will play the entire night. (Let him, as long as Mr. Hub brings her no complaints from the neighbors.) Watching him, she feels as if the flow of Time is slowing down little by little. She strikes a match, igniting wet wicks, the lamps humming, coating the room with their expected flush.

  Toward the end of one afternoon a week later, Mr. Hub comes for the return of his tallow candle. The missus sends me. How had she forgotten, even with his almost daily appearances at her door? The bell pulls and she opens it to find two fresh bottles of goat’s milk sitting outside the door, like mushrooms that have sprouted up through the floorboards. In his darned coat and scuffed shoes, and bearing about him a smell of lye and ammonia, Mr. Hub runs errands, sees that her deliveries are sent, and receives her mail, what little there is, from the postmaster. He has a real talent for the execution of such practical duties, never complains and will consent to any request without argument, grateful for the small fees he receives, these supplements to his meager caretaker’s salary. Standing in her doorway with a happy face, the gay animated expression of someone with fascinating things to relate, although he never reports matters of consequence. She listens with keen indifference, in no hurry to deepen her relationship with him. In fact, she senses a kind of uncertainty in him. Exactly what she can’t say, but it comes every now and then in his words or actions. She might ask him something (I don’t believe I thanked you for touching up) and a single breath will intervene before he answers (I’m not deserving), just the slightest hesitation, but in that split-second interval she senses a kind of shadow of menace or distrust.

  So kind of you to do it while we were away, sparing us the inconvenience.

  It wasn’t up to me, Mr. Hub says, no change in expression. A man was in your apartment.

  She heard him. Had she heard him?

  I was making my rounds. And I saw that the door was open. Just a pinch. You could have missed it. He was sitting on the couch like the most natural thing in the world. Gave me the scare of my life.

  She waits for him to speak, waits to hear his words.

  I supposed him an apparition or God knows what. But he was nothing as terrible as that. Just a colored. All dandyed up. Imagine.

  She tries to.

  Never thought I would set eyes on another one. Here, at least. Not in this city.

  Already she is flipping through a mental index of her past acquaintances, remembered and forgotten. Could he—a colored—be someone from her past life, from the Asylum?

  He didn’t bother to hide. Just sitting there, like the most natural thing in the world.

  She wonders what kind of man this is who would brave the dangers of the city alone. What did he want?

  Mr. Hub draws his lips slightly to one side. Your guess is as good as mine. But you can bet money, he would have robbed you blind had I not chased him away. I keep my hammer on my person. He shows it to her then returns it to his coat pocket.

  Did he say anything?

  Just some gibberish, trying to talk his way free. He asked for you.

  For me?

  He asked your whereabouts. I’m sure he took your name from the bell. He knows his alphabet, that’s for sure.

  And nothing else?

  He tried to hand me something, but I didn’t let the wool slip. Mr. Hub shows his hammer. Yes, he was a slick one.

  What was it?

  I barely looked. I figure, why stand for more lies? Given an ear, he might claim your relation. The king of England. God knows what.

  The same intruder, she thinks. From the country. What can she do besides listen? A foreign body had entered their home, their space. What if anything left behind? What if anything changed?

  A lot of courage that one. Mr. Hub shakes his head in disbelief, a rush of wind streaming between his teeth. You have to admit. To come here. He deserves a medal. Or maybe he’s just plain stupid, or simple. Touched.

  She hears herself utter some reply.

  Would you believe, there was a second one out front waiting for him? The driver. Not dressed up like the first, but I didn’t get such a good look.

  Eliza has no words.

  Sorry to upset you, ma’m. I had hoped to save you the trouble of worrying over it. Nothing is missing?

  No.

  He had mud on his feet. I thought to take every precaution. So the lock was changed, Mr. Hub says, as if this were all logically consistent. One of those gestures perhaps offered in the sure expectation that she would take comfort in it.

  After mutual good wishes, Mr. Hub strides away, leaving her with the weight of words, her ears retaining their living sound. Two men, colored, her name in the mouth of one, the thing offered, mud on the feet: she had heard it all, and now comes the realization: Mr. Hub had talked his way around her question. She still doesn’t know what prompted him to paint her apartment.

  Each thing accounted for—checks again—but Mr. Hub has unsettled what she thought was settled, shaken her belief in anonymity, that there’s no one in the city with a passing thought for her. The building big enough that no neighbor is near and all acquaintances are vague. Eliza a familiar face in the hallway or on the stairwell or on the street (those rare occasions), passing under a street sign, already gone, a woman without name or connections, or a woman who was only a name. Mrs. Bethune. Apartment 5B. Where the piano music comes from. As far as she knows, they assume that she is the pianist. Whatever their assumptions, she is uneasily conscious of her neighbors. More so now. (Yes, on Monday—think about it—there was someone leaning in the shadows, watching.) Who has she seen this week other than Mr. Hub? And how many of her neighbors have caught a glimpse of Tom in the past three years? Before the violence, every resident in the building knew Tom; half of them were Negro and for that reason took pride in the proximity; but who among the present neighbors—white, all of them white—can place him here, in apartment 5B?

  When Sharpe was here, working with Tom and the manager, the neighbors found any excuse to knock on her door—I thought the young master might like some custard—some with punctilious regularity. Pulling the bell, but not without a certain guilty sense of invading someone’s privacy—blurting out explanations and regrets, even as others were less polite, ventured to make forcible entry. She would screen the visitors when she could—

  Tom, this is little Sally from the second floor.

&n
bsp; Some little girl lifting herself out of memory, wearing a short dress of white satin, a black-buckled pink belt around her waist.

  Hello, Mr. Tom.

  Hello, girl. Hello, Sally. Tom took the girl’s hand. She’s a nigger, he said.

  —but Tom was often quick to answer the bell before she or Sharpe or the manager could refuse or turn away the caller, resolved to present “Blind Tom” to one and all.

  I am Blind Tom, one of the greatest humans to walk the earth.

  Syllables paced out one breath at a time.

  Nice of you to visit, Tom said. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

  Names circling names.

  This was all they wanted to know about their neighbors. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Bethune maintained close relations with only one other family in the building, the McCunes, Dr. and Mrs., who were further along in years than Sharpe and Eliza, but not significantly so, and whose offspring, boy and girl, were deeply attentive to Tom. They’re niggers, Tom said. Once a week, the older couple would extend a supper invitation to the younger—never the other way around—so that the Bethunes became a regular presence in their home, a sumptuously furnished apartment (third floor, 3A), the chairs and couches tattered and antique, proud of period detail, the walls hung with tapestry and bedecked with a great number of spirited modern paintings, landscapes and seascapes, in frames of rich golden arabesque set against walls papered in an expanse of white flowers. The McCunes themselves smacked of careful cultivation, presentation pieces with their own form and meaning. Their tastes ran to art, theater, geography (places traveled, destinations to come), and politics—

  I won’t support a losing cause. Sharpe passed the decanter of wine across the table to the Doctor.

  I take that to mean you are perfectly comfortable supporting the winner?

  Hardly.

  At least you have no doubts about who will win.

  I have no doubts.

  The children ran through the room, set forth in their own wonder.

  How can I? They will destroy the South just so they can rebuild it in their own image.

  The causes are deeper.

  I’m not saying they aren’t.

  So why then do you aid the rebels?

  Sharpe stretched his body, easing into an answer. Look, Doctor, I’m still a Southerner. A man can’t simply cut off his family. He sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. I won’t leap to their defense, but why not throw a few bills at the battle-scarred and the war widows?

  The Doctor poured the last of the wine into Sharpe’s glass. Does it matter what the boy thinks?

  Obviously you’re saying it should.

  The Doctor continued to look at him, shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table.

  A benefit concert or two. Is that taking advantage? Besides, do you know how much money we’ve given the Abos over the years? More money than I can count.

  Ah.

  Not openly, of course. Under the table.

  That’s unfortunate. You will never get the recognition. The boy will—

  Doctor, I stopped wondering long ago about what people think of my doing this or that.

  Useful hours for both men, even when they disagreed. These visits revealed a side of the Doctor that Eliza had not been privy to during the many years she had known and worked with him at the Eternally Benevolent Asylum for Ill-Fated Offspring of the Sable Race, something beyond what was contained in the structure of his medical duties. (And it was her own duties in the charitable wings and halls of the establishment that by either providence or happenstance she would come into contact with Sharpe—and Tom.) Though he insisted on a limited schedule, working no more than four hours a day, four days a week, so that his private practice and research should not suffer, he was charged by his work, bright with it, padding through the wards in his white coat, the legs of his binaural stethoscope clamped around his neck. There was a practicality about his body, a man built to a purpose—the total opposite of Sharpe, the tallest man she has ever seen, even today, all angles, juxtaposition, jagged elbows jutting out, forward-pointing hatchet-like knees, and square blocky forehead and temple, aspects of person defying the uniformity of line that is supposed to define a body—moving with tireless fluidity along beds lined up like boats in a dockyard, attending to as many as 160 children at a given time. (A massive four-story building of fine recent construction, the Asylum could accommodate up to 200 orphaned children, providing them with the luxury of modern facilities—indoor toilets, sinks, and baths, gaslights—that only the city’s wealthy had access to.) But he sought to do more than heal and see to the good health of the Negro children under his care. He was determined—the greater goal—to refine their artistic and intellectual tastes through regular attendance at museums, concerts, and dramaturgical stagings. (He took all 160 children to a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at his own expense.) We should endeavor to expose the most unfortunate of the Race to the better class of general culture. It was clear from the atmosphere he projected that he was no ordinary person. Mrs. Shotwell and Mrs. Murray hoped that the Doctor, in his professionalism, the way he spoke and handled himself, would serve as a masculine exemplar who could illuminate the orphans’ own conditions and inspire them (the boys) to aim high and achieve.

  Doctor, should we hire a music teacher? Mrs. Shotwell asked. Do you believe the reports that music can reform a bad disposition?

  Eliza could not help feeling a certain strange joy whenever she had assisted the Doctor, frantically eager to carry wash pan, thread, scissors, knife, to boil the surgical instruments, prepare the opium paste, or stanch bleeding. As house matron she had earned nine dollars a month, a decent wage, but the work was exhausting even if fulfilling, the hours immense. She saw to the stocks and supplies and took daily inventory, the large brass storeroom keys kept on a five-pound iron ring; she tallied up donations, engaged the domestics, and supervised all of the other employees to ensure that they weren’t making light of their duties. Her work with Dr. McCune made up for certain agreed-upon reductions of self, for the Doctor, in his ministrations, showed an emotion deep enough to confirm her own power—They need me, irreplaceable me—a fact that made it easy for her to bend to her other labors with a quiet mind. She had spent so much time with him—month after month, one year after the next—she felt his duties had become part of her. No exaggeration to say that it was she who drummed up patients.

  Once a week, she left the Asylum and went in search of fresh orphans, venturing away from their Midtown locale to explore the narrow twisting streets of the Black Town, the city’s most densely populated district, where surfaces (sidewalks, roofs, shutters, corners, walls) pressed together in unexpected ways, noisily in place, life here chambered inside a ramshackle accumulation of tenements leaning over the sidewalks, as if bent against a winter wind. Eliza advancing softly with a sense of mysterious invitation, feeling the uneasy force of all those lives hived within, families (four or more) jammed up against each other inside a single room, unable to confine respective kin to respective corner, assorted limbs jutting out of slanted windows and crooked doorways, Eliza dizzy with forms all about her. Clusters of Negro men toting pyramids of firewood and Negro women dangling strings of fowl, and men and women and children alike in slow drift with satchels of sweat strapped to their backs, or water pots or baskets (fruit, herbs) positioned on their heads. Faces staring accusations at her, bitter in an undirected way. She would stare right back—hopeful tension—pushing against refuse and waste thick and abstract at her feet, and ask the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies from the two or three or four that she extended invitations to, willing to give themselves up to her then and there. Candidates collected, she would then taxi on to the Municipal Almshouse and spend hours cycling through a maze of warrens where monstrous forms—albinos, pinheads, she-hes, worm-like legless and armless torsos stationed on wooden carts, pig-child hybrids with snouts and curly tails, deer-children (fauns?
satyrs?) with horns and hooves, mermaids swimming in their own urine, Cyclops, Blemmyae, three- and four-eyed Nisicathae and Nisitae, a boy with an underdeveloped twin hanging out of his abdomen, as if the hidden head was only momentarily absent, mischievously peeking into the keyhole of his stomach, a girl with a second canine-toothed and lizard-tongued mouth chewing its way out of her left jaw, and rarer creatures shackled and chained—huddled in dim light against the smell of sawdust, some folded monk-like in cloaks and hoods, others completely nude. Eliza careful to appear curious and concerned, a desperate devotion undercutting her probing looks, her riddle-solving, translating texts of skin and eyes.

  Back at the Asylum, she saw to it that the new arrivals were thoroughly washed and comfortably dressed, each child’s hair combed free of lice, each body put to bed under folds of fresh linen in the Inspection Ward, awaiting Dr. McCune’s examination. The admissions were naturally reluctant to undergo examination, poking and prodding, but before Dr. McCune all their defenses vanished. They gave in with trustful surrender, the ready-made quality about the way he spoke. Disrobe, please. Including shoes and undergarments. Miss Viel here will take care of your belongings. At times she found herself speaking the diagnosis even before he had. The cleared would be taken immediately to the appropriate ward housing their peers, Whole Orphans or Half Orphans, and the wing therein specific to their sex—the wards could amalgamate during meals, boys on one side of the dining hall, girls on the other—where they would be ghosts for several days, invisible, suffering at arm’s length a brief trial of discretionary exclusion before they were accepted into the fold. The eye-sick were afforded the opportunity of surgery to remove the diseased orbs. (One darkness defining another. Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see.) To aid in healing and lessen the chances of inflammation, Dr. McCune would apply a thick paste made from crushed peanuts and water—peanut butter he called it—over the empty eye sockets, two six-inch-high brown mounds that would remain in place for up to a week. Eliza was there to fan flies away and pluck ants and cockroaches from the paste. To wet fever with cold compresses and diminish pain with warm opium. Once the paste was removed, Dr. McCune had to judge that no part of the infection had escaped to another region of the body, before the patient could be assigned his/her own bed in the Eye Ward. Dr. McCune put a high practical value on his work at the Asylum, believing that it aided and enhanced his research and his private practice in the homes of the city’s wealthy Negroes and in his own home, those packs of proper Negroes who made daily pilgrimages to his apartment (3A) in their well-cut clothes, depending on his dogged efforts to keep them in top form.