Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  But, as Tabbs knows (present, a witness), they were not the first to make (find) their way here to the city from wretched Southern climes. Many months earlier the soldiers had returned, unexpected, uninvited, war’s contraband, men who at the very start of the war had sworn an oath of patriotic commitment and duty and enlisted into an all-Negro regiment so as to take up arms and forcibly bring slavery to an end—granted, some found a secondary motivation: to keep a republic that was both in conflict with itself and unsure of its future from a sundering into two separate nations forever conflicted, forever divided—and thus enlisted had shed blood and allowed their own blood to be shed. Entrusted with the task of taking lives, taking towns and cities, on the one hand drawing the last breath from the enemy, and on the other shepherding to safety their emancipated brethren and sistren. Embedded in battle perhaps at the very moment when their kinsmen, neighbors, and friends came under attack, when they were being shot, strung up, and struck down, when they were being burned out of their homes in Black Town and every other precinct in the city, only to be chased from and otherwise expelled and expunged from the city’s municipal boundaries altogether.

  Tabbs wonders, when did word of the violence and the expulsion reach them? And—having given their all in battle, maiming and killing (the skirmishes that memory would—will—never let them relinquish), only to learn that they were now all exiled from the destroyed and crumbling houses of a previous life—what thoughts curled around them at that critical juncture in time? (Standing at the crossroad.) What forces of will, upbringing, counsel, morality, or law urged restraint and kept them from shooting or impaling every alabaster on sight? (Try to feel it now.) Moreover, how were they able to throw themselves back into the fray for the remainder of the war under the auspices of a country, an authority that had if not outright betrayed them, had at the least done nothing to secure and protect the person and property of those they had left behind? Not to mention (to say nothing of) the entire matter of punishment and retribution, what those white men who were duly appointed in the appropriate and austere offices of power would do to see that those of the city’s alabasters (of whatever sex, of whatever age, of whatever standing in society) who had committed unpardonable wrongs against the city’s Negroes would be held accountable and brought to justice to the fullest extent of the law and with all deliberate speed.

  Perhaps it was this wounded sense of weighing and waiting—never forget, never forgive—that sustained them through all of the fallen bodies and sacked cities, however scant and remote (distant) their hopes of return and reckoning. And when the Surrender finally came, to their surprise it did not give them the immediate release from active duty that they had expected, but only further deferred the dream, for they were issued a new assignment: keep the peace, maintain order, provision and protect the Freedmen. For months on end they were summoned to one contentious Southern location or another to put down a last stand by random elements of the enemy’s collapsed army and to deter, detain, or otherwise do away with sporadic groups of bizarrely dressed (faces hidden inside triangular-peaked hoods, bodies concealed under bulbous bedsheets or robes) irregulars and stop them from committing the most brutal retaliatory and fear-instilling acts of sabotage, assassination, rape, kidnapping, hanging, and immolation.

  It took well over a year for the opposition to trickle down and thin away to a point where it either no longer caught the attention of the generals and their counselors or caught their attention but was not deemed worthy of action. At that point the regiment was officially dissolved. The men pooled their wages, commandeered a vessel, subscribed their names to a man in the ship’s manifest, more than seventy-five in all, and set sail for home, each and every one looking all the way to the end of his gaze, determined to return no matter where he had been and what he had done. So the same water that took them away brought them back, as if the ocean too was homesick. The ship’s arrival in the harbor drew no particular notice. Just another ship, one of the many daily, transporting cargo. Then in the sky reddening remains of the day the men started scrambling down the gangplank under a burden of personal belongings (the memories they had carried around in leather satchels and gunnysacks) and military-issued (stolen?) rifles, tents, crates, and barrels, and wheelbarrows that they carried, pushed, or tugged ashore, and stood there before the ship, loosely assembled, stretching their arms, time breaking over their skin, shaking the journey off. The sudden and unexpected image of soldiers, black men in blue, awoke a quiver of sudden alarm and fright inside the alabasters, and drew them to the city’s streets from inside the comfort and safety of their houses and apartments.

  In a voice clean as polished steel, one of the soldiers issued a call and the men fell into parade formation, their flags (colors) holding sky and time, their rifles slanted against the wind. The voice rang out again and the men began marching up Broadway—move as a team, never move alone—waves of clamor radiating from their synchronized boots; light catching and gleaming off metal—rifles, medals of merit, and wheelbarrows stacked high with crates of projectiles and grenades and barrels of kerosene and gunpowder—while the city’s alabasters looked on still, silent, and wide-eyed like grazing cows. Home again. (All the rest now a falling back.) Their sonorous bodies and the keening whine and groan of their wheelbarrows halting the movement of the many buggies, cabriolets, carriages, buckboards, and horse-drawn streetcars crisscrossing the city’s most fabled avenue, stillness staking the alabasters in place like the stately lampposts and sturdy telegraph poles lining the avenue.

  As the light thinned and evening gathered, the regiment continued at its own pace mile after mile, every man sweating and straining for their collective destination, some (see it) indefinable substance or feeling pumping through them—this much: they have a firm understanding of victory and defeat—shunting aside their proven capacity for patience and postponement, driving them all the way to the other end of Broadway, at which point they turned in one sinuous line and passed through the high wrought iron gates of Central Park, where they lit lamps and struck torches and began to set up camp on the Great Lawn, assembling tents, digging trenches, their movements both separate and coordinated, their shadows long and dark, black shapes moving in a silent ballet, their legs partly obscured in the high uncut grass as if they had all been amputated below the knee. They cut down dead trees for firewood. Fire and light. The only blaze in the dark, radiance visible for miles. (Tabbs saw it himself.) Then they retired for the night on pallets inside their tents or slept out in the open on the half moons of hammocks slung between trees. Morning brought a butchery of park creatures—deer, squirrels, and rock doves—that they skinned, cleaned, cooked, and feasted on. The next day the same. And more still in subsequent days. And so on. A standing army sprawling in their camp on the Great Lawn for longer than anyone could have known or expected, waiting through both good and inclement weather to be recognized.

  And there they remain, even while the city accelerates around them, a fast new geography. In a matter of hours a goat path becomes a turnpike a turnpike a road a road a street and the street a name. New Place. New Here. New There. New House. New Water. New Well. New Creek. New Yonder. New Street. More Street. Street Street. New New. Each street breeds an architecture, neat perfect rows of houses. Skinny blocks of wood on a mud alley. Fat blocks of wood lined up before a gutter like men relieving themselves. Active space, men hard at work, no shortage of hands and backs, colored and alabaster (city locals), earning a good wage, some able for the first time to afford pants that button. They work wood with axes, saws, planes, and other (carpentry) tools, ankle-deep in soft wood refuse, while army surveyors scuttle about insect-like with instruments of planning and measurement. The city expands, corners and lots and blocks, Freedmen settlements spreading in all directions, even in neighborhoods that were off-limits to colored citizens only a few years ago, before the riots. Righting wrongs, the city issues a call of welcome to the Freedman (as well as the Uprooted, those who were driven out of t
heir homes and forced into exile on Edgemere)—Everything that had to happen has already happened. Danger and tension are past. It’s a new day. Come and become a citizen, become one of us—seeing miles over the present into a high and limitless democratic future. The sky whitens with justice. The city’s promise pulls smiles out of worried faces, one after the next, not unlike a many-colored sash of infinite length drawn from a magician’s sleeve.

  A new life in a new land among a new set of people in a new united republic where autumn leaves scuttle across the ground like papery crabs. Stubbornly, the arrivals retain time, dragging their feet along, lengthening every moment to pull their histories forward, even as they venture a new soil, bodies covered with dirt. You would think the earth grows on their backs. You would think the earth is trying to bury them.

  Tabbs takes slow almost ashamed steps to maintain a solid distance between himself and them, finds it hard to engineer his body into a vessel of mercy, to set aside the instinct, drive, and industry he has always had and bring his own head and heart into their plight. No small matter to serve a nation. When last was it that he comforted someone? They (the city) want to root him when he wants to stretch. Just how deep does his sense of independence go? He has recently caught himself in a new trend, letting the dutiful language of racial uplift slip into his transactions.

  The boundary lines have fallen for

  Me in pleasant places;

  I have a goodly heritage.

  But he is like nothing they have known. They don’t know what to do with his words. They raise their hats in apology, a rush to please on their faces, mouths snapping open and closed, straining to speak. They never look him in the face, don’t see him at all, his odd ways.

  Everything seems to happen from a distance. Hard to witness, hard to believe. He looks at them with all angles in his eyes. Truncated forms missing hands, feet, and limbs. Ruffled figures with broken backs, bent impossibly at the waist, wrists touching ankles, like malfunctioning bridges unable to either lower or raise. Wobbly creatures with wasted bones knocking out of rhythm under sagging skin. One to the next. The hard lines of their hunger sketch a blueprint of possibility against the faded backdrop of recent history. No language for this. Slavery is a puncture—have you ever picked cotton?—the hole (hold) that can never close. The hole that still bleeds cotton, rice, sugarcane, tobacco. How do they lift their feet without becoming undone?

  I would never have believed

  That Death could have undone so many

  Bless them their trying, their displaced elbows, disjointed knees, sturdy necks, assured fingers. They hold their hands up to the sky with joy and look God in the face. Delivered.

  With heavy rusted teeth they fashion new names. Emerson, Garrison, Brown. Adams, Douglass, Turner. Jackson, Lincoln, Jefferson. Johnson, Grant, Washington. Tubman, Phillips, Hamilton. Strong. Freeman. North. (Looking at God.) They practice saying their names and practice them on each other, words slipping in and out, too busy with the speed of speak to think more.

  Having withstood hardships that would destroy most, they can now remold themselves into something greater here in the city, even if they don’t see much of their history in the wood and brick here and have trouble getting their bearings, tracing a course from one corner to the next. Tabbs hears a thousand hearts turn inside desperate chests, a song that cuts through bone and muscle, kept hidden until now. What gesture of commitment can he send out to them? His past stands right before him, judging. How can he be both more and less himself?

  He starts for the ferry to Edgemere, a long line of bodies following him, bringing their uncertainties and contradictions along. So it is. They lift their faces expectantly toward the heavens. Their eyes seem to look through and beyond everything they see for some visitation of blessing or warning.

  He sits with his back doubled to them, hearing their chatter. Tries to listen past their voices and pushes his shoulders against the darkness, breathing the salt air, Edgemere, the black island, pressing upon him in slow continuity, a drop of ink spreading in the ocean. Disembarks from the ferry and under a white hook of moon takes a circuitous route home, full of false stops and starts, diversions, stalkers (freed, free) behind—who can say how close?—throwing shadows of alarm across the street and high on alley walls, Tabbs moving with an intense sense of direction through Edgemere’s little streets winding in upon each other like a basket of eels. After some time he arrives at his place of residence confident that nobody has followed him, steals up the outside steps careful of his footing in the dark, the stairs narrow, shaking under him, the three-story house starkly rectangular in the dark. He leans his guilt into his room.

  Already he can feel the city dropping off his back. He takes a seat in the darkness, hard black light passing through the window. Darkness upon darkness. Here he is with nothing that matters to him in his room. Only that single window looking out and looking in, and the thick box of his days. He thinks of all those hands out there moving around in the dark, dragging the night forward. And his room starts to move, as if the entire house—the walls, beams, roof—will up and shift to an anywhere anytime place like nothing he has known.

  He sees the dawn rise three feet. Blackbirds arrow across autumn sky. Comes out of his room to find the morning waiting for him with too much clarity, the sun casting its best clean light, allowing him to see the city in distant outline across the water. The city wants him to see and remember. He tries to walk off the urge, but so much crosses his consciousness amid the rush, sweep, and crisscross of bodies. Things left behind or discarded, things he didn’t know he had absorbed or that he’d forgotten, time and distance no barrier in a place that is all water and sound, sound carrying across water, snapping him (elastic) in and out of the present, Edgemere city, city Edgemere.

  Does the city really expect men like him to accept its promises? The time away has pushed him into another existence here on Edgemere, out beyond his old life before the war, afar from the city’s field of influence, the space between him and it changed. (Something holds, something stays in place.) He will break back into the world of the alabasters on his own terms, through the boy. Blind Tom. Having worked the details—the mother and Tom together here on Edgemere—in full and determined preparation, Tabbs is ready to take advantage. (One follows the other.) Go about his life with a familiar concentration. Do the things he needs to do. The Freedmen are immediate in the face of his nostalgia.

  Pushing his drained body along, he can’t locate the kinship he feels for the Freedmen, he cannot look at them without thinking about what is to come. They put their song in the air, a sound not easily separable from their bodies and what moves within their bodies, usually kept under wraps, but not so now, skin curving back like windblown curtains to expose auction blocks, swinging gates, the whips, hounds, chains, crops, violations, and vulgarity. Tabbs seeing it all so clearly, body looking. It should unsettle him. It doesn’t. In fact, he starts to see himself in it all, he Tabbs selected, singled out, belonging, living it too. In a manner of speaking, he is one of the Freedmen.

  So engaged that when he stumbles, the force of it does not register at once. Sitting on his haunches, knees up, hands down, confused, catching a breath, waiting for something to happen. He regains his feet, wondering what brought him down. Almost immediately he sees someone come slouching out of the crowd, arms folded across chest, hands inside armpits, lessening the distance, putting himself a yard away from Tabbs, his arms uncrossing and moving into Tabbs’s face, a complete cut in upward vision, two threatening nubs round and smooth at the ends like whittled branches only inches from Tabbs’s nose and mouth. Tabbs can smell them, could kiss or lick them if he wants. The man brings one missing hand to his mouth in a gesture of eating. Please, master. A thin man with a terrible face, he stands with his head twisted to one side, a look of half smile half supplication. Now repeats that ladling motion, compounding the minuses, missing hand feeding air to empty mouth. Please, master. God demands. Talking into Tabbs’
s silence. How will you fathers give your son a stone if he asks you for bread? Then the silent head-twisted supplication. Please, master. Stiff and vacant, Tabbs neither moves nor speaks.

  Do you have anything for me, master?

  Does he?

  What effort it takes to see what is there, Freedmen trying on their new houses, their faces small, almost unnoticeable in windows not made to their shape.

  He isn’t talking. He isn’t playing. He isn’t even moving. Her Thomas. My Tom. Hunkered down in high stiff silence at the piano on the stage above her, face bowed, body slanted forward, his hands in his lap, black skin and black wood glistening with wet light pouring in through the chapel’s four windows, so high up (twenty feet or more) that she can see the sky and little else, a sky swept clean of everything except for a few infrequent tatters—birds? bats?—streaking in and out of vision, cutting across the blue living hand of the Almighty, He who lifted her up from that peculiar country where her blood was harvested along with cotton, sorghum, tobacco, coffee, and carried her across land and water and set her down on this island, Edgemere, then carried her across the threshold into this broad sturdy white-stoned edifice, the Home for the Education and Edification of African Orphans, tucked away at the far end of one of Edgemere’s ancient and narrow streets, where she can be (reunited) with Thomas, her Thomas, My Tom—Didn’t I take care of my Hebrew children?—at the far point of their lives, mother and son on the verge of great joy after an existence of great sorrow, granted the means to pick up from where they left off eleven years ago when Thomas was so rudely and wrongly taken from her at Hundred Gates, a moment that her mind holds on to and will hold on to, so help her God, for as long as she lives. Never forget, never forgive. Thomas, I am here. Your mother is here. Here we are, together again. (Words she might have even spoken once or twice to him since her arrival here on Edgemere.) Waiting for light (or food or drink) to make a difference and brighten his mood, raise his spirits and pull words out of him and save her from another lost afternoon, another lost day inside this chapel where her thoughts are a little less each day, the small parts of herself that she has retained (what is felt in the heart and felt in the blood) among the many lost through both the coming of age—is fifty old for a woman?—and through stolen time, everything that was taken away from them when they were taken from each other eleven years ago, those small parts that remain that she wants to give back to him, needs to give back—the debt she owes, the dues she must pay—breaking away from her little by little each day like the specks of late afternoon dust carried along high above her in the light streaming in through the chapel’s four windows, until (soon, in the course of time) nothing will be left. Crucial not only that they establish and maintain whatever they can, moment by moment, but also that they regain (recover) anything he remembers from their past lives at Hundred Gates, the twenty feet separating them a telescopic space that can slide back in time eleven years (and more), Thomas up there onstage at the piano and she down here on a pew, perfect quiet sealed on the piano’s shiny wooden surface as it is on his burnished skin, his silent tongue hidden inside his mouth, the black and white keys hidden under the lacquered lid. The names of the many places that worked her ragged bright inside her. Athens, Leland, Rome. And the names she has forgotten. Where she had day after day staggered through fields and kitchens and bedrooms and outhouses, sold or traded or bartered or rented out or shuttled about from one plantation or estate or farm to another in her long career as a slave, a contagious song picked up by other presences rising up around her in the room, the dozen or more niggers planted inside glass-fronted frames who assert themselves in song, their proud and heroic countenances sprouting flower-like from high stiff collars, their voices falling through her from where they hang ghostly from walls painted the color of everything and nothing combined—colors are the deeds of light—this choir (Champions of the Race, Reverend Wire calls them) whose identities are a mystery to her, although she recognizes (remembers) two or three faces from years ago in the pages of the Columbus Observer. They sing in a foreign tongue, voices ascending in a long climb that might go on all the way to heaven, up to a listening God but for the plastered ceiling, a ceiling strong and sturdy in its construction like all the others on Edgemere, fortified both lengthwise and sidewise with the slim black hard branches of the bleem tree, a crisscrossed network of wood not unlike a railway depot in appearance. (A hundred places to go. A hundred people to be.) The voices hold in orbit a little longer before they start a slow slide down the walls and large (man-high, man-wide) wood (bleem) cross nailed to the wall behind the stage (black serpent on the cross) pooling around the bottom of the altar, which ripples with the reflection of gold carved letters: WHEN SHALL WE LIVE IF NOT NOW. Now the voices spill over the edge of the stage onto the floor, which is made from irregular and rather broad planks of bleem wood, and tide forward to flood this entire sparse chapel that offers nothing pleasing to the eye other than rows of pews worn smooth with age, each sculpted from an entire trunk of a bleem tree solid and thick to withstand the destructive force of a child, enough of them to seat a hundred orphans or more. All the day the song will hum inside her. She should speak up, say something, say anything and put an end to it, but she doesn’t want to ruin any hours she and Thomas spend together. Enough simply to spend them, together. It is always toward him that her longings turn, a moment followed by a lesser moment and a hunger to return. They are from each other. I am you. (What are the roots that clutch, that bind?) Entangled in the soul and knotted in the flesh, the spirit of union is uppermost in her. She tells herself as she did yesterday and the day before and probably will do tomorrow that she is on free ground. It is from here that everything can come. It is here, right here in this chapel that everything begins. No matter how late in life, she is not immune to fresh experience. Ask her where she’s been, she’ll tell you where she’s going. (See there, up above: not dust carried in the light pouring in through the windows but seeds following the most direct path to growth, impossible to stop them.) Her life was lived way from here in that (unchanged) country that the Almighty told her she had to abandon, He who decided that she should make a life elsewhere, because she had found favor in His sight and He sent her an angel (Mr. Tabbs) who brought her here to Edgemere and reunited her with Thomas and bestowed His blessings upon her (them, us) in succulent abundance: delicious food and drink, beautiful garments, spacious and comfortable quarters where she can settle into soft sleep each night and awaken anew each morning. O Lord I wait in my room at your mercy. Each day runs its course simply enough. Break of dawn, a rooster will cock-a-doodle-do and set all the roosters to crowing to bring the ocean awake, cause it to close its waters around the island. (Listen and hear it.) As the island gropes toward wakefulness—that which takes its color with the locals turning on their beds—she will hear the bedsheets snap when Thomas jumps from his bed, and she’ll fall to—the floorboard creaking under her feet like rusty hinges flying open—and get everything in readiness for the day ahead—choose an outfit for him from his closet, lay it out on the divan, then draw his bath. He will shed his sleeping tunic, hunker down in the tub, and make the water sing, his forming hands lending shapes to the suds. She will kneel before the tub and help him with soap and rag, his bones dancing under her fingers, the only time in the course of a day when he allows her to touch him.