Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Let’s bear the burden of this life

  We haven’t far to go

  So, day in and day out, she took that little he gave and made do. Nothing to occupy her hours, other than work. All the time in the world on her hands and no time. The rigidity of her station in life. The lack of options. No true leisure time to speak of. She would let her imagination loose on any sights that crossed her vision. Look up and remark on the shape of the clouds. Going from herself to herself as far as her feet could carry her, to the very edge of the estate’s grounds, or to another town or city within walking distance (ten miles or twenty) when the Bethunes sent her on errands. No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t succeed in desiring non-places whose existence she couldn’t verify with her own eyes, although she had heard about people (woogies) and even knew certain people (woogies) who had supposedly sojourned to or taken up residence in some of those places that had names such as Atlanta, Oxford, London, Paris, Zanzibar. In fact, she had doubts that another world existed—what Union? What North? Washington? what White House?—right up to the moment that the steamship whose deck she and Mr. Tabbs stood on pulled into the city’s harbor. It took little convincing to get her on board that ship. Mr. Tabbs made her his offer and she gladly accepted it. She was ready for adventure. The prospect filled her with joy. She and Thomas would be reunited. A thousand miles between them (ten thousand), a moment that perhaps she and her son both dreamed of, she from Hundred Gates and he from wherever he was on this earth. So—tell the truth about it—she told herself that she would voyage in order to see—things belong to those who look at them—voyage to prove this other world did indeed exist—that was the real reason why she accepted Mr. Tabbs’s offer, was so willing to believe in his promises—and, also, believe that Thomas was alive somewhere in this other world.

  At Hundred Gates, everything brought her back to herself and her small world. Surely Hundred Gates (or some other estate, plantation, farm, kitchen) would be the last sight her eyes would register for all eternity. She felt a stranger to herself. Talking little if at all because she had no say. Indeed, she was happy to go through her labors if it meant limited contact with other people. People were obstacles to be avoided (diverted looks), never approached, and rarely spoken to. And when someone did speak to her, she would put on the appropriate face and say nothing true, nothing false, in an effort to hurry on her way. Night never returned what the day had taken, for she would awaken with aches and pains, sore, stiff, puffy and swollen. So it was that she would pass each and every day, moving slowly but surely toward disappearance, toward extinction, knowing that her disappearance would have no impact on the world.

  That life of nothing she had thought was a permanent part of her, branded in her skin. (That small darkened kitchen, that other small darkened bedroom, that tiny cabin.) Then the Almighty brought her to Edgemere by His beneficent hand so that she could repose her body and have peace of mind with time at her disposal to get reacquainted with Thomas, her Thomas, her first reprieve from industry (labor, work)—shake the rug into the fire—in her many many years (fifty, more) of residence on this earth. Now, she feels parts of herself that she never felt before, muscles she never knew she had.

  She repositions her feet on the floor of the chapel (well-seasoned bleem wood) without the old agility and grinds her teeth in annoyance. Thomas moves his head ever so slightly at the noise. Could it be (she wonders) that hard labor, constant work, the daily routine of toil, enabled her to bear up better than this present inactivity, for at Hundred Gates, where the hour and the minute ruled her, she perceived the flow of time less? Released (cut loose) from her time-constrained body, there is no longer anything that can distract her from herself. Memory won’t leave her alone, won’t let her escape this body she has inhabited for so long. Eager with possibility, the self she might (can) become is held hostage—what other word is there for it?—fights tooth and nail against a past that would conquer and claim every inch of her, all of her glands and organs contested.

  She plants herself deeper into the pew. But is she really here? No. She is still there, at Hundred Gates, watching the carriage wobble off down the tree-lined gravel road. Everything grows up around that image. Where she is now, this Home, sprouts up right through tufts of grass on the estate. The floor is shrinking beneath her feet. She looks up and sees the dust motes above floating and swaying in reverse out through the windows, taking the years back from her, eleven years. (Count them.) I can’t keep no numbers. She looks at Thomas. His face is disappearing, particles of skin pulling away into a tiny cloud. The ceiling is lifting. And she starts to rise too. Her new life here on Edgemere, her new life here with Thomas is only something she has dreamed up—

  I woke up this morning

  Where I was I didn’t have a clue

  —a dream that began the moment she and Mingo stood in broad afternoon light watching in outraged resignation as the carriage left the way it had come down the tree-lined gravel road and gradually dissolved from sight—corrosives of sunlight—the sound of its wheels turning in their torn ears. Nothing she or he could do to stop it. (What could a nigger do?) She almost speaks those words to Thomas now. Nothing we could do to stop it. (How doubt that now?) It matters somehow that he knows. But the time to speak of it hasn’t come. She has retained a fixed image of Little Thomas in the carriage, an image that lasted all the way across to this island of Edgemere and is with her still. As she rises, higher and higher, she closes her eyes to visualize the moment better, the entire scene in perfect focus. The sunset blazing as if pumped up with blood. The woogie’s finely tailored trousers of an indeterminate color. The driver’s crumpled hat. Some carefully phrased farewell—Safe travels, was that it? May the Lord be with you, was that it? We bid you Godspeed, was that it?—that the General or Miss Toon muttered into the hot air, while she and Mingo kept silent without a word to anyone who had a say in the matter, Mingo’s face broad and smooth and full of astonished disbelief. The trees swaying, the green world turning on its machinery. Little Thomas’s white teeth brilliant in his open mouth. The sound of her asking herself, What had she done, they done, for the General to enact this punishment on them? These living pictures from another country, another time, unsettle her.

  She pours words, all of the words she saved up from the moment she set out on her journey with Mr. Tabbs and all that she had accumulated since Little Thomas’s departure (eleven years’ worth), that she planned to speak to Thomas, she pours them into the bottommost parts of her heart, reinforcing her plans and projects, a weighty (unshakable?) foundation. Slowly, she feels and hears herself start to descend back to earth, drawn down. She opens her eyes—she doesn’t want to see anymore—as soon as her backside resumes its place on the pew, heavy, beaten (spent), and pain-ridden like the rest of her. And still she feels weight, causing her to wonder if she will sink right through the floor, but with the question she feels an answer rise in her chest, which draws her gaze toward Thomas, and she looks at him now, the two of them sitting here in the chapel breathing the same hungry calm. She takes his face apart, dissects his motionless hands, frail body, and fixed well-cobbled feet, the all of him, trying to find any indication that he remembers his abduction. For her part, the recollection of her final seconds with Little Thomas is what stood upright in her mind for all these years, her body what subsides, Thomas growing, taking on flesh, while she decays, loses substance, life rushing out of her lungs with every breath. As year followed year, she grew to hate more and more the General and Miss Toon and their rotten shat-out seed, hated them with all the thought and feeling her body could hold, hated every single nasty-ass wet-chicken-smelling woogie living or dead who had ever stank up the earth. Strangely easy to hate them, to intone chants and curses—Further on up the road, someone gon hurt you like you hurt me—that would bring boiling plagues and flesh-eating locusts on their generations to the end of time.

  She wants him—her Thomas, my Tom—to know that if she gets angry at him, if she voices
any displeasure, he must know that it is only her past attacking him. Forgive her. Forgive me. Her resentments, her disappointments, her feelings of isolation, indifference, and resignation followed her here. (The weather doesn’t help, a miserable day, humid and muggy, reminding her of home, the way it always seems in her dreams.) But she has crossed over—Mr. Tabbs, do we really have to cross all that water?—so how can she allow herself to think that way? She should be rejoicing. Wade in the water. There is life and abundance for future years. (They both know it. They feel it in their throat and lungs.) A white devil in fancy trousers took Thomas away from her and a nigger angel in fancier pants brought her back to him. That old life is gone. That life shouldn’t (doesn’t) mean anything to her anymore. (The point at which memory softens.) So she must give up thinking, must empty her body of the past and let the future draw her forward, even if Thomas just sits up there at the piano hour after hour, day after day like a lump on a log, treating her to copious silence, nonspeaking and nonmoving no matter how hard she stares across the distance at him, stares until her eyes throb. (It is now later than it was awhile ago and still he hasn’t moved, no way to tell if he is awake or asleep.) She has crossed over, thus it is enough for her to just sit here with him this way, sit and contemplate their past and their prospects, while the closely scheduled activities (instructions, lessons, learning) of the orphans and their teachers go on around them. Indeed—she sees it now—that wise someone—Mr. Tabbs? Reverend Wire? Deacon Double?—had the presence of mind to realize that she and Thomas need to be alone together in the chapel each day, this is just the place for them to trade their silences, for they know, have always known how to answer each other without speaking, without questions. What they share as mother and son, they share alone. Between them sleeps the words they never exchanged, were forced to leave behind. Each day she feels his silence more keenly. (Silence is not a word she associates with Little Thomas, even at his most innocent.) She is apprenticing herself to hush, which withdraws on occasion—she hears chalk clacking and squeaking against blackboards, counting beads colliding, orphans asking about the words that surprise them most during their spelling lessons, orphans at their looms, pottery wheels, and knitting and sewing machines, everything in the Home talking to itself; and beyond that faint distant sounds in the distance: tinkling cowbells, the braying of donkeys, rattling carts, and sea currents muscling into the shore—giving place to the echo of her secret thoughts that surprise even her. Tears stanched behind her shut eyelids, she cried all down inside herself that first night and many nights after. (The ache still even though he is here.) Never the full outpouring of grief because she knew that such letting go would unravel her, turn the spindle of her self until nothing was left. But from time to time she could feel it rise inside her and threaten release, threaten to leak (seep) or spill out of her closed mouth, especially when she unknotted and removed her head scarf before bed. (A body responds differently in the dark when it knows that other people are not around to observe it.) Perhaps Mingo heard it, that soft wet sound dammed inside her. Perhaps Thomas is listening too. Before coming here to Edgemere, when was the last time she had slept without dreaming he was dead? (And longing to return the favor, kill each and every woogie in revenge, man, woman, and child. Wanted to resurrect the ones that were already dead and buried, murder them again, then incinerate all trace of them.) She turned her thoughts toward forgetting, but to her surprise, thinking Thomas dead did not help her any, for death does not sever the ties with the living but pulls the worlds of the living and the dead closer together and braids them in eternal alliance (allegiance). Thomas was the afterlife, pieces of him everywhere. (The cupboard drawer startled open, the cup that moved of its own volition across the table, the sudden chill on a hot day, curtains swaying in a room where all the windows were shut, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of her eye.) How could she gather up what was left of him in this world and move it permanently to the other side? I am poured out like water. As year followed year, she searched for a reason not to long for him. And why should he be the one to claim her attention? I am the only one. Of course there had been others, the ones taken away from her; Thomas was not the first. To say her world is shot through with loss like a moth-eaten garment is to say nothing since every gap in the cloth opens into possibility, what the eye sees when it peers through the holes, what the fingers find when they poke through. She believes in the ability (the will) of mothers to make right—she assumes blame; a need builds inside her—to weave patterns of past and present (fashioning) into a cocoon that can keep her offspring’s name intact, Thomas (never Tom), confident (now) that their suffering, Mingo’s, her daughters’, her own—I am the mother—cannot touch him anymore. This Thomas is moving toward being her Thomas again.

  She retraces the stages of her journey and comes to remember that port (two white ladies under two white parasols) from where she and Mr. Tabbs set sail on a small steamship tossed by the large sea. Distinctly recalls the urgency in which the ship slid out into open water and how the horizon exploded out of the lovely expanse of blue before the deckhands had completely raised the gangplank, the harbor quickly thinning from view, everything hurrying along with all deliberate speed to afford her no chance to change her mind and turn back. Having never confronted the sea, she stood on the deck for a while, wondering at passage over water, at buoyancy, power, and weight, at the salt in the air, the movement of the craft keeping her body occupied as it sought balance, her shadow floating alone on top of waves brimming with scooting fish, more ornate sea creatures submerged beneath, their scales sparkling like the shards of a broken mirror, and mermaids and mermen surfacing now and again to chew the thirsty air, their transparent lungs shining through their exposed rib cages. The many ports they entered, passengers boarding or disembarking, and the many sights, sounds, and smells revealed to her even as she stood on deck and looked back at her past, all that she was flashing from the flashing water, her tragedies like sunken vessels with an angle of hull rising up out of the water.

  At last—two weeks? two months? two years?—they approached the city’s harbor, and as if to give her maximum time to take in what she was seeing, the ship came almost to a standstill, the lulled water tossing it (and her) gently like a body turning out of sleep. A swarm of vessels (dark-sailed dhows and the bulky overcrowded ferries, body braided to body on deck) with their high massive hulls came into her line of sight out of the resounding vastness, some approaching the harbor, others heading out to sea, one vessel alive in another’s movement. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. A waking dream. (Light asks no questions.) Every breath of air made her face shudder. The engine cut off altogether and the ship bobbed into the pier, moored in perfect alignment between two posts like a horse inside its stall. She and Mr. Tabbs were among the first passengers to descend the gangplank onto the pier—she was wobbly at first, a necessary weight (more of the world than we think); with all that water under her for days and weeks she had forgotten that she weighed anything; for his part, Mr. Tabbs took a moment to accustom himself to land, shaking each leg energetically—where the land moved with mariners studying their travel charts and maps, muscled crews hauling crates into and out of blockhouses and stores, drivers fixed on buckboards behind packhorses idle in anticipation. They did not leave the pier to enter the magnificent city surging with legions of people—had she wanted to?—but made haste, ascended another gangplank and boarded a ferry for the final crossing to Edgemere. In less than an hour she heard the call for landing. Edgemere floated into sight. Seen from board at a distance this expanse of sea seemed a thing totally distinct from the small outspread island that emerged from it. These were special waters. Perhaps this was the very sea where the Almighty had drowned old Pharaoh’s army to save Mr. Moses and those Hebrew children.

  Wade in the water

  God’s gon trouble the water

  (Yes, she had these thoughts.)

  Once on land, she and Mr. Tabbs set off by foot for
their destination, the Home for the Education and Edification of African Orphans. She walked the black length of her mind under a dark overcast day, tall curtains of fog hanging beneath dense low-hanging clouds that burned faintly red and black above as no sky she had seen before, the ocean a long flat cloth connecting the island to the horizon. Through the fog (inland) she saw the faint outline of houses silhouetted in the distance. She watched as the ocean started to pull its waters away from the island and restore several feet of borrowed shore, the dhows bobbing slowly back to land. In a counter cadence a thronging of fishermen started hauling in their nets, bright streams of wetness running over them as they pulled fist on water-logged fist. She kept closely in step with Mr. Tabbs as he took a path that turned into one tight street after another, each sidewalk part of a little valley pierced with pinpoints of light from the many candles that were already starting to be lit in the windows of two-story stone houses rising up on either side of them. Soon she caught her first glimpse of a donkey, the beast approaching her from the opposite direction, crates stacked on its small but powerful back and its head curled into its own shadow, but the animal still certain in its course. That donkey followed by a second then a third, each donkey raising its face to the others, breath passed from mouth to mouth, owner behind. Ah, the wonder of it all: ocean, island, dhow, donkeys, fishermen. But you’re free now, Mr. Tabbs said. She had tasted the sound of her new identity on her tongue and liked it so much she would call herself nothing else. Free. Emancipated.

  The curtains of fog parted and the sun broke its chains and drifted from behind the clouds and found its place, a little bright island floating in the sky. For the first time she saw in full clarity the little green and yellow and pink and orange stone houses of Edgemere, and beyond in the middle distance a tower-like structure that she took to be—Mr. Tabbs pointed, There, he said—the Home set a good mile inland from the ocean in its own alien (an aloneness) terrain, a vast grassy plot, against a blurred background of trees (bleem). The Home hung (floated?) before her eyes, even as she flowed (floated?) toward it. So here she was—Here I am—plugged into this brave new world—where she is now, who she is now—her mind throbbing beyond language, beyond meaning. Thomas. Little Thomas. My Tom. Her eleven-year wait would soon be over thanks to the Almighty—all praise due—who had decided to make the impossible possible through His mysterious means.