Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Animation surprises him. (What lives leans into the sun.) Flies hovering about his nose, a mingling of pleasure and suspense. He does not drive them away. The world rushes at him alarmingly from every side. How do his fingers measure and remember?

  In vibrations of grass earth records the sound and intensity of falling shafts of sun. And things man-made too: the peanut-shelling machine’s gyrations forever imprinted in the soil below. Arms and legs moving at the same time. Big circles and small circles. Tiny rituals (ceremonies). Accidents of air.

  Nothing strange about sound pressing in, showing a sense of mission. Place. Names rise from locations. Hundred Gates. These few sounds, segments of breath, he rehearses. The syllables of his name skip across his tongue. Thomas. Where do you live? Whose boy are you? Boy, where do you live? Even if there is tangible distance between saying and meaning, a distance that keeps enlarging in breadth and range.

  The sun drifts back inside, hidden behind a curtain of clouds, already damp, beginning to swell. Stars penetrate along with the smell of the fields, the stable, the shed and the gardens, paths and roads. Freshness, a shift in the way he feels.

  His legs hold him upright, his head floating off where birds fly past. This body isn’t his (he doesn’t own it) but moves when he moves, takes him traveling. Easy-gaiting. The long way round. Knows it, knows it all the way.

  He can hear the sound of his own breathing. (Does he own it?) His feet working harder now on the earth.

  Home. (What else would he call it?) The keys line up like hogs in a pen. They are cool when he touches them, as if he is submerging his hands in a cold stream. Trees bend toward earth in strong wind, the longest leaning touch, each a shadow of the other.

  Is it any wonder he sang like that? Why he played like that?

  A pail of water remains near the stovepipe in case of fire. Its cousin, a larger wooden tub, positioned a few yards in front of their cabin. When the door is open it frames a tree-occluded sky. Dirt, the solitary chair, the rough table—all that is sparse here makes it enough to see this wooden tub, set off in a grass-free area of the yard, where they often wash in the morning. It is here that what she remembers happened.

  No one missed his shadow moving before the house. Nothing unusual there. Familiar in fact. Little Thomas quick and secretive that way—some shadow scurrying across your shoulder beyond vision. It is a struggle even to hold him, to cuddle him, Little Thomas, all vigor and resistance. So easy to lose the chain of connection. His form appears clearly among the leaves, and just as quickly, in a surge of color and motion, you see two brown legs sticking out of the wooden tub like ladles, your eyes surprised, well before understanding catches up. (And this part she has either reconstructed or invented: his head disappearing, one arm thrust out of the water and then nothing more.) Words of panic. She runs to the tub and sees him splashing beads of light. An onrush of angry swells, all of the world’s seas lashing at the baby. Remembers lifting him from the tub, hugging his chill limbs to warm them as she carried him to the cabin. Heads and bodies rising in guilt and alarm—you must keep up with Little Thomas—everyone (her daughters) except her husband, Domingo, who continues to slouch, a bony-shouldered hump. He is a small slim man, quietly sensitive about both his height and his weight, refusing to allow things of denser body or stronger elements to torment him. (No sun or heat is enough. No spiraling rainstorm.) He even resists the ease of a man-made chair, preferring the uneven planks of the floor. She hugs the baby against her chest, his breathing infinitely far from his heart. She closes her eyes. Whispers a prayer in the dark. Her body is cautious and will not ask too much, just this one thing. Let him live.

  She opens her eyes to find herself looking through the open doorway. Sees herself taking a clean rag to wipe down the baby’s body. Her hands lifting him like a plant destined for a pot and plunging him into the wood tub. A sound slips out of the corner of her mouth.

  Mingo gets to his feet, shaking off tension and fret. Casually—do not get caught up in the uproar of the moment—takes the baby from her and holds him up and out for inspection, rough assurance. Kisses the baby and hands him back over to her. But he doesn’t have quite the skill to pull it off, to calm and convince. (Which comes first?)

  In the days that follow, the near tragedy works on and into all of them, even the girls, everyone silent and uncomfortable, nervy and on edge, muted and mutual disgust at their failings, although Little Thomas’s injuries are few. This will not be the last mishap, his last escape from serious harm in the formative years. Her unusual son. (She prefers the term curious. He seems receptive to things that usually escape our notice or that notice tries to escape: shit, piss, spews of dirt, foul odors such as the smell of stagnant water or boiling chitlins, what crawls or flies, buzzes or hisses. Seems to imbibe as much pleasure from the sound of sucking sap from the stalk as from the taste of the sap itself.) So she devises this method of keeping an eye on the baby as she goes about her work. She puts him in a cotton-bale box that she can carry around with her. But he soon masters the ability to crawl over its high sides and scramble away, on the prowl, the border between him and the world thin. (He can’t observe the universe so the universe is without boundaries.) In this way rusty nails puncture his knees. (She is convinced to this day that the metal found its way to his skin less by accident than by choice. Put simply: he had unearthed them. Recall the dirt under his fingers and impacted in the map-like creases of his palms.) Splinters embed themselves under his fingernails and make wood claws out of both hands. His injuries become a discernible point of reference, crawling and walking one continuous thing to her. For the first fifteen months of life he either lies or sits, shaking in his own noise. Then the helpless scatterings that typified his first attempts to push and pull himself. He never seemed to get better at it. Never seemed to move forward or back, but remained, immobile, confined to his belly, like a worm. (Forgive her for thinking this about her own child. Forgive me.) Almost never saw him sitting in an upright position unless he was propped up against a leg of the piano while Mary Bethune or one of the Bethune girls sat prim and proper playing above him. Even took his food while prone on the floor on his belly.

  But all that changed when he learned how to crawl. She remembers it this way: she was sitting on a stack of logs a few yards behind the mansion, where she usually took her break under the shade of a tree, a block of time that belonged to her, short as it was, a few minutes after she had finished serving supper to the family and before she had to begin the tasks that would carry her through dinner and beyond.

  She enjoyed that spot, her husband’s handiwork all about, wood he had neatly cut and stacked. Almost like an unfinished house (hers), the laying down of some promised future. Not that she ever really thought about it that way. Her break afforded her the opportunity to go slow with a coffee, provided a chance to be starkly alone with Thomas, belly down on the ground beside her, her thoughts soft, faint, and faraway. She remembers the silence of this day, just the sound of her sipping coffee, turning her little spoon in her big cup, and the usual curious noises of the boy, harsh and moist. The Bethune residence an amazing sight, as light was actually pushing up from the ground so that the mansion seemed to be floating on a blanket of illumination. She lowered her head and brought the cup to her mouth and the next thing she knew Thomas had somehow managed to climb up an inclined stump of wood to perch at the top of a pile, a deliberate elevation of self.

  That was the start of it. Crawling brought a striking transformation, a living thing changing before your eyes, some lowly creature confined to dirt, his hands directly under his chest and his knees bent outward at odd angles, allowing him the sideways motion of a lizard weaving between legs and chairs. By this means achieving ambulation, however odd. And then, once more, he became unhinged from time. No slow progression from crawling to standing to the first stumbling steps with hands balanced against the wall. Instead the crawling went on for years, his legs refusing to allow him to stand upright let alone ste
p a foot forward.

  After a frustrating year or two, he somehow upped his crawl and acquired speed and lift, so that he was able to actually lope catlike above the ground.

  But the miracle of walking brought new challenges. (The lineage of a thing in its later stages.) He never mastered the ability to go up or down stairs unaided, or to sit down or get up from a chair. Trying to perform one action or the other he would totter backward and forward, and from side to side, his otherwise strong legs brittle and uncertain. (Not unlike General Toon attached to his black canes.) And rarely could he put one foot in front of the other with natural recognizable rhythm and ease, his gait either so heavy that he seemed to be sinking into the ground, or so light (in Miss Toon’s presence) that there seemed nothing solid about his person.

  He squeezes the pale shell until it cracks open, rubs off the crackly brown skin with a set rhythmic motion of thumb and forefinger, and tosses the nut into his mouth. The husk remains on the ground, collecting water and sound, one among many, humming gourds. A numbing buzz in his hands and feet—there is a nerve that stimulates, another that slows down—music entering him as far from the voices and fingers that made it.

  The sun appears as to one looking through smoked glass.

  Where is Little Thomas?

  Smoke rises in shafts of pure black illumination.

  Where is Little Thomas? You must keep up with your brother.

  Glass glints, half smoke, half sun.

  Thomas?

  Why doesn’t he respond to the sound of his chanted name? Truth be told—she knows it, her whole family knows it—he is caught in the grip of a habit to flee the restraints of their scrutinizing presence—his conspirators, pigs and chickens rush to greet him—and find his way into the mansion. In fact, he can find his way all over, seemingly no place or thing he can’t pry his way into. Rambling. Has even wandered miles to trespass on neighboring farms and estates and march into people’s homes and lives. His escapes, invasions, necessitate new secrets and new lies. No one can check his ability to go sightless wherever his feet will take him. Quick and fearless like a carriage hurtling along in the darkness.

  After dinner each day Mary Bethune plays the piano like a medical regime. She returns to the piano to give her daughters lessons in the long deep lull after supper and before retiring to bed. Tom leans out from between the lower levels, the legs of the furniture, the side of a cabinet. He sidles up to the piano while the daughters practice, his body writhing to the tones.

  It’s okay, Charity. Leave him be.

  One day like any other after she has completed the lessons, put an end to her daughters’ complaints and hesitations, and called for Charity to see them off to bed, one day like this as she is walking off, she hears the music that had just ended begin again, the same piece. She turns and sees Tom with his chin at the keyboard, his hands in their mischief toying with the keys. Struck by the moment, they all stand and look, her, Charity, and the girls.

  Charity gives her an expression, half-amused, half-apologetic, unable to invent some excuse. No, Thomas, she says. I’m sorry, ma’m.

  He certainly takes to the instrument, Mary Bethune says. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thinking, They surprise you this way every so often. (One day he is crawling behind her as was his habit and the next day he is walking behind her. Skips a stage in his evolution.) She picks up the blind boy, his bare feet kicking the piano keys as she hands him over to Charity.

  Anything else, ma’m? Charity shifts her gaze. I best be getting these girls off.

  Although the other tries to veil it she detects a bit of admiration in this event. More than a little. No doubt about it. Charity seems pleased by the look on her mistress’s face.

  One afternoon not long after, she hears music rising from the room and enters it expecting to see one of her daughters at the piano. (Any excuse to avoid their other studies.) Can’t believe what she sees. What she hears. Before the moment can overwhelm her he hits another chord, tinkles out another melody. Hands flashing everywhere.

  She sends for the mother, her other, who is not sure she sees things clearly. Eyeballs humming. Ears spinning. A feeling in her body, light, tilting over, all link lost to her surroundings. Ah that’s it. I’ve finally gone off the deep end. Jumped the plank.

  She sets out to retrieve him.

  Little Thomas drops down to the floor and embraces a piano leg. A small target of conflict. Refusing to let go. She has to pry his hands away, finger by finger. Another time he actually crawls under the piano itself, slides and burrows into the cramped space between mahogany above and pine below. Stays a long time, calm and happy.

  General Bethune stares at his oldest daughter indifferently, taking in her report. It is a disagreeable feature of her character that she always seems to enjoy revealing secrets in her possession. But he hears what she has to say, half believing, and dismisses her with instructions for Charity and Mingo to appear before him immediately. Not later, now. His daughter skips off in excitement. While he waits for them he tries to reassemble the essential facts from his daughter’s garbled telling. This much he knows: if what she said is true, his wife hasn’t told him about it. Why hasn’t she told me? Not a question really, but a rumination, a reflection. How well he knows the sentimental attachments of the weaker sex.

  While he is busy with one thing or another he will hear music drifting through the house. This is not listening, a conscious effort on his part, far from it, only the music’s lurking presence following him from room to room. No way he will ever sit and watch the girls and the women—his wife, his daughters, his servant—and the boy at the piano, an act of spectating that is as much vulgar as it is awkward, like spying on someone engaged in an intimate act.

  He gets to his feet with a certain effort before they enter the room. (Best to be on your feet in situations like this, assume a stance of authority and command.) On first sighting he fixes them with a ferocious glance before they can avert their eyes. He means business. General Toon means business. They come in cautiously, as if the house might collapse under their footsteps. Come before him slowly and quietly with heads bowed.

  Suh, you wanna see us? The woman, Charity, saying it, not her husband.

  He doesn’t even bother to reply, to speak at all and ferret out their account, but waits for a lifting of their gaze before he casts his eyes first upon Charity then upon Mingo—he knows they can see him, even if they pretend not to—his look itself demanding a full and factual explanation.

  If he wants to play, play he will. She will see to that. Any right-minded person should be ready to do the same, be willing to afford a pitiful soul this much. The crude but touching expression that bares his innocence and devotion. Little more than simple curiosity perhaps, explainable by some of Nature’s extraordinary aberrations. What matter the source? The motive? (Could you call it that?) Let him play. Under her guidance. Not training exactly. (What would you call it?) She sees his face go bright. He is enjoying this immensely and she begins to enjoy it too.

  At the piano he is strong and loose, no matter how awkward and ungainly he is at other times. Mary Bethune is quite careful in her instruction. Everything is shown in motion and in harmony. Whenever he plays a lesson correctly—well, truth to tell, he plays everything correctly; he shows himself capable of great technical variety; demonstrate a scale and he will play it; show him a melody and he will bounce it back, working the pedals as she worked them; she can only fault his playing for being excessive, too forceful; all that frantic passion (on one occasion he embraces her, laughing into her neck); then too there are times when he duplicates her exactly in volume and intonation, the original inflection—she rewards him with, Admirable! An odd calm completes each lesson, as if he is waiting for her to say the word. Admirable! She comes out of the room exhausted after she finishes her lessons with him, for she can never show him too much, his desire an insurmountable force, hands having made a hundred exertions, ready for a hundred more. Given an attentive pup
il—no, that is not the word; given a faithful pupil, timing, and technique—his left hand may even be better than the right, the Negro’s natural sense of rhythm—are easy enough to demonstrate, familiar ground under our feet. But the finer things—a definite feeling for order, a communicable clarity, an accurate sense of form, the lucky finds and the discovered refinements, the ascendance of beauty—are untranslatable, locked away in the farthest and darkest corner of the soul. No instructor or academy can teach that. And what can’t be shown can’t be mimicked. A long way of saying that these lessons are headed nowhere, are the proverbial dead end. Nothing gained. For the Negro race can never produce a Mozart. The world has never known and will never know a Negro genius. Still she feels inclined to continue the lessons as she notes some change in his playing—she wouldn’t exactly call it growth, development, more a polishing, the mastery of repetition until something shines—as each day he performs some little note or phrase that causes her to look at him with renewed interest and surprise. And when they are done for the day, he sits with his dark hands on the ivory keys, fingers spread wide, a settled pleasure.

  So it goes. Then one day several months into their lessons, she rises from the piano at the close of a session, ready to summon Charity—Take the boy and tidy up a bit—when Tom’s voice springs up. He is singing. What she sees and hears tells her that he is transplanting the foreign lyrics to the unrelated melody she just taught him. She knows the words to the song. He gets some of them right, some of them wrong. No. Something else. In fact, he is mixing the verses of three different songs her daughters are quite fond of singing away from the piano. Somehow the phrasing and timing are just right, perfect.

  He bites into the pink skin of the boiled pig snout. Admirable! he shouts. He drains his glass of lemonade and places it back on the table. Admirable! He tastes his potatoes. Admirable! He gets up from the table and walks around the cabin touching things. Admirable!