Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Her pupils have repented. They are urging her to return, to take up their guidance and instruction again. They have drawn up a letter and taken the trouble of direct and immediate delivery through the quick medium of a servant’s hand, having subscribed themselves on the best paper in the best ink. The missive assures her that they need her, that they are lost without her. They swear to listen. They swear to obey. They swear to practice. They swear hard work and deep sweat. They will look lovingly at sheets of sound during all of their free hours. But Tom is her judgment, the solid basis of all her hopes. It is not the miracle that makes a realist turn to religion. A true realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability to believe in a miracle, and, faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.

  After the rain, the air is rinsed clean, the light precise, every line and edge firmly in sight, the farthest distance diminished, as near as your hand, lands across the oceans captured in a single glance.

  The wood is dry. Who will saw it?

  Tom.

  The fireplace crackles and smokes. Smoke whistles and sings, rising its way through the chimney and out into the world where the pines run. Tom’s arms rush forward at acute angles.

  What is that you are playing?

  The fire sounds like loud kisses.

  I am playing the rain, he says.

  She takes several clean sheets of paper with staffs already printed on them. Tom has already moved on to another piece, one she recognizes.

  Tom, would you play it for me? she asks.

  Tom does not answer.

  Play the rain for me, she says.

  He switches melodies without interruption. Once he finishes it, she has him repeat it, and once more after that, five times in all until she has completely scored the composition. At the top of the sheet where the first bars begin she writes “The Rain Storm.”

  James, look at this. She holds the pages of sheet music before his face. Good God. The woman has lost her mind. Trying to get him to read music was like trying to teach Sanskrit to a Choctaw.

  Mary—

  He wrote it, she says.

  He looks at her distrustfully. Mary, now this too. He actually stands up, bad legs and all. What are you trying to tell me? Have me believe only so much.

  No, James, she says. He wrote it.

  Sound lending sense.

  His first composition. (Could you call it that?)

  She sits with her husband. We should have it published, she says.

  He does not answer her right away, a good sign. Whenever she outlines some idea that he doesn’t agree with, he interrupts her before she fully lays it out. But if he agrees he keeps quiet until she concludes, then closes his eyes as if searching his dark places only to discover that the words she had spoken were the same ones he had already formulated himself.

  Nothing of that now. He gives her an odd look, one she has never seen before. Why? he asks. Suspicion in his look, watching her like a potential thief.

  The following day he purchases an upright piano for his printing office.

  Would you use the word composer?

  Let us consider the possibilities.

  Though she would not be so bold as to describe herself as a technician, let alone an expert—an artist? not even; never that word for herself, something shameful even in pronouncing it—she has known music all of her life and considers herself well versed on the subject, both in mind and in heart. Understands a thing or two about the complex and complicated (murky) process of inspiration and composition. Start here: all sounds are not the same in value even if they share external similarities. So much in what lies behind the utterance, the hidden life, and we must seek to recognize and identify this spirit, learn to distinguish one motion from another lest we confuse conscious intention with simplistic assertion (reaction). Would we accord the same musical weight to a nursery rhyme as to a sonata?

  Countrymen and foreigners alike have noted the Negro’s special gift for song. Melodies snap through their blood. Rhythms wholly specific to their skin ambulate their breath and limbs, animating their bodies in a perpetual eye-exhausting frenzy. These are facts we all agree on. But how little or how much does this really tell us? And how useful, she wonders, is it in helping us to understand this peculiar boy Tom, a full-blooded member of his race and also its singular contradiction? Tom’s playing and preferences pose the most urgent questions. Granted, he has God-given and blood-driven talent. No lesson he can’t master—she takes some credit for his achievements; she is a teacher, a director, fine at what she does—even when she applies the most advanced pedagogic methods. Surprised at the occasional error in his playing or singing. Has come to expect a flawless response; he seems to know what you want and gladly provides it. But can he do anything other than parrot what she does? Can any Negro be more than a parrot? True genius creates. A recital is more than a reproduction. The player must animate the preexisting piece with his own breath and in so doing put the idiosyncratic self on display, in all its glory but without hiding any of its imperfections. She has yet to witness—what she has been waiting for—the unexpected in Tom’s playing, that something more that would tell her that Tom is doubly conscious. For no mind can engender until it is divided into two. (She has given some thought to this matter.) Creation in either composing or playing involves the vital interaction between opposing forces to bring forth an even more vital third.

  Knowing thus, she concludes that Tom is fully of a piece with his race. Shut eyes and bulging forehead, he lacks the needed spirit. (He does not have the spirit. He does not have spirit.) Yes, his details are exact, his description is accurate, but his interpretation and conclusions are random. Where is the conscious breath? (Easy to let your lungs operate on their own, under the unconscious rhythms of habit.) He plays others, never himself. What we have to consider, Tom does not survey the world with the eyes of an explorer, adventurer, or builder. No. He never stirs from the field of the possible, however much he might like to enlarge it. (Assuming that he possesses such a lofty desire. Assuming much.) Should not a song disturb the ear, the senses, even as it pleases? Deformations are not foreign to a composer. In Tom’s case the only thing disturbed is a certain order of whatever is already possible. If he has complex (divided) emotions, are they not entities he can neither locate nor name?

  The name is a crucial point of entry. So much in the heading, the title of the composition, where a few words or numerals can convey an entire story. And the lack of a proper heading closes down the melody and brings a corresponding absence of involvement in the listener. Disregard at your own risk. I am playing the rain. On first hearing Tom you seem to detect the richness, the precision, and the balance of high classical manner, accomplished through an agreeable variety of techniques. Upon closer examination—have another listen; listen—you realize that a song, or composition (your call), is for Tom a mere means like any other. You hear the presence of imitation not far behind what at first strikes the ear as an original melody, the distillation of one or two eternal truths. The mundane veiled in a flourishing of riffs and rhythms. (After all, he is only a boy, only a nigger. And he suffers a malady, one or more.)

  Art is expression, and for lowly forms expression is an impossible act. Would a sow show its love for mud and oats by means of a grunt, or a cow moo in appreciation of cud and grass?

  His head sways on his shoulders, as if he has a hard time controlling it, is barely able to keep it upright.

  An idiot and a nigger—lord have mercy—Tom is doubly short of self. (Perhaps triply short. She had not counted his blindness.) Though he cannot see and he hardly (rarely) speaks—or communicates at all for that matter; often he just sits or stands, doing nothing in particular, other than smiling or baring his teeth—his manner at the piano, his ambience, his bubbling over with happiness, suggests that his primary reason for playing is to please the family, especially the female sex, her and her daughters, and
his mother and his sisters. But true expression is independent of occasion.

  It seems impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best have done already. (The speed an accuracy of her reasoning. How logical she can be.) Would it not be impertinent to suggest that he wishes to? Can he wish, aspire, set goals? Other than in the bodily longing of a chicken desiring feed, a bird desiring a worm, a duck drawn to a pond? Other than in the set demands of Nature, essentials, such as the changing of the seasons or the earth’s need for rain?

  The evening is drawing in, the dim lamps seeming to gain strength.

  Your colors sing, Tom says.

  You can imagine her surprise when Dr. Hollister, after yet another examination—they have not digested his previous few visits, let alone got him out of their system completely—tells them that Tom can actually see large bright objects held up right before his eyes.

  All would like to believe they have saved Tom from serious harm or irrevocable death more than once. Belief along the lines of a confession, as in, I bit off more than I can chew, as the saying goes. Count him among these confessors. Granted, Tom is enough to break down the courage and resolve of even those well accustomed to the Negro’s frequent aggressions and outrages. (Imagine the dangerous consequences of all this seeing its way into print—a comic front-page headline: A Scentoriferous Fight with a Blind Musical Nigger. See p. 18. Containing Adventures, Melodies and Scrapes.) So what should one do now, install him in his room (pantry) for all eternity? Or leave him to his own devices, come what may?

  This is what I’ve been saying, his wife says.

  Let him, he says. The dim light from the lamp outlines his bent shoulders and twisted legs. I’ve never met or seen a nigger who can’t get himself out of something he got himself into.

  From then on she starts to leave Tom alone at the piano for hours at a time. Days and days of this. But what of those moments when no music comes? What does he do with himself? She can only assume.

  Say what you want, his wanderings establish a routine, this element of habit that develops a muscular sense of place. He knows the land, this space called Hundred Gates. Breathes its air and absorbs its sun. Not that all of those invisible and silent hours are taken up with wandering. She learns as much when a neighbor, some planter, calls to inquire about their blind nigger. Only then does she discover that her daughters have been spending much of their free time secretly presenting Tom for impromptu performances for a handful of their neighbors, have been transporting him by foot to their parlors—ones with pianos—to demonstrate his peculiar talents. Of course, she is shocked, and the revelation causes her to question the why, what the girls stand to gain from these activities, holding out the possibility that they gain nothing at all, pride motivating them perhaps, vanity—showing off their possession—or some lesser transgression, such as pure childish indulgence. More than a bit of planning in all of this, for the next day, even before she has a chance to confront the girls, she unearths a new fact: her daughters—the oldest is behind it; she is sure of that much, proof not long in coming—had actually begun sending written notes, crude advertisements, to the other farms through the hands of the nigger girl, Antoinette—such insubordination; now they will need to purchase a new girl at the first opportunity; tell James—discovers this when she intercepts Antoinette, message in hand. But it doesn’t end there. She is even more surprised to see how the note expounds glowingly upon Tom’s abilities but also how it praises him far too lavishly, speaks of him in an almost reverent tone, like a superior being. His mouth speaketh great swelling words. His hands bringeth forth great swelling sounds. Her oldest had penned it, no doubt there: her language, her syntax, her wonderment, her high-sounding romanticism. She will outdo them. She will present Tom to the world.

  With a roll of wheels and the tramp of horses’ hooves, the guests arrive. Some stand looking wide-eyed at their surroundings, as if they have never seen a mansion before, while she stands outside the main door, evening air cooling her face, observing them. All smiles and courtesy she welcomes them into the house, and each guest greets her accordingly. How are you this evening, Miss Charity? Once they are comfortably inside the music room—the General receives them warmly, shakes hands, even mock salutes—she and Antoinette work diligently to bring out the prized vessels and begin serving the guests refreshments. Many of them have brought along their slaves, musical instruments attached. They strike up a tune. And the men turn jubilant, sharing circumstances, anecdotes, and memories as they share the smoke and embers of their cigarettes and pipes. The harsh sounds of their niggers’ banjos and violins like so much distant backdrop, commanding about as much recognition and concern as a mosquito’s irritable buzz. They inquire about Sharpe, who is never in attendance at these gatherings, his time consumed in speculative affairs on the General’s behalf. (So the General says; for all of us.)

  The General’s parties are not exclusive to men. Sometimes wives accompany their husbands, all joining in conversation, the women taking dainty sips of water (no spirits) while the men imbibe brandy and whiskey. (Best savored in moderation.) But the men always find a reason to leave their wives and wander out to the garden—how well one breathes out there, she thinks while she remains inside to attend on the wives, fully hearing their chatter or demands (requests) but also half listening to the men, the private cadence of voices outside, the pungent trail of tobacco in the air, smoke trailing their gestures and words—each man buoyant when he returns to the room, as if he has just delivered the punch line of a joke. Antoinette goes out to the garden and sweeps up the ashes.

  On one occasion, the boy Bible-mouth, H. D. Frye, came with his wife, who, for whatever reason, was the only white woman present besides Mrs. Bethune. Frye by some accounts was no older than fourteen—no telling, he keeps quiet on the subject—the wife twelve. Sharpe had discovered the boy, an itinerant or circuit rider—unclear the distinction—during his many travels, and after much discussion, convinced him to come back to their town and take over the church the Bethunes attended, as the cholera had recently put their pastor under the earth (en route to heaven). He dressed the same at the pulpit and in the street, assuming a single garment, a black robe fitted at the waist that flared out at the ankles like a woman’s dress. He was rather tall, fresh-complexioned, with prominent cheekbones and clever observant eyes. Despite his youth his face wore an expression of absolute reverence, the skin reddish, burning with faith. He was thoughtful and seemingly abstracted. She never understood a word he said either from the pulpit or from the floor. Providence moves through time as the Gods of Homer through space. She suspected that his congregation was as much impressed by his impenetrable sermons as by his prodigious memory. Name any verse—Isaiah 2, verse 4—from the Good Book (of Trial, Affliction, Punishment, and Eventual Redemption) and he could recite it word for word. Even more, he could rearrange the words in any order you requested and seemed to take pleasure in delighting children and niggers alike by reciting verses backward, forward, upside down, and sideways.

  He was otherwise a quiet boy, never talkative, saving his words for the pulpit. (The entire evening she never saw him once speak to his wife, equally quiet as her husband, the plain-faced girl speaking as much with her hands as her mouth.) With the exception of the General, all in the room seemed both highly impressed and highly honored by his presence. The visitors rose from their seats and greeted him with a bow. He did not bow in return, or greet them at all. No words or bodily contact, only a gesture resembling a slight forward tilting of the head, barely discernible. With a show of feeling, Miss Toon went up to him and kissed his hand. But he only returned her a blankness of face suggesting that the kiss had never happened, a moment now excised from time, which caused her to doubt the doings of her own lips. She quietly disappeared from the room. Without pomp or ritual the General touched the boy between the shoulder blades as if he were any other youth. Maybe this was the way he had once touched his own son, Sharpe. (She thinks she rec
alls such scenes. Even forms a picture. But wasn’t Sharpe already a man upon her arrival at Hundred Gates? Possibly. So whatever it is she sees now must have occurred before her arrival. No other way.) The two had come to know and like each other—only Dr. Hollister commanded equal time, attention, and respect from the General—and almost daily he would show up at the printing office for some coffee or cakes, the General fondly observing the boy while he ate. She also remembered how the boy cried out behind the church after he had preached his first sermon—power in his words, eyes glowing with administrative fire—a show of emotion that required a strategic response from General Toon, who went over and began patting the boy on the back, solemnly confirming him in his new function.