Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  How’s it going today, Tom?

  Tom frowns.

  Rhythm, tone, pitch—what can Perry Oliver say about these things with any intelligence or authority? The sole reason the Music Professor is here. Seven sits in the first row, a stand-in for the audience, watching and listening. Cheering and clapping. Extending the pause between songs with standing ovations. Tom seems distracted by Perry Oliver’s voice, the way he speaks the song titles, how the words come out of his mouth. And his playing seems slow and instinctive. Nevertheless, it all goes smoothly, if Howard is to be believed.

  Seven helps Tom down from the stage. Leans close and puts his mouth near the fleshy shell of Tom’s ear. Nicely done, he says.

  Tom rises earlier than usual the next morning and finds his way into the kitchen, seated at the table, head tilted at an angle, shoes laced and tied. Hands stalking the wood. Shoes turning circles above the floor. Seven goes over to him, sleep still clinging web-like to the corners of his eyes. Tom, he says. Are you feeling froggy today?

  Tom says nothing.

  Then hop.

  Tom hops.

  The road as bright as daylight in the unearthly glow.

  Tom, are we all set about what you will play tonight?

  Play what the day recommends, Tom says.

  They got a late start, departed five minutes later than Perry Oliver had planned, Seven preoccupied with his newspaper at the table. Perry Oliver snatched it from his hands, startling the fingers, upsetting the Paul Morphy hat. Now he tosses the crumpled pages out the surrey window, white bats flapping against the dark.

  Roam through the night in silence, the air sharp and clear, a felt exuberance although the streets are largely empty. They are following stars, leaving black earth under their wheels. The heavy scent of orchards and fields. Hibernian Hall rising out of the ground with a cold dingy glitter. Hurry inside. Don’t keep us waiting.

  Backstage, he hears voices, footsteps, doors opening and closing. How many of them are there? More than a hundred tickets purchased in advance, but it is conceivable that many more people will be in attendance. He watches a parade of types into the hall, some entering to the right, others to the left, white-gloved nigger ushers rushing back and forth, opening all the sturdy doors. He has no idea how many people the hall can actually seat, but the sight of all these well-dressed people, their admiration for Tom, fills him with a sense of disbelief, the promise of music and spectacle, something supernatural, drawing them out of their homes this evening.

  He performs a rapid calculation and decides there must be four hundred or more ticket holders in the auditorium, only a handful of empty seats remaining. Why not have Seven run a head count? He can trust him to perform this matter. Simply hang back and wait, expectant. Stirrings, footsteps, murmurs, sighs, a hubbub of voices, little by little all the small and varied sounds of anticipation building up to the “Blind Tom Exhibition.”

  He has made all this happen, gathered all of these people in one place. Shocked to see the harmonious conciliation between his plans—his words: what he says, what he thinks, what he writes—and reality. One thing to imagine, another to witness it in actuality. Any number Seven brings him will be miraculous. Seven seems gratified, confirmed in his mission, even when he is lost from sight somewhere out there in those rambling currents of attendees.

  Before he knows it (on an impulse) he finds himself walking out onto the stage. He doesn’t think it necessary to ease into this all-changing moment. The chattering voices quiet down to a hush, but language is just what he needs now. Word defines the thing attached to it. Take the phrase bare stage and its many associations. He is what is bare. And so are they. Stripped down and innocent. The gaze is innocence itself aspiring to see the world in all its nakedness. The houselights go down, leaving nothing for the brain to watch but the musician (moving or still), nothing for the brain to hear but unblemished sound. Nothing stands between spectator and performer. Nothing can protect you (us) from direct confrontation. This erasure of solitude. The real advantage of this bare exchange lies in its flexibility. The spectrum of chance and possibility. No man-made script that can fully predict the outcome, that allows for easy escape. What is there. What we expect to be there. What could be there.

  He looks up dazed into the span of air and ceiling that hangs above the stage. Looks out at all those he assumes are looking at him. Scrutinizing the silence. He has come to see faces, but he can’t see anything for a number of seconds, a good minute or two, only glare, intense black streaks and gray shadows, so he stands dizzily where he is and waits for faces to appear, trying to regain his composure, too full for more, too astonished to speak. The only thing he can perceive for sure is Seven standing in the wings, large amounts of excitation pressing upon him, ready to bring Tom center stage anytime (once) the word is given. Is this an expression of surprise he notices on Tom’s face? Knowledge? Acceptance? Tom aware, ready to assume his destiny. Blind Tom starts here.

  He knows the exact moment to say something, to make his move. Now as good a time as any. So why doesn’t he? Is it because he needs to see those he will address? Can’t see them but can hear them, feel the contact in the air, all those bodies pressed together in the half light. From here they look transcendent. What a shock it’ll be when the moment before him becomes brighter to his senses, the spectators slowly gaining volume, shape, characteristics, and features until they take on the full weight of existence. (How well blindness serves to protect Tom in this respect.) He might as well wait forever because he now understands that human eyes can’t fully cancel out the blurry world created by this focused illumination, these stage lights burning full and unimpeded in the otherwise dark. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Please allow me to introduce myself, Perry Oliver, Manager of the Performance. He stops for a moment in something between alarm and vexation, realizing that he has prepared no formal introduction. Never even thought about it before now. This one oversight. And here the words are, tumbling out on his tongue. You people of impeccable taste and understanding. One word answered by another. In the same hour came forth the fingers of a man’s hand. Feeling not quite connected to what he is saying—Not in a thousand years would you imagine beautiful melodies flying out from the dark cave of this Negro’s mouth—although they are his words, his thoughts. Fearless despite the sense that the sentences can go one way or another, fail or achieve. Totally unscripted. He gets to say what he wants, a string of elaborate utterances and pronouncements—a musical gem—enjoying it now, as he finds, has always found, the theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation one of life’s greatest pleasures. The audience can like it or not.

  Only right that he should receive total credit for the affective force of his words, pulling Tom from the wings, positioning him at the piano, and eliciting his first round of applause from an audience even before the sounding of the first note. The hardest part over. Now he has only to take these few steps to this exact spot and introduce a song before disappearing from view behind the curtain where he stands sending searching glances at the sea of heads bobbing above all those chairs, distinguishing every fluid face in the audience. Seeing too their gestures and expressions. He knows what they are saying or not saying. All those thoughts joining and falling apart. The burden passed on to them now, as they sit listening, carried on the sound, hoping to grow accustomed to what they are hearing. Imagine all that has to happen, all that has to interconnect for the audience to be linked as one by the final number, applauding, each man or woman on his or her feet, before veering on their separate ways.

  That night, Perry Oliver is careful to bury his face into the soft blind whiteness of his pillow, lest Seven hear him crying.

  Voice of the Waves

  (1856–1862)

  “The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. This am I …”

  HE PLAYS “DIXIE” WITH HIS LEFT HAND IN THE KEY OF A, “Yankee Doodle” with the right in the key of E, and sings “The Gir
l I Left Behind Me” in the key of E.

  He plays the Moonlight Sonata with his back to the piano and his hands inverted.

  He plays a four-handed arrangement of Rossini’s Semiramide with two hands.

  He plays “Voices of the Waves” with his tongue and teeth, as if eating the ivory keys.

  He plays “The Rain Storm” in a minor key with his bare feet, walking melody across the black keys.

  He sings the song about his mother (“Mother, dear Mother, I Still Think of Thee”), and every woman in the audience starts crying.

  And now, ladies and gentlemen, Blind Tom will perform for you one of his own compositions, the latest from his growing catalog. Feel honored, ladies and gentlemen, as your ears will be the first to hear this beautiful tune outside my own. It is titled, and I assure you that you’ll see why, “Rattlesnake Charm.” Speaking slowly to get it right.

  You, Perry Oliver, the Manager of the Performance, call for a challenge from the audience. Who here in the house can make history by confounding Blind Tom? A man produces a composition of his own construction that he points out is some twenty pages in length. Please, sir, come to the stage. As soon as the challenger sets hands to his tune, Tom bends his head nearly to the floor and with one foot raised and stretched out behind him, begins to turn round and round upon the other foot, gaining speed as he spins, the entire figure agitated, rotating about itself on its own axis, performing implausible acrobatic contortions, in poses and expressions beyond the limits of the ridiculous and expressive. Now he begins to ornament the gyrations with spasmodic movements of the hands. He makes some members of the audience dizzy with his spinning. Some of the women cover their faces, or their husband’s hands do it for them without their asking, but you don’t think it odd. Tom looks like nothing more in the world than a man taking his daily exercise, strange gymnastics essential to his bodily health. Something strangely peaceful in the activity, Tom winding deeply into a private place, the eye of his own storm.

  Tom ceases spinning about and seats himself at the piano. He plays back the melody note for note and in the exact rhythm, begins to play it again, seeming to inspect the melody first, run through it once as if to check it out before reshaping and revoicing it, weaving variations and building a continual stream of countermelody and changing textures, transposing the melody and harmony to another key, revealing all of the song’s hidden permutations, one hand now active on the keyboard, the other fluttering in the air.

  Another man in the audience takes to his feet and issues a different challenge, hoping to confound “the eighth wonder of the world.” Rumor has it that Tom can recite certain passages from Plato, word for word. Does he know the fifth chapter of The Republic? Why indeed, you say. He does know it. And for the audience’s additional pleasure, he will also recite chapters six and seven. So Tom does, reciting one chapter in Greek, the next chapter in Latin, and then the last in French, Tom’s voice, the way it holds each person in the audience like a hand gripping a face, a kind of hypnosis. Now he gives—further amazement—an oratory in Japanese followed by in quick order selections from the Gospel according to Mark, several Articles of the Constitution—why stop there?—and the first chapters of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, performing the pages in the exact voice of the master British novelist—If it is too cold or wet I take shelter in the Café de la Régence and amuse myself watching people playing chess. Paris is the place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the place in Paris where this game is played best, and at Rey’s the shrewd Legal, the crafty Philidor and the dependable Mayot sally forth to battle …—saying what the day demands, his voice slow and measured, beautiful and powerful, all the intonations, syllables, and inflections exact, each member of the audience watching and listening with dark redolent attention, rapture, bodies stiff, listening with all their muscles.

  Soon the lights come up, startling, each person like a puzzle piece in her/his seat collectively holding the light together. Applaud with everyone else. Impossible not to.

  Light burning Tom into fame, into history.

  The audience huddles near the orchestra pit, talking greedily, forming a tight arc around Tom, even as the navigator leads him backstage. Tom has no choice but to give himself up to the melee of greeting and compliments and handshaking. The needy who flock to Tom’s dressing room like sick pilgrims, in a terrible hurry to touch or kiss Blind Tom’s hands, forehead, neck, or cheek, to lay hands on his woolly scalp. Seated in a chair and moving as little as possible, Tom tucks his hands safely away into his lap and so doing keeps them out of view, hidden. For the most part, he remains silent in the face of their praise and pronouncements, their inquiries and entreaties, wincing at the smells of these strangers’ colognes. Then the surgeons, doctors, and physicians, who politely or hurriedly wish to examine Tom and supply him the latest remedies and research. (No illness can be concealed from trained sight.) He barks out at those few who seem to agitate (annoy) him—the poking, probing, and prodding, medical fingers sounding his chest, tugging at his nose and ears, tapping his eyes as if testing an eggshell’s firmness, prying his teeth apart; what it means to live in a body: maximum anatomical tension—but by and large he remains quiet and still. Nor does he perk up when the musical professionals inquire about some chord voicing or the tempo of a particular movement, or his feelings about the Moonlight Sonata, his own “The Battle of Manassas,” or why such and such a composition is not in his program, or what songs did he love that he never sang? All those fussy unseen hands, all those heard or ignored or not understood voices. Tom in need of a good night’s rest, two or three good nights, and something to fill his stomach and cool his mouth and tongue (hunkered at the table). Lait.

  He sat on his stool a full half-yard distant from the piano, this awkward position making it necessary for him to stretch out his arms to their full negro length, like an ape clawing his food. His feet showed no better understanding of proper, keyboard posture; when not on the pedals, they twisted incessantly, rubbing into the stage floor like a boar snorting up a well-buried black truffle. When given a theme for improvisation, he would take some ludicrous posture, expressive of listening, but soon lowering the body and rising on one leg, spinning round and round, moving upon that improvised axis like a pirouette dancer, but indefinitely. The muddled notes went stumbling into dots. When he finished playing, he would applaud himself violently, kicking, pounding his hands together, and turning away to his master, the self-named “Manager of the Performance,” for an approving pat on the head. All in all, his music was a conventional affair, uncomplicated in melody, rudimentary in harmony, exact in rhythm and pace, and basic in structure and form. Still, many carry on with the belief that this was the most remarkable performance ever witnessed in our city. A vaguely perceived hare is nevertheless a hare. Indeed, to the amateur ear, Blind Tom’s “exhibition” would put to blush and shame many of our so-called “professors” of music.

  —The Columbus Observer

  The ship bellies into the harbor, faint birdsong sounding above. At last. He steps free of the deck, down the slanted plank, a sea-bleached wreck, a string of stirring bodies (passengers) behind him. (Pied Piper.) Always on the go, chasing an audience for Tom. Maps make the getting there look easy, foreshortening distance, the world small, flat, and manageable, a constellation of names—Chicago, Berlin, London, Boston, Memphis, Paris—laid out before him as prodigious as stars in the sky, names that bring together an elemental union between earth and flesh, ground and Blind Tom. So he draws up plans, his ideas bright forces quite apart from himself. He sees them rise, turn, spin, fall, as light as golden birds.

  The taxis, hotels, and inns, the luggage damaged or lost, the saloons and restaurants. So much that can go wrong. Acts of man and God. Only when he sees multitudes rush in to take their seats inside a concert hall or auditorium does he unwind, thankful for the perfect alignment of events.

  Days glide by like birds. Weeks ocean-wide. So much sky. (What is here must also be
there.) Time measured by the number of seats filled, the number of tickets sold, his thoughts and speech full of facts. Like unnumbered pages the repetitions prevent him from counting the hours and the steps. Repetition. When the word is the same day after day, words like travel, tour, recital, concert, performance. Time does not change, it does not move, nor does his mind or his feet, even if they bear the illusion of coming and going, of getting to somewhere—perhaps not a place—important.

  In Little Vicksburg, he sees a road adorned with the most magnificent carriages ever constructed. In Macon, he expresses his admiration for the brilliant uniforms of militiamen who pass before him. In Augustus—another city another recital. He flies through the minutes, feeling the draw of some vast venue opening up, all river, all ocean, all sky. Even before leaving one town or city for the next, he senses he has lost something he might have gained had he stayed longer. He steps on boat or train already thinking of home, the tour’s end, and thinking beyond that to the next season. In his sleep he has to shake off thoughts of leave-taking, and when he is awake he feels firmly reassured at the sight of his locked suitcases, proof of future engagements. Nothing is as it used to be. His sense of the world is thrown off. Experience has set him in the firm belief that travel is a way of measuring where he is in his life. If things go smoothly his life is running as it should. However, if things go badly—trains off schedule, luggage lost, reckless or route-altering taxi drivers—his life is off course. But a tour throws even this sense of judgment out of whack. What he comes to desire is rest.

  Tom, how do you like New York?

  I don’t like it one bit. Too many fellow beings.

  Like a line of ants, the would-be pianists and professors of music climb up to the stage and gather around the unguarded post-concert piano. The floorboards beneath them sponge sound back. First they examine the ivory keys with their eyes, the magic there. Now put their fingers where Blind Tom had put his hands, his warmth still there. Close their eyes, seeing and feeling the ghost of this man, handprints. Touching keys. Arguing from the man to the music.