Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  The Original Blind Tom. Seven says the name in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own but rather like the voice of a magician, a sorcerer. (Repeated practice will cause the name to come naturally. So he must remain aware of his tongue. Correct it when it errs, when he says or thinks “Juluster” instead of Tom. So, around the clock, practice saying it. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Until it becomes second nature.) The Original Blind Tom. In the sounds of the name he thinks he hears a way for returning Tom back to the world, back to himself. Each word a twin of itself, telling two stories at the same time, his and Tom’s. I have become a name.

  He gave his youth to Tom just as Tom gave his youth to Perry Oliver just as Seven expects Juluster and Vitalis to give their youth to him. Not quite boys, not quite men. (The flickering back and forth.) It’s not just what Seven did but what Seven did not do that haunts him. (Juluster slips back into his skin.) Tom an extension of Perry Oliver in a way Seven could not be. (Craning his neck, Juluster hears something—Vitalis back from his errands or whatever the hell he has been up to?—and stumbles off to investigate.) Is that why he is here in the city, waiting to pick up where he left off? Is it because his mind has set wax-like around the first examples of industry and companionship that he accepted? Is this all a function of his waiting for that past to be resurrected, for Tom to come alive again? Funny almost, the way Tom flies back into Seven’s mind and stays for as long as he wants. Blind Tom living in his blood. You did not choose me, Tom said. It was I who chose you.

  Seven had expected some grand municipal structure manned by a hive of busying buzzing clerks. Instead he finds a shabby little affair, a single-level frame house in serious need of upkeep, set right where the road ends amid a weeded-over garden in what used to be the nigger part of town. The door is open, so he makes a point of entering first, his niggers behind him, the driver who likes to change his name every day—before they started out this morning he christened himself President Washington—followed by Juluster and Vitalis, the driver the oldest of the four, somewhere between middle age and death (visible under his broad-brimmed shadow-forming hat a patch of gray hair at each temple), and them not old, not young. The farther they go, the brighter it is, the more they can see, the interior of the house a cave full of light, illumination spilling out. A cannon shell or some other device of destruction had taken out an entire section of the house, leaving nothing behind but exposed beams and planks. Other signs of mayhem too: craters in the ceiling, walls bare and discolored in places where formerly a painting might have hung, and other walls stippled with projectile holes shaped like a cat’s paw, a cat that can walk sideways across walls. (He has heard about the city’s former troubles, about how all the niggers were either strung up and set ablaze or chased out during conscription.) In a confusion of setting each room they enter carries the pine smell of turpentine, evidence of recent cleaning.

  Voices pull him to their source, two men hunched over a crude chessboard positioned between them, men who are not much older than himself but who have known war firsthand it would seem, as evidenced by the blue uniforms they wear. Then again perhaps the uniforms are castoffs, in this time of shortages—each day the newspapers’ skinny columns worded with such claims—the city using whatever is at hand to clothe its officials. After all, the war has been done for almost three years now.

  For several minutes the two guards trade insults, list all the wrongs that each has done to the other. Seven waits them out, listening to the ocean in the distance, the sound of all that wide water, audible even from here. A chandelier burns brightly overhead, releasing the sweet metal smell of kerosene into the air. Seven looking (watching), hearing (listening), smelling. Something reassuring about the rhythm of their crass curses and ridiculous threats.

  I will eat your eyeballs with smelling salts.

  I will wipe my ass with your balls.

  A sound he hardly notices as he stands there waiting with the others but will miss he knows when it stops.

  One guard (the black pieces) peers up from the board—why has it taken him so long to register Seven’s presence?—giving Seven his countenance in full—his face looks almost flat, like a leaf—and finds Seven with his hard and shiny acorn-small eyes. Something alters in the air, but Seven affects to be completely unsurprised.

  You have some business here? Those three can wait outside.

  I am here on their behalf, Seven says. He hears his own voice beat back at him, bouncing off the ceiling and walls.

  Registration?

  Yes.

  The soldier indicates with outstretched hand that Seven should take a seat, so Seven cramps down into the single chair placed before the long heavy table.

  Then he remembers. I have some documents here—his hands are moving, searching through his many pockets. Hands that find, produce, and present a bundle of documents, with the Freedmen’s Bureau insignia stamped in the wax seal that secures the fold in place. The guard takes the bundle, scraps away the wax seal with his fingertips, unfolds the bundle, and holds the stack of documents out at arm’s length as if he is about to pronounce some decree. His head cants forward, eyes racing across paper—one, two, three—from top to bottom then he swivels his eyeballs—one, two, three—at each nigger in turn. Names?

  Seven pronounces the name of each man, hearing himself slip into incoherence. The soldier repeats each name, drawling out the words in shameless confrontational mockery. Although it is English, the language Seven speaks to him still isn’t his own. No way, because he knows that years of Perry Oliver’s lessons in enunciation—he never spoke like a Southerner and expected the same of Seven—and years of traveling the known world with the Blind Tom Exhibition had permanently retooled his tongue, lathed and shaven the South out.

  Listen to him, the other guard says. He does not lift his gaze from the chessboard. He sounds just like one of them contraband.

  Haven’t you noticed? He even smells like one of them. Pure shit.

  Seven feels a length of wind penetrate the crown of his head directly from above, feels it begin to draw down through him in a straight line—his skull, neck, thorax—making a place inside, like a hook pushed through a worm. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even affront, small practical concessions, but sitting there, his race questioned, his manhood challenged, he undergoes a curious process of invalidation. He feels reticent, almost timid.

  The soldier refolds the documents then holds the bundle before the slot of a four-foot-high, six-foot-square mahogany box, where it quickly disappears—swoosh—sucked inside like a thing preyed upon. Pulls a pen out from its fountain and holds it at the end farthest away from the stylus like a walking stick, an object foreign in his hands. They got to sign right here and right here. He points to the places on the passbook where the first must subscribe his name. Vitalis steps forward, signs his name, then issues Juluster a call. Juluster gropes his way forward and Vitalis moves his hand in place over the passbook. He subscribes his new name—Thomas Greene Wiggins—his hand wandering like a sleepwalker across the book. Now it is the driver’s turn.

  I don’t know no letters, the driver says.

  So Seven signs for him: James Bethune. Selling the shadow to support the substance.

  The soldier starts to read the many pages of the city ordinance governing the use of the passbook—that the user must carry the passbook on his or her person at all times and present it upon request, that the passbook is not transferable to any other individual, that the city reserves the right to revoke the passbook should the user commit a criminal offense, that—Seven fastens on the one word that flies his thoughts to Tom: criminal. Yes, what happened to Tom was criminal. (The freshness of the time that was ours to live).

  Have you committed to an understanding of the particulars of this statute?

  The driver, Juluster, and Vitalis maintain a dumbfounded silence. Understanding thus, Seven answers for them. The guard instructs them to place left hands over hearts and raise th
eir right hands. They do and he duly swears them in. Swearing done he stamps each leather-bound passbook, piles them onto the table like a deck of cards, and turns back to his game.

  And that’s all there is to it, although Seven still sits with expectations of some official closing to the interview. Closureless, he collects the passbooks and gets up from his chair to quit the office, leaving the colossal table to continue about its business.

  The meeting has honed and sharpened Seven’s senses. In the months (years?) that he has lived in the city he has come to know it in a way we can know few places—eyes opened, ready to believe anything—but the soldiers have shown him something he didn’t know about how the city feels about its niggers, both the exiled repatriates (returned) and the new arrivals. Can’t say how he feels about it one way or the other. (Niggers have always been okay in his book.) As long as no one gets in his way, as long as he can keep on keeping on with his business, building Tom, bringing Tom.

  Before Seven can reach the door the driver swerves into the lead, putting it upon himself to be the first to reach their carriage, his business. For the first time Seven notices that the driver has a peculiar walk, stepping softly and delicately; looking at his feet, his hands, and the bend of his head, one might imagine that he was learning to dance the first figure of a quadrille. Arms and legs not quite working the way they should. He seems to be stumbling about in the way of the dead, but here is a man who doesn’t seem capable of falling, of letting ground smack him in the face. The physical laws that govern the universe don’t apply to him. He is keeping the planet in orbit. He can keep the sky up as easily as he can keep his broad-brimmed hat balanced on his head.

  Once they reach their carriage, Seven sees that the horse has taken a healthy shit into the dirt, rich grassy smell, but the driver starts right in feeding it, the long black mouth and sideways moving teeth munching hay from his palm. The driver seizes Seven by the elbow and helps hoist him grunting (the muscular effort of it) into the cab. Does the same for Juluster, but leaves Vitalis to his own devices, no choice but to climb into the cab on his own. There seated next to the driver Seven hears thick pellets of shit thumping to the earth, one after another, builders laying a wall.

  Go.

  The driver kisses the horse’s name fluently above the sound of the moving wheels as if speaking some pre-Babel tongue unknown to man. Seven lacks sufficient range of sight to take in the whole of Central Park. The park is so much, too much, for all of its durable beauty. The landscape changes with each intake of breath. Trees huddling, listening to their own leaves. Leaves sparkling with insects, branches glowing gray with squirrels. A black snake descending slow as molasses down the trunk of a tree. Not that the driver is moving much faster. Keeps them at a steady pace neither stroll nor trot. Nothing is hurrying him (them), just a vague threat that Seven feels hanging over him (them). Then a strange tree pops into view a number of yards ahead, the trunk rising smoothly for fifty feet or more above ground, far higher than any other in the park, before exploding outward in thick foliage-covered branches, a green cloud (leaves). The trunk as wide as a house. The tree vanishes when they turn a bend in the road but reappears after a second bend. Stands flickering, drawing him forward until he finds himself parallel to the trunk and beneath that green cloud that seems to promise access to heaven. A brown shape pokes through the branches thirty feet above. Takes Seven a minute to realize that it is a human face, viewed as clearly anything, a nigger face, a man, peering over the side of a colossal nest, a nest that is as wide and deep as a bathtub. Another brown face appears. And another. And still another. An entire family packed into the nest. Putting their heads around and between branches and twigs, their faces bursting with expressions. By what means did they come to perch in the tallest tree in the park and make it their home?

  He knows that there are nigger camps all around them, niggers disenfranchised, destitute, desperate, dangerous, demanding—deeds in hand, those driven out of their homes during the draft riots want their homes back, or reparations in kind, We demand the right to return—but when he speaks to the driver or Juluster or Vitalis he tries to keep the panic out of his voice. The reports he’s heard about the camps—calculated acts of robbery and murder, revenge enacted on anybody with a white face—have widened his sense of peril, of what can happen (to him). Human nature does not deliberately choose blood, at least not Negro human nature, but the war has driven some of these niggers crazy. He can taste fear on his teeth and on his tongue. The fear of being chanced upon, found out. They will just have to play it by ear, come what may, not that he thinks himself particularly brave. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. (The driver’s rifle positioned horizontally across his lap, crossbeam, cross.) Surely anyone who has been in a position to achieve something large would do the same. Indeed, he is afraid, but the violence, the hurt he knows exists but he doesn’t see, can’t keep him away.

  They escape the park’s green trap unmolested. Up ahead a pale rectangle, the illuminated trough of the horizon, pouring bright ocean out. He is thrown into astonishment. It makes a person hungry to travel in this light.

  They are bringing the dead. More each day. Carrying bodies. Growing coffins in the camps.

  These Freedmen, Wire says. Arriving in the city mostly by foot. From that broken country. Frames of breath and skin. Their flesh a foot thick with diseases and afflictions. All parts of the body ready for death.

  Wire speaks slowly, telling it deliberately, but without the least bit of hesitation, concern, regret. No shakes of the head. No frowns. Plain, matter-of-fact. A job like any other. Small work for a man his size. Even seated there in his chair Wire is a towering figure, his knees rising like andirons level with Tabbs’s face, Tabbs staring into the blue cloth of Wire’s trousers, as if he were holding a conversation with twins, left knee and right.

  A messy line, Wire says. Crying and complaining all. Man, woman, child. Wire seated across from Tabbs black against white walls, dark skin and dark clothes, as if he is some foreign substance the wall has expelled. Hard to tell one from the next after a while. Easy to go around in circles and waste what little time there is. Hard to say who is most deserving of your attention. Who you should see right now or an hour from now and who can safely be left for a day or two.

  Tabbs cannot imagine Wire treating anybody with his big hands, how those hands can touch muscle and skin, explore mouths, necks, chests without giving pain, hands that are twice the size of his own, the knuckles high and sharp, shark fins.

  Without the right measures, even the most benign injuries will consume. Best to clean the wound with kerosene to kill the lice and to keep the flies away. And you learn to treat in the way of war. Amputate first if you can keep the greater life intact. Give Death nothing else to feed on. Burn or bury what you cut off, what you saw away.

  Tabbs sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the watery light and the sound of waves, experiencing the feel of liquid weight—the water, the glass in his hands, the hidden channels in his body—making no effort to hide his despair.

  Wire tilts his own glass forward on his lap, aiming the rim at Tabbs, the bright wine inside threatening to spill over. Tell me, Tabbs. Tell me what it is you need to say.

  Nothing, Tabbs says.

  Nothing?

  Nothing, he says. (The weight.) I can’t get my head around it. I mean, for them to endure so much, endure until now. And to make it this far, all the way here. He shakes his head and keeps shaking it. Speaking into the darkness of the other man’s face, not sure what sort of expression of bereavement Wire expects from him, not sure really what he is feeling just now.

  Why it must play out thus?

  Tabbs nods.

  Why they should be cheated after having won?

  Yes.

  Wire swallows some of his drink. These times are no different from any other. You work around whatever these white devils give you, so as not to be led into their snares.

  Yes, Tabbs says. But cert
ainly it is not as bad as all that? I mean you can do something to contain it, to arrest the dying?

  Wire stares back at him. You frighten me.

  Tabbs sits across from Wire in the droning light, looking into the other man’s eyes, clear eyes, trying to figure the flow of thought. So like Wire, a big man not big on coming to the point, too loud a gesture revealing his feelings and quality of character. If Tabbs needs to explain or excuse himself he can’t. Wire is a man too often listened to, big in years—on this earth twice as long as Tabbs, fifty years or more—experience, wisdom.

  Are we not one and the same? Wire asks. So you recognize that certain questions a true man of the Race will never ask.

  No mistaking Wire’s disappointment. Tabbs wants to get up from his chair right now and walk out of this room, a big circular room filled with Wire’s furniture. Wire unable to relax in an ordinary chair, every chair in his home wide with long legs and a high back, throne-like. His home a dark haunting place full of stale evening light. Even the brightest rooms are dark.

  It’s terribly hard. In fact, the dangers multiply. More arrivals tomorrow. By mule. By sporadic horse. But I can’t stay away. I have a certain affinity. I’m here with you now, but I’m thinking there.