A nice nigger home below. I remember. Where are the others? I remember them.
Tabbs takes this as a pleasing fact, proving that Tom’s powers of memory are still in place.
It’s only me here today.
Hearing this, Tom lowers his head and remains mute long enough for Tabbs and the Doctor to lock concerned glances. You want to look down my throat. Take the nigger words out.
No, Tom, the Doctor says. I remember the nice people you lived with, Mr. and Mrs.—
I know her, Tom says.
When the examination is complete Tabbs and the Doctor retire to the smaller and more intimate anteroom. Here Tabbs feels that he can finally see the Doctor properly, comforting to let his gaze dwell on the other man’s clothing and skin, the Doctor average in height but notable in presence and build, dark with long limbs, outfitted in blue military dress, a blue that dominates the eyes, welcome contrast to the plain humble discomfiture of the room’s furnishings. A pistol on his belt, his bald head and face mounted cannon-like in his high collar, features strong, unashamed, broad nose, wide mouth, and bulky lips—Negro through and through. Gleaming mustache, gleaming skin, gleaming suit and boots—the shine of hard surface, armor. The only sign of vulnerability the black under his eyes, hanging bats.
His heart and lungs are strong, the Doctor says. Good circulation of blood. Decent musculature. A bit underweight but nothing to be concerned about. As for the condition of his eyes there’s little I can say. The eyelids are completely sealed, which might be symptomatic, an indication that disease has set in.
You can find out?
Through surgery.
Another doctor who wants to cut, Tabbs thinks. He looks into the Doctor’s face. You were his physician? He wants several questions out of the way before the Doctor leaves. The doors the Doctor’s words can open.
Long long ago. Well, not that long really. Four years. Seems longer.
He seemed happy to see you.
The Doctor secures the latches on his bag as if this is enough of a response.
An old friend might be just the thing he needs, Tabbs says. He won’t open up to me.
The Doctor cuts his eyes at Tabbs. Says, You know a hundred times what I know.
Tom is sitting on the bench with his hands extended high above the keys, as if warming them over a fire. We left the other place.
We’ll be staying here from now on, Tabbs says. Quieter. More space. No one to bother you.
God man.
He no longer has use for the house. He wants us to have it, wants you to be comfortable.
The sickroom. Tom coughs, ribs heaving, his chest exploding with a second and third cough.
You can choose any room you like.
The children.
You can visit them.
Tom lowers his hands to his lap.
You’ll like it here. Things will be much better. I promise. Tabbs sits down on the bench next to Tom. Some time before he speaks. You don’t like me, Tom?
I like you, Mr. Tabbs.
Are you sure? Have I harmed you? Have I hurt your feelings in some way?
I like you, Mr. Tabbs.
Then what can it be, Tom? What can it be?
Tom’s face brightens with some secret amusement.
What is it? Please tell me. You can tell me anything.
Three birds, Tom says.
What?
Three birds.
Tabbs turns his gaze to the window behind them, which frames a tree twenty yards away, large natural tallness, white fishing dhows docked twenty yards beyond it. Three pear-shaped birds occupy different branches of the tree, chirping singularly and collectively.
He hears Tom ask, You like the country?
Bedazzled, Tabbs looks at the boy, trying to think himself into the boy’s face, seeing in it a large number of small traits that simply cannot be real. A face with a strange distinction all its own that the mother does not share.
You were there, Tom says.
Nothing familiar, nothing Tabbs can recognize. Unknown (undescribed) the boy’s personality and his past. Nothing the Doctor could (would) tell. Had he the Bethune woman he might be able to interview her about some of the boy’s desires and habits.
On the grass.
You want to go to the country? We’ll take a trip. Just say the word. Tabbs is both drained of and filled with everything.
Tom says nothing.
I don’t understand why you want to keep yourself from the world. Doesn’t the piano give you enjoyment?
The keys are hard. Have you never touched them?
Only in folly.
If you try touching them.
Okay, so I’ll touch them now. Tabbs places his fingers lightly on the keys, ivory widening to his touch.
Understand.
But I don’t have your talent.
No. You are not Blind Tom. Tom stands up from the bench and bends over Tabbs. His mouth fits perfectly against Tabbs’s ear. Speaks what the other hears.
A woman? That’s what you want?
Take me to her.
Okay. I will take you.
Bring me her.
Do you understand? I will take you.
When can we go?
Anytime you want.
Tom lowers his head. You’d better go now, Mr. Tabbs, he says, circling the piano, in his own sphere of separation.
After all it has cost Tabbs to find the boy—the money, the miles, the years; I’ve given up everything to follow you—here the boy is, melting away, vanishing, again.
The driver slowed the horse slowed the buggy to mouth the brass-numbered address of each house lined up along one side of the tree-lined street, mumbling the way Tabbs caught himself mumbling certain tentative ideas while he was in the middle of doing something else. The unpaved bumpy road so wide—sufficient space for four wagons to comfortably pass one another—that the high canopy of poplars had no chance of providing any protective shade for any person or vehicle unfortunate enough to be caught in the road. Facing the traveler on either side a baker’s dozen of identical two-story houses with a good twenty feet of lawn separating one from the other, idyllic structures, peaceful, in all likelihood absent of human inhabitants given the wear and weathering. Barely breathing, the driver nodded his head, swung it from side to side, judiciously weighing the numbers. A single sidelong glance that he held as they advanced up the street. Tabbs leaning forward in his seat inside the black-hooded cab behind the driver, peering out from the cloth cave, mutely searching for the lawyer’s house along with the driver, but itching to take a more active part. The driver angled in his field of vision. (Tabbs sees him still.) Infected with Tabbs’s eagerness, he too was leaning forward, his upper body extended precariously over the wagon side, the shadows of horse and man blending on the road, seeing what he saw—nothing should escape his notice, nothing should happen unless he was there to capture it. But the driver seemed to grow visibly older each time he failed to identify the house. He could spell out letters, read some words, the most necessary ones, ones his profession required of him. Even though his mouth spewed out speech that didn’t quite sound like the English language to Tabbs’s ears, a world of difference between the word the driver saw and the way he vocalized it, a wide valley separating what he said and proper pronunciation, that is, the way Tabbs was accustomed to saying it and hearing it said where he came from and the many places he had traveled. With the exception of the victorious (Union) soldiers, nobody down here spoke in a way Tabbs fully understood upon first hearing. Language loose around him. Where was it heading? (He still doesn’t know, those strays with their stray speech.) Tabbs there in the shade of the cab, the driver fully out in the sun, a mile separating the two of them.
They had just driven for an hour (more) from the hotel where Tabbs was lodged. No small talk the entire way here, the driver occupied with keeping the horse at a steady gallop—perhaps he needed to concentrate on this one task, perhaps he had other needs—clicking hooves, his eyes
shifting from the road to the fields to the sky, set on getting them to their destination even though he was not quite sure where it was, while Tabbs barely registered the world that existed outside the confines of the black cab, preoccupied, thinking of what to include in the story he might have to tell the lawyer. What if anything he had left out of the letter he was carrying. (What to remember. What not to.) He needed to act within a solid framework.
The driver had asked, Who you be needin? Tabbs had pretended not to hear. Later he will discover he need only have replied “Simon Coffin” and the driver would have quickly taken him there. Instead, he spoke the exact street address where he had written the lawyer two months earlier. Nothing secretive in his withholding of the name. No reason to have said more, to have acted otherwise. This driver already a relic of the past whatever the (deceptive surface) similarities between him and Tabbs. By Tabbs’s estimation he and the driver were similar in age, give or take a few years, men of the same generation and men of the same flesh—the harmony of their hair, the harmony of their skin—descendants of the same vague African fathers—would to God every person walking the earth had certain knowledge of his genealogy—and yet they came from worlds wholly apart, nothing alike. A Northern city man who had never been to the South before now, having had no good reason to do so before now.
Once they reached the end of the street, the driver tugged the reins in such a way as to have the horse spin them a half circle onto the opposite side of the street headed back in the direction whence they had come. The horse snorted in acknowledgment—All right, I can do this—and they started the slow search, the driver leaning forward, numbers in his mouth. They soon arrived at the end of the street, the very point from which they had started out. The driver drew the horse to the side of road and pulled himself erect on the platform.
We ain’t getting nowhere, the driver said. It sposed to be right in here somewheres but ain’t nan sign. Best I dig it up for you. The driver speaking in a tender voice, comically unsuited to the circumstances. He hopped down from the platform, the most natural act in the world. A scarecrow stitched up in somebody’s dark-colored hand-me-downs.
Wait, Tabbs said. Lacking the driver’s speed and agility, he spun his body 180 degrees and began to work his way down from the cab—the driver did not offer to assist him—backward like a man descending a ladder, one foot then the other. He reached the running board, pushed his weight off, and took a short hop into the dirt. Stood there in the hot rough road carefully positioning his hat on his head, low enough on the brow to block the sun but not too low to block vision. Must see what he must see. Turned to face the driver and stood looking at him. The horse was still moving, wanted to go, stamping one hoof after the next into the red dirt.
Some houses yonder over that rise there. The driver nodded his head toward the opposite side of the plateau a hundred yards off where the forest began again. Where the road don’t carry. Ain’t nowhere else it can be. He took the reins and began wrapping them around a post.
No, Tabbs said. I can go.
It’s pestering me now, the driver said. Clearly disappointed, at a loss, empty-handed, despite his best efforts. I knows where we be. Best I go.
No, Tabbs said.
The driver stood looking at Tabbs with the reins in his hands, the length of them forming a half loop from the dirt road to the horse’s long mouth. His look a reproach to Tabbs’s abruptness, possible rudeness. Tabbs stared right into the man’s irises, clear living tissue, so that all else of him disappeared. The whole of the man in one (two), round windows, maps. An easy walk up the rise, the driver said. You needin directions from there? His voice was pleasant and measured, but his tone was less than welcoming.
No, Tabbs said. I can manage. He removed a smattering of coins from his leather pouch and paid the driver, adding a generous half-dollar tip.
The driver stared sullenly at the coins circling his palm as if they were some foreign and invasive growth, boils or pox, popping up from beneath the skin or embellishing it. He closed his fingers over the coins, a fist, not happy to take them. Slowly lifted his face toward Tabbs. How long you gon be? he asked. Eyes growing tighter, clearly irritated that after having driven this passenger two miles out he now had to wait.
I can’t say. Tabbs quick to answer back, deliberately gruff even though the driver commanded respect. He started for the rise, stepping easily over the broken ground, his feet properly equipped with old sturdy water-repelling boots hardened with mud he had purchased from an alabaster native. Thirty paces out, he turned his head and looked back over his shoulder at the driver, the latter still standing in the same spot, resolutely holding the reins in one hand, the coins fisted in the other. Studying Tabbs, his gaze torn, wavering between one instinct and another. Wouldn’t surprise Tabbs a bit if he found the man gone upon his return.
He started up the rise on a narrow footpath cutting through thick forest, his lungs working. This was the South.
Sometimes he could pick out the human arrangements with quick ease; other times he had to work to see them. Caught (glimpse) a man so thin, such a featherweight, that the slightest puff of wind lifted him a full six feet above the earth, sailed him along, and settled him somewhere else yards away. Tabbs dashed along rows of trees endangered (doomed) by so many varieties of birds, headed for an Anglo-Saxon native (no mistaking him) standing a few yards off. A small man hugging a small basket at his waist. No shoes, his tattered clothing revealing patches of skin not unlike the red dirt in color and texture, a man growing up out of the soil. He snatched up his head at Tabbs’s approach, eyes bulging like two round marbles. Tabbs only went so close, leaving a strategic four feet between them.
Suh, you need one of these apples, the man said. He held out the small basket for Tabbs’s inspection. Green crab apples. They never known a worm.
Tabbs took two of them and paid the man in the smallest denomination of coin he could produce from his leather pouch.
Thanks yese kindly, suh. He dropped his head forward until his chin touched his chest.
Tabbs came right out with it. Do you know where I might find Teaberry Lane?
Old or new?
Tabbs unaware until now that he had a choice. Old, he said, guessing.
Yonder. The man pointed to the other side of the plateau where the forest began, then pocketed his money and scurried away.
Tabbs took some enjoyment in seeing the alabaster this way, face flushed from exerting in the heat. Defeated and under constant watch, the Anglo-Saxon natives were no longer masters in their own homes. In fact, they were as unsure as he was, strangers in a new land under foreign occupation. (Crab apples in his pockets.) They had numerous crimes to answer for, crimes against his people. Not a day passed when he was not struck by a desire—his own stiffening rage—to take one of the hard alabaster faces and smash it into powder. A desire that always flitted nimbly through him and evaporated, overwhelmed by the reality of the cruel necessities of war. (The planters were all dead.) The phase of fear fast replacing the state of fury.
Looked ahead into the white band of the morning and continued across the red span of the plateau, brushing his hands free of red dirt, refusing to break his stride. Trod his way carefully past sweaty Negro women carrying baskets on their heads (they were perfectly beyond his reach), moving on to the opposite side of the plateau and into forest again. Started his descent, gravity pulling him into speed. Easy now or tumble down the rise. Land leveled out—running, slowing into normalcy—and he found himself upon another road that seemed to begin and end nowhere. Worked on steadying his breathing. Heaved like something had burst in his chest. He went the way all the traffic seemed to be headed. Careful about where he placed his feet. Mounds of animal droppings like golden stones in the sunlight. Cowbells followed one another into the distances of the afternoon. The shunt and pull of animals and vehicles. (Strange how the things of this world—horses, mules, oxen, dogs, donkeys—afford flight from it.) Mule-drawn two-wheeled carts and horse
-drawn four-wheeled wagons stumbling along the plateau. Hard to believe that these skeletal animals were (once) living creatures. Hard to believe they simply hadn’t upped and quit by now. All their drivers could do to navigate their vehicles through the ruddy ruts and puddles the rain had made—he recalled no rain—and maneuver around people who bothered neither to stop walking nor to move out the way. Had he found it? Was this road the elusive (Old) Teaberry Lane? Sitting very erect in their saddles, ten or twelve mounted soldiers—the victors, the conquerors—strode through on impressive stallions. Other soldiers walking behind them, meandering in loose formation, their rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, their heavy boots sinking into the red mud.
What could he see in the spaces between the trees? Cemeteries in abundance. Fresh graves with plain wooden crosses to identify the occupants. (This country was growing the dead.) Would harvest a new generation from the old. Lesser life-forms hold little interest in the most recent of the dearly departed. Famished pigs (boars) and bearded goats grazed among the plots, while chickens flapped over the tombstones as if engaged in some athletic tournament.
Less than ten yards away, soldiers were mustering strays in a small muddy treeless break adjoining the road, grouping them into neat rows, only for the commanding officer to change his mind and mold them single file into a long crooked line extending well into the forest. The soldiers motioning and directing with their rifles, showing their irritation, their mounting disgust. The strays moving as one brown body, something large and hungry. Since his arrival in town ten days ago, no morning had passed that Tabbs had not seen them. They kept coming, a brown caravan. A brown sweaty stream, ill-smelling, off-putting to sight and nose—the strays, outfitted in rags, strips of torn cloth, feet shod in leftover leather or canvas, or no shoes at all. The little they owned—scalded pots and skillets, walking sticks, fishing poles, a coat or shawl here and there—in a jumble at their bare feet. The brutal stories he had heard fugitives tell back home on the podium or in the pub seemed so farfetched, much more so than even the most fantastic medieval romance or history. (The published narratives paled in comparison, no more unnerving or shocking than a good children’s bedtime tale.) But seeing these people he could believe they actually lived this history. One thing he could say in favor of his Race: they are a rugged people. A state of being and becoming unknown to him. (And for that reason, better than him, at least in certain respects, nobler, more courageous.) To never have quite enough, hunger growing, satisfaction that never came (comes). Futures denied. They greedily fell (fall) upon every cup of milk offered them, each loaf of bread. Yearning. (Life piled on life.) They will not—even now—settle in his mind, his thoughts. Is it for them that he was here? To build a better day? (The soon-come day without the nigger.) Assured, for mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve. Looking closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material and practical conditions for its solution already exist or are in the process of formation.
Song of the Shank Page 42