Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  If you will excuse me, Mr. Gross. I should begin my work.

  Yes, sir. I don’t wish to impose on your time, Tabbs said, but I kindly ask that you allow me to see you again after you have further reviewed the facts. Then I will leave town and return home.

  Coffin stood looking at Tabbs, saying nothing for the longest time. Mr. Gross, you must know that there is no reason for you to remain in this city. Please leave at the earliest opportunity, today even. I assure you we will be in communication. In fact, you will find a wire awaiting you upon your return home.

  That is so generous of you, sir. But you understand that I have come far. It will be a most difficult matter for me to return in my present unsettled state.

  Coffin lifted his chin in skepticism. Mr. Gross, I should warn you, if you are thinking about—but he said no more, as if he already knew what Tabbs was thinking and didn’t have the strength to offer any opposition. As you wish. At an hour best for you, kindly pay me a return visit on Friday.

  Thank you, sir.

  In the meantime, I urge caution, Mr. Gross. Coffin gave Tabbs an almost paternal look of concern. Take it upon yourself to be more circumspect.

  You have my word.

  I have your word.

  You have my word.

  He was gone too quickly. The day too hot and the road too quiet. He closed the door as much as he could—it was swollen, open as if this explained all, put motive to rest—hesitated in the hall and took his time about leaving the house—each stair a month, each landing a year—hoping the lawyer might call him back. Hard as he might try, he couldn’t quite bury his mistrust. He would never entrust his livelihood, his survival, into the hands of a white person, an alabaster. How easy to see beneath the theatrical disguises of their faces, the secrets and riddles behind their words. Perhaps Coffin was deliberately leaving him up in the air about his intentions? Even if this was the case—he never found out—he had no choice but to trust the lawyer, although he, Tabbs Gross, wished there were some way he could bring the lawyer’s true feelings to the surface. (Is it superabundance of heart or something else that makes him befriend, represent, and defend the—the great prediction, promise—last who shall someday be first?) As he slowly made his way downstairs, he realized that his reasons for being here, in this foreign land, were even remote to himself now. (A stranger.) How could he reveal to this white man, or any man for that matter, his purpose for his risky venture?

  He started back for the hotel, determined not to show up in public again—I can take my meals in my room, I can have my meals delivered to my room, I need only leave my room to bathe—until Friday, two days from now. He would go about his day (that day and the next), thinking no more than usual. Understood that his decision to stay in town would involve (require, demand) two days of tense waiting. How would he manage it? (He still asks himself, How did I manage it?) His story already stretched too far. Get this thing over with.

  When did he first hear the name Blind Tom? 1859? 1860? 1861? Tabbs is not entirely sure. Tom was a regular topic of conversation on the Negro grapevine.

  I would never pay a penny of my hard-earned salary to hear him, the well-dressed man said. This is the way of these alabasters, to present us in a bestial light.

  You’ve got it all wrong, his companion said, casual dress, casual bearing. So what if the little blind nigger whirls around onstage. He’s probably just taking him some exercise cause those candlefaces keep him cooped up all the time, under their thumbs.

  Although total opposites in dress, the two men walked loose-limbed and carefree. What you got to say about it, Tabbs? Are you attending the concert?

  Like other Negroes, Tabbs had thoughts about Blind Tom—was he aiding the Race or harming it?—

  What are your feelings about the war, Tom?

  I am not afraid of bullets. They fly so fast.

  —but he couldn’t come into words; whenever the subject came to his tongue he had difficulty speaking. His mind raced ahead.

  Not a damn thing. Just like I thought.

  Ah, don’t be so hard on Tabbs. He’s a real race man.

  The men got a good laugh out of this statement. They continued on, Tabbs straining his ears trying to follow the argument as the voices faded with distance.

  Tabbs had to admit, Blind Tom as a man, as a Negro man—well, he was still a boy, only thirteen years of age—was rather disappointing—

  Tom, you keep up quite a schedule of travel. It would tax any man, young or old, Anglo-Saxon or Negro. Do you not get tired?

  Be passersby.

  —but his way with Bach, if one could believe the journals, was something to adore.

  Indeed, hearing Blind Tom in actuality proved to be all he had hoped it would be, although he can no longer pinpoint the year when he first saw Tom in concert. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know. (The years don’t pass for nothing.) Only the concert itself remains firm in his memory. How would he describe it? Not unlike a body’s first entry into the ocean, smitten, salt-tasting skin hungry for more, sea secrets. Feel it:

  Fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the performance the gold and white auditorium was quiet and still virtually empty, the highest boxes and the gallery dark, almost invisible, while the best boxes, draped with long-fringed pelmets and velvet railings on the ground floor and at stage left and stage right, were only dimly visible. A few Negro attendants stood about chatting in the dress circle and the stalls, lost among the red velvet armchairs under the half light of the tiny flames of the huge dimly glowing chandelier, and the great red patch of the curtain that Tabbs hid behind was plunged in shade. He waited patiently, his anger bending to anticipation. At nine o’clock, the scheduled start, the main doors to the auditorium opened, uniformed Negro attendants bustling in with tickets in hand, directing a train of couples in front or behind, Mr. and Mrs. Candleface done up in formal ballroom dress, buoyant (floating and flying) in ballooning skirts and expansive tails, who nested down in numbered seats and began sweeping the auditorium with a leisurely gaze. (Who’s here? Who isn’t?) Only after all the alabasters were seated did the attendants allow the Negro ticket holders to enter—a crush of bodies—the gallery (Coon Heaven), way up above just beneath the rotunda ceiling with its fresco of naked women flying about in blue sky and muscular gods pitched in battle. The Negroes scrambling and fighting over the best seats, a din that caused the alabasters below to crane their necks and catapult hard glances and hot curses in their direction. Niggers! Could the alabasters actually see the Negroes they damned and cursed? The Negroes were only momentarily ill at ease, refusing to let environs spoil a good time. They expected a festive event, necessary break from their everyday chaotic and hierarchichal world. Aware nonetheless that they were in public and hence were under inspection—all eyes watching, all eyes on me—each man representing all men, each woman all women. All would suffer shame and setback should any one step out of line. So put your best self on display. Mind your p’s and q’s. Candlefaces!

  He heard the manager’s voice, and carefully moved from his clandestine position behind the curtain. Took an innocent measure of the custodial closet before he stepped inside and closed the door three-quarters of the way. Confined so, he couldn’t help but smell his own body sharp and fresh in the rank empty darkness, clean light splaying through the parted door.

  Listen:

  Here is the piano in semidarkness, plates of light, planks of darkness, black keys and white keys. Here is the boy seated at the piano, a Negro like yourself. The boy center stage before a packed house, and you quietly wedged inside a custodian’s closet in clandestine repose—invisible, your stomach rumbles—with the door barely open, one long rectangle of vision, the boy there and you here, remote, far away—another time, another place—your eyes stinging with the effort to see over and around the broom and mop heads and handles, the buckets and pails and brushes and shovels and dustpans and hammers hanging from the walls, to look and cut through everything—one edge of th
e door frame, one edge of the stage curtain, the piano itself—separating you from the pianist a hundred feet away. Obscured, you think you catch a glimpse of his face behind the cantilevered slant of the raised polished lid. He brings his hands into position and begins the first selection, hands moving, casting a haze over his features, or perhaps it is the light shining down from the massive chandelier above—thousands of burning candles—that spins a web of glare that makes him so hard to see. You are skilled in fine general culture and know how to listen. Shut your eyes to skin and you are forced to admit that the performance is thoroughly in tune with the very best of European art, that the performer you are hearing is one of them, no doubt about it, a young virtuoso. He moves his body very little and has an odd way of bringing his lower lip up and letting it fall at short intervals, as a fish works its mouth while breathing. He seems to use only one foot, his right, in pedaling. And when he finishes the piece, he stands up from the stool, turns slightly toward the audience, and takes a quick bow. (Three seconds, four.) Then sits right back down on the stool and begins the next selection.

  Ears pressed to air, you, Tabbs, stand for nearly an hour without words and listen, sound rushing in and piling up inside your head in copious abundance. His fingers tap the seconds into melodies, tick the chords into minutes—you stand for another hour—and you have the difficult task of maintaining your discipline, of somehow staying silent and inconspicuous. Dare not even shift your weight from one foot to the other. Aware of a certain pulsing. A tall man, you can cross the stage in five steps, erase time and distance, if you so choose. He pulls you toward him. Lightheaded, weak, you don’t care. In this nowhere, you, Tabbs, feel yourself more solidly, no longer worrying about the mundane this or that. Something to behold.

  It could have ended there—in a way it did—with the end of the concert. But signs—changing times, the war going badly for the South—flooded in. General Bethune took ill, the nature of his affliction a matter of speculation. As it is, the slave owner and Confederate provocateur rarely travels, certainly never to set foot on free, Northern soil. Furthermore, he almost never traverses his own Southern climes with his shackled subjugate, young Tom, according that responsibility to the stage manager, Mr. Thomas Warhurst. Whatever his reasons for touring of late, he has apparently done so at considerable risk to his own health. Tabbs hunkering down at his table with newspaper and a glass of wine as his imagination and hopes caused the air across from him to shape into the boy’s hunched-over form, some timid insect with wings folded, lunging toward words, unable to suppress his impulse to higher efforts. Water plopped against the table, one drop, two, and another. A man setting out to war weeps.

  For many years the outspoken Southerner’s name, General James Neil Bethune, had been mixed up in the controversy over severance, minority rights, and expansion, no phase in that strange life that could not have graced the leaves of a medieval history or romance. From the fiery and impetuous young lieutenant who stole as his bride the daughter of a ruler-elect of the land—the Anglo-Saxon loves a soldier—to the cool and ambitious agitator of the platform and page, the podium and the press, who took upon himself the duty to voice his nation’s cause—secession—before it was either a cause or a nation.

  In Tabbs’s reading of the man, General Bethune was less a product of his country and more an aberrant self-creation, a self-directed and sovereign nation of one.

  A month after the concert, Tabbs found himself seated in a sun-bleached office, all nerves. (A Negro maid had led him down a long hall and put him before a desk. Led without speaking a single word. He had stood for a good ten minutes knocking on the door, under a hard hot wind flouncing the awning. The door finally drew open to a second Negro maid, a girl in her teens, blinking him into focus and understanding. Early morning and the girl already looked tired, gazing back at him as if looking through him for a quiet place to rest.) Morning light pouring through louvers, making white walls whiter. A legal text open on the desk, broken at the spine. A (third) Negro maid crawled on hands and knees about the floor, wiping and scrubbing, suds gathering and disappearing. Her pail came up, her rag went in, the water went out, her rag waved hither and thither, lingered to rub and massage, her knees and palms creaked forward or back. Tabbs flicked eyes over the delicacy of her thin legs, small frame and hands. Caught her face revealed under rows of bruises. Then the door flapped open and still another (fourth) Negro maid appeared. A narrow woman—a life spent in tiny kitchens and tinier outhouses—the light (bone?) buttons shining on her dark smock. She waved at him—come this way—without either entering or speaking. He removed his hat from his lap, got up from his seat, and followed her down the unlit hall. He had received a wire from General Bethune’s lawyer, a Mr. Geryon, directing him to this location at this hour—no other instructions or information—but no signs so far of either the lawyer or General Bethune. Was General Bethune present? Would he actually appear? Important to make an imposing first impression, for General Bethune would know him without ever having first met him.

  She stopped before an open door, pointed—in there—and he entered the room without hesitation, as if it was his right to be there. Whenever he considers it later—now—he finds it impossible to recollect what thought guided his first movement, unsure even if he had formulated any thoughts at the moment he entered the room. Remembers some force drawing him inside, not prompting but actually guiding his legs and hands and mouth. The room had no window—was it a pantry or closet?—and hence no source of natural light, but bright illumination radiated out from two tall thick candles burning on a small card table stationed in the center of the room, where General Bethune sat on the far side in a plain chair, staring blankly up at Tabbs. He gave no indication that Tabbs’s fearless entry had disturbed or upset him, that it (he) was anything out of the ordinary.

  He stood up from behind the table and extended his hand in offering. A man of medium height, perhaps slightly taller, in any case far shorter than Tabbs by several inches. And he appeared, despite rumors about ill health, to be quite fit, his body worked to the rhythms of regimented exercise, impressive for a man twenty years Tabbs’s senior. A good-looking man on top of that—yes, admit it—with a full head of wavy back-combed hair, dark eyes, and nicely cut features. Tabbs stepped forward, this erasing of distance affording a closer examination that revealed that the General’s face was beginning to show signs of (early) aging, the skin cracked in the places you might expect for a man in his midfifties rather than midforties.

  Tabbs took the older man’s warm hand into his own, and they shook firmly—which hand moved the other?—while General Bethune smiled in greeting. Tabbs forbade any smile to cross his lips, determined to show the other before him the coldness of profound, even deserved, respect. Their hands parted—who was the first to let go?—enough reason for Tabbs to casually take a seat in a second chair positioned before the table without General Bethune’s invitation.

  The next words out of General Bethune’s mouth came in the form of a question. What has been the holdup? Excuse my asking, but why have you, sir, been so long in coming? I’ve been waiting here a good half hour or more. Completely cordial, expressing no rudeness or displeasure in his asking.

  Took Tabbs a minute to respond. Sat gazing through wick-generated patterns bouncing off the table and gliding across General Bethune’s face. He said that he actually had arrived several minutes before their appointed time. Then he realized that he had not checked his watch. (Couldn’t do so now.) Nor did he know for sure how long he had actually sat waiting in the other room.

  I regret to inform you, General Bethune said, that you are sadly mistaken about the hour.

  Tabbs detected the scent of tobacco smoke, invisible fumes rushing into his nostrils. (Yes, someone had been smoking.) Calmly and without unnecessary words, he told as if giving a sworn deposition the circumstances leading up to their meeting today at what he knew to be the correct and agreed upon time. He wanted to be forceful and direct. Yet his words
sounded cautious to his own ears.

  I have listened, General Bethune said. I will henceforth consider the matter settled. You simply misunderstood. Let us leave it at that.

  This caught Tabbs off guard. What should he say now? Review the facts again? Voice a complaint? Set this alabaster straight?

  I understand you have a matter you need to present before me.

  Yes. Tabbs wasted no time in outlining his proposition, making his intentions clear. General Bethune listened to it all with no change of expression.

  You must have given this matter considerable pondering, he said.

  Yes, I have.

  You speak well.

  Tabbs looked into the other’s confidently upturned face, under its smooth sweep of hair. For whatever reason, everything apparently sat well with him. With this realization, Tabbs’s face started to go tight. Difficult to keep his eyes open. Weighted under the fatigue of observation.

  Then he saw something: General Bethune shifted slightly in his seat, an odd adjustment. And it occurred to him: something strange in General Bethune’s physical makeup, although he couldn’t say what exactly, couldn’t put his finger on it. General Bethune wasn’t (isn’t) put together quite right.

  But no matter how well you speak, what would possess me to give this matter serious consideration? I see no reason why I should.

  Tabbs was pleased with the question, for he took it to mean that General Bethune would actually consider doing the impossible: entering into business with the darker other. Consider it, sir, Tabbs said, for one primary reason. The war may end tomorrow or the day after, next month or next year or two years from now. We know not the hour. But one thing is certain. You will lose.

  General Bethune didn’t flinch. By all indication, you are right, Mr. Gross. If I understand you correctly, you wish to rescue Tom. But Tom is already free.

  No, Tabbs says, quite the contrary. This is not a moral matter, but an industrial one. I see an opportunity. More likely than not, other men will soon approach you, perhaps some already have.