Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Sometimes smoke rising from the kerosene lamp fools him, mirages created by light and heat, the city’s reach into his memory mapped along whatever streets he can name. Looking out through the giant glassy eye of window from his supine position on the bed, he cannot see the city. No city. No sun. Only the sky’s dull palette of gray with ocean beneath it. A dhow passes, the captain swinging the tiller from one gunwale to the other, the man looking for all the world like someone sitting in the bowels of some oceanic monster. Another man passes in the street atop his donkey, the animal’s movements at once awkward and perfectly poised in the cold. And whatever other sights distract Tabbs’s eye in drift. Such is life on Edgemere. A practical people, a sober people. They make allowances, make way with whatever measly means they have at their disposal. No crying or complaining. So why not remain here? Remain here on the island and make Edgemere home.

  That’s Christmas out there, he hears Tom say.

  Not for long, Tabbs says. He turns his head to see Tom standing outlined before his tired eyes, his facial movements and expressions giving a distraught impression, his shirt so dingy that it looks less like a shirt and more like milk spilled across his chest. His frock coat repulsive with its dark patches. Repulsive his whole delicate figure.

  Take me to her.

  Will you shut up about it.

  I want to see her.

  You will.

  I want—

  All right, you’ll get there.

  Need makes us hungry, cold, afraid. (The air rolled in dirty winter wind and light.) We can only imagine what is absent. (Nothing completed, nothing attained.) Winter chill curls in around the door as Ruggles enters. Tabbs props himself up in bed. Was this his tragedy? So late in the game he is still condemned to make that effort of adaptation that he has always made, play the outward role, sometimes without being conscious of it.

  Ruggles doesn’t bother to take off his hat or coat. He looks about the room as if his eyes want to glimpse nothing else. So you’re still under the weather. He shakes his head. God grant everybody such a life. He pulls up a chair, letting the legs scrape across the floor, and sits down with a grim concentrated expression. Cocks his misshapen hat.

  If I could get out of this bed.

  You can. All of this over some imposter? You’re just throwing dust up in the air after the fact. Ruggles looks at him with anger, face full of passion.

  It is snowing now, snow whirling nimbly over the street, falling thick through the brittle air, and settling on the grassless ground, startling white against the gray day.

  Let it go. Ain’t that what I been telling you all along?

  Guess I never heard. Why don’t you tell me again?

  Sides, this Original Blind Tom has little life left to live.

  Is that so? His little life seems fine to me.

  Think of a three-legged cow. The deformity is only interesting at first. Nobody wants to look at that same three-legged cow a third and a fourth and a fifth time.

  Thanks, Ruggles. That helps.

  Now they simply sit like members of the audience waiting for the next act. Comes the news that Ruggles has just been appointed postmaster.

  Why are you always bragging on your gifts? The words are hard and icy in Tabbs’s mouth.

  Me? Homeskillet, have you ever heard me brag?

  All the time.

  Tell him, Tom.

  Tom’s face shows bewilderment (fright). A slight exhalation, lips pursed to air.

  Damn it, Ruggles. Now you gon get him started.

  What did I do?

  What did I do?

  Why don’t we just get going?

  Damn your meeting. I can use your meeting like spit in my face.

  But you’re still going to bring yo sorry ass.

  Like a new set of balls.

  Sorry motherfucker.

  An hour after dusk the men of the Vigilance Committee come in silence, emerging from darkness, walking toward the slim triangle of Wire’s church, Resurrection African Christian Episcopal (RACE). Inside the church they move in noise and light. Tabbs sees Wire near the front of the church, busy greeting the deacons. He waves and Wire raises his hand and continues what he is doing. Tabbs follows the men to the row of pews at the front of the church, where a circle of kerosene lamps casts yellow light, the whole room aglow with objects, fresh and bright and distinct, but the ceiling beams above them hardly visible. One after the next, the men come up in a breezy manner, shake him by the hand, and ask him how things are. You better now?

  How can he tell them about what he really feels? That something has settled in him after all those weeks in bed. That he is able to settle easily enough into the way of life here on Edgemere. That he feels utterly alone whenever he is in the city, alabasters consuming him with their cold bitter eyes. He endures their finger pointing, their verbal insults, their angry bodies brushing against him, comes to expect it (the stable framework of the body and the mind), accepts the position of one scorned as if it were proper and natural. Tells himself, They think I’m a foreigner, a stray. Me. And this is my city. My city.

  The soldiers—brown rifles and white hands—are supposed to watch over the strays, keep them orderly, keep them safe. Can it be they are responsible for the fact that he is still breathing? Soldiers and their weapons everywhere in the city, weapons shining clean. He feels transparent, all those eyes looking through him. So he feels thankful whenever he leaves the city to return to Edgemere. Letting the island further inside him the longer he remains here. He is immensely comfortable on Edgemere; his time here, this year, month, however many months or days it’s been, have brought a feeling of protection he has never experienced before. Saturated in blackness.

  The soldiers are leaving the city. The city is sending them away.

  Nawl.

  They are.

  How you know?

  I’m telling you.

  The news is an occasion for some emotion—sighs, gasps, utterances, and expressions of disbelief.

  We knew that, knew that they wouldn’t stay forever.

  And now is the time.

  A people cannot be redeemed by military victory, Wire says, but only by the spiritual and moral rebirth of the individual and the nation.

  Amen, Deacon Double says. He is the only man standing in the room, his appointed duty to see to it that every member of the committee has what he needs, whether it’s a glass of water or something more stringent like Medusa, a plain wafer or a blessed slice of bread. He is clearly a mongrel, two bloods mixing in his buttermilk-colored skin. However, brother, I can hardly see this as good news. For without the sword, covenants are but words and of no strength to secure and protect a man.

  Protect Africans. The refugees.

  Are you afraid? Ruggles asks. We will protect the refugees. We will protect ourselves. Why should another protect us?

  Go protect them, Tabbs wants to say. Has Edgemere taken possession of him for good? He cannot leave. He does not want to leave. He must not leave. Let the soldiers leave.

  Speak, brother, Deacon Double says.

  Neither borrowers nor lenders be, Ruggles says. We must either stand on our own two feet or start wearing garments unbefitting a manly race. Ruggles stands up now and begins pacing. He needs to move his arms to be more forceful. God said to Moses, “I am that I am,” or more exactly, “I shall be that I shall be.” Each race sees from its own standpoint a different side of God. The Hebrews could not serve God in the land of the Egyptians, nor can the Negro under the Anglo-Saxon. He can only serve man here on Edgemere.

  How did we get to God? Wire asks.

  Ruggles looks at him. Well, brother, ain’t this a church?

  Just go carefully, that’s all I’m saying. Go carefully.

  Brother, what are you saying?

  A lot of people say things with they mouth, Ruggles says. I’m not one for a lot of talk.

  Indeed, Double says. What the whole body does is more eloquent than lips.

  So wh
at are you saying?

  Tabbs knows that he will never forget a word or gesture of Ruggles’s tonight.

  What am I saying? Ruggles says. Here is what I am saying. Every man in this room was forced from his home. Everyone here. Each one of us. Ruggles looks at each member of the committee in turn—Wire, Tabbs, Drinkwater and his soldiers, Double and the other deacons. Tabbs sees something in Ruggles that he will never fully reach.

  What you supposing we do?

  Yes, brother. What? The Deacon waits for an answer. We have arms, we have ammunition, safeguarded right here in this very church.

  That’s right, Drinkwater says.

  Now, don’t go too far, Wire says. In battle men see things they thought they’d kept hidden.

  They do, Double says. They do.

  Each day brings word of mass graves of strays sprouting up all across the city, mutilated corpses rising knee deep out of the earth with the abrupt arrival of spring, and half-fleshed corpses floating in pits filled with rainwater, fat unwholesome frogs perched atop muddy torsos and water moccasins swimming in and out of organs and skin. Stories splinter in all directions, the hurt Tabbs doesn’t see far away. Black bodies burned. Black bodies hanging from trees and telegraph poles. Africans pulled off random streetcars and mobbed to death. Bloated black bodies floating in canals, rivers, and ponds. Blood in every eye. Such stories become commonplace. Tabbs bears these facts with equanimity, nothing so barbarous that the human mind cannot accept it. He lives in a silence with noise and conversation all around him. Air thick with event. Hard to keep up with it all. Many times Tabbs will hear running footsteps, yells of fear and excitement, everybody around him trying to get to the bottom of some new tragedy, loud donkeys filling in the spaces between words. Delivered out of nothing, strays flee the city for Edgemere, the city’s African population expelled again. Ferries heavy with hundreds of the expulsed, their hulls low in the water. Uprooted. Exiled. Displaced. The land grows weary of her inhabitants. Pulled continually into their orbit, Tabbs struggles to gain a footing in the changing daily life of the island. Lives, giving his entire attention to thoughts that on the one hand grow more vague day by day and, on the other, grow more precise and unambiguous.

  The strays want to forget, erase the bad old days of hunger, desire, and desperation spiriting them across the ocean to this island, dazed by their own movement, sagging, dragging. Most have no experience with money. They work hard for very little, for less than they should. And they are cheated of what they earn. The bony women with big butts always seem to be pregnant. The stunted children seem wallowed in ignorance, cunning, play, and slovenliness. Strays display their impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cares to see. Every stray he meets is named Lincoln. His life is no longer a single story but part of theirs. Tabbs Lincoln.

  Tabbs wants to say to them, Tell me what it was like. (Why do you just look at me instead of telling me about your sadness?) But he rarely speaks to them—stilted and confused; downcast and dejected; their inaccurate but splendid words—content to observe them from a distance. How can he open himself to arms that will not embrace? How heal wounds that do not bleed?

  Fair to say that Tabbs does not sense any changes in his own physical condition or wish for anything to be different. The world is what it is. He has to force himself to be gentle with this frailty he finds himself in the midst of.

  Uncertain of clear boundaries, the exiles put up makeshift shelters in the main square, old canvas tents and burlap lean-tos flapping under the walnut trees. Their children steal from stores and grow bold enough to sneak into kitchens while their parents are out fishing or peddling firewood. And their famished dogs begin to seek out and kill chickens and goats, tearing out the throats of younger animals, and doing enough bodily harm to the larger—donkey, sheep, cow—a plug bitten out of a calf or flank, an eye lost, an ear ripped away—to make them unusable. That’s when feelings turn completely against them. Black-robed members of the Vigilance Committee shoot their dogs on sight, and tear down their ugly shelters, row after row.

  Comes the day when Tabbs sees from a distance four heads set in a stationary circle around the fountain in the main square, long faces, long necks. Horses shaped out of stone. He expects water to spill from the mouths of these horses until he sees one head dip, muzzle sinking into the water. Closer, the horses prove to be strays kneeling in the grass under arrest, hands tied behind their backs at the wrist with lengths of rope. Confined to the reach of their bodies. The single deacon guarding them letting them rest some coolness back into their bodies, jabbing the air this way and that with his finger. Fountains are not for human consumption, he tells them. Each stray turns his face toward Tabbs in embarrassment, while the Deacon lifts his head and nods at Tabbs in silence.

  Some get sick from tainted food and cloudy water. Die.

  In this overexcited atmosphere Tabbs is content most days to let the hours in Wire’s house pass without any disruption. Other days he attends meetings with the Vigilance Committee.

  Look at these poor bastards, he says.

  They stretch forth their hands, Wire says. And we stretch forth ours.

  You might as well appeal against the thunderstorm as against these terrible but necessary hardships, Deacon Double says.

  They need light and instruction, Ruggles says. So either give it to them, or let them all starve.

  I thought you were going to protect them, Tabbs wants to say.

  It’ll take them time to learn, Wire says. Them chains is hard on a man. Hard.

  Amen.

  Many a morning as Tabbs drifts into town he notices Deacon Double moving with a look of reserve and obstinacy on his face. Though he walks with his head down, many locals will recognize him and stop to greet him, and he will glance up and smile a reply as he hurries on with the swiftness of a man who feels both humiliation and danger in recognition. He is as tall as Tabbs but thick and strong, muscled up perfectly, his threatening frame always amenable in immaculate dress, his eyes—a fleeting exchange of glances—his most noticeably attractive feature, green. The pace of those days was such that Tabbs was never able to talk to him at length, in any intimacy. He would do so today. He sees the Deacon approaching, ready to enter his office. As he unlocks the door, he turns his face toward Tabbs but not his body. He knows that I don’t like him, Tabbs tells himself. He knows that I think he is a son of a bitch. They greet one another.

  I’m surprised to see you here, the Deacon says, something unnaturally deliberate in the way he utters the words.

  Have a moment?

  A questioning look.

  He swallows dry breath, strays itching in his memory. They enter the Deacon’s office. Tabbs strives to get his bearings, for every time he visits the deacon’s office he finds that the positions of the furniture and decorations have changed. He swears that this is an actual physical fact—like some bizarre variation of musical chairs—and not simply a failing of memory explained by his few visits and the separation of time between each. He’ll make a mental map and later sketch on paper what he remembers seeing, then will use the actual drawn map to verify his suspicions upon his next visit.

  He decides to be direct. I don’t know who’s in charge.

  We all are. The committee.

  Tabbs is absolved. He goes to the meetings not simply because he has time to kill or because he wants to study their beliefs, but because he wants to be there when they step back into the world of order.

  You don’t approve?

  No, it’s not that. I’m just trying to get my bearings. Tabbs sees Double clearly on the other side of the table, his handsome features, green eyes, the startling colors of his shirt. Double indicates that Tabbs should sit and he does, but Double remains standing.

  Do you pray?

  He takes in a grand vista of bookcases that reach the ceiling, three walls, a tall line of rifles inside each case, a fence of armaments. A window set in the front wall, where Double stands in morning light, pistols on the long ta
ble between them. Tabbs knows there is intimacy in what he is seeing. I do, but perhaps not enough.

  Yes. You must ask yourself, Why did God give us this situation?

  He can smell soaps on the other man’s body.

  And you should know the answer without any doubt. Divine power operates far beyond the limitations of what my human awareness can grasp or my five senses can detect. His voice is exact, crystal clear. If we live and move and have our being in Him, God also lives and moves and has His being in us. Double plants and unplants his feet until they are perfectly poised. That’s why we must pray. “Whatever you ask for in prayer with faith, you will receive.” Matthew 21:22. What I know is not based on what I see.

  I am not unaware of your point of view.

  But I can see that my words fall on deaf ears.

  I don’t see any need for fomenting violence.

  Double waves the suggestion away. We are fomenting nothing. Mr. Gross, if I set before you a cup of hot water and a portion of tea, would you call it a cup of tea?

  I must place the hot water to the tea.

  Exactly.

  Tabbs watches Double, understanding what kind of God is behind his stare.

  What an opportunity we all have now, Mr. Gross. The war has given us a new world. We can turn the page and begin afresh. The work to be done is not to be a reproduction of what we see in the Anglo-Saxon’s country. It is not to be a healing up of an old sore, but the unfolding of a new bud, an evolution, the development of a new side of God’s character and a new phase of humanity. As in every form of the inorganic universe we see some noble variation of God’s thought and beauty, so in each separate man, in each separate race, something of the absolute is incarnated. For the special work of each race the prophets arise among the people themselves.

  Prophets? Tabbs sees in Double’s gaze something of that amused expression with which General Bethune had observed him many years ago.