Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  He takes a seat, as dusty as it is. Something new—a kind of fascination, vitality—has entered her manner, a mischievous glitter in her eyes. She looks at him and smiles, waiting for something. Tom is holding her hands and pressing them with a desperate intensity. Tabbs sees her troubled look, but she turns her head away. He casts his gaze over to the piano, tempted to rise to his feet and go over to it. Instead he looks around in amazement at all the dirty things in the room, dismayed. That is a beautiful instrument, he says.

  She glances doubtfully at the piano and laughs self-consciously. Tom touching her hair. But why are you here?

  We’re here for you.

  Me.

  You.

  She does not push him to answer any more questions.

  We have to leave.

  She just watches him.

  It’s the only way, the only way we can be safe. We can go to the South where the soldiers can protect us. Our only guarantee of protection.

  I’m not going anywhere with you.

  Eliza, Tom says. Miss Eliza. Stroking her hair.

  The boy standing by the door in speechless astonishment, something loosed in him at the sight–disdain, desire, resentment, a yearning for identification. For his part, Tabbs resents the boy’s squeamishness but says nothing.

  You’re asking me to pack up my belongings.

  No need.

  But then I’ll have nothing.

  I’m not the one asking.

  Her head slightly inclined in the attitude of someone who is hard of hearing. Tom leaves her side, his movements quiet as the night, and while the Bethune woman, Eliza, stands considering, Tom circles the room, once, twice, stopping before the piano on the third pass; he rounds it once, twice. A pageant of odors invades Tabbs’s senses, mildew and much else. No way he can (will) leave this room without her. He is ready to say more, but what more can he say? What does she want him to say? Unwilling to let go, he can only hope that she will press him for details, a reasonable explanation. That she will share her worries.

  Tom kneels down on all fours and crawls under the piano. Then he tries to grunt upright into a standing position, tries to lift the piano, hoist it onto his back.

  Take me home. Tom speaks over his shoulder to Tabbs. Tom is sitting rather solidly, not a care in the world, Eliza seated beside him, Tabbs and the boy—all seriousness—in the seat behind them, the compartment empty except for the four of them, together, a solitary quartet. Take me home. I don’t want no trouble. No thirty pieces of silver.

  Okay, Tom. Okay. Thinking, Please cease your babbling. A woman again, Tabbs had secured his scarf and applied ample portions of Eliza’s face powder and rouge before they set out, his head abuzz with the task before them. So far so good, although the journey here was not without challenges, Tabbs reliving the moment when Eliza encountered the startled expression on the face of the station clerk; not until they were almost upon him did he notice them, the ancient alabaster awakened by this odd pairing of a white woman with three Negro traveling companions. Tabbs was glad she had done the speaking to the station clerk since his voice was wanting in firmness, its quality unsteady. But his troubles weren’t over. The entire time in the station, he stared in dumbfounded frustration at Tom hanging about the woman, cooing, wanting to tell her something. Doors cracked open in Tabbs’s head, releasing a fresh fit of panic. No way of knowing what trouble Tom might bring forth, the havoc he might cause.

  Tom and Eliza engage in a whispered conference, while Tabbs sits watching the boy in appreciative quietness and listening to his halty breathing. Side by side, he and the boy are nearly touching. He wants to make conversation. The boy’s lips move. If they manage to formulate the faintest of sounds, Tabbs doesn’t hear what they say. Tabbs requests that the boy repeat himself. Listens with all his body, searching for clues, but the boy is having difficulty getting his words out, his eyes feverishly active, fear the source of his discomfiture. Now Tabbs starts to worry again too, fresh unease, not that he had ever stopped. They will need to change trains in the city.

  Tabbs speaks to him, and the boy lifts his shoulders in a meaningless way, his brown eyes rippling with sun, which rises and falls inside them. When he is praised, his eyes light up with a glow of their own, red suffusing his cheeks. The afternoon sun starts to lose its harsher edge. Late afternoon light. The city calls out to them, Tom playful still, full of rejoicing.

  Tom. Tabbs touches him on the shoulder.

  Eliza and Tom are the first to detrain when they reach the station, Tabbs and the boy behind them. He steps down to the platform, his feet wobbly. They amble on, cautious, looking (and listening) this way and that—Tom in his gangling posture, as clumsy in his bodily movements as a child taking his first walk, a body of mixed messages—before venturing on to their southbound locomotive. They are the last to board. The train snags into motion, pulling out of the station. They weave toward the sleeping cars against the violent rattle of the train.

  They walk a gauntlet, successive rows of nigger-seeking faces lifting in concert. Tabbs feels a storm gathering inside his head, a spinning turbulence that sets his whole body atremble, his eyes going far beyond what is visible, starting to water, blurred sight. Against his expectations, they reach their assigned compartment and slip into their berths. Anxious, time is transferred from one station to another with the swiftness of a thought. Now the city looks very far away out the window, and he feels achingly free of everything in it. Can it really be this easy? He fidgets in his berth. As he sees the city through the glass a smart hurt imposes itself on his mind. Something is eluding him, but what?

  The boy is a need evocative of other necessities. His once terrified face loosens into a bemused grin when their eyes meet, traces of dried sweat marking the boundaries of his brow and chin. Still, there is a glimpse of self-doubt in his physical posture. Small, a pygmy to Tabbs’s manly stature. Tabbs sees him shift restlessly in his berth. What can he do to help?

  He tells the boy something about the science of locomotion, about engines, pistons and pulleys, steam and tracks. He hopes in speaking this way he isn’t causing a greater shock than the boy has already suffered. He feels the words go into the boy, but the boy remains silent, his features sporting a specter of worry. Stations drone by.

  Train, station, train. Train, station, train. Train, station, train. A sameness of place, sound, and motion. After a while it no longer seems to him that he is trying to put space and distance behind him or shorten space and distance ahead, but that he and the train are now hanging suspended in pure time like a single thread of spider-web. Going nowhere and fleeing from nothing. A hypnotic steadiness (seeing) of trees and towns and solitude. Eliza and Tom speak amicably. He and the boy should too, but the boy sits quietly, an expression at once fierce, wild, and tender.

  I thought—Tabbs begins, but he does not say it, disappointed in his own failed and spent flesh.

  Something releases in the air. Alabasters enter the compartment. Tabbs feels a constriction in his chest, a muscle withdrawing to some empty space within. Warily, the alabasters (four of them) begin making their way toward Tabbs and his party, moving slowly, closing in. Soon they are close enough for Tabbs to take in the expressions on their faces, faces registering a type of disbelief more akin to caution (fear). The figures identical, the same, in dress. We all dressed in Memphis cotton, Ruggles said. They cast their slow heavy-lidded glances upon Eliza, Tabbs, Tom, and the boy in turn, surrendering to the sight.

  How you all doing?

  Eliza speaks a reply.

  Where you heading?

  She tells him.

  Is that right? … These niggers are with you? … You don’t say? That one here, she sure is a peculiar-looking one.

  Yeah. What’s your name, auntie?

  She can’t talk, Eliza says.

  One blind nigger and one mute one. Trust my eyes. And what’s this one’s affliction?

  I’m jus a nigger, the boy says.

  I can see that. />
  The four alabasters continue to stand before them, their expressions eager, puzzled, and wild. Tabbs begins to tremble. To have made it this far. From the way that their features scramble he can tell that they are tense but undecided, as if waiting for a higher authority to instruct them. For a while the four alabasters continue to do nothing but stand there in wordless confrontation, staring with a peculiar blankness. Now all he can do is to continue to sit, weighing a thousand expedients, stippled shadows ever present, moving across his lap. Now he hears a humming cadence. Tom’s lips are amurmur with faint sounds. Talking to himself? Singing? Then Tom starts to string together phrases, a disjointed discourse. The alabasters turn their eyes toward Tom.

  What’s that?

  Tom speaks sings discourses on and on.

  I could swear that he’s—

  He’s just an imbecile, Lucky. Can’t you see that?

  Yeah, Lucky. Leave the nigger be.

  Still the words of this man’s cohorts do nothing to lessen his sober intent gaze, the air full of Tom’s voice, a hysterical music, roaring saliva bellowing above their heads, building in volume and intensity until ears hurt.

  Lord Jesus!

  The alabasters back out of the compartment. Tom continues to shout scream his gibberish.

  Tom, Tabbs says.

  No stopping him.

  Tom!

  You hear that nigger?

  Yeah, I heard him. Son of a bitch.

  The air falls still.

  On my mother’s life.

  The four alabasters enter the car again.

  They’ve come for you, Tom says. You could not put it off forever.

  And Tabbs hears the startled shout, There, that one there! and he feels monstrously exposed, breaking out of the limits of his body. Hurrying forward, the deceived snatch the scarf off his head and hurl it into the air, a red moth, the furious flutter of things undone.

  Station!

  Needing to feel superior to his attackers, Tabbs stands straight up to his full height—

  See, what I tell you?

  That nigger son of a bitch.

  —but when the first blow comes he recoils back into his seat. He fights the air, his heartbeats coming in little waves of acceleration, knowing that he is going to fail, and he slows his body down until he is breathing with infinitesimal care while some fragment of his attention thinks soberly about the facts. A refusal to put his life in the hands of these others. If he holds his breath will he disappear? Held breath decreasing his weight and whatever space he takes up. He becomes quite still, sitting with unbreathing rigidity, listening to the sound of his held breath until he spills his air out all at once in a noisy rush. He does not even feel the boot. One minute he is in his berth, the next prone in the aisle, feeling his eye, the side of his face, his mouth, his nose, his entire head, the slow painful pounding of the blood.

  You damn nigger bastard!

  Someone stooping over him with the coldest eyes he has ever seen.

  He hears, You did not choose me. It was I who chose you.

  More hands touch him with savage interest. He hears the sound of his body being pummeled, the shock of blows about his head, and it angers him, their determination to handle him as if they own him, have a right to his flesh. He hears now the sound of his fists on flesh, hard muscles, skin, and bone shocking against his fists. Back on his feet as quick as he can be, sealed in by bodies—still four? or more now? the compartment filled with alabasters, every fucking alabaster who has ever lived and some who haven’t even been born yet—receiving their weight and laying his own on them.

  He hears Tom say, Fire up that engine! then hears Eliza say something, her voice calm and sensible, without panic. Hears someone else say, You let him call you that? Sees the boy’s hand move in a lazy arc and one alabaster bring both hands to his throat, as if choking himself, a vise grip, streams of blood spurting through his fingers despite the liquid-stamping pressure he applies. The alabaster goes down with a gurgling sound.

  The boy moves the shank in furious desperation at his attackers. A second falls, and a third, and a fourth. Then someone seizes his shank-wielding hand, while another jumps in to afflict damage. Hellfire, the boy says. They got me. Screaming even as he is lifted out of his berth, sound swarming into the marrow of Tabbs’s consciousness, weeping and shouting and wild talk. Tabbs feels himself being lifted, too, kicking, squirming and squiggling like a hook-baited worm but going wherever they carry him. The nerve. Off the train now. The bitching nerve of these godless people. Damn every one of them. Above ground, he sees alabasters, some of the locals, staring alert down the street or seated on benches, porches, and stoops, pulled tidily into themselves. A few smile approvingly. Tossed into the gravel and the dirt. He does not move at first because he cannot. A small shower of stones falls around him. A few hit him. Then they are on him again, fists and feet.

  He half pushes and half flings an alabaster off of him, and his feet flee beneath him. In the shouting and running he has no time to stop and see what damage he has suffered. (He tastes blood.) No time. He twists quickly left, shrinks his body to push it through a hole cut in a hedge, then comes upon uneven ground running across patches of dry grass, his head light, his mouth dry, his saliva thick and bitter, sound building and breaking inside him. But the noise behind him is loud and wilder now. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees that the first of his pursuers is near. Run even if he can think of nothing to give him safety, no hiding place.

  The ground erupts. Planters unearthed. Up from a hidden seam in the blackness. Their garments shining clean. They spit dirt free from their mouths. Lick and restore luster to their boots. Both time and anti-time. All he can dream and then some—foot stretching into yard, yard stretching into furlong, furlong stretching into mile, mile stretching into league, a line of bodies that extends to the horizon. (Does the world really reach that far?) A future promising that it can hold far more than the past could ever hope to. A world to get lost in.

  Minutes slip through his hands, and hours fail to raise his feet. Where you going to run to? Why not escape down the path that lies in the direction you were heading, south? Paths stretching in all directions, hidden inevitabilities. Yet and always yet.

  He blinks words. Can’t help but hear the faint rumbling behind his eyes, some unseen whole taking shape.

  And he thinks, I’ve lost him. I’ve finally lost him. No earthly way he can bear the loss, not now, not ever.

  Although she had been living in a third-floor apartment at 6 Gracie Square for a decade or more, none of her neighbors knew her name or knew where she was from. No designation either family or Christian was ever put on her postal box or doorplate. And the neighbors say she never answered the bell and that her groceries were left in the basket set for that purpose outside her door. Moreover, although up to twenty families resided alongside her in this unpretentious five-story red-brick apartment building located on a quiet cobblestoned street with thick-trunked trees perfectly spaced and aligned as if on parade, the fact that a blind Negro was living in her apartment with her was known only in humor and disgust. Indeed, her neighbors considered her barbarous in electing to live with a Negro, even if they were too well bred and polite to tell her so.

  Sightings of the Negro were few and far between. Last summer, several of the neighbors saw the woman lead him to a closed carriage, and the same neighbors witnessed them return in their carriage at summer’s end.

  On several occasions, the superintendent was summoned to her apartment for maintenance or repairs, but he never saw the blind Negro, only heard him moving around in a far chamber. Saddled with the tools of his trade, the superintendent would go about his work, while the Negro’s mistress—thin, tall, angular—watched him openly and frankly in her plain velvet blouse and ordinary skirt, her face creased into a look of distrust. One time when he was performing some odd job, the superintendent heard the Negro throwing a tantrum somewhere in the apartment and claims that the Negro’s mistr
ess grew ashamed and blushed.

  Some claim that the woman almost never entered the Negro’s room since he detested human contact. However, whenever he let her enter, she would take the opportunity to clean what she could and wipe dust from the chair, the bureau, and the bedposts with slow quiet movements of her bare fingers. While she cleaned, he would stand silently at the window with his back turned to her and his afflicted arm stiff at his side.

  The neighbors say that for the entire decade that the woman lived at 6 Gracie Square, they had become accustomed to hearing piano music coming from her apartment at all hours of the day and night. They would be in the middle of one activity or another when the music would suddenly begin, and they would listen attentively and respectfully, a disciplined and discriminating audience, even as they carried on with whatever they had been doing.

  Then one day, several people passing on foot along the street heard big windows unlock with a clang above them and looked up to see the Negro plunge out onto the balcony and lean over the railing with his head cocked at some sound. After a minute or two, he went back inside. The big windows shut, and he was seen no more that day, or any other day that anyone can remember. But once he was back inside the apartment, they recall hearing piano music, a tune that none of them recognized. Soon thereafter, the music stopped. And no one ever heard it again.

  May 31, 2013

  Zanzibar

  Acknowledgments

  Here, I wish to acknowledge some of the people who uplifted me in more ways than one during the many years it took me to write this novel. Thanks and praise to Myrtle Jones, Binyavanga Wainaina, Lore Segal, Joe Cuomo, David Mills, Reginald Young, Bayo Ojikutu, Duriel Harris, Jacqueline Johnson, Randy Levin, Tucker Hyde, Steven Varni, and Terese Svoboda—dear friends who I trust with my life.