Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

When Sharpe was here, working with Tom and the manager, the neighbors found any excuse to knock on her door — I thought the young master might like some custard — some with punctilious regularity. Pulling the bell, but not without a certain guilty sense of invading someone’s privacy — blurting out explanations and regrets, even as others were less polite, ventured to make forcible entry. She would screen the visitors when she could—

Tom, this is little Sally from the second floor.

Some little girl lifting herself out of memory, wearing a short dress of white satin, a black-buckled pink belt around her waist.

Hello, Mr. Tom.

Hello, girl. Hello, Sally. Tom took the girl’s hand. She’s a nigger, he said.

— but Tom was often quick to answer the bell before she or Sharpe or the manager could refuse or turn away the caller, resolved to present “Blind Tom” to one and all.

I am Blind Tom, one of the greatest humans to walk the earth.

Syllables paced out one breath at a time.

Nice of you to visit, Tom said. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

Names circling names.

This was all they wanted to know about their neighbors. Indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Bethune maintained close relations with only one other family in the building, the McCunes, Dr. and Mrs., who were further along in years than Sharpe and Eliza, but not significantly so, and whose offspring, boy and girl, were deeply attentive to Tom. They’re niggers, Tom said. Once a week, the older couple would extend a supper invitation to the younger — never the other way around — so that the Bethunes became a regular presence in their home, a sumptuously furnished apartment (third floor, 3A), the chairs and couches tattered and antique, proud of period detail, the walls hung with tapestry and bedecked with a great number of spirited modern paintings, landscapes and seascapes, in frames of rich golden arabesque set against walls papered in an expanse of white flowers. The McCunes themselves smacked of careful cultivation, presentation pieces with their own form and meaning. Their tastes ran to art, theater, geography (places traveled, destinations to come), and politics—

I won’t support a losing cause. Sharpe passed the decanter of wine across the table to the Doctor.

I take that to mean you are perfectly comfortable supporting the winner?

Hardly.

At least you have no doubts about who will win.

I have no doubts.

The children ran through the room, set forth in their own wonder.

How can I? They will destroy the South just so they can rebuild it in their own image.

The causes are deeper.

I’m not saying they aren’t.

So why then do you aid the rebels?

Sharpe stretched his body, easing into an answer. Look, Doctor, I’m still a Southerner. A man can’t simply cut off his family. He sat back in his chair, arms spread wide in a request for pardon. I won’t leap to their defense, but why not throw a few bills at the battle-scarred and the war widows?

The Doctor poured the last of the wine into Sharpe’s glass. Does it matter what the boy thinks?

Obviously you’re saying it should.

The Doctor continued to look at him, shoulders curved forward, head hanging over the table.

A benefit concert or two. Is that taking advantage? Besides, do you know how much money we’ve given the Abos over the years? More money than I can count.

Ah.

Not openly, of course. Under the table.

That’s unfortunate. You will never get the recognition. The boy will—

Doctor, I stopped wondering long ago about what people think of my doing this or that.

Useful hours for both men, even when they disagreed. These visits revealed a side of the Doctor that Eliza had not been privy to during the many years she had known and worked with him at the Eternally Benevolent Asylum for Ill-Fated Offspring of the Sable Race, something beyond what was contained in the structure of his medical duties. (And it was her own duties in the charitable wings and halls of the establishment that by either providence or happenstance she would come into contact with Sharpe — and Tom.) Though he insisted on a limited schedule, working no more than four hours a day, four days a week, so that his private practice and research should not suffer, he was charged by his work, bright with it, padding through the wards in his white coat, the legs of his binaural stethoscope clamped around his neck. There was a practicality about his body, a man built to a purpose — the total opposite of Sharpe, the tallest man she has ever seen, even today, all angles, juxtaposition, jagged elbows jutting out, forward-pointing hatchet-like knees, and square blocky forehead and temple, aspects of person defying the uniformity of line that is supposed to define a body — moving with tireless fluidity along beds lined up like boats in a dockyard, attending to as many as 160 children at a given time. (A massive four-story building of fine recent construction, the Asylum could accommodate up to 200 orphaned children, providing them with the luxury of modern facilities — indoor toilets, sinks, and baths, gaslights — that only the city’s wealthy had access to.) But he sought to do more than heal and see to the good health of the Negro children under his care. He was determined — the greater goal — to refine their artistic and intellectual tastes through regular attendance at museums, concerts, and dramaturgical stagings. (He took all 160 children to a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at his own expense.) We should endeavor to expose the most unfortunate of the Race to the better class of general culture. It was clear from the atmosphere he projected that he was no ordinary person. Mrs. Shotwell and Mrs. Murray hoped that the Doctor, in his professionalism, the way he spoke and handled himself, would serve as a masculine exemplar who could illuminate the orphans’ own conditions and inspire them (the boys) to aim high and achieve.

Doctor, should we hire a music teacher? Mrs. Shotwell asked. Do you believe the reports that music can reform a bad disposition?

Eliza could not help feeling a certain strange joy whenever she had assisted the Doctor, frantically eager to carry wash pan, thread, scissors, knife, to boil the surgical instruments, prepare the opium paste, or stanch bleeding. As house matron she had earned nine dollars a month, a decent wage, but the work was exhausting even if fulfilling, the hours immense. She saw to the stocks and supplies and took daily inventory, the large brass storeroom keys kept on a five-pound iron ring; she tallied up donations, engaged the domestics, and supervised all of the other employees to ensure that they weren’t making light of their duties. Her work with Dr. McCune made up for certain agreed-upon reductions of self, for the Doctor, in his ministrations, showed an emotion deep enough to confirm her own power— They need me, irreplaceable me —a fact that made it easy for her to bend to her other labors with a quiet mind. She had spent so much time with him — month after month, one year after the next — she felt his duties had become part of her. No exaggeration to say that it was she who drummed up patients.

Once a week, she left the Asylum and went in search of fresh orphans, venturing away from their Midtown locale to explore the narrow twisting streets of the Black Town, the city’s most densely populated district, where surfaces (sidewalks, roofs, shutters, corners, walls) pressed together in unexpected ways, noisily in place, life here chambered inside a ramshackle accumulation of tenements leaning over the sidewalks, as if bent against a winter wind. Eliza advancing softly with a sense of mysterious invitation, feeling the uneasy force of all those lives hived within, families (four or more) jammed up against each other inside a single room, unable to confine respective kin to respective corner, assorted limbs jutting out of slanted windows and crooked doorways, Eliza dizzy with forms all about her. Clusters of Negro men toting pyramids of firewood and Negro women dangling strings of fowl, and men and women and children alike in slow drift with satchels of sweat strapped to their backs, or water pots or baskets (fruit, herbs) positioned on their heads. Faces staring accusations at her, bitter in an undirected way. She would stare right back — hopeful tension — pushing against refuse and waste thick and abstract at her feet, and ask the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies from the two or three or four that she extended invitations to, willing to give themselves up to her then and there. Candidates collected, she would then taxi on to the Municipal Almshouse and spend hours cycling through a maze of warrens where monstrous forms — albinos, pinheads, she-hes, worm-like legless and armless torsos stationed on wooden carts, pig-child hybrids with snouts and curly tails, deer-children (fauns? satyrs?) with horns and hooves, mermaids swimming in their own urine, Cyclops, Blemmyae, three- and four-eyed Nisicathae and Nisitae, a boy with an underdeveloped twin hanging out of his abdomen, as if the hidden head was only momentarily absent, mischievously peeking into the keyhole of his stomach, a girl with a second canine-toothed and lizard-tongued mouth chewing its way out of her left jaw, and rarer creatures shackled and chained — huddled in dim light against the smell of sawdust, some folded monk-like in cloaks and hoods, others completely nude. Eliza careful to appear curious and concerned, a desperate devotion undercutting her probing looks, her riddle-solving, translating texts of skin and eyes.