Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Take me to her.

I sent her away. And she hasn’t come back. I’m sorry. I sent her to the city.

I can find her if you take me off the water.

Tabbs almost laughs.

Where we were living before.

What.

With the piano.

You’re asking about the Bethune woman?

Bring me to her.

Is that who you mean? Tabbs understands. Tom wants the Bethune woman.

Take me to her.

Tabbs sees three girls, strays, contraband, dressed in black, seated out in the open, light rising up from under them as if they are sitting on top of blankets of sunlight. As he passes them, a woman comes over to take him by the elbow to halt him. She speaks but he understands nothing of what she is saying in her irritable quick patter.

Flying their rags at the end of broom handles like the standards of an impoverished army, the shoe blackers shuck and jive. Juba it up, clapping and singing.

One mornin Massa ready to head out the door

And gon away

He went to git his coat

But neither hat nor coat was there

For colored gal, she had swallowed up both

Then took her nap in the chair

Massa took her to the tailor shop

To have her mouth made small

Colored gal took in one breath

And swallowed ole Massa, tailor and all

They exhibit many steps strokes lifts without breaking the measure of the music, with high-pitched shouts of A show for your money, a shine for the show.

Clutching something in his fist, the coin-rich boy holds aloof from the rest in the shadows of a tree. He notices Tabbs — the businesslike usage in his steady gaze — and comes over to him.

Good day, suh.

Good day.

You not from round here?

No, I’m not.

I ain’t either.

He gives Tabbs an expression that says, We got that in common.

I’m in need of employment, the boy says.

I would like to help, but I don’t have any work for you.

The boy silently closes his eyes and does not say a word more, as if stricken blind and dumb.

Urchins tussle. Pitch rocks and stones. Spill blood and bones.

Put your ear to a tombstone and hear the sound of the dead trying to rise. An aphorism that Wire has heard time and again here on Edgemere. But these newly dead have had no stones fashioned for them, only raw fresh graves, one black mound after the next like the shiny backs of so many beetles against the red horizon where a low-hanging sun turns the ocean into a rippled sheet of metal, throwing the shadows of the dhows lining the shore against the sky like so many black nests. None have sailed today, or will sail tomorrow, or take to the ocean the day after that, and many more days perhaps, not now, not after this.

He stands surveying the widening prospect of the island, children and mules rapidly coming and going in a rattle of speech and chatter between the bodies of the dozens upon dozens of mourners assembled here waiting for Wire to speak. Everything they do is considered, unhurried. He tilts his head as though to shake water out of his ear. He has an accounting to give, but quiet is knotted into his body, already wearied by what he will have to say, tired beyond bearing by all the events that have led to this moment. Wire already hurrying away from the thought before it becomes solid enough to take a grip and summon other thoughts that he has safely penned away …

Then he hears Double speak. God has three rings: of birth, of death, and of the resurrection of the dead.

It is Wire’s place to speak, his ordained right, as Double well knows, so in addressing the crowd before Wire has a chance to, Double has supplanted Wire’s authority, no two ways about it.

But the alabaster has only one, Double says. Death. Their actions have made clear that they will no longer permit us to fish these waters that we have always fished, and in so doing, they mean to starve us.

Motherfuck them, Ruggles says. Motherfuck every stinking alabaster that some white bitch shat out of her stinking womb.

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than this, Double says. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.

They have numbers, Wire says.

And so do we, even if our numbers are less. Let one man be ten.

Be careful.

Brothers, I ask you, is it wrong to ignore the arms and the ammunition that God has entrusted to us? The church can order them to be removed, but nay. Rather let the church hang like Christ on the cross over these boxes of arms and ammunition until the boxes are used.

Be careful. Think it through. Every man here had better do that. Wire looks at each man in the room.

Injustice is on the throne, Double says.

Shit, Ruggles says. You ain’t said nothing.

They’re shitting on us.

They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. All a woogie knows.

Walking all over us. Shitting on us.

I ain’t never been nobody’s slave. And ain’t gon be.

Can’t they jus leave us be?

You’re talking willful destruction, Tabbs says.

They’re killing us one way or the other. If we must die …

Walking all over us. Shitting on us.

They don’t know no other way.

Be careful.

Advances only a few yards when he sees the band of shoe blackers, all of them, the youngest and the oldest, fully seated on the ground outside a stone gate. Resting. No, not resting, more as if they are all waiting for something, expecting something. Whispering, nodding, grinning. One urchin looks up and sees Tabbs, then they all begin exchanging excited winks. The last to notice, the coin-rich waif turns his head and falls silent under Tabbs’s gaze. The unmoving darkness of his eyes. He does not look away. Tabbs can see him watching, preparing himself.

Sir? The boy stands up. Tabbs thinks twice about acknowledging the waif. He should just continue on, walk right past him and wash his hands once and for all. So why doesn’t he? For no conscious reason, he decides to go over to the boy, neither curious nor suspicious, and having (seeing) nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

The boy holds out his hand, then opens it to reveal the coin Tabbs gave him yesterday glinting with sweat in his palm. It’s okay if I come to your hotel room with you, he says.

What?

It’s okay if I come to your hotel room with you.

This boy — Tabbs had not asked his name — with his flushed face, shining eyes, and poorly obedient tongue. He takes Tabbs with his other hand, the hot little dirty coinless one, this final action — Tabbs thinking, I will never see him again, I never saw him again.

In the ocean air his thoughts play. Strangely peaceful here, the water glowing and rippling, and light hanging in the sky like trailing silk. The night cooler than you might imagine, out in the open like this, all those stars freezing above.

An ungodly man diggeth up evil, and in his lips there is a burning fire. So is the tongue among them, that it defileth the whole body and setteth on fire the course of nature. Double is quick and alive, full of energy and expectation, his movements strong and excessive as he strolls back and forth along the water’s edge, which is like the spine of some colossal animal, strolls before the men assembled one and all in white robes along the shoreline, the men perfectly calm and relaxed in their garments as if these robes are simply another feature of this landscape, shawls of sea fog. He is part, one of those white-robed men, and he stands waiting and watching and hearing the low buzz of the other men breathing alongside him.

I was there at the beginning, Double says. I remember the cold hold where together we were held in shackles and wallowed in filth and stewed in disease and pondered the worth of life and the finality of death as the chains rang and echoed and the ship creaked.