Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

When I sit down the world stands up. Tom, the man says to me. How does it make you feel to know that all these people are here for you?

The horses go galloping across the keys. The men pop up from the small spaces between one key and the next. Trenches. Where silence lives. The soft space. The men rush for the edge where they will fall off and die.

Tom, the man says. What do you know about the Battle of Manassas?

The cannons roll along too, positioned for firing. I had hot metal in my mouth, under my tongue, and I spoke it.

I skip to one short key after the next. Toss notes into the air that the world may see and catch. The running men are blown down at the sound. I stand up and take my bow, and the seats stand up with me, hands and voices coming at me.

Yes, I’ve brought them all here. I’ve brought them all here. With the long and the short keys. Water running down my face.

The General cuts across the floor with his stabbing canes, a man walking on knives, shanks.

At church one Sunday, the General slapped a planter. How it happened :

Boy, what brings you to church today? the planter speaking to me.

Me speaking back: Many of the first will be last and become a single one.

The planter laughed. Said: That’s why God protects children, niggers, and the crazy.

And that’s when the General’s hand found skin. Watch yo mouth, the General said. Don’t you ever mock anything that belongs to me.

That must be hard to do, the man said.

No, I said. I like to find things. I am a natural finder of things, I said, words in my mouth. Running through rain. Rain running through me.

Blind Tom?

Ain’t no Tom here.

Me against the floor, against ground. Words like hard, firm, solid. Words like pain. The stabbing canes move the ground along so that the world walks when they walk.

Eyes put light in the dark. The face is the place from which the voice comes.

Why do you sing like that?

A person puts all of his body into his voice.

I hear the rain sounding upon the fence, clattering on roofs, and on nests where the birds take baths.

Words like shallow and deep. Hot and cold. I walk wet-footed to the table.

Lait.

She pours. At my mouth it enters me in a rush.

She pours when I say it again.

Hardly had she settled in her armchair at the window overlooking the garden when she hears a knock on the door. Her skin tingles in quiet panic. Back in the days of the Blind Tom Exhibition the journalists would always speak rapidly, a thousand words a minute, so Sharpe would have to be diligent in answering their questions, making an effort to speak slowly and clearly in complete sentences. But what can her tongue do? Moreover, what reason does she have to believe that the caller is an innocent, only an annoying and innocuous newspaperman wielding words and not a brutal intruder? How long has it been since a journalist has come calling? Since anyone has?

She doesn’t have to answer. Just keep sitting here, a secret. The pure vulnerability of an open body. Another knock. So the caller knows she’s here. She stands up from her chair, rising with a reluctance that ascends right up to her head. The doorknob mushrooms into her hand. A nigger woman appears in the doorway and stands there looking collected and very intent. Tom’s mother. (Who else?) Eliza feels a heavy uneasiness. Something has happened to this woman’s son and his mother is here to see that Eliza answers for it. Payback.

Mrs. Bethune.

She has seen the woman only once before. Then like now she is not bothered by their unalikeness, Tom and his mother. Indeed, they look nothing alike, but unseeing and sighted are two separate categories of existence. The blind look only like themselves.

The mother steps into the house and two niggers follow her, three intact shapes, Tom himself (Glory!) and one she doesn’t recognize, a mere boy. She is steady under his gaze.

Mrs. Bethune.

What does she feel upon seeing Tom? (Glory!)

The Negress releases her head from the bonnet, rubs the color out of her face, and becomes someone else, half woman, half deception. Tabbs Gross.

You.

I brought him, Tom says.

Then they say nothing for a time, wordless knowledge. The room seems composed of impossible red and yellow hues. And it seems terribly strange to her that she should meet this man now with no anger at all, something quite different in her feelings. This new emotion, whatever it is, sternly demands that she pay no attention to him, pretend nothing has happened— I’m here to take the boy to his mother —no interest or shock, that they share no history. He seems to walk about the room, triumphant, looking and touching, his presence physical and insistent, her attention taken by his sex-changing stunt, a man fluted in a beautiful dress standing in the middle of her room. Then he goes over to examine the piano. Now Tom starts to move. For some time he strides about the room with the unnamed Negro boy following him like a clumsy devoted animal.

She and Tom let their hands touch. Mr. Gross keeps a respectful distance, his eyes changed with reduced feeling. He seems nervous, even afraid. Then he is speaking, light bright words flying and chirping like birds in the room, busy with claims and proclamations. Here he is talking about the piano. She would have expected Tom to come upon the piano first.

To where? Where will we go?

South.

Why on earth hadn’t she thought of that? Suddenly she is glad to have them here in the country with her, her buried senses unearthed. Remembering (what else?) the beautiful boy in boots — Sharpe — the black leather long and lean. And now Mr. Gross in a dress with boots of his own, dress cupping their length. He is saying something that she can’t hear. She smiles at him, wanting to get over the fact that he had accused her before, that he had taken Tom away from her at a time when she could no longer tolerate the boy’s presence, but he had done it in such a way to imply neglect and cruelty on her part. (She could say to him, I was here when no one else was. ) And Tom. (Glory!) Tom who manages to veer away from the boy shadowing him and is now holding her at the elbow, hugging her, touching her hair, Eliza aware of the boy’s protective eyes taking in this moment. Indeed, she is going places that she does not understand. Fine by her. She can’t remain here.

Tom sits on the floor, his legs spread and his head hanging from his neck like a heavy flower.

Tabbs squeezes into the last of the petticoats. The dress will come next, cotton smothering his strength, putting male and female together to deny the one and to lie about the other. He had removed shirt, pants, undergarments — layers of events and incidents, taking on new layers, a determined creature, his face immaculately shaved, smooth to the touch, not a trace of hair. And with color at his mouth and cheeks, his face brightly exaggerated by rouge, he actually looks like a woman, a Negress. Now, a touch of perfume. Then the head scarf, the final touch. Earlier, he felt like a chicken standing there naked in the room, sunlight like hot wax unfeathering him. Through no fault of his own he has to relinquish this part of his self, conceal his sex, for the sake of practicality and safety, the closest he can come to a kind of invisibility. Figures the alabasters probably won’t attack him if they think he is a woman. Hopefully, the orphan’s youth will be protection enough for him. (Women and children.)