Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

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.