Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

But, as Tabbs knows (present, a witness), they were not the first to make (find) their way here to the city from wretched Southern climes. Many months earlier the soldiers had returned, unexpected, uninvited, war’s contraband, men who at the very start of the war had sworn an oath of patriotic commitment and duty and enlisted into an all-Negro regiment so as to take up arms and forcibly bring slavery to an end — granted, some found a secondary motivation: to keep a republic that was both in conflict with itself and unsure of its future from a sundering into two separate nations forever conflicted, forever divided — and thus enlisted had shed blood and allowed their own blood to be shed. Entrusted with the task of taking lives, taking towns and cities, on the one hand drawing the last breath from the enemy, and on the other shepherding to safety their emancipated brethren and sistren. Embedded in battle perhaps at the very moment when their kinsmen, neighbors, and friends came under attack, when they were being shot, strung up, and struck down, when they were being burned out of their homes in Black Town and every other precinct in the city, only to be chased from and otherwise expelled and expunged from the city’s municipal boundaries altogether.

Tabbs wonders, when did word of the violence and the expulsion reach them? And — having given their all in battle, maiming and killing (the skirmishes that memory would — will — never let them relinquish), only to learn that they were now all exiled from the destroyed and crumbling houses of a previous life — what thoughts curled around them at that critical juncture in time? (Standing at the crossroad.) What forces of will, upbringing, counsel, morality, or law urged restraint and kept them from shooting or impaling every alabaster on sight? (Try to feel it now.) Moreover, how were they able to throw themselves back into the fray for the remainder of the war under the auspices of a country, an authority that had if not outright betrayed them, had at the least done nothing to secure and protect the person and property of those they had left behind? Not to mention (to say nothing of) the entire matter of punishment and retribution, what those white men who were duly appointed in the appropriate and austere offices of power would do to see that those of the city’s alabasters (of whatever sex, of whatever age, of whatever standing in society) who had committed unpardonable wrongs against the city’s Negroes would be held accountable and brought to justice to the fullest extent of the law and with all deliberate speed.

Perhaps it was this wounded sense of weighing and waiting — never forget, never forgive — that sustained them through all of the fallen bodies and sacked cities, however scant and remote (distant) their hopes of return and reckoning. And when the Surrender finally came, to their surprise it did not give them the immediate release from active duty that they had expected, but only further deferred the dream, for they were issued a new assignment: keep the peace, maintain order, provision and protect the Freedmen. For months on end they were summoned to one contentious Southern location or another to put down a last stand by random elements of the enemy’s collapsed army and to deter, detain, or otherwise do away with sporadic groups of bizarrely dressed (faces hidden inside triangular-peaked hoods, bodies concealed under bulbous bedsheets or robes) irregulars and stop them from committing the most brutal retaliatory and fear-instilling acts of sabotage, assassination, rape, kidnapping, hanging, and immolation.

It took well over a year for the opposition to trickle down and thin away to a point where it either no longer caught the attention of the generals and their counselors or caught their attention but was not deemed worthy of action. At that point the regiment was officially dissolved. The men pooled their wages, commandeered a vessel, subscribed their names to a man in the ship’s manifest, more than seventy-five in all, and set sail for home, each and every one looking all the way to the end of his gaze, determined to return no matter where he had been and what he had done. So the same water that took them away brought them back, as if the ocean too was homesick. The ship’s arrival in the harbor drew no particular notice. Just another ship, one of the many daily, transporting cargo. Then in the sky reddening remains of the day the men started scrambling down the gangplank under a burden of personal belongings (the memories they had carried around in leather satchels and gunnysacks) and military-issued (stolen?) rifles, tents, crates, and barrels, and wheelbarrows that they carried, pushed, or tugged ashore, and stood there before the ship, loosely assembled, stretching their arms, time breaking over their skin, shaking the journey off. The sudden and unexpected image of soldiers, black men in blue, awoke a quiver of sudden alarm and fright inside the alabasters, and drew them to the city’s streets from inside the comfort and safety of their houses and apartments.

In a voice clean as polished steel, one of the soldiers issued a call and the men fell into parade formation, their flags (colors) holding sky and time, their rifles slanted against the wind. The voice rang out again and the men began marching up Broadway — move as a team, never move alone — waves of clamor radiating from their synchronized boots; light catching and gleaming off metal — rifles, medals of merit, and wheelbarrows stacked high with crates of projectiles and grenades and barrels of kerosene and gunpowder — while the city’s alabasters looked on still, silent, and wide-eyed like grazing cows. Home again. (All the rest now a falling back.) Their sonorous bodies and the keening whine and groan of their wheelbarrows halting the movement of the many buggies, cabriolets, carriages, buckboards, and horse-drawn streetcars crisscrossing the city’s most fabled avenue, stillness staking the alabasters in place like the stately lampposts and sturdy telegraph poles lining the avenue.

As the light thinned and evening gathered, the regiment continued at its own pace mile after mile, every man sweating and straining for their collective destination, some (see it) indefinable substance or feeling pumping through them — this much: they have a firm understanding of victory and defeat — shunting aside their proven capacity for patience and postponement, driving them all the way to the other end of Broadway, at which point they turned in one sinuous line and passed through the high wrought iron gates of Central Park, where they lit lamps and struck torches and began to set up camp on the Great Lawn, assembling tents, digging trenches, their movements both separate and coordinated, their shadows long and dark, black shapes moving in a silent ballet, their legs partly obscured in the high uncut grass as if they had all been amputated below the knee. They cut down dead trees for firewood. Fire and light. The only blaze in the dark, radiance visible for miles. (Tabbs saw it himself.) Then they retired for the night on pallets inside their tents or slept out in the open on the half moons of hammocks slung between trees. Morning brought a butchery of park creatures — deer, squirrels, and rock doves — that they skinned, cleaned, cooked, and feasted on. The next day the same. And more still in subsequent days. And so on. A standing army sprawling in their camp on the Great Lawn for longer than anyone could have known or expected, waiting through both good and inclement weather to be recognized.

And there they remain, even while the city accelerates around them, a fast new geography. In a matter of hours a goat path becomes a turnpike a turnpike a road a road a street and the street a name. New Place. New Here. New There. New House. New Water. New Well. New Creek. New Yonder. New Street. More Street. Street Street. New New. Each street breeds an architecture, neat perfect rows of houses. Skinny blocks of wood on a mud alley. Fat blocks of wood lined up before a gutter like men relieving themselves. Active space, men hard at work, no shortage of hands and backs, colored and alabaster (city locals), earning a good wage, some able for the first time to afford pants that button. They work wood with axes, saws, planes, and other (carpentry) tools, ankle-deep in soft wood refuse, while army surveyors scuttle about insect-like with instruments of planning and measurement. The city expands, corners and lots and blocks, Freedmen settlements spreading in all directions, even in neighborhoods that were off-limits to colored citizens only a few years ago, before the riots. Righting wrongs, the city issues a call of welcome to the Freedman (as well as the Uprooted, those who were driven out of their homes and forced into exile on Edgemere)— Everything that had to happen has already happened. Danger and tension are past. It’s a new day. Come and become a citizen, become one of us —seeing miles over the present into a high and limitless democratic future. The sky whitens with justice. The city’s promise pulls smiles out of worried faces, one after the next, not unlike a many-colored sash of infinite length drawn from a magician’s sleeve.