Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

A new life in a new land among a new set of people in a new united republic where autumn leaves scuttle across the ground like papery crabs. Stubbornly, the arrivals retain time, dragging their feet along, lengthening every moment to pull their histories forward, even as they venture a new soil, bodies covered with dirt. You would think the earth grows on their backs. You would think the earth is trying to bury them.

Tabbs takes slow almost ashamed steps to maintain a solid distance between himself and them, finds it hard to engineer his body into a vessel of mercy, to set aside the instinct, drive, and industry he has always had and bring his own head and heart into their plight. No small matter to serve a nation. When last was it that he comforted someone? They (the city) want to root him when he wants to stretch. Just how deep does his sense of independence go? He has recently caught himself in a new trend, letting the dutiful language of racial uplift slip into his transactions.

The boundary lines have fallen for

Me in pleasant places;

I have a goodly heritage.

But he is like nothing they have known. They don’t know what to do with his words. They raise their hats in apology, a rush to please on their faces, mouths snapping open and closed, straining to speak. They never look him in the face, don’t see him at all, his odd ways.

Everything seems to happen from a distance. Hard to witness, hard to believe. He looks at them with all angles in his eyes. Truncated forms missing hands, feet, and limbs. Ruffled figures with broken backs, bent impossibly at the waist, wrists touching ankles, like malfunctioning bridges unable to either lower or raise. Wobbly creatures with wasted bones knocking out of rhythm under sagging skin. One to the next. The hard lines of their hunger sketch a blueprint of possibility against the faded backdrop of recent history. No language for this. Slavery is a puncture — have you ever picked cotton? — the hole (hold) that can never close. The hole that still bleeds cotton, rice, sugarcane, tobacco. How do they lift their feet without becoming undone?

I would never have believed

That Death could have undone so many

Bless them their trying, their displaced elbows, disjointed knees, sturdy necks, assured fingers. They hold their hands up to the sky with joy and look God in the face. Delivered.

With heavy rusted teeth they fashion new names. Emerson, Garrison, Brown. Adams, Douglass, Turner. Jackson, Lincoln, Jefferson. Johnson, Grant, Washington. Tubman, Phillips, Hamilton. Strong. Freeman. North. (Looking at God.) They practice saying their names and practice them on each other, words slipping in and out, too busy with the speed of speak to think more.

Having withstood hardships that would destroy most, they can now remold themselves into something greater here in the city, even if they don’t see much of their history in the wood and brick here and have trouble getting their bearings, tracing a course from one corner to the next. Tabbs hears a thousand hearts turn inside desperate chests, a song that cuts through bone and muscle, kept hidden until now. What gesture of commitment can he send out to them? His past stands right before him, judging. How can he be both more and less himself?

He starts for the ferry to Edgemere, a long line of bodies following him, bringing their uncertainties and contradictions along. So it is. They lift their faces expectantly toward the heavens. Their eyes seem to look through and beyond everything they see for some visitation of blessing or warning.

He sits with his back doubled to them, hearing their chatter. Tries to listen past their voices and pushes his shoulders against the darkness, breathing the salt air, Edgemere, the black island, pressing upon him in slow continuity, a drop of ink spreading in the ocean. Disembarks from the ferry and under a white hook of moon takes a circuitous route home, full of false stops and starts, diversions, stalkers (freed, free) behind — who can say how close? — throwing shadows of alarm across the street and high on alley walls, Tabbs moving with an intense sense of direction through Edgemere’s little streets winding in upon each other like a basket of eels. After some time he arrives at his place of residence confident that nobody has followed him, steals up the outside steps careful of his footing in the dark, the stairs narrow, shaking under him, the three-story house starkly rectangular in the dark. He leans his guilt into his room.

Already he can feel the city dropping off his back. He takes a seat in the darkness, hard black light passing through the window. Darkness upon darkness. Here he is with nothing that matters to him in his room. Only that single window looking out and looking in, and the thick box of his days. He thinks of all those hands out there moving around in the dark, dragging the night forward. And his room starts to move, as if the entire house — the walls, beams, roof — will up and shift to an anywhere anytime place like nothing he has known.

He sees the dawn rise three feet. Blackbirds arrow across autumn sky. Comes out of his room to find the morning waiting for him with too much clarity, the sun casting its best clean light, allowing him to see the city in distant outline across the water. The city wants him to see and remember. He tries to walk off the urge, but so much crosses his consciousness amid the rush, sweep, and crisscross of bodies. Things left behind or discarded, things he didn’t know he had absorbed or that he’d forgotten, time and distance no barrier in a place that is all water and sound, sound carrying across water, snapping him (elastic) in and out of the present, Edgemere city, city Edgemere.

Does the city really expect men like him to accept its promises? The time away has pushed him into another existence here on Edgemere, out beyond his old life before the war, afar from the city’s field of influence, the space between him and it changed. (Something holds, something stays in place.) He will break back into the world of the alabasters on his own terms, through the boy. Blind Tom. Having worked the details — the mother and Tom together here on Edgemere — in full and determined preparation, Tabbs is ready to take advantage. (One follows the other.) Go about his life with a familiar concentration. Do the things he needs to do. The Freedmen are immediate in the face of his nostalgia.

Pushing his drained body along, he can’t locate the kinship he feels for the Freedmen, he cannot look at them without thinking about what is to come. They put their song in the air, a sound not easily separable from their bodies and what moves within their bodies, usually kept under wraps, but not so now, skin curving back like windblown curtains to expose auction blocks, swinging gates, the whips, hounds, chains, crops, violations, and vulgarity. Tabbs seeing it all so clearly, body looking. It should unsettle him. It doesn’t. In fact, he starts to see himself in it all, he Tabbs selected, singled out, belonging, living it too. In a manner of speaking, he is one of the Freedmen.

So engaged that when he stumbles, the force of it does not register at once. Sitting on his haunches, knees up, hands down, confused, catching a breath, waiting for something to happen. He regains his feet, wondering what brought him down. Almost immediately he sees someone come slouching out of the crowd, arms folded across chest, hands inside armpits, lessening the distance, putting himself a yard away from Tabbs, his arms uncrossing and moving into Tabbs’s face, a complete cut in upward vision, two threatening nubs round and smooth at the ends like whittled branches only inches from Tabbs’s nose and mouth. Tabbs can smell them, could kiss or lick them if he wants. The man brings one missing hand to his mouth in a gesture of eating. Please, master. A thin man with a terrible face, he stands with his head twisted to one side, a look of half smile half supplication. Now repeats that ladling motion, compounding the minuses, missing hand feeding air to empty mouth. Please, master. God demands. Talking into Tabbs’s silence. How will you fathers give your son a stone if he asks you for bread? Then the silent head-twisted supplication. Please, master. Stiff and vacant, Tabbs neither moves nor speaks.