Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Do you have anything for me, master?

Does he?

What effort it takes to see what is there, Freedmen trying on their new houses, their faces small, almost unnoticeable in windows not made to their shape.

He isn’t talking. He isn’t playing. He isn’t even moving. Her Thomas. My Tom. Hunkered down in high stiff silence at the piano on the stage above her, face bowed, body slanted forward, his hands in his lap, black skin and black wood glistening with wet light pouring in through the chapel’s four windows, so high up (twenty feet or more) that she can see the sky and little else, a sky swept clean of everything except for a few infrequent tatters — birds? bats? — streaking in and out of vision, cutting across the blue living hand of the Almighty, He who lifted her up from that peculiar country where her blood was harvested along with cotton, sorghum, tobacco, coffee, and carried her across land and water and set her down on this island, Edgemere, then carried her across the threshold into this broad sturdy white-stoned edifice, the Home for the Education and Edification of African Orphans, tucked away at the far end of one of Edgemere’s ancient and narrow streets, where she can be (reunited) with Thomas, her Thomas, My Tom — Didn’t I take care of my Hebrew children? — at the far point of their lives, mother and son on the verge of great joy after an existence of great sorrow, granted the means to pick up from where they left off eleven years ago when Thomas was so rudely and wrongly taken from her at Hundred Gates, a moment that her mind holds on to and will hold on to, so help her God, for as long as she lives. N ever forget, never forgive. Thomas, I am here. Your mother is here. Here we are, together again. (Words she might have even spoken once or twice to him since her arrival here on Edgemere.) Waiting for light (or food or drink) to make a difference and brighten his mood, raise his spirits and pull words out of him and save her from another lost afternoon, another lost day inside this chapel where her thoughts are a little less each day, the small parts of herself that she has retained (what is felt in the heart and felt in the blood) among the many lost through both the coming of age — is fifty old for a woman? — and through stolen time, everything that was taken away from them when they were taken from each other eleven years ago, those small parts that remain that she wants to give back to him, needs to give back — the debt she owes, the dues she must pay — breaking away from her little by little each day like the specks of late afternoon dust carried along high above her in the light streaming in through the chapel’s four windows, until (soon, in the course of time) nothing will be left. Crucial not only that they establish and maintain whatever they can, moment by moment, but also that they regain (recover) anything he remembers from their past lives at Hundred Gates, the twenty feet separating them a telescopic space that can slide back in time eleven years (and more), Thomas up there onstage at the piano and she down here on a pew, perfect quiet sealed on the piano’s shiny wooden surface as it is on his burnished skin, his silent tongue hidden inside his mouth, the black and white keys hidden under the lacquered lid. The names of the many places that worked her ragged bright inside her. Athens, Leland, Rome. And the names she has forgotten. Where she had day after day staggered through fields and kitchens and bedrooms and outhouses, sold or traded or bartered or rented out or shuttled about from one plantation or estate or farm to another in her long career as a slave, a contagious song picked up by other presences rising up around her in the room, the dozen or more niggers planted inside glass-fronted frames who assert themselves in song, their proud and heroic countenances sprouting flower-like from high stiff collars, their voices falling through her from where they hang ghostly from walls painted the color of everything and nothing combined — colors are the deeds of light — this choir (Champions of the Race, Reverend Wire calls them) whose identities are a mystery to her, although she recognizes (remembers) two or three faces from years ago in the pages of the Columbus Observer. They sing in a foreign tongue, voices ascending in a long climb that might go on all the way to heaven, up to a listening God but for the plastered ceiling, a ceiling strong and sturdy in its construction like all the others on Edgemere, fortified both lengthwise and sidewise with the slim black hard branches of the bleem tree, a crisscrossed network of wood not unlike a railway depot in appearance. (A hundred places to go. A hundred people to be.) The voices hold in orbit a little longer before they start a slow slide down the walls and large (man-high, man-wide) wood (bleem) cross nailed to the wall behind the stage (black serpent on the cross) pooling around the bottom of the altar, which ripples with the reflection of gold carved letters: WHEN SHALL WE LIVE IF NOT NOW. Now the voices spill over the edge of the stage onto the floor, which is made from irregular and rather broad planks of bleem wood, and tide forward to flood this entire sparse chapel that offers nothing pleasing to the eye other than rows of pews worn smooth with age, each sculpted from an entire trunk of a bleem tree solid and thick to withstand the destructive force of a child, enough of them to seat a hundred orphans or more. All the day the song will hum inside her. She should speak up, say something, say anything and put an end to it, but she doesn’t want to ruin any hours she and Thomas spend together. Enough simply to spend them, together. It is always toward him that her longings turn, a moment followed by a lesser moment and a hunger to return. They are from each other. I am you . (What are the roots that clutch, that bind?) Entangled in the soul and knotted in the flesh, the spirit of union is uppermost in her. She tells herself as she did yesterday and the day before and probably will do tomorrow that she is on free ground. It is from here that everything can come. It is here, right here in this chapel that everything begins. No matter how late in life, she is not immune to fresh experience. Ask her where she’s been, she’ll tell you where she’s going. (See there, up above: not dust carried in the light pouring in through the windows but seeds following the most direct path to growth, impossible to stop them.) Her life was lived way from here in that (unchanged) country that the Almighty told her she had to abandon, He who decided that she should make a life elsewhere, because she had found favor in His sight and He sent her an angel (Mr. Tabbs) who brought her here to Edgemere and reunited her with Thomas and bestowed His blessings upon her (them, us ) in succulent abundance: delicious food and drink, beautiful garments, spacious and comfortable quarters where she can settle into soft sleep each night and awaken anew each morning. O Lord I wait in my room at your mercy. Each day runs its course simply enough. Break of dawn, a rooster will cock-a-doodle-do and set all the roosters to crowing to bring the ocean awake, cause it to close its waters around the island. (Listen and hear it.) As the island gropes toward wakefulness — that which takes its color with the locals turning on their beds — she will hear the bedsheets snap when Thomas jumps from his bed, and she’ll fall to — the floorboard creaking under her feet like rusty hinges flying open — and get everything in readiness for the day ahead — choose an outfit for him from his closet, lay it out on the divan, then draw his bath. He will shed his sleeping tunic, hunker down in the tub, and make the water sing, his forming hands lending shapes to the suds. She will kneel before the tub and help him with soap and rag, his bones dancing under her fingers, the only time in the course of a day when he allows her to touch him.