Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

I am the one, he would say. (Even now she has no idea what he meant, not the slightest clue, despite the many times she heard him say it.) And he would wander off into the woods. No — try again — she would allow him to wander off while she stood watching. If only he could spend — had she the power — all of his waking hours at the piano. It was this alone that could pull the wildness out of him. Had he been so allowed — had she the power — he would have played until his fingers bled. (And bled they had on two or three occasions.) Of course, the General never would have granted permission — no way — generous (for a woogie) of him to allow what time he did.

Let’s bear the burden of this life

We haven’t far to go

So, day in and day out, she took that little he gave and made do. Nothing to occupy her hours, other than work. All the time in the world on her hands and no time. The rigidity of her station in life. The lack of options. No true leisure time to speak of. She would let her imagination loose on any sights that crossed her vision. Look up and remark on the shape of the clouds. Going from herself to herself as far as her feet could carry her, to the very edge of the estate’s grounds, or to another town or city within walking distance (ten miles or twenty) when the Bethunes sent her on errands. No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t succeed in desiring non-places whose existence she couldn’t verify with her own eyes, although she had heard about people (woogies) and even knew certain people (woogies) who had supposedly sojourned to or taken up residence in some of those places that had names such as Atlanta, Oxford, London, Paris, Zanzibar. In fact, she had doubts that another world existed — what Union? What North? Washington? what White House? — right up to the moment that the steamship whose deck she and Mr. Tabbs stood on pulled into the city’s harbor. It took little convincing to get her on board that ship. Mr. Tabbs made her his offer and she gladly accepted it. She was ready for adventure. The prospect filled her with joy. She and Thomas would be reunited. A thousand miles between them (ten thousand), a moment that perhaps she and her son both dreamed of, she from Hundred Gates and he from wherever he was on this earth. So — tell the truth about it — she told herself that she would voyage in order to see — things belong to those who look at them — voyage to prove this other world did indeed exist — that was the real reason why she accepted Mr. Tabbs’s offer, was so willing to believe in his promises — and, also, believe that Thomas was alive somewhere in this other world.

At Hundred Gates, everything brought her back to herself and her small world. Surely Hundred Gates (or some other estate, plantation, farm, kitchen) would be the last sight her eyes would register for all eternity. She felt a stranger to herself. Talking little if at all because she had no say. Indeed, she was happy to go through her labors if it meant limited contact with other people. People were obstacles to be avoided (diverted looks), never approached, and rarely spoken to. And when someone did speak to her, she would put on the appropriate face and say nothing true, nothing false, in an effort to hurry on her way. Night never returned what the day had taken, for she would awaken with aches and pains, sore, stiff, puffy and swollen. So it was that she would pass each and every day, moving slowly but surely toward disappearance, toward extinction, knowing that her disappearance would have no impact on the world.

That life of nothing she had thought was a permanent part of her, branded in her skin. (That small darkened kitchen, that other small darkened bedroom, that tiny cabin.) Then the Almighty brought her to Edgemere by His beneficent hand so that she could repose her body and have peace of mind with time at her disposal to get reacquainted with Thomas, her Thomas, her first reprieve from industry (labor, work) — shake the rug into the fire — in her many many years (fifty, more) of residence on this earth. Now, she feels parts of herself that she never felt before, muscles she never knew she had.

She repositions her feet on the floor of the chapel (well-seasoned bleem wood) without the old agility and grinds her teeth in annoyance. Thomas moves his head ever so slightly at the noise. Could it be (she wonders) that hard labor, constant work, the daily routine of toil, enabled her to bear up better than this present inactivity, for at Hundred Gates, where the hour and the minute ruled her, she perceived the flow of time less? Released (cut loose) from her time-constrained body, there is no longer anything that can distract her from herself. Memory won’t leave her alone, won’t let her escape this body she has inhabited for so long. Eager with possibility, the self she might (can) become is held hostage — what other word is there for it? — fights tooth and nail against a past that would conquer and claim every inch of her, all of her glands and organs contested.

She plants herself deeper into the pew. But is she really here? No. She is still there, at Hundred Gates, watching the carriage wobble off down the tree-lined gravel road. Everything grows up around that image. Where she is now, this Home, sprouts up right through tufts of grass on the estate. The floor is shrinking beneath her feet. She looks up and sees the dust motes above floating and swaying in reverse out through the windows, taking the years back from her, eleven years. (Count them.) I can’t keep no numbers. She looks at Thomas. His face is disappearing, particles of skin pulling away into a tiny cloud. The ceiling is lifting. And she starts to rise too. Her new life here on Edgemere, her new life here with Thomas is only something she has dreamed up—

I woke up this morning

Where I was I didn’t have a clue

— a dream that began the moment she and Mingo stood in broad afternoon light watching in outraged resignation as the carriage left the way it had come down the tree-lined gravel road and gradually dissolved from sight — corrosives of sunlight — the sound of its wheels turning in their torn ears. Nothing she or he could do to stop it. (What could a nigger do?) She almost speaks those words to Thomas now. N othing we could do to stop it. (How doubt that now?) It matters somehow that he knows. But the time to speak of it hasn’t come. She has retained a fixed image of Little Thomas in the carriage, an image that lasted all the way across to this island of Edgemere and is with her still. As she rises, higher and higher, she closes her eyes to visualize the moment better, the entire scene in perfect focus. The sunset blazing as if pumped up with blood. The woogie’s finely tailored trousers of an indeterminate color. The driver’s crumpled hat. Some carefully phrased farewell— Safe travels , was that it? May the Lord be with you , was that it? We bid you Godspeed , was that it? — that the General or Miss Toon muttered into the hot air, while she and Mingo kept silent without a word to anyone who had a say in the matter, Mingo’s face broad and smooth and full of astonished disbelief. The trees swaying, the green world turning on its machinery. Little Thomas’s white teeth brilliant in his open mouth. The sound of her asking herself, What had she done, they done, for the General to enact this punishment on them? These living pictures from another country, another time, unsettle her.

She pours words, all of the words she saved up from the moment she set out on her journey with Mr. Tabbs and all that she had accumulated since Little Thomas’s departure (eleven years’ worth), that she planned to speak to Thomas, she pours them into the bottommost parts of her heart, reinforcing her plans and projects, a weighty (unshakable?) foundation. Slowly, she feels and hears herself start to descend back to earth, drawn down. She opens her eyes — she doesn’t want to see anymore — as soon as her backside resumes its place on the pew, heavy, beaten (spent), and pain-ridden like the rest of her. And still she feels weight, causing her to wonder if she will sink right through the floor, but with the question she feels an answer rise in her chest, which draws her gaze toward Thomas, and she looks at him now, the two of them sitting here in the chapel breathing the same hungry calm. She takes his face apart, dissects his motionless hands, frail body, and fixed well-cobbled feet, the all of him, trying to find any indication that he remembers his abduction. For her part, the recollection of her final seconds with Little Thomas is what stood upright in her mind for all these years, her body what subsides, Thomas growing, taking on flesh, while she decays, loses substance, life rushing out of her lungs with every breath. As year followed year, she grew to hate more and more the General and Miss Toon and their rotten shat-out seed, hated them with all the thought and feeling her body could hold, hated every single nasty-ass wet-chicken-smelling woogie living or dead who had ever stank up the earth. Strangely easy to hate them, to intone chants and curses— Further on up the road, someone gon hurt you like you hurt me —that would bring boiling plagues and flesh-eating locusts on their generations to the end of time.