Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

She wants him — her Thomas, my Tom —to know that if she gets angry at him, if she voices any displeasure, he must know that it is only her past attacking him. Forgive her. Forgive me. Her resentments, her disappointments, her feelings of isolation, indifference, and resignation followed her here. (The weather doesn’t help, a miserable day, humid and muggy, reminding her of home, the way it always seems in her dreams.) But she has crossed over— Mr. Tabbs, do we really have to cross all that water? — so how can she allow herself to think that way? She should be rejoicing. Wade in the water. There is life and abundance for future years. (They both know it. They feel it in their throat and lungs.) A white devil in fancy trousers took Thomas away from her and a nigger angel in fancier pants brought her back to him. That old life is gone. That life shouldn’t (doesn’t) mean anything to her anymore. (The point at which memory softens.) So she must give up thinking, must empty her body of the past and let the future draw her forward, even if Thomas just sits up there at the piano hour after hour, day after day like a lump on a log, treating her to copious silence, nonspeaking and nonmoving no matter how hard she stares across the distance at him, stares until her eyes throb. (It is now later than it was awhile ago and still he hasn’t moved, no way to tell if he is awake or asleep.) She has crossed over, thus it is enough for her to just sit here with him this way, sit and contemplate their past and their prospects, while the closely scheduled activities (instructions, lessons, learning) of the orphans and their teachers go on around them. Indeed — she sees it now — that wise someone — Mr. Tabbs? Reverend Wire? Deacon Double? — had the presence of mind to realize that she and Thomas need to be alone together in the chapel each day, this is just the place for them to trade their silences, for they know, have always known how to answer each other without speaking, without questions. What they share as mother and son, they share alone. Between them sleeps the words they never exchanged, were forced to leave behind. Each day she feels his silence more keenly. ( Silence is not a word she associates with Little Thomas, even at his most innocent.) She is apprenticing herself to hush, which withdraws on occasion — she hears chalk clacking and squeaking against blackboards, counting beads colliding, orphans asking about the words that surprise them most during their spelling lessons, orphans at their looms, pottery wheels, and knitting and sewing machines, everything in the Home talking to itself; and beyond that faint distant sounds in the distance: tinkling cowbells, the braying of donkeys, rattling carts, and sea currents muscling into the shore — giving place to the echo of her secret thoughts that surprise even her. Tears stanched behind her shut eyelids, she cried all down inside herself that first night and many nights after. (The ache still even though he is here.) Never the full outpouring of grief because she knew that such letting go would unravel her, turn the spindle of her self until nothing was left. But from time to time she could feel it rise inside her and threaten release, threaten to leak (seep) or spill out of her closed mouth, especially when she unknotted and removed her head scarf before bed. (A body responds differently in the dark when it knows that other people are not around to observe it.) Perhaps Mingo heard it, that soft wet sound dammed inside her. Perhaps Thomas is listening too. Before coming here to Edgemere, when was the last time she had slept without dreaming he was dead? (And longing to return the favor, kill each and every woogie in revenge, man, woman, and child. Wanted to resurrect the ones that were already dead and buried, murder them again, then incinerate all trace of them.) She turned her thoughts toward forgetting, but to her surprise, thinking Thomas dead did not help her any, for death does not sever the ties with the living but pulls the worlds of the living and the dead closer together and braids them in eternal alliance (allegiance). Thomas was the afterlife, pieces of him everywhere. (The cupboard drawer startled open, the cup that moved of its own volition across the table, the sudden chill on a hot day, curtains swaying in a room where all the windows were shut, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of her eye.) How could she gather up what was left of him in this world and move it permanently to the other side? I am poured out like water. As year followed year, she searched for a reason not to long for him. And why should he be the one to claim her attention? I am the only one. Of course there had been others, the ones taken away from her; Thomas was not the first. To say her world is shot through with loss like a moth-eaten garment is to say nothing since every gap in the cloth opens into possibility, what the eye sees when it peers through the holes, what the fingers find when they poke through. She believes in the ability (the will) of mothers to make right — she assumes blame; a need builds inside her — to weave patterns of past and present (fashioning) into a cocoon that can keep her offspring’s name intact, Thomas (never Tom), confident (now) that their suffering, Mingo’s, her daughters’, her own— I am the mother —cannot touch him anymore. This Thomas is moving toward being her Thomas again.

She retraces the stages of her journey and comes to remember that port (two white ladies under two white parasols) from where she and Mr. Tabbs set sail on a small steamship tossed by the large sea. Distinctly recalls the urgency in which the ship slid out into open water and how the horizon exploded out of the lovely expanse of blue before the deckhands had completely raised the gangplank, the harbor quickly thinning from view, everything hurrying along with all deliberate speed to afford her no chance to change her mind and turn back. Having never confronted the sea, she stood on the deck for a while, wondering at passage over water, at buoyancy, power, and weight, at the salt in the air, the movement of the craft keeping her body occupied as it sought balance, her shadow floating alone on top of waves brimming with scooting fish, more ornate sea creatures submerged beneath, their scales sparkling like the shards of a broken mirror, and mermaids and mermen surfacing now and again to chew the thirsty air, their transparent lungs shining through their exposed rib cages. The many ports they entered, passengers boarding or disembarking, and the many sights, sounds, and smells revealed to her even as she stood on deck and looked back at her past, all that she was flashing from the flashing water, her tragedies like sunken vessels with an angle of hull rising up out of the water.

At last — two weeks? two months? two years? — they approached the city’s harbor, and as if to give her maximum time to take in what she was seeing, the ship came almost to a standstill, the lulled water tossing it (and her) gently like a body turning out of sleep. A swarm of vessels (dark-sailed dhows and the bulky overcrowded ferries, body braided to body on deck) with their high massive hulls came into her line of sight out of the resounding vastness, some approaching the harbor, others heading out to sea, one vessel alive in another’s movement. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. A waking dream. (Light asks no questions.) Every breath of air made her face shudder. The engine cut off altogether and the ship bobbed into the pier, moored in perfect alignment between two posts like a horse inside its stall. She and Mr. Tabbs were among the first passengers to descend the gangplank onto the pier — she was wobbly at first, a necessary weight (more of the world than we think); with all that water under her for days and weeks she had forgotten that she weighed anything; for his part, Mr. Tabbs took a moment to accustom himself to land, shaking each leg energetically — where the land moved with mariners studying their travel charts and maps, muscled crews hauling crates into and out of blockhouses and stores, drivers fixed on buckboards behind packhorses idle in anticipation. They did not leave the pier to enter the magnificent city surging with legions of people — had she wanted to? — but made haste, ascended another gangplank and boarded a ferry for the final crossing to Edgemere. In less than an hour she heard the call for landing. Edgemere floated into sight. Seen from board at a distance this expanse of sea seemed a thing totally distinct from the small outspread island that emerged from it. These were special waters. Perhaps this was the very sea where the Almighty had drowned old Pharaoh’s army to save Mr. Moses and those Hebrew children.