Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

The air smells faintly of burning — leaves, refuse, and shit (donkey), never the smell of kerosene or coal since Edgemere has neither — is sweet with the pugency of wood fires. Will she get to go out into the open today? She lifts her eyes, frets to see through the high high windows. Maybe if they actually leave the chapel, leave the Home — she has hardly gone out of the asylum the two or three months she’s been here on Edgemere — to knock along the shore. They will walk and sing — singing shortens the road, lessens the distance — his hand with its heat and bones just so around her, the measure of the sweetest promise, as the dhows drift inland. What a good idea. So they will get up and go now.

She leans back and hears (feels) her bones crack. The sound severs whatever it is that anchors the stage in place and yanks it free of its moorings. The stage begins to drift about the room. Thomas panics, afraid of drowning. Reaches out with both hands and grabs the rim of the piano in the gap between the soundboard and the cantilevered lid and he sits there with the piano fastened to his long outstretched arms.

What has she done? Then something clatters into the air. She turns at the sound. Can barely make out slow-moving figures crawling along the floor, tunneling between pews, row after row, and coming up for space and air, the hide and seek of laughing faces, one boy almost connected caterpillar-like to the boy in front or behind him, their shadows sealed together.

Yall better get up from there.

…

You heard me.

Ah, Mamma. We ain’t doing nothing.

We jus come to see.

Ain’t nothing to see, she says.

…

You ain’t hear me?

Faces and bodies sprout up from between the benches. Four, five, six.

Look at that blind nigger.

He yo son?

Yall get. Gon now.

Hey, Mamma. We jus lookin.

Is he gon play that pianer?

When he gon play it?

I bet you he don’t even know how to play it.

Yah had better gone.

We jus want to see him play that pianer.

Yeah. Ain’t nobody botherin you.

I ain’t gon tell you again.

What?

I ain’t gon tell you again.

Mother, ain’t nobody scared of you.

Wit yo old ass. The boy’s lips draw down in a sickly sneer.

She grabs her bowie knife by its bone handle and gets up from her chair. The boys scatter, their eyes bright with terror. They had better. Let them tremble and beware. Where she comes from stab is another word for knife. Slit another word for throat. Shank another word for dead.

Get up on I the one.

What? she asks. Thomas has slurred something. Thomas —my Tom —what did you say? And the more she doesn’t say. Go ahead. Don’t stop now. Cat got your tongue? Speak to her as if he is the past. Thomas, please tell me—

Then, as if this is the sign (word) he has been waiting for, he breaks into movement, starts fingering the ivories hard and with purpose, and just like that he is Little Thomas again, the Blind Tom that the world knew. A three-headed song — how many melodies can the air hold? — that pulls him this way and that, and that pulls her into the circle of melodies. See, silence could not hold him forever, because he is who he is, a Wiggins (not a Bethune), her and him both, one, same blood, like to like.

Then his fingers stop making sense. Why has he stopped playing?

Why you stop?

The ox is on my tongue.

What? What did you say? Willing herself futilely to be calm. In fact, she can hear the calmness of her own voice as if from a distance. Thomas, please tell me—

Take me. The only one.

Thomas?

But the words wilt right there. He turns wordlessly back to the piano. Holds up his big hands and shows her them, front then back, knuckles on display. She has no idea what this gesture means. Tom gathered in his own arms.

Wire thinks back to last night when the ocean claimed so many, passengers busy underwater, their mouths and throats full like overflowing chalices even as their eyes were burning, red. Not that he could see them in full detail really since he could only make out the contours of bodies trying to keep above the waves and the ferry hanging on the horizon as if pinned to the sky before it was carried under. And then he was being drawn down too and could hear his fellow passengers, the wet groaning language of his brethren and sistren through his soaked skin, the ocean wild around him with foam and glitter and swarming colors. In unison they upped and downed and scissored their arms and legs. Then as the light began to fan out and open up and land and sky began to assemble themselves around him, he realized with astonishment that he was as much excited by what he had dreamed as he was terrified. Why?

Defined against the sky, the dhows consume him with their overwhelming presence, teetering and tottering under the constant force of water and wind, bewitched currents that dance light and wood to their own needs. Only yesterday he had blessed the boats to start the fishing season. May you open your eyes to water and may the creatures of the sea open their mouths to hooks. The serenity and calm in the ocean, in the land, and in the heavens, even in the straight still trees, is almost enough to distract him as he makes his rounds through the camps, but once inside an encampment with its dark little tents and stooped figures in rags, misery in drabness is thrown back to him, tells him where he is. The tents turn around to look at him and the refugees mutter suitable thanks and praises, their attention commanded (he tells himself) through his simple unadorned presence rather than his height, his learning, his profession, his verses and prescriptions and treatments and medicines. The refugees line up in a long queue, as if they have come to present their lives — well, in a sense they have, haven’t they? — his hands active and his eyes full. One by one he takes the measure of them. Each person he examines tenses up and assumes odd angles like a model sitting for a portrait (study). The human body dazzles the imagination with existence from crown to heel bone, from the brain riding in the head to the winding provinces of the intestines and the heart that branches with its wild arteries and the muscles of the back that somehow remain steady and strong under stress and strain. These Freedmen suffer in silence, try to hide their hurt (sorrow just sits and rocks), although here in the camps heartache and sorrow have nowhere to hide.

How are you feeling? Which part is paining you? Are you able to eat?

They kill his ears with their barely audible words. So he composes habits for the camps so that these Freedmen’s expectations will be neither gluttonous nor starved. Liniments and elixirs that can bring the blood back to the cheeks and heat to numb digits and limbs. His method of strengthening and enlarging the circulatory and respiratory systems by diet, rigor, and breathing. (See Avicenna.)

The refugees burrow their bodies under damp blankets, settling in for the night. (The thought of them that evening in the camp.)

Now the song calls him.

Oh for three words of honey, and two strips of fatback

that I might tell but one wonder of thy wedding night

That seems to be the song of the moment in the camps, can’t miss it, it is everywhere, and he makes a record of it in his head for future reference, no telling how the information may prove useful down the line — words you say to show that you are one of them, words to put in a sermon. So let them sing. (Sing yourself to where the song comes from.) Whenever he is lost deep within himself their songs call him out. The children follow him around the well, singing. Dear water, clear water, playful in all your streams.