Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Who does not love to hear them and see them, perfect in music and movement? With his listening funnel, he hears the way history sounds in a chest— Into the air, as breath into the wind —the lungs taking up their work. Judges the force of circulation with just the lightest touch along the wrist, feeling the sequence of intervals — loud and soft, regular or irregular — as they abide in the pulse, the blood banging in the body. He finds the true extension of himself in them, in all of the refugees, these Freedmen, but the landscape (what he sees) is inexact in its slant of figures, facts of the flesh suggesting fewer souls than are actually here. The city still has nowhere to place them all despite the makeshift and quickly constructed houses put up on new streets. And so much is in short supply. Victuals, medicine, clothing, soap, tents, blankets and bedding, lamps, kerosene. The provisions of food and other necessities made available to them through the Bureau and through the Christian goodwill of the Red Cross, Action Now, and the League of Churches dwell in awkward distribution inside their silos. The body is owned by hunger. So the body says. But not even these shortages can spoil the children. Take this as proof: a group of boys have made glassless spectacles from orange rinds. It is your own self you hunger for. How clever.

In the last camp on his rounds — each day this human coming and going into the camps — the refugees are busy with grief. They carry a coffin high above their heads and move in equal pace, swaying from side to side. They believe in giving the coffin a dance, action that is not work, but matter itself through which the work navigates, the commandments of metal and wood. Once the coffin is comfortably tucked into the freshly dug grave, he says his say then they pour their libations. (All in man that mourns and seeks.) And he trembles inside himself, undone for a moment by the three or four things that can happen to a man in the camps. He and the mourners turn away.

For whatever reason, he looks back to see bored children leaping over the grave.

Ah, that dead nigger is going off to glory.

Around their wood fires the refugees melt into light, but there is nothing luminous about this. (In the fading light does the sound of the water also darken?) Holy is that dark which will neither promise nor explain. He is no fool. Knows that their bodies, as the bodies of us all, are promised to something more certain than Emancipation or Liberty or Happiness: Death. However, the trouble with them — his people, us —is that we are always preparing to die.

Body, ain’t you lonesome?

Lay down a little while

Body, ain’t you tired?

Lay down a little while

The challenge (always) is to win their hearts and their minds and change the way they view themselves and their situation. He has to both kill the nigger (slave) inside and bring the African out. Such are the selves they struggle with and are struggling out of.

What pains have we not felt? What suffering have we not known? (The thoughts of a wise man in the language of common African folk.)

Who understands better than he does their hunger and desperation? Slavery taught them the ways of doubt so that they may believe. Life knows no time or limits. Even death makes life.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Jehovah has double blessed him with the gift of gab (mouth) and the gift of healing (hands), talking and touching his way into the truths these professions require. Once more he put his hands upon the man’s eyes, and his sight was restored and he saw everything clearly. So illuminate he can and illuminate he will until every single person in the camps, until each refugee in the cell of himself is convinced of his freedom.

Brothers and sisters, the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. But behold, I tell you that we stand at the edge of centuries facing a new era of ten thousand years, and He, Almighty Jehovah, stands with us. It all comes together here , all there ever was is now. Soon you will rise and walk away from this life. You and I both, together, will rise and enter a holy house, on this earth, not in the heaven above. Until then hold on.

His heart beyond both worry and anguish: Light breaks where no light was before, where no eye was prepared to see, and animals rise up to walk.

These ideas have their satisfaction. They turn a rambling and brutal chronicle of bondage and pain and abuse and injustice into a neatly structured story of triumph where the African (black sheep) awakens to the fullness of his strength and inherits a plentiful earth, some forty thousand acres along with a million mules.

Bright stars fixed in thick light in the black night sky beckon. Jehovah willing, he can now go home and take a moment to grieve, catch some shut-eye, then rise fresh and resume work on Sunday’s sermon, “God Has a Hand in It.” Holding on to God’s unchanging hand. My people—

My people? People don’t belong to you. You belong to them, but only if they let you. So let me. W hatever it takes, he will do, he is willing. By any means necessary.

Doctor Reverend. Mr. Reverend. Pastor, Doctor, sir. Reverend Doctor. Pastor, sir.

I’m listening, he says. Tell me what you have to say. He can’t help thinking that there is something mysterious about the way the boy accosts him.

The boy speaks his piece. Them soldiers paid me this quarter, the boy says. The boy holds it up so he can see it, as if he needs convincing.

He wishes he could pay the boy two quarters or a dollar, bargain some sum that will relieve him of the obligation to travel to the soldiers’ camp in Central Park. He can’t. The hour of his seeming quiet has passed. So he dismisses the boy and simply stands there waiting for his second wind — is he struggling for breath? — and diligently gauging his own mood, not proud about what he is thinking. God means to impose impossible tasks on him and others like him until they breathe their last.

Central Park is a distance he can cross by foot, and he will cross it by foot no matter how tired he is, moving hesitantly as if he fears stepping into a hole. He sees big gashes in the sidewalk, unusual colors showing through, and has the distinct impression that the buildings are sinking into their foundations, dwellings freighted with the city’s past, year upon year. His eyes seek out something else. (The city does not tell its past.) Outside of him — way back, beyond — are others of unknown number. He knows that they are watching him even if the city to him is his own tongue. Is it possible for him to forget the rank and rancid odors that wafted across the ocean into Edgemere after he had taken up exile there? Most terrible of all in those first months were the rumors, yet to be proven these many years later, circulating among the fellow exiles on Edgemere (and even a few of the natives) about profitable new industries on the mainland, hats and ties and vests and chaps and belts and shoes made from African skin, which, for a time at least, surpassed the same products made from chupacabra leather; vials filled with the semen of hanged men — sales surpassing (supply and demand) gourds filled with morning dew and wineskins filled with Italian, French, or Spanish water — and tea made from weeds that had sprouted up where men had pissed themselves moments before death. Is memory (the facts and rumors and the speculations created by the facts and rumors) what spurs him on?

Trees at a wet and dripping distance mark his progress across the Main Lawn of Central Park. Grass sprouting from the ground underfoot. (The landscape is something he moves across.) What is that large feeling he notices spreading in the air even before he reaches the guard-(gate)-house? The entire bivouac gripped by an apprehensive energy. The blocky house is stark, self-announcing, and though the room is austere and cramped inside, it is oddly partitioned into two distinct apartments with rifles and bayonets and trunks of ammunition in the first, and a table-dominated sitting area in the second, where the men, veterans of the war to free the Negro, are engaged in voluble discourse, gazing into each other’s eyes as they talk. Aggression holds everything together: room, arms and ammunition, table, the light coming from kerosene lamps that casts murals on the walls from the shadows of the animated men, the afterimages of light. He has long been curious. They have killed. They have killed white men. But he has never said anything to them about it and they have said nothing to him. Still, they are part of something, and he is part of it with them, a simple allegiance.