Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

He gets to his feet with a certain effort before they enter the room. (Best to be on your feet in situations like this, assume a stance of authority and command.) On first sighting he fixes them with a ferocious glance before they can avert their eyes. He means business. General Toon means business. They come in cautiously, as if the house might collapse under their footsteps. Come before him slowly and quietly with heads bowed.

Suh, you wanna see us? The woman, Charity, saying it, not her husband.

He doesn’t even bother to reply, to speak at all and ferret out their account, but waits for a lifting of their gaze before he casts his eyes first upon Charity then upon Mingo — he knows they can see him, even if they pretend not to — his look itself demanding a full and factual explanation.

If he wants to play, play he will. She will see to that. Any right-minded person should be ready to do the same, be willing to afford a pitiful soul this much. The crude but touching expression that bares his innocence and devotion. Little more than simple curiosity perhaps, explainable by some of Nature’s extraordinary aberrations. What matter the source? The motive? (Could you call it that?) Let him play. Under her guidance. Not training exactly. (What would you call it?) She sees his face go bright. He is enjoying this immensely and she begins to enjoy it too.

At the piano he is strong and loose, no matter how awkward and ungainly he is at other times. Mary Bethune is quite careful in her instruction. Everything is shown in motion and in harmony. Whenever he plays a lesson correctly — well, truth to tell, he plays everything correctly; he shows himself capable of great technical variety; demonstrate a scale and he will play it; show him a melody and he will bounce it back, working the pedals as she worked them; she can only fault his playing for being excessive, too forceful; all that frantic passion (on one occasion he embraces her, laughing into her neck); then too there are times when he duplicates her exactly in volume and intonation, the original inflection — she rewards him with, Admirable! An odd calm completes each lesson, as if he is waiting for her to say the word. Admirable! She comes out of the room exhausted after she finishes her lessons with him, for she can never show him too much, his desire an insurmountable force, hands having made a hundred exertions, ready for a hundred more. Given an attentive pupil — no, that is not the word; given a faithful pupil, timing, and technique — his left hand may even be better than the right, the Negro’s natural sense of rhythm — are easy enough to demonstrate, familiar ground under our feet. But the finer things — a definite feeling for order, a communicable clarity, an accurate sense of form, the lucky finds and the discovered refinements, the ascendance of beauty — are untranslatable, locked away in the farthest and darkest corner of the soul. No instructor or academy can teach that. And what can’t be shown can’t be mimicked. A long way of saying that these lessons are headed nowhere, are the proverbial dead end. Nothing gained. For the Negro race can never produce a Mozart. The world has never known and will never know a Negro genius. Still she feels inclined to continue the lessons as she notes some change in his playing — she wouldn’t exactly call it growth, development, more a polishing, the mastery of repetition until something shines — as each day he performs some little note or phrase that causes her to look at him with renewed interest and surprise. And when they are done for the day, he sits with his dark hands on the ivory keys, fingers spread wide, a settled pleasure.

So it goes. Then one day several months into their lessons, she rises from the piano at the close of a session, ready to summon Charity— Take the boy and tidy up a bit —when Tom’s voice springs up. He is singing. What she sees and hears tells her that he is transplanting the foreign lyrics to the unrelated melody she just taught him. She knows the words to the song. He gets some of them right, some of them wrong. No. Something else. In fact, he is mixing the verses of three different songs her daughters are quite fond of singing away from the piano. Somehow the phrasing and timing are just right, perfect.

He bites into the pink skin of the boiled pig snout. Admirable! he shouts. He drains his glass of lemonade and places it back on the table. Admirable! He tastes his potatoes. Admirable! He gets up from the table and walks around the cabin touching things. Admirable!

Or this: Standing still, taking pleasure in the idle noises his shoes make. Steps can form whole words. But the words do not move his feet forward. In the shed a cow with a large belly standing as cows do, standing and staring stubbornly. He stretches out his arms to caress her muzzle, saliva collecting on his fingers, tongue lolling in its mouth. Admirable!

General Toon beckons her to sit. Her legs will not move at first, fearing they have misunderstood his command. He points at a chair. She sits down.

Your boy, General Toon says.

Thomas?

Her glance briefly meets his steady gaze. Her eyes fall.

Your boy, Thomas. Grant her this. C an you explain it?

Thomas knows what he has to do, suh, she says. He is smart, she thinks. He clacks a little, she says.

You call that clacking?

Here comes trouble, she thinks. Thomas is out to expose them. No, suh. Some of my other ones had it, she says. What she doesn’t say: she even stammers herself sometime. Certain words drawled strangely. So she’s been told.

You call that clacking?

Yes, suh. I mean, no, suh.

Little Thomas’s body is renouncing speech while amplifying every other sound that enters him. Unusual — she will admit that.

Miss Toon wants answers, too — of course, Miss Toon also gives advice; she is anxious about Little Thomas — her interest and concern amounting to a challenge. But the questions don’t annoy or anger Charity — they are decent enough questions — for the light in her mistress’s eyes, the other woman’s pure excitement, is enough consolation. Tom issued from her body. No denying it, no changing it.

But more and more in the days and weeks that follow her meeting with the Toons, Thomas deserts them to spend all his days in the mansion. Tom, where you at? They summon her again.

The culminating structure of the house, set in this landscape, a natural part of it, no other place it can or should be, rising white out of the ground like a mushroom. She stands wincing in the light. Takes a deep breath, fills her lungs. Call it a gathering of courage. She hesitates to go in. General Toon looks bad-tempered, the room otherwise cool and pleasant. Only an accident of timing has allowed her to get here now, late as it is.

No one to blame but herself if she is here standing before him yet again, if she hasn’t already figured out a way to tell him once and for all what he wants to hear and in so telling put an end to the accusations. Not that she is eager to aid him. Of course, she has thought it over, she is prepared, armed with excuses, ready to count the hours and the days, sketch in what only exists for him for them in shadow outline. Easier said than done. Already her story starts to lose coherence.

He looks sourly at her. Instructs her to bring Tom to the house in the morning to begin daily obedience lessons. As well, he details a list of chores he expects the boy to perform. Starting tomorrow. Bright and early.

Sit, Tom. Good.

Stand, Tom. Good boy.

Be quiet, Tom. Quiet down now, Tom. No blubbering.

Good.

They are walking briskly now, a constitutional, under the elms at the edge of the garden. A walk seems to help settle him, make him easier to cope with for the day. Mary Bethune always takes the lead, with him behind her, though they take turns at varying the pace, a shifting distance. A hot day, and the air so still that it seems to absorb all sound of their footfalls. Then something changes. She isn’t sure who first steps up the pace, only knows that she turns to see him following her as fast as he can, arms pumping, head bouncing, a charging bull. She picks up speed, and so does he, matching her pace. It is not unlike watching your shadow following you. And she will admit that this unsettles her. For she has reason to believe that the skin of another is no barrier against his advances. In fact, there are times when she swears — has seen it with her own eyes — that he assumes the look of other persons, their stances, their gestures, their posture, his face a mask of theirs, changing expression when theirs did, their bodies and identities like clothes he can hang on his person, a total embodiment. Where some see the presence of the supernatural in his feats of imitation, feel a foreboding, the first elements of some danger to come, she seeks a physical cause that will — she is sure of it — eventually reveal itself. (Although she is a believer in both the Man Above and the Man Below, she is not inclined toward either fundamentalism or superstition.) Granted, she will admit that his behavior on occasion unnerves her, but these occasions are rare. She is perfectly at ease around the boy and finds a certain comfort in his presence. They leave the shade of the trees, bright light now, sun in every step. Perhaps you don’t need to see a thing to be it. (Can she help it if she thinks this?) After all, this boy is bonded to sound. There must be some way that his ears are able to register and measure the exact rhythm of her footfalls and his. An interesting notion, even moving in a way. She turns her head to look back at him and sees him take one step, two, before he also turns his head and looks back over his shoulder.