Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Steeple. Church. People. The congregation is in step with the church and the church is in step with time. After service ends the lead deacon comes out front to give poor farmers and such unlikely beings to understand that the pastor does not converse with ordinary mortals. They must put everything in writing — ask the impossible — and hand him a note the moment he leaves the church. He never leaves through the front but goes through the back. Where Negroes push and shove each other amid a hubbub of noise and gossip while they wait for the pastor to appear before them and lend an ear to their secrets and complaints and mouth opinions and advice, usually in the form of biblical scripture but sometimes in plain English if you are lucky. When he appears in the doorway, the world draws to a hush. Ritual perfection. He holds up the bottom of his black gown to avoid tripping over it as he comes down the stairs. One after the next they begin to pour out their sufferings. She hears him say to one man, But after all, who is your father? Moves on to the next person. She thinks she is going to faint, everything whirling around her. Does her best to breathe the air at calculated intervals. Deeply moved, he squeezes one woman’s slender bony hands. As the solemn moment draws near she quiets her breathing. He puts a hand on her shoulder, leans forward some, and turns his ear toward her face to hear what she has to say. Saying done, he draws back and looks at her with a stern expression. You ought to be ashamed to ask me such a question. How is it possible for a mother to pray for the peace of a living soul? It’s a great sin, I tell you, and it is forgiven only because of your ignorance. Your son is alive, is he not?

The Doctor has an inkling. Once, not many years ago, he successfully treated a three-year-old Negro for this same incurable and often terminal affliction. The boy had poked himself in the eye with a twig, what at first seemed a minor injury, a scratch, a doctor’s poor diagnosis setting the stage for greater injury. A week later the eye became infected. After a second week the other eye became infected, both eyes causing the onset of brain fever. Then he was called in. Upon a careful review of the case, he decided to remove both eyes, and remove them he did and in so doing he not only saved the boy’s life but also prevented any further physical and mental deterioration. A paper detailing the case had been published in a British medical journal.

Now he has the opportunity to study the effects of the illness in its later and perhaps even final stages. (This Bethune boy promises much. He senses it and trembles at the possibilities.) Does the fever seep down to the most profound layer of the mind, rooted, biding its time, never to rise again until the terminal moment? He can see another paper on the horizon. How he would love to deliver it in Paris, or at some other open and welcome gathering on the Continent, before the most distinguished men of his profession who are attuned to the latest advances in science and medicine. How slow the progress here. How thick the ignorance. A matter of endless frustration for him. So good to have an ally like James in the scientific cause. But he is as much struggling to comprehend James’s uncharacteristic stealth — why had James kept silent about the boy, kept him hidden, and for all these many years? — as much as the strange case of this boy Tom. So unlike James to keep secrets from him. They are old friends, best friends perhaps, although he doesn’t always agree with James’s national and ethnological policies and prophecies.

He is moving briskly but not urgently, headed toward the Bethune mansion. Although he is preoccupied he makes it a point to tip his hat to all he meets, regardless of their position in life. He has yet to reach the height of his fame, but he has already developed something of a reputation as a man of science bent on ridding the men and women of their region, their country, of their faulty and dangerous notions and traditions. In particular, he sees no way of holding his tongue against the planter’s wasteful practice of forcing expectant mothers to work in the fields down to the period of delivery. No way to prove it, but he is convinced that either maternal anxieties or industry itself cause crippling and irreversible effects on the brain of the unborn. Hence, a mentally weakened infant enters the world, fulfilling the prejudiced hypotheses about the Negro’s limited intelligence. Indeed, he is convinced that the planters can do away with many of their numerous complaints against the Negroes if only they take it upon themselves to rear a better crop of workers.

Some of his beliefs rub his fellow citizens the wrong way, but his authority is too great for them to disregard his opinions.

How quickly he arrives at the mansion and how gracefully he steps down from his carriage without the assistance of his Negro driver. He arrives on the porch, out of breath, out of words. The Bethunes’ Negress Charity opens the door, and he removes his hat and bows a little, lets his hat return and says a few casual words to her, the way one makes polite conversation, before she takes him in and shows him to the library, him on guard, observing and evaluating, beginning his inquiry as soon as he is one foot inside the mansion, looking for the signs.

She wonders if she should thank the General for bringing the Doctor. (The vague hope that the Doctor may reveal something useful.) That is, she wonders if she should feel thankful. Even if she decides that the General’s action warrants her appreciation — she is only beginning to mull that over, hasn’t had long to think about it, all so unexpected and sudden, in a rush of minutes — how can she voice the words? Not her place to. And even if it were, she doesn’t think she could bring her tongue to do so.

No, it doesn’t surprise him, for the Negro, like his Anglo-Saxon superior, is an imitative being. How wrong of them to sneer at any act of simulation, no matter how peculiar or extreme. Might imitation be proof of buried intelligence, the first stirrings of coherent function and knowledge that, when thought and deed come together in noble agreement, form the basis of culture? The question warrants further investigation.

His thoughts on medicine mingle with the voices of fellow doctors and surgeons he has reviewed the case with, all rank outsiders in matters of research. So easy for common eyes to refuse to see what they should see because they don’t wish to see it, for common mouths to parrot the same reductive beliefs in the same old weighted language. Freaks of nature. Oversights or accidents of God. He longs to get the examination under way. He has never been so upset by waiting. The thought hardly out of his mind before he feels something shift around him. It takes him a moment to locate the subject, sitting still and quiet on the sofa, blending in. How had he missed the boy’s entry? Might he have been here the whole time? As impossible as it seems, he senses that the boy had deliberately tried to catch his attention only moments earlier, for he sees a definite alertness in the face. (Later, he will recall having heard a noise — a cough or a clearing of the throat — a sound coming before the sight. This addition.) No doubt about it. The boy is listening and smelling.

That’s when it hits him. This is the boy. The other’s dark complexion glows before him, mingling with the light and odor of candles, body and face causing him to draw back as before a vision of rare life. What difficulties an artist would have in painting his portrait. His physical advancement, certain aspects of his appearance — the bulging forehead, his ample mouth and cheeks, the wide neck, his broad shoulders, the height and strength — evidence of the vital spirit within. In the struggle to survive his illness the strong thing within has stripped him of all unessential thoughts, hindrances to living. Confined as he is to his world of darkness, is he even capable of detecting the ailment present but hidden within his person? How difficult to get to the ordinary life behind a thing.