Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Ma’m. He lifts his hat, and before she can react he takes (snatches?) the bag from her hand, gets another bag and a third, then climbs onto the first passenger car and deposits them into the carrying space, loading and reloading two bags at a time, working with a kind of furious patience, a calmness and authority that surprise Eliza after his deferential antics earlier on. The conductor assumes his perch and hangs there in frozen immobility, his gaze calmly following the Negro, the conductor looking (trying to) more unconcerned than perturbed. (Just for a moment, she catches the fire of anger in his eyes.)

All aboard!

After he loads the heavy trunk, the Negro sees to it that she and Tom assume a berth on the train — moving single file down the narrow aisle, the Negro, Tom, Eliza — one (his decision) all the way at the rear of the car, meaning that they must pass row after row of their fellow passengers — the car half full — proper ladies and gentlemen who are nevertheless shocked and alarmed at this occurrence, drawing back in disgust and (even more) willing to express their feelings through faint cries of protest and indignation and (probably) derision and scorn. Tom takes the inside seat, near the window, passing his malacca cane off to Eliza for safekeeping. Eliza relieved that at least this much is settled. Duty fulfilled, the Negro stands poised in the aisle, waiting quietly — loud breath, silent sweat — looking down at them, eyes bright, as if the lifting and carrying and conducting had been a form of play. She takes it that he is waiting for her to discharge him.

Sir, I’m both sorry and thankful, she says.

Much obliged, ma’m.

Please allow me to compensate you something for your time and effort.

No, ma’m.

Are you certain?

Yes’m.

Iron scrape and drag, the train begins its sluggish pull out of the station.

Well, I best be leaving. The Negro bows slightly and lifts his hat. Ma’m. He shifts his attention to Tom. Mister. Tom neither moves nor speaks. The Negro stands, watching and waiting, the great iron wheels slowly rotating in hope of greater momentum, and succeeding somewhat, a beat or two. Mister. Momentarily he leans all the way over her and touches Tom’s shoulder. Tom turns his unseeing face at the contact. Only then does she notice that the Negro is staring at Tom with a marveling smile. Now she gets it. One poor son of Ham helping out another. Kindness, generosity — it was more than that with the Negro. It was Race and blood, shared suffering and circumstance. But wait — watching him watch — is that the true sum of it? She feels privy to an even greater, deeper, emotion. Apart from anything else, what — she sees in his gaze — can only be described as admiration and devotion, sentiments fully evident — unmistakable — from something in his manner and posture that had nothing to do with strength or height or poise or clothes or their cut and fit.

You can help us again, Tom says.

Much obliged. The Negro tilts his head-hat. Safe passage. Turns and starts down the aisle, swinging his shoulders lazily as he walks, unconcerned about what they think and at the same time very much concerned that they get a good look so as to recognize and remember this man, this Negro, moved by his own words, his own thoughts, made significant and present in the world because he has accomplished something of value for none other than the one and only Blind Tom.

It makes Eliza smile to herself as she watches.

And then he is gone, out there in the steam and smoke. She eases back and relaxes in her seat. Glances at Tom beside her, almost indistinct in bright light blaring through the window, a smile on his face, enjoying the movement of the train as it follows the curve of a hill, leaving the edges of the town to their left, scattered farms and homesteads hugging hurtling earth. A gradual thickening of brown and green until soon nothing but vegetation is visible through the windows (left right). The thought that they are finally leaving the country for the city becomes irresistible.

Mile after mile the other passengers maintain an illusion of civility and pay her and Tom no mind. Only shifting corner-eyed glances. Tensely hissed whispers. Words drifting between words. Diction strikingly precise. A general sense of touchiness all around. She has the greatest desire to start a discussion with these people. To confront them. (Something of the defiant Negro rubbing off on her.) So why doesn’t she?

The conductor enters the coach at the far end with a smile-commissioned face, squat and out of proportion to the visible rest of him under his short-brimmed cap. Starts his way down the narrow aisle, cumbersome and bulky, dodging knees and elbows, exchanging greetings (automatic discourse) and collecting tickets with a supplicating nod of his gray cap. At the appropriate time, Eliza holds her tickets up, and, shoe-leather hands, the conductor makes as if to take them, actually lowers and targets his brim, only to move on to the passengers seated in the row behind. A crude deliberate formula in his treatment.

Sometime later — the next station, the one after that — a soldier boards their car, brass buttons bright against the dark blue cloth of his tunic, varicolored medals splayed across his chest, mapping for the world the war he has returned from (that has returned him). The field saber holstered in its scabbard alongside him an awkward appendage, a rudder steering him this way and that down the aisle. And the hat he’s wearing, the biggest she’s ever seen, looming large on his small head, some powerful ocean-crossing ship bouncing on the peaked waves of his ears. (Does she even see his face?) Taken by glory, another passenger relinquishes a seat at coach front so that the soldier need not suffer the slight indignity of sitting in the rear where Eliza and Tom sit. (Does the soldier thank him?) Before he has comfortably put himself between the cushions — saber removed — even before the train has pulled out of the station, the conductor enters the car and speaks to the soldier with a catch in his voice and a smile hung on the end of his words. Takes his ticket. Nods his thanks and good wishes. Then he brings himself before Eliza and asks for her tickets with triumphant malice, his eyes lit sharply with exactly what he thinks about her. She produces them and he accepts them, satisfied with having the power to diminish and delay, even if he must capitulate and perform his job.

He slides away down the glistening aisle. They are speeding through space, tracks catapulting them toward the low sun, the city, toward home. Her bones jerking and shaking. She feels no more solid than the disparate streams of smoke swimming past the window, kicking their skinny black legs, bringing (now) the smell of fire with them.

Traveling north through a continual cascade of trees, moving between dialects and regions, a rise rich in territorial overtones. Unclear to her the national claims, where (before the war) what federation begins or ends, no line of demarcation, no sharp defining difference — they cross the river — separating one state from another, between there and here, only this river curving them into a view (window) of a halo of motion on the horizon, then, an hour later, sun sinking into the dark waist and a flaming flower rising up, the glass glistening with its fuzzy light, the city’s brooding skyline, growing across the distance with each closing mile, waving its petals of roofs and towers, domes and belfries, factories surmounted by smokestacks and churches surmounted by the cross.

The conductor jams his body in the door to keep it open, wind rushing in and something inside the coach emptying out, all speech and sound snatched free into the world. Eliza actually feels her insides suck; drowning in the air. But the conductor only stands there smiling (back) at them, features distorted under the rushing wind. After a gradual easing off of speed, they pull into the iron-vaulted shed of Grand Central Depot, a structure as big as a cathedral and possessing many of the same Gothic affectations.