Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Tom risks putting his hands on the keys. Fallen chances.

Wait, Tom, wait.

A discomfiting silence falls over the room. The instructor sits down at the piano, causing Tom’s hands to fly up then come to rest comfortably in his lap. The instructor proceeds to demonstrate the melody that Tom bungled. Once, twice, three times. Again and again. He watches Tom try the melody with some determination in his movements.

Wait, Tom, wait.

Tom makes an odd little gesture of helplessness.

Set in his ways, Tom clutches at playing things in the manner he knows them. Can’t seem to let go, pleasure and habit impeding his advance. Not clear if he even knows what the instructor is after. At times he doesn’t seem to understand what the instructor is saying, what the instructor is going on about. Sharps and flats. Keys and doors. Seems unable to divide one thing from another. Doesn’t even try, make the effort. He can be impatient, forever geared up to move on, to get into the next satisfying adventure, that sense of now when he is sitting at the table with his fork and spoon at the ready. No, these lessons are far from easy sailing. Quite rough at times. (No, Tom!) The first week or two Seven feared that Tom was proving to be too much for the instructor. In thought and deed Tom roamed uncontrollably, unable to halt once he got started at the piano, tearing on until the end of a tune, deaf to the instructor’s orders and directions (pleas?), as if he owned the piano and would do anything he damned well pleased with it. The instructor shouts, but Tom simply ignores him. Seven breaks in, asking Tom to behave. The instructor turns to him and brings a finger up to his lips, making it clear that he wants Seven to keep out of it. Then Seven watches helpless as the instructor’s hands swoop down like vicious talons and attack Tom’s fingers, forcing them still, killing the music contained within the worm-like fingers. It hurts Seven to see it, but he says nothing — his cowardly heart — Tom wheezes out some air, Seven watching, trying to discount his feelings of guilt and remorse because he hasn’t come to Tom’s defense. He suffers a flush of curiously mixed emotion, wishing that his own feeling could somehow make the pain less for Tom, but knowing that it will not. He is all at once overwhelmed with a passionate longing to throw his arms around his charge.

Tom puts demands on both of them. (You miss the point, Tom.) But the instructor seems to be a man who knows how to make himself obeyed. (In this house, you are my student, Tom.) Physical force is not his only means. Why should he go easy on Tom? Why should things be any different for him? Tom should be treated like any other student. Tom has a head to learn and learn he will.

He has to endure a rehearsal of all he has done wrong over the past hour. He sits listening at the far corner of the bench, his body stiff, defenseless, unresisting, everything happening at once, his hands hovering above the keys like frightened birds.

Okay, now let me hear you try it.

And try it he does, Tom’s hands slow and smooth, moving in such a way — soft, serious — as if to suggest that he now realizes he needs to curb his instincts and calm himself in the face of what he is up against if he ever hopes to play exactly how the instructor is determined to have him play. Seven shifts forward on the couch, uniformly, barely noticeable. He can see Tom’s black mind working, searching, recalling, questioning.

The instructor gives Tom a smile, perhaps to lead him away from his unhappy thinking, but of course Tom can’t see the smile.

Better, Tom, better.

The instructor’s reasons for insisting that Tom play something a certain way are so written in stone he never bothers to set them out. But steadfastness is the one thing Tom has in abundance.

Seven observes it all with a sudden idleness — the possible danger of watching — a patience that comes from a routine hungering, a hearing beyond these failed notes nicking his ears. Listening to Tom with unhesitating faith. Tom’s errors, his stammering and hesitation, somehow make him more striking, strangely heighten his endowment. (Glows.) Fragments of perfection Seven can believe in. Much still is possible, but he might be convinced — he is already convinced — to deem the continuous tapping on the keys some sort of private code between Tom and the instructor. And he is privy to it, this secret language, even if he doesn’t understand it. The little his body enjoys in this moment he regards as a privilege, for God has granted Tom something withheld from him and Mr. Oliver and legions of others: music.

On another afternoon, Tom says, We want to sing.

Shimmering in the light from the window, the instructor begins singing in a language that Seven has never heard before. Seven goes cold, an unfamiliar thrill running up and down his body. He regards the instructor’s tongue as if for the first time. He knows that mankind is an entity made up of tongues, tongues taking on names like German, French, Spanish, although the only tongues he’s ever heard are nigger and Anglo-Saxon. And Indian. (Almost forgot.) Seven pictures these tongues as so many strands of leather attached to a whip handle, thin strips of hardened skin that might all have come from the same bull, reunited after death, or that might have come from many different bulls, a hodgepodge of hoof and horn. Just as a single tongue leaves the darkness of the mouth and produces words on contact with the air, the many-portioned whip whooshes forward and snaps out a word, nine strips say, all speaking the same word in nine different languages. Snap!

Seven has even heard that it is possible to trick your natural-born tongue into sounding foreign words. But this music instructor is the first man he has actually witnessed perform the feat. Little more than a hard-to-believe rumor before now. But it doesn’t end there.

Seven witnesses something even more incredible. When the instructor finishes singing, Tom takes up the tune, singing it in the same foreign tongue while his native hands provide accompaniment at the piano. Seven sinks into serene amazement. (The instructor’s eyes go wide for a moment.) Seven can feel his heart beating, slowly, steadily. Tom and the instructor shine in the fresh light, in the brilliance of this startling peace called music. Seven studies Tom’s face for every trace of shifting emotion. He was right the entire time. Right indeed. In fact, he is quite sure that he detects a third sound lingering in the space between the sung note and the melody that accompanies it, some sound issuing forth from Tom’s body — a wheezing, a humming, a cooing, a purring — an interaction of the vocal and respiratory musculature, which mix to form a third sound combining the two. As if Tom’s tongue or lungs are stuck between one motion and another. Three sounds coming out of this one nigger body.

Tom never wants the lesson to end, the piano to cease. The instructor has to enforce a strict time frame.

I’ll imagine you want to be getting back, the instructor says. He sees Seven and Tom to the door. He leans kindly toward them and expresses one final sentiment before he lets them leave. Guidance, he says. You are in need of guidance. Hard to say if he sounds glad or sorry or worried. Seven searches his face for the fun, for the teasing that might suggest he means something other than what he says. But he is also surprised by the note of sincerity in the instructor’s voice. You have much to learn, the instructor says. How can Seven disagree?

Tom has developed the habit of throwing his hat onto the table in order to free his hands. Some days Seven will simply take the hat and put it in its proper place to spare himself the necessity of further struggle. Not today.