Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

He knows the exact moment to say something, to make his move. Now as good a time as any. So why doesn’t he? Is it because he needs to see those he will address? Can’t see them but can hear them, feel the contact in the air, all those bodies pressed together in the half light. From here they look transcendent. What a shock it’ll be when the moment before him becomes brighter to his senses, the spectators slowly gaining volume, shape, characteristics, and features until they take on the full weight of existence. (How well blindness serves to protect Tom in this respect.) He might as well wait forever because he now understands that human eyes can’t fully cancel out the blurry world created by this focused illumination, these stage lights burning full and unimpeded in the otherwise dark. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Please allow me to introduce myself, Perry Oliver, Manager of the Performance. He stops for a moment in something between alarm and vexation, realizing that he has prepared no formal introduction. Never even thought about it before now. This one oversight. And here the words are, tumbling out on his tongue. You people of impeccable taste and understanding. One word answered by another. In the same hour came forth the fingers of a man’s hand. Feeling not quite connected to what he is saying— Not in a thousand years would you imagine beautiful melodies flying out from the dark cave of this Negro’s mouth —although they are his words, his thoughts. Fearless despite the sense that the sentences can go one way or another, fail or achieve. Totally unscripted. He gets to say what he wants, a string of elaborate utterances and pronouncements — a musical gem —enjoying it now, as he finds, has always found, the theatrical instinct for disguise and transformation one of life’s greatest pleasures. The audience can like it or not.

Only right that he should receive total credit for the affective force of his words, pulling Tom from the wings, positioning him at the piano, and eliciting his first round of applause from an audience even before the sounding of the first note. The hardest part over. Now he has only to take these few steps to this exact spot and introduce a song before disappearing from view behind the curtain where he stands sending searching glances at the sea of heads bobbing above all those chairs, distinguishing every fluid face in the audience. Seeing too their gestures and expressions. He knows what they are saying or not saying. All those thoughts joining and falling apart. The burden passed on to them now, as they sit listening, carried on the sound, hoping to grow accustomed to what they are hearing. Imagine all that has to happen, all that has to interconnect for the audience to be linked as one by the final number, applauding, each man or woman on his or her feet, before veering on their separate ways.

That night, Perry Oliver is careful to bury his face into the soft blind whiteness of his pillow, lest Seven hear him crying.

“The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. This am I …”

HE PLAYS “DIXIE” WITH HIS LEFT HAND IN THE KEY OF A, “Yankee Doodle” with the right in the key of E, and sings “The Girl I Left Behind Me” in the key of E.

He plays the Moonlight Sonata with his back to the piano and his hands inverted.

He plays a four-handed arrangement of Rossini’s Semiramide with two hands.

He plays “Voices of the Waves” with his tongue and teeth, as if eating the ivory keys.

He plays “The Rain Storm” in a minor key with his bare feet, walking melody across the black keys.

He sings the song about his mother (“Mother, dear Mother, I Still Think of Thee”), and every woman in the audience starts crying.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Blind Tom will perform for you one of his own compositions, the latest from his growing catalog. Feel honored, ladies and gentlemen, as your ears will be the first to hear this beautiful tune outside my own. It is titled, and I assure you that you’ll see why, “Rattlesnake Charm.” Speaking slowly to get it right.

You, Perry Oliver, the Manager of the Performance, call for a challenge from the audience. Who here in the house can make history by confounding Blind Tom? A man produces a composition of his own construction that he points out is some twenty pages in length. Please, sir, come to the stage. As soon as the challenger sets hands to his tune, Tom bends his head nearly to the floor and with one foot raised and stretched out behind him, begins to turn round and round upon the other foot, gaining speed as he spins, the entire figure agitated, rotating about itself on its own axis, performing implausible acrobatic contortions, in poses and expressions beyond the limits of the ridiculous and expressive. Now he begins to ornament the gyrations with spasmodic movements of the hands. He makes some members of the audience dizzy with his spinning. Some of the women cover their faces, or their husband’s hands do it for them without their asking, but you don’t think it odd. Tom looks like nothing more in the world than a man taking his daily exercise, strange gymnastics essential to his bodily health. Something strangely peaceful in the activity, Tom winding deeply into a private place, the eye of his own storm.

Tom ceases spinning about and seats himself at the piano. He plays back the melody note for note and in the exact rhythm, begins to play it again, seeming to inspect the melody first, run through it once as if to check it out before reshaping and revoicing it, weaving variations and building a continual stream of countermelody and changing textures, transposing the melody and harmony to another key, revealing all of the song’s hidden permutations, one hand now active on the keyboard, the other fluttering in the air.

Another man in the audience takes to his feet and issues a different challenge, hoping to confound “the eighth wonder of the world.” Rumor has it that Tom can recite certain passages from Plato, word for word. Does he know the fifth chapter of The Republic? Why indeed, you say. He does know it. And for the audience’s additional pleasure, he will also recite chapters six and seven. So Tom does, reciting one chapter in Greek, the next chapter in Latin, and then the last in French, Tom’s voice, the way it holds each person in the audience like a hand gripping a face, a kind of hypnosis. Now he gives — further amazement — an oratory in Japanese followed by in quick order selections from the Gospel according to Mark, several Articles of the Constitution — why stop there? — and the first chapters of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities , performing the pages in the exact voice of the master British novelist— If it is too cold or wet I take shelter in the Café de la Régence and amuse myself watching people playing chess. Paris is the place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the place in Paris where this game is played best, and at Rey’s the shrewd Legal, the crafty Philidor and the dependable Mayot sally forth to battle … — saying what the day demands, his voice slow and measured, beautiful and powerful, all the intonations, syllables, and inflections exact, each member of the audience watching and listening with dark redolent attention, rapture, bodies stiff, listening with all their muscles.