Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

There he is.

He looks bigger in person.

Praise be.

They look up at the sky to see if God is watching too.

Tom, would you like to say a few words to the people?

Yes, Tom says. I am Blind Tom, and so are you.

He sounds just like the Lord.

Praise be.

Tom walks right past President Buchanan, positions himself before the Chickering full grand piano, and starts to play. About the first song, the president’s niece is heard to say, I never felt that song as I did just now. About the second song, a prominent senator in attendance will remember majestic rivers winding over the floodplains , while his wife will opine, Away flew the notes. Of the many journalists present, one will later sum up the recital this way: Music broke out on Blind Tom like the smallpox.

Even before the applause for his last song has ended (no encore), Tom makes his way over to the members of the Japanese delegation. Says, You don’t understand our music.

Outside the White House, more journalists with their paper, pens, and questions. Tom, you’re a big boy.

Yes. I’m a behemoth.

The photographer. His heavy plates, black scrim, flash. The camera he must carry tortoise-like on his back. He crawls inside the black scrim. The shutter falls, a puff of blinding smoke.

Tom says, A photograph is a mirror that remembers.

Where to now, Tom?

Tom is off to glory.

In the first place he will represent the Southern army leaving home to their favorite tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which you will hear in the distance, growing louder and louder as they approach Manassas (the imitation of the drum and fife). He will represent the Grand Union Army leaving Washington City to the tune of “Dixie.” You will recollect that their prisoners spoke of the fact that when the Grand Union Army left Washington, not only were their bands playing “Dixie,” but their men were also singing it.

He will represent the eve of battle by a very soft sweet melody, then the clatter of arms and accoutrements, the war trumpet of Beauregard, which you will hear distinctly; and then McDowell’s in the distance, like an echo at first. He will represent the firing of the cannons to “Yankee Doodle,” the Marseilles Hymn, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” With “Dixie,” you will hear the arrival of the train cars containing General Kirby’s reinforcements, which you will all recollect was very valuable to General Beauregard upon that occasion after their arrival of which, as you will hear, the fighting will grow more severe (shouts and yells, and the imitation of horses, musketry, and death).

A tribute to genius, presented to Tom, the blind colored pianist, by Messrs Knabe & Co, Baltimore, Front Street Theater July 3, 186—

Testimonial:

I well remember in Charleston where a party of us had him with us on and off for two or three months, and a young lady sat down at the piano and began to play. Tom was at the dark end of the chamber, spinning upon his hands and heels, and mumbling to himself. He caught the sound of the instrument and stood for a moment still and upright. Then, like a wild animal, he made a dash and swooped down upon her. Terrified, the poor girl shrieked and ran, while the rest of us held him writhing and trembling with what seemed to be rage. “She stole my harmonies,” he cried over and over, “she stole my harmonies.” And never again did he allow her to come near him. If she were even in the room he knew it somehow and became restive and angry.

Attaining his zenith, the height of public regard, Blind Tom is a sun setting everything in the world ablaze, radiating excellent reviews, parades in his honor (the clamor, the sureness of gesture and step, the rousing speeches, the swells of fellow feeling), delighted and devoted concertgoers, invitations and entreaties from worthy personages and distinguished delegations who seek a private audience with this singular phenomenon of Nature (the decorum of Tom’s hosts), the journalists who want to exchange a few words with him, and the many ordinary and cheerful well-wishers who go out of their way to simply catch a glimpse of Blind Tom in the flesh during those lapses and lulls when he is not onstage or otherwise on display. Open the gates of heaven, for everything in the world is either outside or inside Tom. Tom the everything in everything. Never before has Perry Oliver felt so recognized, so understood, so vindicated. Free.

So why then day after day this troubling disquiet that came upon him without warning several months ago — where were they then, in Seattle? Chicago? the war benefit in Charleston? — and that never seems to leave him? He sits up at night with his ledger of water-stiffened pages, trying to plan (order? predict?) the future in his clean penmanship, trying to escape the feeling that he is being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant.

That feeling even more so after he starts to notice three weeping women in black at every concert. Three weeping women dressed in black. Seated next to each other in the blue-black dark, tears flowing and mouths stunned open. Each woman assumes a distinct set to her body. The first with her face tilted to one side. The second woman holding the sides of her face. The third forehead gripped in the vise of her right hand. He watches their heaving bosoms without hearing their sobs, drowned out by the music perhaps. Sees them swallowing deep breaths then spilling the breaths out again. They become a familiar presence, concert after concert, city after city, three weeping women in black. They seem to have no idea that their gestures are extreme — bawling, wringing their hands, shouting meaningless phrases over and over. Do they assume that no one hears them? From the stage he searches out their countenances, trying to detect features around their expressions of penitence and grief. Strange remote faces. How old are they? Are they sisters of the Race? (This brutal looking into.) That’s when he begins to notice that the faces actually change at each concert. Never the same three women, but always a set of three women in black, comely or ugly, young or old or of indeterminate age. Perhaps these women are all part of some union of the female sex a thousand members strong. Ten thousand. Besides their black garb, one fact holds true from concert to concert: although they are weeping he can see that their eyes are alive, registering and interpreting, taking in everything.

Then the night when red moon and red sun compete in the same sky above fog that rides low to the ground. He closes the curtains, canceling light, and starts fingering the keys in the dark. And he continues to finger them. An owl hoots in the ghosted air and he hoots back. In no one’s name but his own let this long night end.

He dreams. Covered in dirt, the planters are hacking the earth with broad flat plates, no cutting edge. Their crops ground underground, down into the earth. What tool can reach them?

You just can’t take him from me, Perry Oliver says. With no fair warning.

You will thank me for it, General Bethune says. The quicker you suffer, the sooner it ends. The General speaks slowly and fluidly, with great power. All the doors in the room are closed. (Every door tells a story.) And the Greek and Roman faces carved into the mantel near the ceiling look down on the conversation, Perry Oliver seated in a chair so tall that it rises three feet into the air behind him, General Bethune seated on the other side of him in a similar chair, chunks of ice sizzling (the sound) inside two squat square glasses filled with whiskey on the small round table between the two men, behind them a neatly bricked fireplace like a big wide yawning mouth ready to swallow them.

But, sir. Perry Oliver loosens the clasp joining the two ends of his string tie. All these years I put in. All those years.