Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Seven needs Juluster. And everything that comes with that need. Each day is an achievement. Each day makes it harder to desist, to turn back, not that he has any intention of doing so. The greater the discouragement the keener he is to press on.

He lifts his gaze, surprised, because the air buzzes around a clean form that emerges into the day’s expectations. The clear light keeps falling on Juluster — teetering tottering he has found his way into the room — on his shut eyes and hunched neck — what saddens him now? — shawling around his shoulders. He displays a forlornness resembling Seven’s own. Still, it’s hard to feel sorry for Juluster since Seven is forever aware of his agile body beneath all those well-tailored clothes, a body forced to bend in so many ways that eventually nothing comes naturally, Juluster’s blankness offering nothing that links him with his other, Tom. He is Tom at the same time that he is too preposterous to be Tom. (Root distinction, difference: Juluster is a rare one, but he belongs. Tom never belonged. Tom never could belong. A challenge — what blind person isn’t? — Juluster is both cooperative and independent in ways that Tom never was, never could be.) He looks somewhat like Tom. A pure and simple brute, this negro with a narrow and sloped forehead, who bears in the middle section of his brain the signs of certain grossly powerful energies. The thinking faculties are poor or even null; therefore, he is possessed by his desire and also by his will, of an often terrible intensity. (What does Tom look like now? Has the richness of his darkness faded from his skin?) And physical differences between Tom and his double can be put off to aging — who will remember anyway? The public has not seen Tom for more than five years — although Juluster is Tom’s senior by a decade (more), having already reached thirty years of age. No. Even that is a lie. On his last birthday he achieved his Jesus year. But he still believes in his youthfulness. More importantly, he believes in the role that Seven has given him to play — game for the game — a role Seven mentally scripts moment by moment from memory— lait —selling the shadow to support the substance. Since Juluster is game for the game teach him his name. The body is a habit he can break. Even now his flesh quivers, every inch of it, the skin coming unhinged. He seems to be drifting out of himself, becoming other, becoming Blind Tom.

The Original Blind Tom. Seven says the name in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own but rather like the voice of a magician, a sorcerer. (Repeated practice will cause the name to come naturally. So he must remain aware of his tongue. Correct it when it errs, when he says or thinks “Juluster” instead of Tom. So, around the clock, practice saying it. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Until it becomes second nature.) The Original Blind Tom. In the sounds of the name he thinks he hears a way for returning Tom back to the world, back to himself. Each word a twin of itself, telling two stories at the same time, his and Tom’s. I have become a name.

He gave his youth to Tom just as Tom gave his youth to Perry Oliver just as Seven expects Juluster and Vitalis to give their youth to him. Not quite boys, not quite men. (The flickering back and forth.) It’s not just what Seven did but what Seven did not do that haunts him. (Juluster slips back into his skin.) Tom an extension of Perry Oliver in a way Seven could not be. (Craning his neck, Juluster hears something — Vitalis back from his errands or whatever the hell he has been up to? — and stumbles off to investigate.) Is that why he is here in the city, waiting to pick up where he left off? Is it because his mind has set wax-like around the first examples of industry and companionship that he accepted? Is this all a function of his waiting for that past to be resurrected, for Tom to come alive again? Funny almost, the way Tom flies back into Seven’s mind and stays for as long as he wants. Blind Tom living in his blood. You did not choose me, Tom said. It was I who chose you.

Seven had expected some grand municipal structure manned by a hive of busying buzzing clerks. Instead he finds a shabby little affair, a single-level frame house in serious need of upkeep, set right where the road ends amid a weeded-over garden in what used to be the nigger part of town. The door is open, so he makes a point of entering first, his niggers behind him, the driver who likes to change his name every day — before they started out this morning he christened himself President Washington — followed by Juluster and Vitalis, the driver the oldest of the four, somewhere between middle age and death (visible under his broad-brimmed shadow-forming hat a patch of gray hair at each temple), and them not old, not young. The farther they go, the brighter it is, the more they can see, the interior of the house a cave full of light, illumination spilling out. A cannon shell or some other device of destruction had taken out an entire section of the house, leaving nothing behind but exposed beams and planks. Other signs of mayhem too: craters in the ceiling, walls bare and discolored in places where formerly a painting might have hung, and other walls stippled with projectile holes shaped like a cat’s paw, a cat that can walk sideways across walls. (He has heard about the city’s former troubles, about how all the niggers were either strung up and set ablaze or chased out during conscription.) In a confusion of setting each room they enter carries the pine smell of turpentine, evidence of recent cleaning.

Voices pull him to their source, two men hunched over a crude chessboard positioned between them, men who are not much older than himself but who have known war firsthand it would seem, as evidenced by the blue uniforms they wear. Then again perhaps the uniforms are castoffs, in this time of shortages — each day the newspapers’ skinny columns worded with such claims — the city using whatever is at hand to clothe its officials. After all, the war has been done for almost three years now.

For several minutes the two guards trade insults, list all the wrongs that each has done to the other. Seven waits them out, listening to the ocean in the distance, the sound of all that wide water, audible even from here. A chandelier burns brightly overhead, releasing the sweet metal smell of kerosene into the air. Seven looking (watching), hearing (listening), smelling. Something reassuring about the rhythm of their crass curses and ridiculous threats.

I will eat your eyeballs with smelling salts.

I will wipe my ass with your balls.

A sound he hardly notices as he stands there waiting with the others but will miss he knows when it stops.

One guard (the black pieces) peers up from the board — why has it taken him so long to register Seven’s presence? — giving Seven his countenance in full — his face looks almost flat, like a leaf — and finds Seven with his hard and shiny acorn-small eyes. Something alters in the air, but Seven affects to be completely unsurprised.

You have some business here? Those three can wait outside.

I am here on their behalf, Seven says. He hears his own voice beat back at him, bouncing off the ceiling and walls.

Registration?

Yes.

The soldier indicates with outstretched hand that Seven should take a seat, so Seven cramps down into the single chair placed before the long heavy table.

Then he remembers. I have some documents here — his hands are moving, searching through his many pockets. Hands that find, produce, and present a bundle of documents, with the Freedmen’s Bureau insignia stamped in the wax seal that secures the fold in place. The guard takes the bundle, scraps away the wax seal with his fingertips, unfolds the bundle, and holds the stack of documents out at arm’s length as if he is about to pronounce some decree. His head cants forward, eyes racing across paper — one, two, three — from top to bottom then he swivels his eyeballs — one, two, three — at each nigger in turn. Names?