Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Seven pronounces the name of each man, hearing himself slip into incoherence. The soldier repeats each name, drawling out the words in shameless confrontational mockery. Although it is English, the language Seven speaks to him still isn’t his own. No way, because he knows that years of Perry Oliver’s lessons in enunciation — he never spoke like a Southerner and expected the same of Seven — and years of traveling the known world with the Blind Tom Exhibition had permanently retooled his tongue, lathed and shaven the South out.

Listen to him, the other guard says. He does not lift his gaze from the chessboard. He sounds just like one of them contraband.

Haven’t you noticed? He even smells like one of them. Pure shit.

Seven feels a length of wind penetrate the crown of his head directly from above, feels it begin to draw down through him in a straight line — his skull, neck, thorax — making a place inside, like a hook pushed through a worm. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even affront, small practical concessions, but sitting there, his race questioned, his manhood challenged, he undergoes a curious process of invalidation. He feels reticent, almost timid.

The soldier refolds the documents then holds the bundle before the slot of a four-foot-high, six-foot-square mahogany box, where it quickly disappears — swoosh — sucked inside like a thing preyed upon. Pulls a pen out from its fountain and holds it at the end farthest away from the stylus like a walking stick, an object foreign in his hands. They got to sign right here and right here. He points to the places on the passbook where the first must subscribe his name. Vitalis steps forward, signs his name, then issues Juluster a call. Juluster gropes his way forward and Vitalis moves his hand in place over the passbook. He subscribes his new name — Thomas Greene Wiggins — his hand wandering like a sleepwalker across the book. Now it is the driver’s turn.

I don’t know no letters, the driver says.

So Seven signs for him: James Bethune. Selling the shadow to support the substance.

The soldier starts to read the many pages of the city ordinance governing the use of the passbook — that the user must carry the passbook on his or her person at all times and present it upon request, that the passbook is not transferable to any other individual, that the city reserves the right to revoke the passbook should the user commit a criminal offense, that — Seven fastens on the one word that flies his thoughts to Tom: criminal. Yes, what happened to Tom was criminal. (The freshness of the time that was ours to live).

Have you committed to an understanding of the particulars of this statute?

The driver, Juluster, and Vitalis maintain a dumbfounded silence. Understanding thus, Seven answers for them. The guard instructs them to place left hands over hearts and raise their right hands. They do and he duly swears them in. Swearing done he stamps each leather-bound passbook, piles them onto the table like a deck of cards, and turns back to his game.

And that’s all there is to it, although Seven still sits with expectations of some official closing to the interview. Closureless, he collects the passbooks and gets up from his chair to quit the office, leaving the colossal table to continue about its business.

The meeting has honed and sharpened Seven’s senses. In the months (years?) that he has lived in the city he has come to know it in a way we can know few places — eyes opened, ready to believe anything — but the soldiers have shown him something he didn’t know about how the city feels about its niggers, both the exiled repatriates (returned) and the new arrivals. Can’t say how he feels about it one way or the other. (Niggers have always been okay in his book.) As long as no one gets in his way, as long as he can keep on keeping on with his business, building Tom, bringing Tom.

Before Seven can reach the door the driver swerves into the lead, putting it upon himself to be the first to reach their carriage, his business. For the first time Seven notices that the driver has a peculiar walk, stepping softly and delicately; looking at his feet, his hands, and the bend of his head, one might imagine that he was learning to dance the first figure of a quadrille. Arms and legs not quite working the way they should. He seems to be stumbling about in the way of the dead, but here is a man who doesn’t seem capable of falling, of letting ground smack him in the face. The physical laws that govern the universe don’t apply to him. He is keeping the planet in orbit. He can keep the sky up as easily as he can keep his broad-brimmed hat balanced on his head.

Once they reach their carriage, Seven sees that the horse has taken a healthy shit into the dirt, rich grassy smell, but the driver starts right in feeding it, the long black mouth and sideways moving teeth munching hay from his palm. The driver seizes Seven by the elbow and helps hoist him grunting (the muscular effort of it) into the cab. Does the same for Juluster, but leaves Vitalis to his own devices, no choice but to climb into the cab on his own. There seated next to the driver Seven hears thick pellets of shit thumping to the earth, one after another, builders laying a wall.

Go.

The driver kisses the horse’s name fluently above the sound of the moving wheels as if speaking some pre-Babel tongue unknown to man. Seven lacks sufficient range of sight to take in the whole of Central Park. The park is so much, too much, for all of its durable beauty. The landscape changes with each intake of breath. Trees huddling, listening to their own leaves. Leaves sparkling with insects, branches glowing gray with squirrels. A black snake descending slow as molasses down the trunk of a tree. Not that the driver is moving much faster. Keeps them at a steady pace neither stroll nor trot. Nothing is hurrying him (them), just a vague threat that Seven feels hanging over him (them). Then a strange tree pops into view a number of yards ahead, the trunk rising smoothly for fifty feet or more above ground, far higher than any other in the park, before exploding outward in thick foliage-covered branches, a green cloud (leaves). The trunk as wide as a house. The tree vanishes when they turn a bend in the road but reappears after a second bend. Stands flickering, drawing him forward until he finds himself parallel to the trunk and beneath that green cloud that seems to promise access to heaven. A brown shape pokes through the branches thirty feet above. Takes Seven a minute to realize that it is a human face, viewed as clearly anything, a nigger face, a man, peering over the side of a colossal nest, a nest that is as wide and deep as a bathtub. Another brown face appears. And another. And still another. An entire family packed into the nest. Putting their heads around and between branches and twigs, their faces bursting with expressions. By what means did they come to perch in the tallest tree in the park and make it their home?

He knows that there are nigger camps all around them, niggers disenfranchised, destitute, desperate, dangerous, demanding — deeds in hand, those driven out of their homes during the draft riots want their homes back, or reparations in kind, We demand the right to return —but when he speaks to the driver or Juluster or Vitalis he tries to keep the panic out of his voice. The reports he’s heard about the camps — calculated acts of robbery and murder, revenge enacted on anybody with a white face — have widened his sense of peril, of what can happen (to him). Human nature does not deliberately choose blood, at least not Negro human nature, but the war has driven some of these niggers crazy. He can taste fear on his teeth and on his tongue. The fear of being chanced upon, found out. They will just have to play it by ear, come what may, not that he thinks himself particularly brave. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. (The driver’s rifle positioned horizontally across his lap, crossbeam, cross.) Surely anyone who has been in a position to achieve something large would do the same. Indeed, he is afraid, but the violence, the hurt he knows exists but he doesn’t see, can’t keep him away.