Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

The boy curls up in his piano, in himself. Waiting. Waiting him out.

The sound reaches him before he reaches the courtyard, tearing and shredding, pellets pinging against hard surfaces, girls seated around metal tubs, shucking ears of corn, emptying fingers of beans and peas, seventy girls or more arranged in groups of ten. All those learning hands. No surprise at his entry. Unnoticed or as unremarkable as those hills of discarded green skin rising up from the floor. Or he is only partially glimpsed passing through rows of freshly laundered clothes and sheets flapping flag-like on ropes suspended from one side of the courtyard to the other. Is it her he sees just up ahead beating dust from the pillowcases? Gone before he makes it there. Moving on, courtyard and clotheslines giving way to ceilings and walls, boys young and alive in rooms, speaking at once, taking stairs headlong at a gallop, leaping over couches and chairs. And now she is with them, laying down the law, her thick gold and silver bracelets rattling as she pushes and pulls the children. She can be heard going about her labors even when the eye catches no sight of her, bracelets clattering up and down her wrists and forearms. She crosses the room jauntily with a cluster of the smallest boys about her, ready to bring the older ones to order. Motioning at this one, shouting at that one. What did I tell you? Where my switch?

I need to speak to you a moment.

She stops and turns, releasing a movement of shadow. Mr. Tabbs.

Might I have a word?

Jus let me mind these children first.

I’ll be in the church.

Set on a short walk to the church, he leaves the way he came, through the high wrought iron gate set inside the four-storied stone wall surrounding the Home, a wall ancient and crumbling but wide and strong, suitable for a castle or a fort. No clue who built it, when or why. His progress quickly stalls on a street where donkey buttocks block his passage, Tabbs caught behind a donkey train on a street so narrow you have to turn sideways to let another person or animal pass. The conductor carries a stick, beating it rhythmically against his own leg rather than against animal hide. Directs the train with a series of kissing sounds and whistles. One kiss means Go left. Another, Go right. This whistle, Straight ahead. That whistle, Step around that hole. Tabbs following along, a hoof a minute. These people and their donkeys. A man without a donkey is a donkey. Content to take life at a crawl. Why horses and carriages are rare here.

He wants answers. Something to go on. Unclear the source of the boy’s despair. If he is cross or sad. Just what exactly? The boy had expressed no desire to see anyone other than her. I want her. He has no idea what the boy and the mother do together in their time alone. What the boy does with his day. She seems to be exactly the thing the Home requires. Works without complaint for the miserly salary the Home can provide. Makes no fuss over her own person or her own sufferings. She seems to like her work, and life here on Edgemere. Doesn’t she owe this new life to him? Fact of the matter, she owes her new life to him. Edgemere. Salaried labor. Her son. Tabbs needs her to tell her son. Needs her to set the boy right, get inside his head and make him understand what they’re doing. Who else better than her?

He had offered her a generous share of future earnings. (He had it on good word that the Blind Tom Exhibition took in better than twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the Bethunes, a sum he expected to meet and increase.) For I know the plans I have for you, sayeth the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. But she neither accepted nor declined the offer, only continued to sit with her hands in her lap, looking at the washtub hollow on the floor between them.

Tell me how much, he said.

You already said it good, she said.

So you’re okay with the percentage? I can have papers drawn up.

I had enough of papers.

And that was that. Now he needs to know that Tom is still free to shaping, that all of him is within reach.

Turning the corner, the last mule in the train blinks him a big-eyed wink, proud of its balanced buttocks close enough for Tabbs to smell and touch, and thanking Tabbs for his patience, for hanging in stride after long deliberate stride, his shoes closely rhythmed with hooves, almost on beat. Passing the angular church the mule makes sure to lower its head and mumble a few respectful words.

Lord, do it

Do it for me

This is the cry of your children

Please, Sir

Do it for me

Right now

What is it that Tabbs hears? The choir (congregation) singing inside? Preaching, weeping, praying, hollering, testifying, grunting, groaning and moaning, and stomping feet. He passes under the prohibitive sign of warning above the church door. NO FISH ALLOWED. Takes all of his wondering into the church, half-expecting to find Wire there.

If you read your Bible

You heard about the blind man who could not see.

But he is alone. Must have chased minister and congregation away, leaving only echoes. Can I preach it like I feel it? He takes a seat at the rear of the church, welcoming the hard pew beneath him, the creaking bulk of it. Closes his eyes and savors the privacy, the quiet emptiness, dozens of wooden pews like docked ships. Explaining it all to himself. Thinking about everything and nothing.

You should take your time with this one, Ruggles said.

Since when are you the man of caution?

I always look first.

I’ve looked, Tabbs said.

Nawl. You couldn have.

What am I missing?

What are you seeing?

A chance, Ruggles. A chance.

Shit. You already got that.

Ruggles, just come out and say it.

I thought I was.

Ruggles.

Okay. You’re dealing with a white man.

I’ve never known anything white to scare you.

This ain’t bout being scared. Everybody scared. But this ain’t bout that.

Well, what’s it about then? I can’t change the fact that he white. Damn if I care.

You should care a little, a teeny bit. Cause his white skin ain’t the only thing you got to worry bout. You want to hear the rest?

Are you gon say it?

The rest: You ain’t half what he is.

…

He got everything to go along with that alabaster skin. Money to do his will. And men to boot. More and more of the same.

That’s the story of this country.

And it’ll be your story too.

He opens his eyes to discover her sitting on a pew at the front of the church, watching.

I ain’t mean to wake you, she says.

No. I asked for you to come.

He waves her toward him.

She tries to rise, once, twice, three times, fumbling and weak, Tabbs refusing to accept such causality— She is stalling for time —primed to disbelieve, outraged. Then he sees that she is carrying something in her face, all of what she is. He speaks to her, softly but not softly enough. She sits down on the pew directly in front of him with unconscious ease and economy, like a section of wall slipping into an allotted place. He slides along the pew to angle a view of her face. Nothing of the son in the mother, the boy all black fire, dark sheen, while she bears the evidence of Anglo-Saxon blood — studding, rape. Her features indefinable, beholden to no eye, neither ugly nor pretty. Just. And ageless. He thinks of her as an old woman although she could as easily be thirty as fifty.