Song of the Shank

Underground (Return) (1869)

“The closer I’m drawn to God, the more things on earth lose their color and taste.”

SOMETHING IS SUCKING ELIZA IN, SUCKING HER INTO THIS country landscape, Eliza a city lady who holds a fit against the country but who now feels absolutely secure here. Go wherever you please. Look at whatever you please. Solace and delight in the honey-colored bales of hay dotting the landscape, the sacks of feed, the bushels of peanuts and firewood lining the road. Surroundings so rich she has to select senses.

She walks until the landscape slurs into darkness. And once it is dark she is inside the house in ten minutes. She can sit down, rest her tired soul, and let her hungry body fill itself. Night around her continues to be alive, her body porous to every noise, scent, and taste. The lovely swallowing of thick night air as it carves around her brain, cutting away any thoughts or memories she doesn’t want, leaving her with nothing but her lean anonymity. Glad to be cut off from the city. Not the slightest clue about what is going on there. Her final appalling days there enough.

Perhaps the events should not have proved as stunning as they did, however suddenly they came. One miscellaneous night she heard wild thunder and knew that people were going to die. Then in the days that followed, sky noises, abrupt light, and fires glowing in her windows like fireflies painted the complete details of scenes that she did not need to see, mobs hunting and hounding the way only white blood can, Eliza not quite believing that it was happening again.

Tom, how did you escape the mob?

Tom said, I went up in a chariot of fire.

She knows that she cannot return to the city. She is uneasy at the thought that this stay in the country is a return to a kind of beginning, a push back. (Sharpe. Tom.) She tries to shove away from the thought, but it stays suspended in her brain. What is she saying good-bye to?

You did not choose me. It was I who chose you.

She flames a lamp. Light pushes its way about the corners of the disintegrating roof. It had once been a nice house, with soft timber selected for the beauty of its grains. Now the house carries a faint odor of dampness. The beams in the ceiling look old and insecure, little monsters chewing up the wood from inside. She feels calm in a strange distracted way. Lingering in this wayside place where new emotions enter her. Thinking (what else?) about black days and nights in the city where she would wake early each morning, the pain in her head on again.

What she wanted was something not far from herself, but she would not want to think her feelings out. Back home in the city, even before the violence, she would be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that she would venture out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about the streets with no particular destination in mind. In this way she got to see the city in her own good time. The streets always curiously empty, no explanation for it, unless — perhaps — half the population spent every day drowsing the hottest part of the day indoors. Only those few but serious faces returning her gaze. In the faces she would sense some terrible knowledge shared. Then one day she saw a man who looked like a beardless General Bethune walking freely about, crutches circling him, like a man rowing a boat on dry land. Peeking into the man’s silent face, she convinced herself that it was someone else entirely. That was when she knew she had to get out of the city, alone there in her apartment, no Sharpe, no Tom, only the piano. Convinced herself that she had to go to the house in the country, for the outside world in the city had become so painful for her that she could no longer stand to be in it. And then the violence came.

Walking around the house she sees only lifeless objects. She is the only crazily alive thing in the house. She will always stand outside, against herself, searching for that something inside that can break down her despair. (Why?) Daylight remembrance of words said and events that happened far apart, now no longer separate but pushed into each other. (Bath. Lait.) Her days will be filled with more broken things. Any reason she should think differently? This is what she has. This is what I have.

Some nights when she sleeps, the long day behind her, she hears Tom speaking inside her, speaking in a voice that does not sound like the one she remembers — but why does it sound familiar? — and speaking words she doesn’t remember him saying. She does not resist. Indeed, she lets it happen, forgetting who she is for a time to become him. Sleeps on serenely. No one has heard these words, it seems, but her, a rare luxury:

The doors spring open. The people enter. The music flies up. Breath stops. I am what I am. A what and a who.

Go down belowdecks then climb back up top into sunlight and noise. Look, Blind Tom! What seeing is.

They choose me. I cannot choose them. What seeing is. A hand touches my shoulder. A voice comes into my ear. Each person is a surprise.

People see me. Even when I cannot feel them. (Will you look after him? Please look after him. Please walk him back to the house. See to it that he doesn’t fall. See to it that he puts on the white suit.) I must be spoken to or touched. I must speak or move. Draw water. Drawing with hands. What is “deep”? How high is “above”? How much space is “wide”? Even there thy left hand shall lead me and thy right hand shall hold me. What is “tall” or “short”? “Ugly” or “beautiful”? Measure. What seeing is. Hot and cold I understand. Hungry and tired. Sleep and awake. They always think I am asleep. What seeing is.

When I sit down the world stands up. Tom, the man says to me. How does it make you feel to know that all these people are here for you?

The horses go galloping across the keys. The men pop up from the small spaces between one key and the next. Trenches. Where silence lives. The soft space. The men rush for the edge where they will fall off and die.

Tom, the man says. What do you know about the Battle of Manassas?

The cannons roll along too, positioned for firing. I had hot metal in my mouth, under my tongue, and I spoke it.

I skip to one short key after the next. Toss notes into the air that the world may see and catch. The running men are blown down at the sound. I stand up and take my bow, and the seats stand up with me, hands and voices coming at me.

Yes, I’ve brought them all here. I’ve brought them all here. With the long and the short keys. Water running down my face.

The General cuts across the floor with his stabbing canes, a man walking on knives, shanks.

At church one Sunday, the General slapped a planter. How it happened:

Boy, what brings you to church today? the planter speaking to me.

Me speaking back: Many of the first will be last and become a single one.

The planter laughed. Said: That’s why God protects children, niggers, and the crazy.

And that’s when the General’s hand found skin. Watch yo mouth, the General said. Don’t you ever mock anything that belongs to me.

That must be hard to do, the man said.

No, I said. I like to find things. I am a natural finder of things, I said, words in my mouth. Running through rain. Rain running through me.

Blind Tom?

Ain’t no Tom here.

Me against the floor, against ground. Words like hard, firm, solid. Words like pain. The stabbing canes move the ground along so that the world walks when they walk.

Eyes put light in the dark. The face is the place from which the voice comes.

Why do you sing like that?

A person puts all of his body into his voice.

I hear the rain sounding upon the fence, clattering on roofs, and on nests where the birds take baths.

Words like shallow and deep. Hot and cold. I walk wet-footed to the table.

Lait.

She pours. At my mouth it enters me in a rush.

She pours when I say it again.

Hardly had she settled in her armchair at the window overlooking the garden when she hears a knock on the door. Her skin tingles in quiet panic. Back in the days of the Blind Tom Exhibition the journalists would always speak rapidly, a thousand words a minute, so Sharpe would have to be diligent in answering their questions, making an effort to speak slowly and clearly in complete sentences. But what can her tongue do? Moreover, what reason does she have to believe that the caller is an innocent, only an annoying and innocuous newspaperman wielding words and not a brutal intruder? How long has it been since a journalist has come calling? Since anyone has?

She doesn’t have to answer. Just keep sitting here, a secret. The pure vulnerability of an open body. Another knock. So the caller knows she’s here. She stands up from her chair, rising with a reluctance that ascends right up to her head. The doorknob mushrooms into her hand. A nigger woman appears in the doorway and stands there looking collected and very intent. Tom’s mother. (Who else?) Eliza feels a heavy uneasiness. Something has happened to this woman’s son and his mother is here to see that Eliza answers for it. Payback.

Mrs. Bethune.

She has seen the woman only once before. Then like now she is not bothered by their unalikeness, Tom and his mother. Indeed, they look nothing alike, but unseeing and sighted are two separate categories of existence. The blind look only like themselves.

The mother steps into the house and two niggers follow her, three intact shapes, Tom himself (Glory!) and one she doesn’t recognize, a mere boy. She is steady under his gaze.

Mrs. Bethune.

What does she feel upon seeing Tom? (Glory!)

The Negress releases her head from the bonnet, rubs the color out of her face, and becomes someone else, half woman, half deception. Tabbs Gross.

You.

I brought him, Tom says.

Then they say nothing for a time, wordless knowledge. The room seems composed of impossible red and yellow hues. And it seems terribly strange to her that she should meet this man now with no anger at all, something quite different in her feelings. This new emotion, whatever it is, sternly demands that she pay no attention to him, pretend nothing has happened—I’m here to take the boy to his mother—no interest or shock, that they share no history. He seems to walk about the room, triumphant, looking and touching, his presence physical and insistent, her attention taken by his sex-changing stunt, a man fluted in a beautiful dress standing in the middle of her room. Then he goes over to examine the piano. Now Tom starts to move. For some time he strides about the room with the unnamed Negro boy following him like a clumsy devoted animal.

She and Tom let their hands touch. Mr. Gross keeps a respectful distance, his eyes changed with reduced feeling. He seems nervous, even afraid. Then he is speaking, light bright words flying and chirping like birds in the room, busy with claims and proclamations. Here he is talking about the piano. She would have expected Tom to come upon the piano first.

To where? Where will we go?

South.

Why on earth hadn’t she thought of that? Suddenly she is glad to have them here in the country with her, her buried senses unearthed. Remembering (what else?) the beautiful boy in boots — Sharpe — the black leather long and lean. And now Mr. Gross in a dress with boots of his own, dress cupping their length. He is saying something that she can’t hear. She smiles at him, wanting to get over the fact that he had accused her before, that he had taken Tom away from her at a time when she could no longer tolerate the boy’s presence, but he had done it in such a way to imply neglect and cruelty on her part. (She could say to him, I was here when no one else was.) And Tom. (Glory!) Tom who manages to veer away from the boy shadowing him and is now holding her at the elbow, hugging her, touching her hair, Eliza aware of the boy’s protective eyes taking in this moment. Indeed, she is going places that she does not understand. Fine by her. She can’t remain here.

Tom sits on the floor, his legs spread and his head hanging from his neck like a heavy flower.

Tabbs squeezes into the last of the petticoats. The dress will come next, cotton smothering his strength, putting male and female together to deny the one and to lie about the other. He had removed shirt, pants, undergarments — layers of events and incidents, taking on new layers, a determined creature, his face immaculately shaved, smooth to the touch, not a trace of hair. And with color at his mouth and cheeks, his face brightly exaggerated by rouge, he actually looks like a woman, a Negress. Now, a touch of perfume. Then the head scarf, the final touch. Earlier, he felt like a chicken standing there naked in the room, sunlight like hot wax unfeathering him. Through no fault of his own he has to relinquish this part of his self, conceal his sex, for the sake of practicality and safety, the closest he can come to a kind of invisibility. Figures the alabasters probably won’t attack him if they think he is a woman. Hopefully, the orphan’s youth will be protection enough for him. (Women and children.)

I got to dress up too? the boy asks.

No need. The boy is so thin that his clothes seem to have made an effort to fit as close as possible to his body so as not to miss his ghostly proportion of skin and bone.

Mr. Tabbs.

You can’t call me that. Once we’re out there, no misters.

Okay, Mr. Tabbs. The boy goes on looking at Tabbs, nodding at some private thought.

You just remember to keep an eye on Tom.

You ain’t got to worry about me. I done worked as a navigator befo.

He will set out again. He must set out again. He sets out again — his choices are his choices — for a country estate on the murky outskirts of the city (the geometry of moving from here to there). His motives for traveling are justifiable. Fill up your horn with oil and be on your way. He will find the Bethune woman, his duty to press on, but his brain runs in the wrong direction, trying to push down, unable to push down, one grisly thought that speeds repeatedly through his head: What if she is gone for good? How then will he get Tom to budge?

Earlier all evening he kept discovering himself stilled, unable to think. Now he must go directly toward what he fears.

They move in thick blinks of travel to the main jetty. It will cost you to get there. He will have to negotiate with a captain the price of passage to the city — Yes, ma’m. No, ma’m, five for you each — a cost too much, but he pays it. Eyes flashing beneath his cap, the captain takes Tabbs with one hand at his elbow and the other in the small of his back and helps him down into the slightly wobbling dhow. The boy leads Tom. Four in a dhow, wind smacking the sail, waves thrusting up. The captain proves to be a good ferryman, maneuvering against the strong currents. The dhow seems to glide along of itself, the water awake and rushing now that they’ve decided to take their chances, facing into the wind, feeling the wind, grateful (Tabbs) in fact for the cool salty blowing and flapping, all of the colors you can think of sparkling on the surface of the water, a shock of bouncing brightness, only this flashing substance lying between them and land on the other side, the final crossing. The captain speaks to them calmly in a condescending language, but there is no energy in Tabbs to be angry or insulted. The captain offers them oranges and bananas, which Tom and the boy accept. Eating done, they toss the rinds and peels into the ocean, the captain unspeaking, occupied with the close focus of sea, his hands working in silent rhythm, his eyes glazed with concentration. For the rest of the hour Tabbs watches the captain’s mannerisms along with the (unavoidable) shifting of the sea, Tabbs remotely enjoying the ride, forgetting. Then the ocean changes, starts to break open. The dhow rocks and dips, wood creaking, the sound of nails freeing themselves, water splashing up over the sides, splashing over them, and Tabbs starts to rue the moment, panic in the boy’s face, the boy scooting from one side of the dhow to the other and back again in an effort to avoid the water. Quit that now. Water, get away from me. Now I said quit. I ain’t playin. He reaches as if to grab his knife, until he realizes that it will do little good to cut the water, a thing that can’t be killed. Tom tries to brush and shoo the water away from his person. Tabbs feels dizzy, sick, stupid. Have they come this far, land just up ahead, only for the dhow to disintegrate beneath them, right under their feet, for them all to sink into a place of forgetting, nothingness? For his part Tabbs displays not the least bit of panic — too late for that — hands stiff and calm, keeps his knees parallel to each other beneath his dress, while light bounces off his scarf, tries to remain as calm as the seated captain. Tom stands fully upright, shoulders squared and chin high, in self-assured defiance of the swaying, hands outstretched to balance himself, knowing without the others’ saying that they (Tabbs) are afraid, that all is not well. With gracious ease the captain works the rudder this way and that and regains control of the craft, careful to give Tabbs a look of amends. Or is it something else? Hands moving, he draws the dhow parallel to the quay. Then he just sits there, looking at them, waiting for them to quit his dhow. He does not try to hide his dismay, making it clear that he will not assist them. To his credit, the boy (wobbly) regains his composure enough to climb the stone stairs twenty feet to the pier with Tom directly behind him.

They walk without hurrying, long slow breaths, although the streets are full of alabasters, alabasters who watch three Negroes go by, the only three, a Negress, a boy, and a blind nigger, Tabbs tense with uncertainty. The air carries to his ear sounds that have no understood meaning. Every window in the city unshut, shades lifted, curtains open. He should shrink down into himself, go back, but he cannot. Despite the heavy petticoats he feels light in his low-cut boots. The boy steers Tom away from any obstacle in his path with a slight tug of the sleeve. Tabbs realizes that they have set a course for the train station, Tom leading the way, walking more sprightly than he and the boy. Who is he that he can do this? Blind Tom can do anything.

They move in silence, everything suddenly heavy and slowed down, until they reach the train station, shade-filled and muted in color. A strict stillness. Alabasters, their curious watching of Tabbs, Tom, and the boy. Tabbs purchases three fares. (He catches a waver in the eyes in front of him, the alabaster caged inside the ticket booth.) And they take a bench, sit down, and wait, Tom between Tabbs and the boy.

We’re going to her, Tom says.

Tabbs’s hand on his shoulder to quiet him, a tenderness.

The room is so still that Tabbs hears no sounds until he thinks of listening for them, hearing calls of “nigger” and “blind.” The station towering over them so they feel they are within a deep iron well. The roof and walls rattle and shake whenever a locomotive leaves or enters the station. Caged and aging light in this echoing vault. There is no wish in him to step away from this place.

Tabbs breathes in the forbidden atmosphere. Eyes everywhere. Has his secret been found out? He feels manically awake. Tom blind and the boy eyes wide open, swallowing everything, shank glinting in his boot. Tabbs continues to sit locating himself. Not their train. Two or three more trains are called out. He lets the calls seep into him. The boy’s head is bent down, his lips moving, as if speaking with someone. He opens his eyes when Tabbs touches him on the shoulder.

Finally, they hear the call.

Train, Tom says. And already he is up and walking toward the platform, the boy shambling after him. Once again, Tom is leading them — to the proper car. (Blind Tom. Half man, half amazing.) They walk the stretch of the station to reach their compartment, from front to rear, open air on either side of them, Tabbs aware of every sound as the alabasters come and go. What he wants in his life now seems a huge thing.

Tom pulls himself up into the car and clatters about the almost empty compartment. The boy slides alongside of him and directs him to a seat. Tabbs sits directly behind the two of them, attached instantly to the sounds of the train. The alternatives that surround them. Not too late to turn back. But he understands the complications of removal. This is his whole life right here. No turning back. Soon they are pulling out of the station. Too late to turn back.

Fire up the engine, Tom says. You will see her.

Who?

Her.

Pulling into speed, above clattering wheels. Motion simultaneous around him. Tabbs nestles back into his seat, watching the boy, his face young and lean and dark, his eyes bright. Encased in the slow-rocking compartment. The train sweeps unhesitatingly into a tunnel, deep space around him. He sees his reflection in dark glass — some woman — and is shuddering in the darkness. This is when it will happen, he thinks, in the impersonality of darkness. But the train comes into daylight, his eyes inches away from the window, receiving the moments of brightly lit trees, water left behind, the city left behind, the train stirring its way up into the light, passing small towns.

For some time — an hour or more? — Tabbs sits in the slow-rocking compartment and tries to lose touch with the world around him, looking with hope at the boy’s and Tom’s faces every now and again. Then the conductor calls out their station, and Tom rises up out of his seat. Debarked, Tom resumes his frantic push for the Bethune woman’s country house. Spills forward without hesitation, his legs running ahead of his speed-shaken body.

The thrill and terror that get knocked into Tabbs when he sees the house. He wants to say something but can’t, opening and closing his mouth as he takes in the full aspect of the sight blooming up before them, as they draw the house closer to them. The grounds are a jungle. Grass overgrown. Tangles of vines climbing up to the roof so it appears the house has grown hair. Wind banging and loosening a roof tile, trying to unpeel it. And Tom is already banging on the door, the boy twenty feet behind him, unsure what to do next, watching Tabbs, who nods to acknowledge that everything is all right.

Tom, let me.

With Tabbs’s concerned hand on his shoulder, Tom steps back to allow Tabbs access to the door.

He sees her face, unbelieving, baffled. Startled, she backs away. He simply walks into the waiting silence behind her, the politest entry he can make. Enters into stunning emptiness. A room that holds nothing of interest except for a settee and a few chairs made soft by embroidered pillows and antimacassars ready to soak up pomade. The room bright and hot, sun streaming in, revealing all the dust in the air. Tom and the boy follow, and he watches pure surprise (fear) slide into her face. His hands work quickly, removing the dark head covering and the bright coloring from his face, no more need to hide and deny.

You.

The whole of her person shaped now into an accusation that drives her confusion into him. There is no wish in him to be here.

She stares at Tom long and with so much concentration, like a person taking a farewell look. She looks exhausted, face and body drawn out. Tom takes her hand and holds it, caressing it. He moves closer toward her, bringing his excitement. She does not seem able to say anything. Tabbs watches them with far-off curiosity, and so watching, feels himself receding from the scene.

The room appears to have suffered a flood sometime recently, the walls mildewed with dampness and ocher in color, a far wall taken up by the large pattern of a watermark seeping through from another world, spreading in the shape of stupendous buttocks, the windowsills and the wainscot deeply outlined by dark liquid. Thin white curtains like a thin glaze of water across the windows — light free, light that is not blocked out by the huge oak looming in view outside the window behind Eliza and Tom and extending upward out of sight, a good ten feet above the house itself.

He takes a seat, as dusty as it is. Something new — a kind of fascination, vitality — has entered her manner, a mischievous glitter in her eyes. She looks at him and smiles, waiting for something. Tom is holding her hands and pressing them with a desperate intensity. Tabbs sees her troubled look, but she turns her head away. He casts his gaze over to the piano, tempted to rise to his feet and go over to it. Instead he looks around in amazement at all the dirty things in the room, dismayed. That is a beautiful instrument, he says.

She glances doubtfully at the piano and laughs self-consciously. Tom touching her hair. But why are you here?

We’re here for you.

Me.

You.

She does not push him to answer any more questions.

We have to leave.

She just watches him.

It’s the only way, the only way we can be safe. We can go to the South where the soldiers can protect us. Our only guarantee of protection.

I’m not going anywhere with you.

Eliza, Tom says. Miss Eliza. Stroking her hair.

The boy standing by the door in speechless astonishment, something loosed in him at the sight — disdain, desire, resentment, a yearning for identification. For his part, Tabbs resents the boy’s squeamishness but says nothing.

You’re asking me to pack up my belongings.

No need.

But then I’ll have nothing.

I’m not the one asking.

Her head slightly inclined in the attitude of someone who is hard of hearing. Tom leaves her side, his movements quiet as the night, and while the Bethune woman, Eliza, stands considering, Tom circles the room, once, twice, stopping before the piano on the third pass; he rounds it once, twice. A pageant of odors invades Tabbs’s senses, mildew and much else. No way he can (will) leave this room without her. He is ready to say more, but what more can he say? What does she want him to say? Unwilling to let go, he can only hope that she will press him for details, a reasonable explanation. That she will share her worries.

Tom kneels down on all fours and crawls under the piano. Then he tries to grunt upright into a standing position, tries to lift the piano, hoist it onto his back.

Take me home. Tom speaks over his shoulder to Tabbs. Tom is sitting rather solidly, not a care in the world, Eliza seated beside him, Tabbs and the boy — all seriousness — in the seat behind them, the compartment empty except for the four of them, together, a solitary quartet. Take me home. I don’t want no trouble. No thirty pieces of silver.

Okay, Tom. Okay. Thinking, Please cease your babbling. A woman again, Tabbs had secured his scarf and applied ample portions of Eliza’s face powder and rouge before they set out, his head abuzz with the task before them. So far so good, although the journey here was not without challenges, Tabbs reliving the moment when Eliza encountered the startled expression on the face of the station clerk; not until they were almost upon him did he notice them, the ancient alabaster awakened by this odd pairing of a white woman with three Negro traveling companions. Tabbs was glad she had done the speaking to the station clerk since his voice was wanting in firmness, its quality unsteady. But his troubles weren’t over. The entire time in the station, he stared in dumbfounded frustration at Tom hanging about the woman, cooing, wanting to tell her something. Doors cracked open in Tabbs’s head, releasing a fresh fit of panic. No way of knowing what trouble Tom might bring forth, the havoc he might cause.

Tom and Eliza engage in a whispered conference, while Tabbs sits watching the boy in appreciative quietness and listening to his halty breathing. Side by side, he and the boy are nearly touching. He wants to make conversation. The boy’s lips move. If they manage to formulate the faintest of sounds, Tabbs doesn’t hear what they say. Tabbs requests that the boy repeat himself. Listens with all his body, searching for clues, but the boy is having difficulty getting his words out, his eyes feverishly active, fear the source of his discomfiture. Now Tabbs starts to worry again too, fresh unease, not that he had ever stopped. They will need to change trains in the city.

Tabbs speaks to him, and the boy lifts his shoulders in a meaningless way, his brown eyes rippling with sun, which rises and falls inside them. When he is praised, his eyes light up with a glow of their own, red suffusing his cheeks. The afternoon sun starts to lose its harsher edge. Late afternoon light. The city calls out to them, Tom playful still, full of rejoicing.

Tom. Tabbs touches him on the shoulder.

Eliza and Tom are the first to detrain when they reach the station, Tabbs and the boy behind them. He steps down to the platform, his feet wobbly. They amble on, cautious, looking (and listening) this way and that — Tom in his gangling posture, as clumsy in his bodily movements as a child taking his first walk, a body of mixed messages — before venturing on to their southbound locomotive. They are the last to board. The train snags into motion, pulling out of the station. They weave toward the sleeping cars against the violent rattle of the train.

They walk a gauntlet, successive rows of nigger-seeking faces lifting in concert. Tabbs feels a storm gathering inside his head, a spinning turbulence that sets his whole body atremble, his eyes going far beyond what is visible, starting to water, blurred sight. Against his expectations, they reach their assigned compartment and slip into their berths. Anxious, time is transferred from one station to another with the swiftness of a thought. Now the city looks very far away out the window, and he feels achingly free of everything in it. Can it really be this easy? He fidgets in his berth. As he sees the city through the glass a smart hurt imposes itself on his mind. Something is eluding him, but what?

The boy is a need evocative of other necessities. His once terrified face loosens into a bemused grin when their eyes meet, traces of dried sweat marking the boundaries of his brow and chin. Still, there is a glimpse of self-doubt in his physical posture. Small, a pygmy to Tabbs’s manly stature. Tabbs sees him shift restlessly in his berth. What can he do to help?

He tells the boy something about the science of locomotion, about engines, pistons and pulleys, steam and tracks. He hopes in speaking this way he isn’t causing a greater shock than the boy has already suffered. He feels the words go into the boy, but the boy remains silent, his features sporting a specter of worry. Stations drone by.

Train, station, train. Train, station, train. Train, station, train. A sameness of place, sound, and motion. After a while it no longer seems to him that he is trying to put space and distance behind him or shorten space and distance ahead, but that he and the train are now hanging suspended in pure time like a single thread of spider-web. Going nowhere and fleeing from nothing. A hypnotic steadiness (seeing) of trees and towns and solitude. Eliza and Tom speak amicably. He and the boy should too, but the boy sits quietly, an expression at once fierce, wild, and tender.

I thought — Tabbs begins, but he does not say it, disappointed in his own failed and spent flesh.

Something releases in the air. Alabasters enter the compartment. Tabbs feels a constriction in his chest, a muscle withdrawing to some empty space within. Warily, the alabasters (four of them) begin making their way toward Tabbs and his party, moving slowly, closing in. Soon they are close enough for Tabbs to take in the expressions on their faces, faces registering a type of disbelief more akin to caution (fear). The figures identical, the same, in dress. We all dressed in Memphis cotton, Ruggles said. They cast their slow heavy-lidded glances upon Eliza, Tabbs, Tom, and the boy in turn, surrendering to the sight.

How you all doing?

Eliza speaks a reply.

Where you heading?

She tells him.

Is that right? … These niggers are with you? … You don’t say? That one here, she sure is a peculiar-looking one.

Yeah. What’s your name, auntie?

She can’t talk, Eliza says.

One blind nigger and one mute one. Trust my eyes. And what’s this one’s affliction?

I’m jus a nigger, the boy says.

I can see that.

The four alabasters continue to stand before them, their expressions eager, puzzled, and wild. Tabbs begins to tremble. To have made it this far. From the way that their features scramble he can tell that they are tense but undecided, as if waiting for a higher authority to instruct them. For a while the four alabasters continue to do nothing but stand there in wordless confrontation, staring with a peculiar blankness. Now all he can do is to continue to sit, weighing a thousand expedients, stippled shadows ever present, moving across his lap. Now he hears a humming cadence. Tom’s lips are amurmur with faint sounds. Talking to himself? Singing? Then Tom starts to string together phrases, a disjointed discourse. The alabasters turn their eyes toward Tom.

What’s that?

Tom speaks sings discourses on and on.

I could swear that he’s—

He’s just an imbecile, Lucky. Can’t you see that?

Yeah, Lucky. Leave the nigger be.

Still the words of this man’s cohorts do nothing to lessen his sober intent gaze, the air full of Tom’s voice, a hysterical music, roaring saliva bellowing above their heads, building in volume and intensity until ears hurt.

Lord Jesus!

The alabasters back out of the compartment. Tom continues to shout scream his gibberish.

Tom, Tabbs says.

No stopping him.

Tom!

You hear that nigger?

Yeah, I heard him. Son of a bitch.

The air falls still.

On my mother’s life.

The four alabasters enter the car again.

They’ve come for you, Tom says. You could not put it off forever.

And Tabbs hears the startled shout, There, that one there! and he feels monstrously exposed, breaking out of the limits of his body. Hurrying forward, the deceived snatch the scarf off his head and hurl it into the air, a red moth, the furious flutter of things undone.

Station!

Needing to feel superior to his attackers, Tabbs stands straight up to his full height—

See, what I tell you?

That nigger son of a bitch.

— but when the first blow comes he recoils back into his seat. He fights the air, his heartbeats coming in little waves of acceleration, knowing that he is going to fail, and he slows his body down until he is breathing with infinitesimal care while some fragment of his attention thinks soberly about the facts. A refusal to put his life in the hands of these others. If he holds his breath will he disappear? Held breath decreasing his weight and whatever space he takes up. He becomes quite still, sitting with unbreathing rigidity, listening to the sound of his held breath until he spills his air out all at once in a noisy rush. He does not even feel the boot. One minute he is in his berth, the next prone in the aisle, feeling his eye, the side of his face, his mouth, his nose, his entire head, the slow painful pounding of the blood.

You damn nigger bastard!

Someone stooping over him with the coldest eyes he has ever seen.

He hears, You did not choose me. It was I who chose you.

More hands touch him with savage interest. He hears the sound of his body being pummeled, the shock of blows about his head, and it angers him, their determination to handle him as if they own him, have a right to his flesh. He hears now the sound of his fists on flesh, hard muscles, skin, and bone shocking against his fists. Back on his feet as quick as he can be, sealed in by bodies — still four? or more now? the compartment filled with alabasters, every fucking alabaster who has ever lived and some who haven’t even been born yet — receiving their weight and laying his own on them.

He hears Tom say, Fire up that engine! then hears Eliza say something, her voice calm and sensible, without panic. Hears someone else say, You let him call you that? Sees the boy’s hand move in a lazy arc and one alabaster bring both hands to his throat, as if choking himself, a vise grip, streams of blood spurting through his fingers despite the liquid-stamping pressure he applies. The alabaster goes down with a gurgling sound.

The boy moves the shank in furious desperation at his attackers. A second falls, and a third, and a fourth. Then someone seizes his shank-wielding hand, while another jumps in to afflict damage. Hellfire, the boy says. They got me. Screaming even as he is lifted out of his berth, sound swarming into the marrow of Tabbs’s consciousness, weeping and shouting and wild talk. Tabbs feels himself being lifted, too, kicking, squirming and squiggling like a hook-baited worm but going wherever they carry him. The nerve. Off the train now. The bitching nerve of these godless people. Damn every one of them. Above ground, he sees alabasters, some of the locals, staring alert down the street or seated on benches, porches, and stoops, pulled tidily into themselves. A few smile approvingly. Tossed into the gravel and the dirt. He does not move at first because he cannot. A small shower of stones falls around him. A few hit him. Then they are on him again, fists and feet.

He half pushes and half flings an alabaster off of him, and his feet flee beneath him. In the shouting and running he has no time to stop and see what damage he has suffered. (He tastes blood.) No time. He twists quickly left, shrinks his body to push it through a hole cut in a hedge, then comes upon uneven ground running across patches of dry grass, his head light, his mouth dry, his saliva thick and bitter, sound building and breaking inside him. But the noise behind him is loud and wilder now. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees that the first of his pursuers is near. Run even if he can think of nothing to give him safety, no hiding place.

The ground erupts. Planters unearthed. Up from a hidden seam in the blackness. Their garments shining clean. They spit dirt free from their mouths. Lick and restore luster to their boots. Both time and anti-time. All he can dream and then some — foot stretching into yard, yard stretching into furlong, furlong stretching into mile, mile stretching into league, a line of bodies that extends to the horizon. (Does the world really reach that far?) A future promising that it can hold far more than the past could ever hope to. A world to get lost in.

Minutes slip through his hands, and hours fail to raise his feet. Where you going to run to? Why not escape down the path that lies in the direction you were heading, south? Paths stretching in all directions, hidden inevitabilities. Yet and always yet.

He blinks words. Can’t help but hear the faint rumbling behind his eyes, some unseen whole taking shape.

And he thinks, I’ve lost him. I’ve finally lost him. No earthly way he can bear the loss, not now, not ever.

Although she had been living in a third-floor apartment at 6 Gracie Square for a decade or more, none of her neighbors knew her name or knew where she was from. No designation either family or Christian was ever put on her postal box or doorplate. And the neighbors say she never answered the bell and that her groceries were left in the basket set for that purpose outside her door. Moreover, although up to twenty families resided alongside her in this unpretentious five-story red-brick apartment building located on a quiet cobblestoned street with thick-trunked trees perfectly spaced and aligned as if on parade, the fact that a blind Negro was living in her apartment with her was known only in humor and disgust. Indeed, her neighbors considered her barbarous in electing to live with a Negro, even if they were too well bred and polite to tell her so.

Sightings of the Negro were few and far between. Last summer, several of the neighbors saw the woman lead him to a closed carriage, and the same neighbors witnessed them return in their carriage at summer’s end.

On several occasions, the superintendent was summoned to her apartment for maintenance or repairs, but he never saw the blind Negro, only heard him moving around in a far chamber. Saddled with the tools of his trade, the superintendent would go about his work, while the Negro’s mistress — thin, tall, angular — watched him openly and frankly in her plain velvet blouse and ordinary skirt, her face creased into a look of distrust. One time when he was performing some odd job, the superintendent heard the Negro throwing a tantrum somewhere in the apartment and claims that the Negro’s mistress grew ashamed and blushed.

Some claim that the woman almost never entered the Negro’s room since he detested human contact. However, whenever he let her enter, she would take the opportunity to clean what she could and wipe dust from the chair, the bureau, and the bedposts with slow quiet movements of her bare fingers. While she cleaned, he would stand silently at the window with his back turned to her and his afflicted arm stiff at his side.

The neighbors say that for the entire decade that the woman lived at 6 Gracie Square, they had become accustomed to hearing piano music coming from her apartment at all hours of the day and night. They would be in the middle of one activity or another when the music would suddenly begin, and they would listen attentively and respectfully, a disciplined and discriminating audience, even as they carried on with whatever they had been doing.

Then one day, several people passing on foot along the street heard big windows unlock with a clang above them and looked up to see the Negro plunge out onto the balcony and lean over the railing with his head cocked at some sound. After a minute or two, he went back inside. The big windows shut, and he was seen no more that day, or any other day that anyone can remember. But once he was back inside the apartment, they recall hearing piano music, a tune that none of them recognized. Soon thereafter, the music stopped. And no one ever heard it again.

May 31, 2013

Zanzibar