Song of the Shank

Moving House: Three Views of the City (1867)

“God does not beget a child and then kill it.”

SHALLOW-BREATHING BODIES SHUFFLE ABOUT, FEET MAKING a way, making way. Some feet shod, others routinely naked. Ankles made raw, skin white with calluses. Dim shapes, both fact and becoming, who feel more in control, more hopeful than their eyes suggest, eyes bright and empty, the sockets weak, the orbs so frighteningly clear that they look completely disembodied, hovering in midair, that wild unsteady look of bewilderment and doubt offset by the intentionality of their presence, tangibly here and here for a reason, for the long haul. Tabbs sees the agitation in their faces, faces heavy with an expectation that cannot be put down. So assured, so much purpose, so determined — promised (a plot so wide so long; a beast of burden so young so strong), thought capable of, expected to — To your tents, O Israeli — bringing their hands tightly together in prayer to defeat Doubt, beseeching in bodies that are designed for activity far more vigorous than this, waiting, passing time, ready for the next thing although that next thing is uncertain, so they must keep holding on to God’s unchanging hand (for now) in a world that refuses to stay still. They move with the weight and speed of their own expectations, confidence (new) in the quick movement of their legs. Their once slow tongues up the pace too, stumbling into strange conjoinings of consonants and vowels, a metamorphosis that Tabbs has heard seen with his own skeptical ears and eyes — Tom’s mother speaks at double the speed he recalls her speaking in the South — even as he gets stuck in the thick speech of fresh arrivals, those just off the boat as it were, struggles to understand their muddy English, the thick drawn-out syllables, and the way certain words sink beneath sense altogether. Listen to them. The one the many. Here those who were not now are. Strays who have drifted up from the peculiar lands, customs, and institutions of the South, otherwise know as Freedmen, the freed who feel free and think free and talk free. Ripening so fast. Even the sun seems to lighten the color of their skin — however dark their eyes — new skin for a new race.

But, as Tabbs knows (present, a witness), they were not the first to make (find) their way here to the city from wretched Southern climes. Many months earlier the soldiers had returned, unexpected, uninvited, war’s contraband, men who at the very start of the war had sworn an oath of patriotic commitment and duty and enlisted into an all-Negro regiment so as to take up arms and forcibly bring slavery to an end — granted, some found a secondary motivation: to keep a republic that was both in conflict with itself and unsure of its future from a sundering into two separate nations forever conflicted, forever divided — and thus enlisted had shed blood and allowed their own blood to be shed. Entrusted with the task of taking lives, taking towns and cities, on the one hand drawing the last breath from the enemy, and on the other shepherding to safety their emancipated brethren and sistren. Embedded in battle perhaps at the very moment when their kinsmen, neighbors, and friends came under attack, when they were being shot, strung up, and struck down, when they were being burned out of their homes in Black Town and every other precinct in the city, only to be chased from and otherwise expelled and expunged from the city’s municipal boundaries altogether.

Tabbs wonders, when did word of the violence and the expulsion reach them? And — having given their all in battle, maiming and killing (the skirmishes that memory would — will — never let them relinquish), only to learn that they were now all exiled from the destroyed and crumbling houses of a previous life — what thoughts curled around them at that critical juncture in time? (Standing at the crossroad.) What forces of will, upbringing, counsel, morality, or law urged restraint and kept them from shooting or impaling every alabaster on sight? (Try to feel it now.) Moreover, how were they able to throw themselves back into the fray for the remainder of the war under the auspices of a country, an authority that had if not outright betrayed them, had at the least done nothing to secure and protect the person and property of those they had left behind? Not to mention (to say nothing of) the entire matter of punishment and retribution, what those white men who were duly appointed in the appropriate and austere offices of power would do to see that those of the city’s alabasters (of whatever sex, of whatever age, of whatever standing in society) who had committed unpardonable wrongs against the city’s Negroes would be held accountable and brought to justice to the fullest extent of the law and with all deliberate speed.

Perhaps it was this wounded sense of weighing and waiting — never forget, never forgive — that sustained them through all of the fallen bodies and sacked cities, however scant and remote (distant) their hopes of return and reckoning. And when the Surrender finally came, to their surprise it did not give them the immediate release from active duty that they had expected, but only further deferred the dream, for they were issued a new assignment: keep the peace, maintain order, provision and protect the Freedmen. For months on end they were summoned to one contentious Southern location or another to put down a last stand by random elements of the enemy’s collapsed army and to deter, detain, or otherwise do away with sporadic groups of bizarrely dressed (faces hidden inside triangular-peaked hoods, bodies concealed under bulbous bedsheets or robes) irregulars and stop them from committing the most brutal retaliatory and fear-instilling acts of sabotage, assassination, rape, kidnapping, hanging, and immolation.

It took well over a year for the opposition to trickle down and thin away to a point where it either no longer caught the attention of the generals and their counselors or caught their attention but was not deemed worthy of action. At that point the regiment was officially dissolved. The men pooled their wages, commandeered a vessel, subscribed their names to a man in the ship’s manifest, more than seventy-five in all, and set sail for home, each and every one looking all the way to the end of his gaze, determined to return no matter where he had been and what he had done. So the same water that took them away brought them back, as if the ocean too was homesick. The ship’s arrival in the harbor drew no particular notice. Just another ship, one of the many daily, transporting cargo. Then in the sky reddening remains of the day the men started scrambling down the gangplank under a burden of personal belongings (the memories they had carried around in leather satchels and gunnysacks) and military-issued (stolen?) rifles, tents, crates, and barrels, and wheelbarrows that they carried, pushed, or tugged ashore, and stood there before the ship, loosely assembled, stretching their arms, time breaking over their skin, shaking the journey off. The sudden and unexpected image of soldiers, black men in blue, awoke a quiver of sudden alarm and fright inside the alabasters, and drew them to the city’s streets from inside the comfort and safety of their houses and apartments.

In a voice clean as polished steel, one of the soldiers issued a call and the men fell into parade formation, their flags (colors) holding sky and time, their rifles slanted against the wind. The voice rang out again and the men began marching up Broadway — move as a team, never move alone — waves of clamor radiating from their synchronized boots; light catching and gleaming off metal — rifles, medals of merit, and wheelbarrows stacked high with crates of projectiles and grenades and barrels of kerosene and gunpowder — while the city’s alabasters looked on still, silent, and wide-eyed like grazing cows. Home again. (All the rest now a falling back.) Their sonorous bodies and the keening whine and groan of their wheelbarrows halting the movement of the many buggies, cabriolets, carriages, buckboards, and horse-drawn streetcars crisscrossing the city’s most fabled avenue, stillness staking the alabasters in place like the stately lampposts and sturdy telegraph poles lining the avenue.

As the light thinned and evening gathered, the regiment continued at its own pace mile after mile, every man sweating and straining for their collective destination, some (see it) indefinable substance or feeling pumping through them — this much: they have a firm understanding of victory and defeat — shunting aside their proven capacity for patience and postponement, driving them all the way to the other end of Broadway, at which point they turned in one sinuous line and passed through the high wrought iron gates of Central Park, where they lit lamps and struck torches and began to set up camp on the Great Lawn, assembling tents, digging trenches, their movements both separate and coordinated, their shadows long and dark, black shapes moving in a silent ballet, their legs partly obscured in the high uncut grass as if they had all been amputated below the knee. They cut down dead trees for firewood. Fire and light. The only blaze in the dark, radiance visible for miles. (Tabbs saw it himself.) Then they retired for the night on pallets inside their tents or slept out in the open on the half moons of hammocks slung between trees. Morning brought a butchery of park creatures — deer, squirrels, and rock doves — that they skinned, cleaned, cooked, and feasted on. The next day the same. And more still in subsequent days. And so on. A standing army sprawling in their camp on the Great Lawn for longer than anyone could have known or expected, waiting through both good and inclement weather to be recognized.

And there they remain, even while the city accelerates around them, a fast new geography. In a matter of hours a goat path becomes a turnpike a turnpike a road a road a street and the street a name. New Place. New Here. New There. New House. New Water. New Well. New Creek. New Yonder. New Street. More Street. Street Street. New New. Each street breeds an architecture, neat perfect rows of houses. Skinny blocks of wood on a mud alley. Fat blocks of wood lined up before a gutter like men relieving themselves. Active space, men hard at work, no shortage of hands and backs, colored and alabaster (city locals), earning a good wage, some able for the first time to afford pants that button. They work wood with axes, saws, planes, and other (carpentry) tools, ankle-deep in soft wood refuse, while army surveyors scuttle about insect-like with instruments of planning and measurement. The city expands, corners and lots and blocks, Freedmen settlements spreading in all directions, even in neighborhoods that were off-limits to colored citizens only a few years ago, before the riots. Righting wrongs, the city issues a call of welcome to the Freedman (as well as the Uprooted, those who were driven out of their homes and forced into exile on Edgemere)—Everything that had to happen has already happened. Danger and tension are past. It’s a new day. Come and become a citizen, become one of us—seeing miles over the present into a high and limitless democratic future. The sky whitens with justice. The city’s promise pulls smiles out of worried faces, one after the next, not unlike a many-colored sash of infinite length drawn from a magician’s sleeve.

A new life in a new land among a new set of people in a new united republic where autumn leaves scuttle across the ground like papery crabs. Stubbornly, the arrivals retain time, dragging their feet along, lengthening every moment to pull their histories forward, even as they venture a new soil, bodies covered with dirt. You would think the earth grows on their backs. You would think the earth is trying to bury them.

Tabbs takes slow almost ashamed steps to maintain a solid distance between himself and them, finds it hard to engineer his body into a vessel of mercy, to set aside the instinct, drive, and industry he has always had and bring his own head and heart into their plight. No small matter to serve a nation. When last was it that he comforted someone? They (the city) want to root him when he wants to stretch. Just how deep does his sense of independence go? He has recently caught himself in a new trend, letting the dutiful language of racial uplift slip into his transactions.

The boundary lines have fallen for

Me in pleasant places;

I have a goodly heritage.

But he is like nothing they have known. They don’t know what to do with his words. They raise their hats in apology, a rush to please on their faces, mouths snapping open and closed, straining to speak. They never look him in the face, don’t see him at all, his odd ways.

Everything seems to happen from a distance. Hard to witness, hard to believe. He looks at them with all angles in his eyes. Truncated forms missing hands, feet, and limbs. Ruffled figures with broken backs, bent impossibly at the waist, wrists touching ankles, like malfunctioning bridges unable to either lower or raise. Wobbly creatures with wasted bones knocking out of rhythm under sagging skin. One to the next. The hard lines of their hunger sketch a blueprint of possibility against the faded backdrop of recent history. No language for this. Slavery is a puncture — have you ever picked cotton? — the hole (hold) that can never close. The hole that still bleeds cotton, rice, sugarcane, tobacco. How do they lift their feet without becoming undone?

I would never have believed

That Death could have undone so many

Bless them their trying, their displaced elbows, disjointed knees, sturdy necks, assured fingers. They hold their hands up to the sky with joy and look God in the face. Delivered.

With heavy rusted teeth they fashion new names. Emerson, Garrison, Brown. Adams, Douglass, Turner. Jackson, Lincoln, Jefferson. Johnson, Grant, Washington. Tubman, Phillips, Hamilton. Strong. Freeman. North. (Looking at God.) They practice saying their names and practice them on each other, words slipping in and out, too busy with the speed of speak to think more.

Having withstood hardships that would destroy most, they can now remold themselves into something greater here in the city, even if they don’t see much of their history in the wood and brick here and have trouble getting their bearings, tracing a course from one corner to the next. Tabbs hears a thousand hearts turn inside desperate chests, a song that cuts through bone and muscle, kept hidden until now. What gesture of commitment can he send out to them? His past stands right before him, judging. How can he be both more and less himself?

He starts for the ferry to Edgemere, a long line of bodies following him, bringing their uncertainties and contradictions along. So it is. They lift their faces expectantly toward the heavens. Their eyes seem to look through and beyond everything they see for some visitation of blessing or warning.

He sits with his back doubled to them, hearing their chatter. Tries to listen past their voices and pushes his shoulders against the darkness, breathing the salt air, Edgemere, the black island, pressing upon him in slow continuity, a drop of ink spreading in the ocean. Disembarks from the ferry and under a white hook of moon takes a circuitous route home, full of false stops and starts, diversions, stalkers (freed, free) behind — who can say how close? — throwing shadows of alarm across the street and high on alley walls, Tabbs moving with an intense sense of direction through Edgemere’s little streets winding in upon each other like a basket of eels. After some time he arrives at his place of residence confident that nobody has followed him, steals up the outside steps careful of his footing in the dark, the stairs narrow, shaking under him, the three-story house starkly rectangular in the dark. He leans his guilt into his room.

Already he can feel the city dropping off his back. He takes a seat in the darkness, hard black light passing through the window. Darkness upon darkness. Here he is with nothing that matters to him in his room. Only that single window looking out and looking in, and the thick box of his days. He thinks of all those hands out there moving around in the dark, dragging the night forward. And his room starts to move, as if the entire house — the walls, beams, roof — will up and shift to an anywhere anytime place like nothing he has known.

He sees the dawn rise three feet. Blackbirds arrow across autumn sky. Comes out of his room to find the morning waiting for him with too much clarity, the sun casting its best clean light, allowing him to see the city in distant outline across the water. The city wants him to see and remember. He tries to walk off the urge, but so much crosses his consciousness amid the rush, sweep, and crisscross of bodies. Things left behind or discarded, things he didn’t know he had absorbed or that he’d forgotten, time and distance no barrier in a place that is all water and sound, sound carrying across water, snapping him (elastic) in and out of the present, Edgemere city, city Edgemere.

Does the city really expect men like him to accept its promises? The time away has pushed him into another existence here on Edgemere, out beyond his old life before the war, afar from the city’s field of influence, the space between him and it changed. (Something holds, something stays in place.) He will break back into the world of the alabasters on his own terms, through the boy. Blind Tom. Having worked the details — the mother and Tom together here on Edgemere — in full and determined preparation, Tabbs is ready to take advantage. (One follows the other.) Go about his life with a familiar concentration. Do the things he needs to do. The Freedmen are immediate in the face of his nostalgia.

Pushing his drained body along, he can’t locate the kinship he feels for the Freedmen, he cannot look at them without thinking about what is to come. They put their song in the air, a sound not easily separable from their bodies and what moves within their bodies, usually kept under wraps, but not so now, skin curving back like windblown curtains to expose auction blocks, swinging gates, the whips, hounds, chains, crops, violations, and vulgarity. Tabbs seeing it all so clearly, body looking. It should unsettle him. It doesn’t. In fact, he starts to see himself in it all, he Tabbs selected, singled out, belonging, living it too. In a manner of speaking, he is one of the Freedmen.

So engaged that when he stumbles, the force of it does not register at once. Sitting on his haunches, knees up, hands down, confused, catching a breath, waiting for something to happen. He regains his feet, wondering what brought him down. Almost immediately he sees someone come slouching out of the crowd, arms folded across chest, hands inside armpits, lessening the distance, putting himself a yard away from Tabbs, his arms uncrossing and moving into Tabbs’s face, a complete cut in upward vision, two threatening nubs round and smooth at the ends like whittled branches only inches from Tabbs’s nose and mouth. Tabbs can smell them, could kiss or lick them if he wants. The man brings one missing hand to his mouth in a gesture of eating. Please, master. A thin man with a terrible face, he stands with his head twisted to one side, a look of half smile half supplication. Now repeats that ladling motion, compounding the minuses, missing hand feeding air to empty mouth. Please, master. God demands. Talking into Tabbs’s silence. How will you fathers give your son a stone if he asks you for bread? Then the silent head-twisted supplication. Please, master. Stiff and vacant, Tabbs neither moves nor speaks.

Do you have anything for me, master?

Does he?

What effort it takes to see what is there, Freedmen trying on their new houses, their faces small, almost unnoticeable in windows not made to their shape.

He isn’t talking. He isn’t playing. He isn’t even moving. Her Thomas. My Tom. Hunkered down in high stiff silence at the piano on the stage above her, face bowed, body slanted forward, his hands in his lap, black skin and black wood glistening with wet light pouring in through the chapel’s four windows, so high up (twenty feet or more) that she can see the sky and little else, a sky swept clean of everything except for a few infrequent tatters — birds? bats? — streaking in and out of vision, cutting across the blue living hand of the Almighty, He who lifted her up from that peculiar country where her blood was harvested along with cotton, sorghum, tobacco, coffee, and carried her across land and water and set her down on this island, Edgemere, then carried her across the threshold into this broad sturdy white-stoned edifice, the Home for the Education and Edification of African Orphans, tucked away at the far end of one of Edgemere’s ancient and narrow streets, where she can be (reunited) with Thomas, her Thomas, My Tom — Didn’t I take care of my Hebrew children? — at the far point of their lives, mother and son on the verge of great joy after an existence of great sorrow, granted the means to pick up from where they left off eleven years ago when Thomas was so rudely and wrongly taken from her at Hundred Gates, a moment that her mind holds on to and will hold on to, so help her God, for as long as she lives. Never forget, never forgive. Thomas, I am here. Your mother is here. Here we are, together again. (Words she might have even spoken once or twice to him since her arrival here on Edgemere.) Waiting for light (or food or drink) to make a difference and brighten his mood, raise his spirits and pull words out of him and save her from another lost afternoon, another lost day inside this chapel where her thoughts are a little less each day, the small parts of herself that she has retained (what is felt in the heart and felt in the blood) among the many lost through both the coming of age — is fifty old for a woman? — and through stolen time, everything that was taken away from them when they were taken from each other eleven years ago, those small parts that remain that she wants to give back to him, needs to give back — the debt she owes, the dues she must pay — breaking away from her little by little each day like the specks of late afternoon dust carried along high above her in the light streaming in through the chapel’s four windows, until (soon, in the course of time) nothing will be left. Crucial not only that they establish and maintain whatever they can, moment by moment, but also that they regain (recover) anything he remembers from their past lives at Hundred Gates, the twenty feet separating them a telescopic space that can slide back in time eleven years (and more), Thomas up there onstage at the piano and she down here on a pew, perfect quiet sealed on the piano’s shiny wooden surface as it is on his burnished skin, his silent tongue hidden inside his mouth, the black and white keys hidden under the lacquered lid. The names of the many places that worked her ragged bright inside her. Athens, Leland, Rome. And the names she has forgotten. Where she had day after day staggered through fields and kitchens and bedrooms and outhouses, sold or traded or bartered or rented out or shuttled about from one plantation or estate or farm to another in her long career as a slave, a contagious song picked up by other presences rising up around her in the room, the dozen or more niggers planted inside glass-fronted frames who assert themselves in song, their proud and heroic countenances sprouting flower-like from high stiff collars, their voices falling through her from where they hang ghostly from walls painted the color of everything and nothing combined — colors are the deeds of light — this choir (Champions of the Race, Reverend Wire calls them) whose identities are a mystery to her, although she recognizes (remembers) two or three faces from years ago in the pages of the Columbus Observer. They sing in a foreign tongue, voices ascending in a long climb that might go on all the way to heaven, up to a listening God but for the plastered ceiling, a ceiling strong and sturdy in its construction like all the others on Edgemere, fortified both lengthwise and sidewise with the slim black hard branches of the bleem tree, a crisscrossed network of wood not unlike a railway depot in appearance. (A hundred places to go. A hundred people to be.) The voices hold in orbit a little longer before they start a slow slide down the walls and large (man-high, man-wide) wood (bleem) cross nailed to the wall behind the stage (black serpent on the cross) pooling around the bottom of the altar, which ripples with the reflection of gold carved letters: WHEN SHALL WE LIVE IF NOT NOW. Now the voices spill over the edge of the stage onto the floor, which is made from irregular and rather broad planks of bleem wood, and tide forward to flood this entire sparse chapel that offers nothing pleasing to the eye other than rows of pews worn smooth with age, each sculpted from an entire trunk of a bleem tree solid and thick to withstand the destructive force of a child, enough of them to seat a hundred orphans or more. All the day the song will hum inside her. She should speak up, say something, say anything and put an end to it, but she doesn’t want to ruin any hours she and Thomas spend together. Enough simply to spend them, together. It is always toward him that her longings turn, a moment followed by a lesser moment and a hunger to return. They are from each other. I am you. (What are the roots that clutch, that bind?) Entangled in the soul and knotted in the flesh, the spirit of union is uppermost in her. She tells herself as she did yesterday and the day before and probably will do tomorrow that she is on free ground. It is from here that everything can come. It is here, right here in this chapel that everything begins. No matter how late in life, she is not immune to fresh experience. Ask her where she’s been, she’ll tell you where she’s going. (See there, up above: not dust carried in the light pouring in through the windows but seeds following the most direct path to growth, impossible to stop them.) Her life was lived way from here in that (unchanged) country that the Almighty told her she had to abandon, He who decided that she should make a life elsewhere, because she had found favor in His sight and He sent her an angel (Mr. Tabbs) who brought her here to Edgemere and reunited her with Thomas and bestowed His blessings upon her (them, us) in succulent abundance: delicious food and drink, beautiful garments, spacious and comfortable quarters where she can settle into soft sleep each night and awaken anew each morning. O Lord I wait in my room at your mercy. Each day runs its course simply enough. Break of dawn, a rooster will cock-a-doodle-do and set all the roosters to crowing to bring the ocean awake, cause it to close its waters around the island. (Listen and hear it.) As the island gropes toward wakefulness — that which takes its color with the locals turning on their beds — she will hear the bedsheets snap when Thomas jumps from his bed, and she’ll fall to — the floorboard creaking under her feet like rusty hinges flying open — and get everything in readiness for the day ahead — choose an outfit for him from his closet, lay it out on the divan, then draw his bath. He will shed his sleeping tunic, hunker down in the tub, and make the water sing, his forming hands lending shapes to the suds. She will kneel before the tub and help him with soap and rag, his bones dancing under her fingers, the only time in the course of a day when he allows her to touch him.

Are you her? he will ask her.

Yes, she says. But his interest in her soon disappears. (He casually pushes away the arms that try to embrace him.) He will dress himself then take his place at the table, the sun spilling its copper glow into and across the room, Thomas lathered in golden light, honey, amber, stuck inside his silence with deliberation. (Why should the sunlight care?) Dressing, she will be heartily uncertain (afraid?) about who she has become and who he is and what he has become and what he recalls. Does he remember or has he forgotten who she is? After all it has been eleven years, eleven long years. Or perhaps something about her has changed? Smell? Sound of her voice? The way she walks? Sound of her footsteps? Or could it be, might it be, that this is somebody else in the supposed form of her son, a somebody who bears her son’s name? Three brief knocks on the door summon her to open it, and an orphan (always a boy) standing there on the other side hugging a large silver serving tray, his smile reaching out to her through the open door. Ma’m, I have been instructed to bring the morning’s repast. The orphan’s voice causes Thomas’s body to move. She knows the hunger behind his face, but throughout the day he limits what he consumes, the brooding taste of a glass of goat’s milk (still his favorite) to move each morning along, and some morsels of bread perhaps with a dollop of jam or a sprinkling of sugar, then for dinner a fistful or two of meat (hen, guinea fowl, goat) and a few forks of potato or vegetable (the utensils’ bright clatter and chime), and not much more than that for supper, every part of his body unsatisfied.

She studies the creases edging his eyes, the bones pressing up from under the cheeks — he needs to eat, he must eat — the places (temple, forehead) where the skull turns outward, revealed, and his clothes sagging from his bones. His face, his whole bony frame — he looks like he might dissolve. (The body through time.) He must eat because she wants to see him looking like a man, the way he looked when she first saw him again after eleven years, all thickened and broadened into man skin and man muscles, but in her presence he eats almost nothing and drinks almost nothing and never goes to the (indoor) toilet. (When does he go?) Something in him has turned, settled, quieted down, something essential. (The chapel is lonely-still just like Thomas.)

When she knew him, when he was still hers, eleven years ago, it took two or three hours of him roaming through the countryside to tire him out sufficiently to keep him seated long enough to have his supper. She, Mingo, and the girls had grown used to Little Thomas wandering off from the cabin into fields (white to the very door of the mansion with cotton and green to the wraparound porch with coffee) and meadows, up the tall rock (the way he sat on top of it) — down by the sides of the deep river and lonely streams, bounding over the hills or rolling like a log across the plain, headstrong into the deep and gloomy woods. Like a kitten playing through the falling leaves. Wherever Nature led. No fear of a world he couldn’t see, since his sense of smell and taste missed nothing — see his hands reaching to bring leaf and flower and insect and bird and fish to his mouth, an entire afternoon in the shape of that touch. She remembers the fluid fascination that every thing and person exercised upon him. Trees pushing at sky. Maggots churning inside the cold corpse of an opossum rotting in the grass where worms gather in testament. The way birds let loose their three-toed grip on the earth. Something moving through air, moving through him. Life changed to landscape and landscape life. Thomas made sleepy by the expanse. She would call his name in that long dragging way, extending the syllables accordion-like. Then his face would poke out into the tunnel of her seeing from some hiding place (brush, bush, or briar patch; trough, kennel, or pen; outhouse, cave, or coop), a child’s grin pushing up through his drowsy features, and she would take him, Little Thomas dirt-faced and barefoot, her hand firm in his hand, and start back to the cabin in the failing light of sunset, a red river of ribbons above them. (How many times had she and Little Thomas strolled, hand in hand, in the murmuring shade of the water oak trees?) His voice would flood the evening with stories he couldn’t tell fast enough. (Feeling the language run over her body, a garbled stream, so she had to listen closely and sort through the flow, fishing out a word here and there and stringing them together in meaning.) Figures homebound at sundown, flashing past — he forces her breathing to catch up — a constellation of niggers (men, women, and children alike) still crouched in the fields under wide-brimmed hats, coursing in and out of smoke-and steam-fueled factories and mills with an infinite supply of materials (lumber, textiles, leathers, metals) in constant circulation through doors and windows, she and Little Thomas zipping past vistas such as these and other scenes of normal life. His frenzied uneven way of walking — each uneven step took an ambitious piece of ground — threatened several times to steal her balance, but she held fast until they reached the entrance to Hundred Gates, where they followed the long gravel road lined with cottonwood trees on either side up to the white house, only to go around the house and off into the deep recesses of the estate to their cabin, which commanded its own modest place in the world. And when they bounded through their cabin door — the flutter of moths in the waning light of the lantern — Mingo and the girls could see that Little Thomas was different, could tell him from the restless boy who couldn’t keep still even when he was sitting down, fidgeting, fussing with his clothes and limbs and face, blowing on his hands or knees or feet as if trying to extinguish flames nested in his flesh. The boy would be innocent off in a corner of the yard imitating the twittering sounds of birds, each chirp small, clear, and sharp. (The sound comes to her unexpectedly every so often. She can hear it even now.) In a pitched assault he would ram himself into a wall over and over again — like the ocean out there smashing into the island of Edgemere, and slapping up against the dhows, calling them back to water — until someone managed to tackle or trip him to the ground. Those aggravated presences from earlier in the day would still be lingering in the cabin in diminished form, force, and capacity, echoes that would hum and snap back into Little Thomas shortly upon his stepping across the threshold. Quiet and steady, he would sit down to a heavy supper — fatback sandwiches, black apples, two or three helpings of sweet root lathered in lard and corn cakes glazed with molasses, two or three Seminole potatoes, some red grass, and a pitcher or two of lemonade or iced tea — that proved to be no challenge for him. Feed me bushels of light. At the first sign of any agitation, the girls would remove every article of his clothing until he was butt naked and quiet, stripped of music and words. Supper done, with the slightest roll of the tongue Charity could sing him to sleep. And she too could now bed down for the night after a long day of labor and the exhaustive challenge of Little Thomas. (Asleep, his body hummed with the expectation of sunrise—Let us cast off deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light—the yearning outside world anxious to have him return, the impatient moon nosing about the window, trying to peek through.) Daylight would set him ablaze with some song — if he had one he had a thousand — that he would be bellowing at the top of his small voice. He would take his station at the table, the fingers of both hands moving in every direction in the air until they settled down onto the splintered surface, where they would glide along the wood thirsting for music. And he would eat and drink whatever they put before him, songing through a mouth filled with food. Even before he had had his fill, he would say to her, Please leave me now, repeating the words ever and again until she stood up from the table and selected from one of the few garments she owned. She would sling the dress over her shoulders and comb her hair back into a ponytail, cover her head with a scarf tightened in a knot at her nape, and take him up from the table and quit their cabin for their yard. There she would hold him close. (The only image she can see now, in the silence, the only image of herself that she likes, in which she can recognize herself, in which she delights.) After a few stumbling steps, they would start hand in hand for the house, past the flower garden that Miss Toon tended with all the loving care that a green thumb is capable of and on to the house itself, where she would turn the copper doorknob and fling the door wide. They would make their entry into the foyer on the Oriental carpet. Miss Toon was never long to meet them. Standing there in her flounces and high collar that came all the way up to her chin, Miss Toon would smile at Little Thomas with keen interest and longing. Then she would take him into her company and they would slip behind the French doors into the parlor, shutting the doors behind them, the two glass doorknobs like big diamonds, and Charity’s breath would catch for a small expectant moment. Charity wanted nothing more than to stay in the parlor and hear what Little Thomas would play and what he and Miss Toon might play together. (Charity forgave them their inclination toward companionship, their wanting to be alone with Music, this blameless act, for she had seen the way their hands moved across the keys, the impossible made possible.) However, without an excuse to linger, she soon went about her employment, her body emptying through the house and the reaches of the estate. Little Thomas — my Thomas, my Tom—moored at the piano with Miss Toon at his side for a period of instruction whereby the spirit flowing between them had a chance to reveal itself, as each had it in her or his person to test the mettle and endurance of the other with melodies, ditties, and songs, for each seemed to know where the other was strong or weak, she carrying the first verse and he either repeating it or carrying the next. And so on. Music would fill in the hours, would come to Charity through walls and shut doors. A line of melody would sit on the laundry lines like a flock of birds, would gush out of the well with every pump of the handle. How untroubled she felt. Indeed, it would have been a double burden to fulfill her duties and also keep Little Thomas entertained. With the arrival of noon, she knew then that he was sharing in repast with the Bethunes at their long mahogany table, even as she headed back to the cabin for dinner with Mingo and the girls. She saw Little Thomas lick the music off his fingers in preparation for food. And after an hour, dinner done, chores resumed, she was brought back to herself. Recoiled from afternoon sun, light and heat wearing her out, her body opened. (The body is made up of things that grow stiff and accumulate pain.) Was it actually weariness that had overtaken her or simply the idea of going back to Little Thomas? For soon the moment would come (an hour or two later) when the General would put an end to the time he had granted Little Thomas and his wife for instruction that day and summon Charity to the parlor. Take this boy from my house. Easier said than done, for even then Little Thomas would be playing at the piano and it would seem that nothing could deter him in the effort. On a fortunate day, a sugarplum or two could lull his hands still, lure him away from the piano and lead him out of the house. And there she and Thomas would be, brightening in the colors — petunia, zinnia, chicory, four-o’clock — of Miss Toon’s garden, with her chores to get back to.

I am the one, he would say. (Even now she has no idea what he meant, not the slightest clue, despite the many times she heard him say it.) And he would wander off into the woods. No — try again — she would allow him to wander off while she stood watching. If only he could spend — had she the power — all of his waking hours at the piano. It was this alone that could pull the wildness out of him. Had he been so allowed — had she the power — he would have played until his fingers bled. (And bled they had on two or three occasions.) Of course, the General never would have granted permission — no way — generous (for a woogie) of him to allow what time he did.

Let’s bear the burden of this life

We haven’t far to go

So, day in and day out, she took that little he gave and made do. Nothing to occupy her hours, other than work. All the time in the world on her hands and no time. The rigidity of her station in life. The lack of options. No true leisure time to speak of. She would let her imagination loose on any sights that crossed her vision. Look up and remark on the shape of the clouds. Going from herself to herself as far as her feet could carry her, to the very edge of the estate’s grounds, or to another town or city within walking distance (ten miles or twenty) when the Bethunes sent her on errands. No matter how hard she tried she couldn’t succeed in desiring non-places whose existence she couldn’t verify with her own eyes, although she had heard about people (woogies) and even knew certain people (woogies) who had supposedly sojourned to or taken up residence in some of those places that had names such as Atlanta, Oxford, London, Paris, Zanzibar. In fact, she had doubts that another world existed — what Union? What North? Washington? what White House? — right up to the moment that the steamship whose deck she and Mr. Tabbs stood on pulled into the city’s harbor. It took little convincing to get her on board that ship. Mr. Tabbs made her his offer and she gladly accepted it. She was ready for adventure. The prospect filled her with joy. She and Thomas would be reunited. A thousand miles between them (ten thousand), a moment that perhaps she and her son both dreamed of, she from Hundred Gates and he from wherever he was on this earth. So — tell the truth about it — she told herself that she would voyage in order to see — things belong to those who look at them — voyage to prove this other world did indeed exist — that was the real reason why she accepted Mr. Tabbs’s offer, was so willing to believe in his promises — and, also, believe that Thomas was alive somewhere in this other world.

At Hundred Gates, everything brought her back to herself and her small world. Surely Hundred Gates (or some other estate, plantation, farm, kitchen) would be the last sight her eyes would register for all eternity. She felt a stranger to herself. Talking little if at all because she had no say. Indeed, she was happy to go through her labors if it meant limited contact with other people. People were obstacles to be avoided (diverted looks), never approached, and rarely spoken to. And when someone did speak to her, she would put on the appropriate face and say nothing true, nothing false, in an effort to hurry on her way. Night never returned what the day had taken, for she would awaken with aches and pains, sore, stiff, puffy and swollen. So it was that she would pass each and every day, moving slowly but surely toward disappearance, toward extinction, knowing that her disappearance would have no impact on the world.

That life of nothing she had thought was a permanent part of her, branded in her skin. (That small darkened kitchen, that other small darkened bedroom, that tiny cabin.) Then the Almighty brought her to Edgemere by His beneficent hand so that she could repose her body and have peace of mind with time at her disposal to get reacquainted with Thomas, her Thomas, her first reprieve from industry (labor, work) — shake the rug into the fire — in her many many years (fifty, more) of residence on this earth. Now, she feels parts of herself that she never felt before, muscles she never knew she had.

She repositions her feet on the floor of the chapel (well-seasoned bleem wood) without the old agility and grinds her teeth in annoyance. Thomas moves his head ever so slightly at the noise. Could it be (she wonders) that hard labor, constant work, the daily routine of toil, enabled her to bear up better than this present inactivity, for at Hundred Gates, where the hour and the minute ruled her, she perceived the flow of time less? Released (cut loose) from her time-constrained body, there is no longer anything that can distract her from herself. Memory won’t leave her alone, won’t let her escape this body she has inhabited for so long. Eager with possibility, the self she might (can) become is held hostage — what other word is there for it? — fights tooth and nail against a past that would conquer and claim every inch of her, all of her glands and organs contested.

She plants herself deeper into the pew. But is she really here? No. She is still there, at Hundred Gates, watching the carriage wobble off down the tree-lined gravel road. Everything grows up around that image. Where she is now, this Home, sprouts up right through tufts of grass on the estate. The floor is shrinking beneath her feet. She looks up and sees the dust motes above floating and swaying in reverse out through the windows, taking the years back from her, eleven years. (Count them.) I can’t keep no numbers. She looks at Thomas. His face is disappearing, particles of skin pulling away into a tiny cloud. The ceiling is lifting. And she starts to rise too. Her new life here on Edgemere, her new life here with Thomas is only something she has dreamed up—

I woke up this morning

Where I was I didn’t have a clue

— a dream that began the moment she and Mingo stood in broad afternoon light watching in outraged resignation as the carriage left the way it had come down the tree-lined gravel road and gradually dissolved from sight — corrosives of sunlight — the sound of its wheels turning in their torn ears. Nothing she or he could do to stop it. (What could a nigger do?) She almost speaks those words to Thomas now. Nothing we could do to stop it. (How doubt that now?) It matters somehow that he knows. But the time to speak of it hasn’t come. She has retained a fixed image of Little Thomas in the carriage, an image that lasted all the way across to this island of Edgemere and is with her still. As she rises, higher and higher, she closes her eyes to visualize the moment better, the entire scene in perfect focus. The sunset blazing as if pumped up with blood. The woogie’s finely tailored trousers of an indeterminate color. The driver’s crumpled hat. Some carefully phrased farewell—Safe travels, was that it? May the Lord be with you, was that it? We bid you Godspeed, was that it? — that the General or Miss Toon muttered into the hot air, while she and Mingo kept silent without a word to anyone who had a say in the matter, Mingo’s face broad and smooth and full of astonished disbelief. The trees swaying, the green world turning on its machinery. Little Thomas’s white teeth brilliant in his open mouth. The sound of her asking herself, What had she done, they done, for the General to enact this punishment on them? These living pictures from another country, another time, unsettle her.

She pours words, all of the words she saved up from the moment she set out on her journey with Mr. Tabbs and all that she had accumulated since Little Thomas’s departure (eleven years’ worth), that she planned to speak to Thomas, she pours them into the bottommost parts of her heart, reinforcing her plans and projects, a weighty (unshakable?) foundation. Slowly, she feels and hears herself start to descend back to earth, drawn down. She opens her eyes — she doesn’t want to see anymore — as soon as her backside resumes its place on the pew, heavy, beaten (spent), and pain-ridden like the rest of her. And still she feels weight, causing her to wonder if she will sink right through the floor, but with the question she feels an answer rise in her chest, which draws her gaze toward Thomas, and she looks at him now, the two of them sitting here in the chapel breathing the same hungry calm. She takes his face apart, dissects his motionless hands, frail body, and fixed well-cobbled feet, the all of him, trying to find any indication that he remembers his abduction. For her part, the recollection of her final seconds with Little Thomas is what stood upright in her mind for all these years, her body what subsides, Thomas growing, taking on flesh, while she decays, loses substance, life rushing out of her lungs with every breath. As year followed year, she grew to hate more and more the General and Miss Toon and their rotten shat-out seed, hated them with all the thought and feeling her body could hold, hated every single nasty-ass wet-chicken-smelling woogie living or dead who had ever stank up the earth. Strangely easy to hate them, to intone chants and curses—Further on up the road, someone gon hurt you like you hurt me—that would bring boiling plagues and flesh-eating locusts on their generations to the end of time.

She wants him — her Thomas, my Tom—to know that if she gets angry at him, if she voices any displeasure, he must know that it is only her past attacking him. Forgive her. Forgive me. Her resentments, her disappointments, her feelings of isolation, indifference, and resignation followed her here. (The weather doesn’t help, a miserable day, humid and muggy, reminding her of home, the way it always seems in her dreams.) But she has crossed over—Mr. Tabbs, do we really have to cross all that water? — so how can she allow herself to think that way? She should be rejoicing. Wade in the water. There is life and abundance for future years. (They both know it. They feel it in their throat and lungs.) A white devil in fancy trousers took Thomas away from her and a nigger angel in fancier pants brought her back to him. That old life is gone. That life shouldn’t (doesn’t) mean anything to her anymore. (The point at which memory softens.) So she must give up thinking, must empty her body of the past and let the future draw her forward, even if Thomas just sits up there at the piano hour after hour, day after day like a lump on a log, treating her to copious silence, nonspeaking and nonmoving no matter how hard she stares across the distance at him, stares until her eyes throb. (It is now later than it was awhile ago and still he hasn’t moved, no way to tell if he is awake or asleep.) She has crossed over, thus it is enough for her to just sit here with him this way, sit and contemplate their past and their prospects, while the closely scheduled activities (instructions, lessons, learning) of the orphans and their teachers go on around them. Indeed — she sees it now — that wise someone — Mr. Tabbs? Reverend Wire? Deacon Double? — had the presence of mind to realize that she and Thomas need to be alone together in the chapel each day, this is just the place for them to trade their silences, for they know, have always known how to answer each other without speaking, without questions. What they share as mother and son, they share alone. Between them sleeps the words they never exchanged, were forced to leave behind. Each day she feels his silence more keenly. (Silence is not a word she associates with Little Thomas, even at his most innocent.) She is apprenticing herself to hush, which withdraws on occasion — she hears chalk clacking and squeaking against blackboards, counting beads colliding, orphans asking about the words that surprise them most during their spelling lessons, orphans at their looms, pottery wheels, and knitting and sewing machines, everything in the Home talking to itself; and beyond that faint distant sounds in the distance: tinkling cowbells, the braying of donkeys, rattling carts, and sea currents muscling into the shore — giving place to the echo of her secret thoughts that surprise even her. Tears stanched behind her shut eyelids, she cried all down inside herself that first night and many nights after. (The ache still even though he is here.) Never the full outpouring of grief because she knew that such letting go would unravel her, turn the spindle of her self until nothing was left. But from time to time she could feel it rise inside her and threaten release, threaten to leak (seep) or spill out of her closed mouth, especially when she unknotted and removed her head scarf before bed. (A body responds differently in the dark when it knows that other people are not around to observe it.) Perhaps Mingo heard it, that soft wet sound dammed inside her. Perhaps Thomas is listening too. Before coming here to Edgemere, when was the last time she had slept without dreaming he was dead? (And longing to return the favor, kill each and every woogie in revenge, man, woman, and child. Wanted to resurrect the ones that were already dead and buried, murder them again, then incinerate all trace of them.) She turned her thoughts toward forgetting, but to her surprise, thinking Thomas dead did not help her any, for death does not sever the ties with the living but pulls the worlds of the living and the dead closer together and braids them in eternal alliance (allegiance). Thomas was the afterlife, pieces of him everywhere. (The cupboard drawer startled open, the cup that moved of its own volition across the table, the sudden chill on a hot day, curtains swaying in a room where all the windows were shut, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of her eye.) How could she gather up what was left of him in this world and move it permanently to the other side? I am poured out like water. As year followed year, she searched for a reason not to long for him. And why should he be the one to claim her attention? I am the only one. Of course there had been others, the ones taken away from her; Thomas was not the first. To say her world is shot through with loss like a moth-eaten garment is to say nothing since every gap in the cloth opens into possibility, what the eye sees when it peers through the holes, what the fingers find when they poke through. She believes in the ability (the will) of mothers to make right — she assumes blame; a need builds inside her — to weave patterns of past and present (fashioning) into a cocoon that can keep her offspring’s name intact, Thomas (never Tom), confident (now) that their suffering, Mingo’s, her daughters’, her own—I am the mother—cannot touch him anymore. This Thomas is moving toward being her Thomas again.

She retraces the stages of her journey and comes to remember that port (two white ladies under two white parasols) from where she and Mr. Tabbs set sail on a small steamship tossed by the large sea. Distinctly recalls the urgency in which the ship slid out into open water and how the horizon exploded out of the lovely expanse of blue before the deckhands had completely raised the gangplank, the harbor quickly thinning from view, everything hurrying along with all deliberate speed to afford her no chance to change her mind and turn back. Having never confronted the sea, she stood on the deck for a while, wondering at passage over water, at buoyancy, power, and weight, at the salt in the air, the movement of the craft keeping her body occupied as it sought balance, her shadow floating alone on top of waves brimming with scooting fish, more ornate sea creatures submerged beneath, their scales sparkling like the shards of a broken mirror, and mermaids and mermen surfacing now and again to chew the thirsty air, their transparent lungs shining through their exposed rib cages. The many ports they entered, passengers boarding or disembarking, and the many sights, sounds, and smells revealed to her even as she stood on deck and looked back at her past, all that she was flashing from the flashing water, her tragedies like sunken vessels with an angle of hull rising up out of the water.

At last — two weeks? two months? two years? — they approached the city’s harbor, and as if to give her maximum time to take in what she was seeing, the ship came almost to a standstill, the lulled water tossing it (and her) gently like a body turning out of sleep. A swarm of vessels (dark-sailed dhows and the bulky overcrowded ferries, body braided to body on deck) with their high massive hulls came into her line of sight out of the resounding vastness, some approaching the harbor, others heading out to sea, one vessel alive in another’s movement. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before. A waking dream. (Light asks no questions.) Every breath of air made her face shudder. The engine cut off altogether and the ship bobbed into the pier, moored in perfect alignment between two posts like a horse inside its stall. She and Mr. Tabbs were among the first passengers to descend the gangplank onto the pier — she was wobbly at first, a necessary weight (more of the world than we think); with all that water under her for days and weeks she had forgotten that she weighed anything; for his part, Mr. Tabbs took a moment to accustom himself to land, shaking each leg energetically — where the land moved with mariners studying their travel charts and maps, muscled crews hauling crates into and out of blockhouses and stores, drivers fixed on buckboards behind packhorses idle in anticipation. They did not leave the pier to enter the magnificent city surging with legions of people — had she wanted to? — but made haste, ascended another gangplank and boarded a ferry for the final crossing to Edgemere. In less than an hour she heard the call for landing. Edgemere floated into sight. Seen from board at a distance this expanse of sea seemed a thing totally distinct from the small outspread island that emerged from it. These were special waters. Perhaps this was the very sea where the Almighty had drowned old Pharaoh’s army to save Mr. Moses and those Hebrew children.

Wade in the water

God’s gon trouble the water

(Yes, she had these thoughts.)

Once on land, she and Mr. Tabbs set off by foot for their destination, the Home for the Education and Edification of African Orphans. She walked the black length of her mind under a dark overcast day, tall curtains of fog hanging beneath dense low-hanging clouds that burned faintly red and black above as no sky she had seen before, the ocean a long flat cloth connecting the island to the horizon. Through the fog (inland) she saw the faint outline of houses silhouetted in the distance. She watched as the ocean started to pull its waters away from the island and restore several feet of borrowed shore, the dhows bobbing slowly back to land. In a counter cadence a thronging of fishermen started hauling in their nets, bright streams of wetness running over them as they pulled fist on water-logged fist. She kept closely in step with Mr. Tabbs as he took a path that turned into one tight street after another, each sidewalk part of a little valley pierced with pinpoints of light from the many candles that were already starting to be lit in the windows of two-story stone houses rising up on either side of them. Soon she caught her first glimpse of a donkey, the beast approaching her from the opposite direction, crates stacked on its small but powerful back and its head curled into its own shadow, but the animal still certain in its course. That donkey followed by a second then a third, each donkey raising its face to the others, breath passed from mouth to mouth, owner behind. Ah, the wonder of it all: ocean, island, dhow, donkeys, fishermen. But you’re free now, Mr. Tabbs said. She had tasted the sound of her new identity on her tongue and liked it so much she would call herself nothing else. Free. Emancipated.

The curtains of fog parted and the sun broke its chains and drifted from behind the clouds and found its place, a little bright island floating in the sky. For the first time she saw in full clarity the little green and yellow and pink and orange stone houses of Edgemere, and beyond in the middle distance a tower-like structure that she took to be — Mr. Tabbs pointed, There, he said — the Home set a good mile inland from the ocean in its own alien (an aloneness) terrain, a vast grassy plot, against a blurred background of trees (bleem). The Home hung (floated?) before her eyes, even as she flowed (floated?) toward it. So here she was—Here I am — plugged into this brave new world — where she is now, who she is now — her mind throbbing beyond language, beyond meaning. Thomas. Little Thomas. My Tom. Her eleven-year wait would soon be over thanks to the Almighty — all praise due — who had decided to make the impossible possible through His mysterious means.

Voices reached her even before she and Mr. Tabbs reached the stone fence that rose up from the ground ten feet into the air above them. Passing through the gate, she saw a wild constellation of orphans roaming in playful circles across the wet grass of the main lawn, boys and girls alike dressed in cheerful uniforms (black pants, white shirt or blouse with a length of red tie extending down the front), their voices singing through her skin.

Down, down, baby

Down, down, baby

Down by the riverside

Grandma, grandma sick in bed

She called the doctor and the doctor said

Let’s get the rhythm of the head, ding dong (Heads rock bell-like side to side)

Let’s get the rhythm of the head, ding dong (Heads rock)

Let’s get the rhythm of the hands (Two claps)

Let’s get the rhythm of the hands (Two claps)

She relished this dance that she had seen many times before. Would it be too much to say that she wanted to join them with her old arms, legs, and hips? She pushed to know. They scattered away from the macadam walkway on her approach.

Hey, Mr. Tabbs, sir, they said in one voice from both sides of the lawn. Did you bring us anything from the city?

He got some chocolate.

Some wine candy.

Turtles.

You eat that? That’s nasty.

Nawl. Some cracklin.

Nawl. Some Jumpin Jacks.

Candy cane.

It ain’t Christmas.

He brought the lady.

Who she?

Who you?

She a teacher.

Nawl.

Uh huh.

She his wife.

Nawl.

Uh huh.

No way.

Is that yo wife?

She his wife.

Shut up.

You shut up.

Their next words like their last. A calm Sharpened her as she looked at the face of each child. Carried by memory, she wanted to hear all their voices at once, even if she had to close her eyes to hear them. (What the heart believes it needs.) And even if some (many? most?) of the orphans did not speak the way she was used to hearing niggers speak, but instead, like Mr. Tabbs, vocalized their say with that new city (Edgemere?) way of saying, a tongue that was already starting to sound familiar to her ears. (Mapping language.) She could feel the movement of shared blood, theirs and hers. Why could they not remain one body? They were niggers after all, and every nigger was a slave — so she had been told for as long as she could remember — Africa a whole country full of slaves where woogies could go shop and take their pick. Blood was blood, even if, as she was to learn, Mr. Tabbs and some of the orphans had been born here, on Edgemere or in the city.

All of their humility drained away as they drifted around her, the ground saturated with their dance. Come on inside, Mamma. They wanted to look at her, touch her, get the closest look and feel that they could, eyes in their fingertips. She did not object; she was in thrall to all of them. She and Mr. Tabbs continued up the macadam walk toward the Home accompanied by dozens of rejoicing orphans, their dancing bodies bumping into her. A few minutes later they all moved as one through the dimness of a long wide corridor, the last rays of sunlight persevering in stained glass windows that she would later come to find in every room of the Home except for the chapel. Light shining through biblical scenes — Christ multiplying one dhow into a thousand, Elijah carried into heaven on a chariot of fire, and so on — in variegated pigments, a kind of red-yellow-blue combination (light interwoven) that stood out as the only color through the stained glass. (What Thomas cannot see you look at.) Little that she could make out amid the loose shadows on the rise (three flights of stairs? four?) to an upper floor, but she could tell that the Home was a formidable structure, sturdy and well built with the same thick stones that the other houses on the island were constructed from.

They stopped before a room on a floor of many rooms, the line of children behind Mr. Tabbs and her. Mr. Tabbs slipped one hand into his waistcoat and removed an iron ring that encircled a well-notched key, then slid the key into the door and unlocked it for her to enter, which she did, a little dazed by the speed of things.

This is your room, he said. I will bring your son. The look in his eyes made her feel strange. He took his leave, and the orphans followed him, mostly without complaint, waving their good-byes, feeling exactly the way they wanted to feel, the older children pulling the reluctant younger children along.

Not long after an orphan brought her supper, three fish sleeping side by side on a plate. She ate. Then the night came to shut her in anxious waiting. She felt the walls contract as most of the air in the room swirled around her. Could feel the walls pressing on her skin. She sank off to sleep. Little did she know, it would be one week before she would see Thomas.

Early the next (second) day, Mr. Tabbs called upon her with six or seven orphans in tow, carrying the dresses, blouses, skirts, gowns, stockings and undergarments, and shoes that constituted her new wardrobe. They filled her closets with the clothes and set her table for breakfast, then went away without a word. And Mr. Tabbs repeated what he had said the evening before, that he would bring Thomas to her.

There in her quarters the world dropped away. Morning light so heavy that it almost shattered the stained glass windows as it fell into the room, so heavy that it hurt when it dropped onto her — bearing up in that light, bearing that light — every familiar object in the room (table, chair, bed, closet, lamp, bowl, basin) atremble (quivering), fragile, brittle in the face of such breakage. Like the clouds the walls changed color. She tried to keep very still in the fantastic temperatures of the room and make her way to the fires in her mind where Thomas might be, a place she could never hold for long, light distracting her, as she should be distracted, the sound (hearing) of light searing her flesh. (Light has many names.) Would lean out the window as far as she could, looking down into the ocean’s hush and hurry. And so time would wear on, each frame of the day free and clear in the unclenched light down to the dhows (mechanisms of wind) with their jagged sails, coming and going each hour, their giant hooks — gaffs they were called — coils of fishing line, and baskets visible even from her window. She would take her supper and settle into bed, until the moon appeared (at last) in the night sky, her shutters open and window swallowing a mouthful of stars.

Rooted thus in her quarters, each day passed pretty much the same her first week on the island of Edgemere. The orphans would arrive in triplicate to bring her breakfast, her dinner, and her supper — eventually, she and they came to acknowledge one another without astonishment — and, supper done, she would have to get out of bed to receive a new visitor each evening. On the third supper-curtained day, a giant stooped under the lintel and lengthened his body into the room — the wonder of it, all her life happened long before this — then stood there in all of his tall broad majesty in his billowing robe, a wild mangle of folds. The curious circumstances of his height, which elicited feelings of attraction and repulsion, protection and terror, placed him beyond the physical confines of handsome and ugly. (His face hardly registered.) He introduced himself as Reverend Wire. Even his voice made a powerful impression on her. Sometimes God chooses not to explain. Sister Wiggins, if you need answers I would encourage you to sojourn to that place where only the Holy Ghost can take us through prayers. Whenever he delivered his weekly sermon to the seated assemblage in the chapel, it was the word of the Almighty writing Himself on her flesh. Many of us believe that God gives us too little. Oh, how wrong we are. Let me tell you, my children, that when God gives He gives in excess. Make no mistake about that. It is for each of us to take full advantage of His plentiful quantities. The five senses exist for more than five reasons. He who listens too hard does not see. And he who looks too hard does not hear. To all appearances he was completely at ease sermonizing from his lofty position at the pulpit, his long arms fully extended beneath him on either side of the podium to support his long body, which jutted all the way forward over the podium at a precarious angle as if he were about to make an acrobatic effort to jacknife his lower extremities into the air and stand (balance) on his hands.

Each Sunday the orphans make a spirited march into the chapel as one organized body, more than two hundred of them — how many lives can go on at once? — only to break into playful frenzy: bodies planted between the furrows of pews, hiding-and-seeking, hands scooping up coins of sunlight scattered across the floor, lips drumming rhymed banter — the Dozens they called it — all of their endeavors bright and hopeful. Talking, playing, laughing, until they realize that she is there in the chapel with them and they surge forward — the aspect of delight insists upon a closer look — welcoming her with daisied smiles. They want to hold, to be held. Perhaps she gives one or two of them a hug. The watching faces swoop down from the wall in a swarm of armed appearances so that the service can begin. We give thanks for the young ones among us, who remind us how much we need to do to create with them a better world. We should not indict our children with our deeds and ambitions. So what must we say? The orphans all hold her hand — what else means anything to them? — or the dense folds of her pleats. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal. There’s a fullness here, some surplus, that she won’t respond to. (Is that it?) She can only empty herself with prayer. I was reading the Book of Corinthians the other day and I came across this strange verse. Let me read it to you: 1 Corinthians 12:17 says, “If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be?” The rest of the verse is also strange: “If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?” She takes a good hard look at the children, her hesitations blurred. Each Sunday she brings herself to the chapel, but she knows she is not enough. For all of their dawdling, their moping and whining, their store of groans and paroxysms of wails and howls that accompany the sorrow of her leaving the chapel after Sunday service, Reverend Wire is reluctant to take the whip or rod to their backsides. They give reason for cruelty, but he has opted for accommodation. (Quiet feelings come to suffice.) God makes us good, but it is our duty and responsibility as Africans and as Christians to be better. Think about it. Turn it over in your heart.

The fourth day, a figured shaft of air spiraled in the doorway, Deacon Double bringing the scent of earth and flowers. Awkwardly smiling, awkwardly received. He inclined his posture toward her — this impulse to lean forward, to lean across — nodded, and took her hand but took it too hard. A quaver, a fumbling, a missed beat, a smile held too long. His head rested egg-like softly on his shoulders, and his narrow eyes and broad forehead reminded her of a statue with its fixed sculpted eyes, an ancient granite face (his skin gray). He moved buoyantly around the candlelit room but with almost hoofed (goat, horse, deer) precision, stepping slowly and carefully as if on dangerous terrain. While circulating he looked around with curious insistence, intoning words as if he were singing in the voice of someone twice his size. Sister, he said, be patient, and keep your head high, for the one you are waiting for will soon be here. I believe that the time is at hand when the sons of God shall be revealed—stopping every now and again for a lingering look, that sconce on the wall, those porcelain knobs on the cupboard doors, the ill-fitting drawers, his skin changing color depending on where he stood in the room, now yellow like the bedsheets, now red like the clay pitcher, as she had heard that certain magical lizards could do in Africa. I saw a door standing open in heaven, and the same voice I had heard before spoke to me with the sun of a mighty trumpet blast. The voice said, Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things. So I went up and I saw. She tries to understand the riot of his words — I marvel at the sun which is not afraid to repeat itself and at the seasons that come again and again, or the bee returning to the flower, and at new things repeating the old—for he has a thousand proverbs and verses to hand, one for every occasion. Those are hurt who want to be hurt. Agony does not only belong to the heart. And thus do the innocent suffer. Not because God is punishing them but because they have very little power to stop what is causing their suffering. But power with others can change the world. The spirit bears the body forward. Charity pleased to learn something new and useful, although she said nothing to him about her gratification. Each glass-globed and sconced flame burning on the wall bent toward him as he passed. (He bent the light toward him.)

After some time he stopped walking, light collecting around him. (She bedazzled, swayed by movement, words, light.) He lost the sense of inexhaustible and energetic joy and gained a certain mundane solemnity and rigidity, but even as he stood in place directly before her he kept touching himself — his shirt pockets, his trouser pockets, his hair — as if he were searching for something. Talking always, holding counsel. From all evidence he was a man who had lived and still lives a God-fearing and God-directed prayer-stained life. All of the schemes and deceptions of the past are past. You are with us now, you are among us now, you are one of us now. Here you have found sanctuary. This is your resting place. So be patient, sister. The hour of our redemption is soon near. Once he ceased to speak, he stood for a time in silence until she observed his right hand cross his body, disappear into the cavernous sleeve of his robe, and withdraw to her astonishment a weathered copy of the Good Book. He brought the tome to his lips, kissed it, allowed his book-heavy hand to fall to his side, then remained silent and completely still as if in preparation for more. A strong possibility that he had a second heavy book up the other sleeve. For all she knew this man full of words had an entire library hidden in the recesses of his garments or his body. He opened the book, the smell of an earlier time (Bible days) leaking out of the pages, and read some passage—… an old battleground (limbs strewn around) — the pages whispering as he turned them. He touched her arm. Spread his fingers on her back. Sister, I hope you are ready. Time is waiting. We — you, Tom, the church — we have much work to do. Multitudes will sing his name once again. But this time he will sing for us.

Would it be that a dozen or more of the brightest orphans with their teachers (light shining through their dresses) paid her a brief visit the next morning, her fifth day? Not that they meant to tell her anything or take anything away from her. (Unlike her other visitors.) She was still an other, but they had decided to take her in with compassion and trust. How tender of them. After all she was somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Later she sat in the foreign evening thinking about the deacon’s words from the day before, seeing this place the way he saw it, as a getting-away place. And just as her thoughts began to settle, she heard the door. Found a man in his prime neatly tucked into his blue uniform, with his little cup of cap above his uneven eyes, his hair in glossy slicked-back waves, and a brass-buckled belt encircling his waist, with a revolver sheathed inside a polished leather holster, a braided cord looped in its handle. Lieutenant Drinkwater. His hand moved in swift short strokes, and their blood neared in a quick clasp, a brisk intensity. Wire brought word of your arrival, he said. He was so excited. I don’t think I have ever seen him so excited. So I was dandering by and thought I might as well call. The line of his thin brown lips eluding his words. What was there for her to say? (She brings little to the scene.) These simple facts closed an evening.

Although she often wondered that week why Mr. Tabbs was taking so long to return with Thomas, truth be told, she was also happy to remain confined in her quarters, looking at dhows fixed on the sea, lapping waves, and the sun bobbing weightless on the horizon. (Where is the earth? Nowhere.) She knew nothing worth knowing, for the walls silenced all trace of the world, could keep any voices in earshot out of her, the small floating lives of all those orphans. (Some excitement puddling into laughter.) Nothing slowed or sped her. For her time was not divided into seconds and hours but into light and sound. (Hold sound and light apart.) So she assumed small guilts and was content to eat her meals, tolerate her visitors, retire to bed, enjoy a night of unbroken sleep, and wake at daylight looking at the floor.

She was among people far too eager to have her, to receive her. Their admiration, their enthusiasm. (If only she could feel incredible to herself.) Only her last caller seemed to express any reluctance, that small-hours visitant on the sixth day. As the door opened, he was slightly turned as if ready to go away, sensing he had disturbed her. Perhaps the candor of the light dismayed him. Then he turned to face her and her throat dried quicker than a match put to a kerosene-wet wick. He was well groomed and slim with a muscular elegance — how would you have him? — his medium-height frame encased in a perfectly tailored suit. She immediately felt underdressed in her new clothes and her old scarf on the sweat-wet nest of her hair. He made his sign, spoke his greeting. His well-shaved face did not know what expression to hold. She was happy to feel him take her hand, touch that convinces the hand. (Let’s see how she felt that day.) His voice rose up thick and comforting. You can take me or leave me. At her invitation he sat down easily in a chair at the table. The story is his thick hands holding a glass of water in the unruly afternoon light. So much is misunderstood about your presence here, he said. And your son. Especially him. His left hand pressed the loose fabric of his waistcoat to his chest. It is my sincere hope that both you and he come out the better for it. And that was the start of it, this Mr. Ruggles putting words together for her purpose.

With him hunkered into his angle at the table she came to know his seasoned intelligence. I’ve had some dealings with the planters, I’ve been there, I’ve seen. (Who can prove one place more than another?) Surely there must be something they share beyond that? And then he said something else to her, and she spoke back, the table becoming conversation where nothing had been. She felt grateful and grounded as they lived against each other, their talk widening and widening. Indeed, she did what she could to hold him at the table as long as she could. He gentled the long afternoon by sitting with her. Her feet twitched. And her hands. They took the evening as it came. Darkness moving under the table and along the walls. Aware of the smell of burning wax, the heat of the flames, the cool night air. She ate her supper, and he watched her. (The orphan pleaded with him to sup too, but he would not.) They sat in the dark until she got up to light the candles. What was the conversation about for three hours, for all evening?

Her head cleared in the hard morning light. She watched the wind fall back across the water and birds caught in midair by her own wonderment. Watched them drift through layered currents like white lace torn away from a dress. And rake their claws into the ocean. She had to bend and twist — oh her aching back — to register these clear occurrences of Nature. A few notes from a piano floated across the water — she heard it — a flat sound on the waves, music that suggested some gathering in the distance, and she seemed to remember something that she thought long forgotten.

But before memory could resurface, yet another orphan called upon her. Ma’m, you are wanted in the chapel. The orphan’s voice joyous in telling her this. He gave her his brightest smile. So she followed him, her footsteps attached to those of this boy who preceded her, her gaze held by the narrow openings into the classrooms and workshops side by side with one another — none of the rooms connect — crammed full with children and piled high with books, tools, and materials (leather, brick, iron), orphans at their desks working on their letters and numbers. (She likes the sound of words doing what they do.) At their workbenches and anvils, sewing machines and looms, side-glancing her as she passes them. (Mamma, she could hear them whisper. Mamma.)

When they entered the chapel she saw that the vast open stage was crowded with Mr. Tabbs and the men she had come to know over the previous days as Mr. Ruggles, Lieutenant Drinkwater, Deacon Double (a tight smile on his face), and Reverend Wire, along with other men she had not met and did not recognize against the big wooden cross, the Bible (bound in animal hide) open on the podium at the center of a stage and the humiliating glare and polish of other objects she could not name on the altar. And there he was (the ocean air and light found his form), a man-boy clearly outlined against the piano shaped like a spreading stain (puddle). She saw him and thought, That can’t be him. That can’t be my Thomas. My Tom. Long white tunic with buttons big as medals and gold fringe on the chest. White trousers with black stripes down the sides. His shoulders as broad as Mingo’s. And a string of other features she can no longer remember. (What she saw.) She opened her mouth to speak, but only muddled sound stumbled out. So she moved toward him to feel what remained, but at her touch, he peeled his bulky frame away from her skin.

Are you her? he said.

Seeing the trouble, Reverend Wire laid his hands firmly on Thomas’s head in the same steady manner that she was to see time and time again.

Finding speech, she thanked the Reverend for his intervention, although inside she was locked up in a curious double mood: angry (would that be the word?) that her reunion with Thomas had assumed this public form, the anger even more so, even more acute after she had been forced (no other way to put it) to live in pause for a week waiting for this reunion, no reason given, no apologies offered.

And all of this was true. Still, that first day back in their chambers she was delighted. She had her Thomas back with her at last. (Praise be His name.) But as time went on — the next day and the day after that and the others that followed — he remained detached from her in the guessing silence. Not that it troubled her. She told herself that if Tom remained deaf (to her) that was only because she had not tried hard enough, spoken loud enough. So those first weeks, she tried so hard, would say whatever words drifted onto her tongue. But still he said nothing and kept her firmly at a distance. Silence on the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the nose in the palms of her hands. In fact, he gave no indication that he could even hear the sound of her voice — had he become deaf? — continued to shrink and shrivel away, only a little bread each day to keep the taste of the world on his tongue. Feed me banks of light. Perhaps he was sick. Perhaps he needed a doctor.

Meeting her concern, Reverend Wire, a man of the cloth and a healer (two hats, two-heads), examined him. Dr. Wire watched Thomas’s chest rise and fall, put his ear to Thomas’s chest and listened as if to a broken watch, held down his tongue with two fingers and looked into his throat, picked up each hand by the wrist, counted the pulse of his blood.

His body is perfectly fine, the two-headed preacher-doctor said. But this business of reunification is too much for him, too upsetting, a shock to what he knows and expects. You must give him time. The return to himself will take time.

A return she is still waiting for. In this life I have heard your promise and I am ready to serve. Waiting for Thomas her Thomas to emerge from this man. She spends each day looking for ways to fill in the hours, to stretch them out so that they can run into each other. How bout we play our game now? Waiting is one thing a nigger knows how to do. So she can wait a little longer. Time on her hands. All the time in the world. She reserves all of patience and tolerance for Thomas as she did at Hundred Gates so many years ago. I am the only one. She feels justified in her determination, thinking only about the person he can become, she can become. But each day rebuilds itself like the one before. Tomorrow he will install himself there onstage before the piano at his body’s insistence and so will she on this same pew. So have all the days been and perhaps they shall be for a long time to come. How deeply must he be touched to enter?

Now she hears it, a breath breaking open, almost like a strangled cry that comes again and again — listen to it — huh, huh, huh. His mouth causing the shape of his face to change, some new face trying to be born. She falls under the spell of the cadences of her son’s breathing, the two of them sounding as one, until his breath quiets after a final whistle.

The bell rings, signaling the end of instruction for the day, the orphans released from learning and labor. Time now for an orphan to escort them back to their quarters — as if they don’t know their way by now, as if they will get lost in the halls — and for her and Thomas to retire their troubled skin until tomorrow. The strangeness of light between Thomas and his piano, the fine edge gleaming around his body. He is touched with heat, flushed — could it be? — a little red even. She sees the reflections of his hands in the piano’s laminated shine, hands that are useless on Edgemere. Thomas, leave that piano be. What will put them back into motion?

Let us join hands in prayer, Reverend Wire said.

Your hand hot, Thomas said. Fire. A faggot of fire.

Now she hears it, her breath a flat tune limping its way out of her mouth. She cannot trust what even her own body tells her. The thing she is feeling now fits nothing she knows. Pain but she can’t say where. Now she understands that this is a new hurt, an all-over hurt happening beneath the skin, the grinding friction caused by two bodies, past and present, moving up against each other inside one skin. (That accounts for why she feels so heavy all of the time.) Or is his silence taking her apart nervewise? (No, that can’t be it.) So she starts to say what she has actually wanted to say but had put off saying because it had seemed premature, begins to remind him (again?) about the blackberry patch that grew wild off the road to Hundred Gates, the crooked tree with its white peeling bark, the horse behind the rock quarry, the hills like beached whales, all the rises and curves of the land, the sloping riverbank, the minnows wheeling in the shallows — even now there’s something she keeps trying to say that never comes out right; what is the language that will keep their past as it should be? — the earth odors and rock odors and plant odors and animal odors. (His spirit lives for her in such odors.) The light on Sunday mornings, those Sunday mornings. She sees his face move, sees it go sideways on his neck, tracing a movement from one end of the keyboard to the other then back again, and so on, as if he were reading a book. But nothing manifests. She feels blocked about saying anything else. Perhaps her words come too late. She can admit the letdown to herself.

She looks at his face, his lidded-over eyes, and something in her unhouses itself. Now she understands. He does not remember because he cannot remember. What the eyes see is preserved in the orbs themselves, where sight is stored in the seeing. Tom cannot see; hence, he cannot remember, has nothing to see to remember. Something opens between them. Who is she to want to hang back there? None of that matters anymore. It is less a question of where and when — the hills that go doubling back, the bedding straw piled to one side — and more of how and what—she knows the why—her useless nostalgia draining away. She must create the right conditions. Unless she does something now, right now, tomorrow will be the same, him up there and her down here. Is it possible for her to learn to do what he does? (What better way?) The space for it exists in her, now that she has been freed from Hundred Gates, freed from labor, her time and body her own. (If you have a song to sing then sing it right this minute.) Not that she could ever get music the way he got it, from the getting place. Called. Marked. Sounds planted deep inside him. (Why he moves the way he moves, walks the way he walks). A story foretold.

She can pinpoint the day when music claimed him. The day when in the haze of a rainy afternoon a wet wind, with him still unborn in her womb, she stumbled into the center of town, Broad Street, more relaxed than she should have been for someone expecting a child. She might have been six months belly-round then. She had been sent on some errand — sweep the floor into the fire, shake the dust into the wind — but she can no longer recall who sent her or for what reason. The first thing she remembers seeing: niggers bent over or kneeling cleaning up a wagonload of apples that had burst open on the road. The wind brought the sound of whistles, drums, and fifes. She let her gaze float in the direction of the sound just as a brigade of woogies and niggers in plumed regalia came marching into view at the other end of the street. She stopped walking and stood facing fixedly this disturbance. Eight musicians in all — if memory serves — two whistles and two fifes and two bass drums and two kettledrums that kept them in stride. What was the occasion, the reason for the jubilation? The nodding accepting crowd granted the band passage. Wagons and carriages halted to let them through. For some reason she remembers more about the woogies and niggers who were walking on the sidewalk and in the street that day than she can about the individuals who made up the brigade, can actually picture one bent woogie head after another concealing a grim gaze, heavy heads under bright parasols — so was it some sad occasion? a mourning? — and a nigger herdsman (all the herdsmen were niggers) driving his bell-tinkling flock — cows? goats? Sheep? — down the street. High-stepping, the brigade paraded their bannering sounds from one end of Broad Street to the other, then circled back again. Then the fife players called out a line, and the drummers whooped and moaned in response, and they all began to dance and sway. And so did she.

The air smells faintly of burning — leaves, refuse, and shit (donkey), never the smell of kerosene or coal since Edgemere has neither — is sweet with the pugency of wood fires. Will she get to go out into the open today? She lifts her eyes, frets to see through the high high windows. Maybe if they actually leave the chapel, leave the Home — she has hardly gone out of the asylum the two or three months she’s been here on Edgemere — to knock along the shore. They will walk and sing — singing shortens the road, lessens the distance — his hand with its heat and bones just so around her, the measure of the sweetest promise, as the dhows drift inland. What a good idea. So they will get up and go now.

She leans back and hears (feels) her bones crack. The sound severs whatever it is that anchors the stage in place and yanks it free of its moorings. The stage begins to drift about the room. Thomas panics, afraid of drowning. Reaches out with both hands and grabs the rim of the piano in the gap between the soundboard and the cantilevered lid and he sits there with the piano fastened to his long outstretched arms.

What has she done? Then something clatters into the air. She turns at the sound. Can barely make out slow-moving figures crawling along the floor, tunneling between pews, row after row, and coming up for space and air, the hide and seek of laughing faces, one boy almost connected caterpillar-like to the boy in front or behind him, their shadows sealed together.

Yall better get up from there.

…

You heard me.

Ah, Mamma. We ain’t doing nothing.

We jus come to see.

Ain’t nothing to see, she says.

…

You ain’t hear me?

Faces and bodies sprout up from between the benches. Four, five, six.

Look at that blind nigger.

He yo son?

Yall get. Gon now.

Hey, Mamma. We jus lookin.

Is he gon play that pianer?

When he gon play it?

I bet you he don’t even know how to play it.

Yah had better gone.

We jus want to see him play that pianer.

Yeah. Ain’t nobody botherin you.

I ain’t gon tell you again.

What?

I ain’t gon tell you again.

Mother, ain’t nobody scared of you.

Wit yo old ass. The boy’s lips draw down in a sickly sneer.

She grabs her bowie knife by its bone handle and gets up from her chair. The boys scatter, their eyes bright with terror. They had better. Let them tremble and beware. Where she comes from stab is another word for knife. Slit another word for throat. Shank another word for dead.

Get up on I the one.

What? she asks. Thomas has slurred something. Thomas—my Tom—what did you say? And the more she doesn’t say. Go ahead. Don’t stop now. Cat got your tongue? Speak to her as if he is the past. Thomas, please tell me—

Then, as if this is the sign (word) he has been waiting for, he breaks into movement, starts fingering the ivories hard and with purpose, and just like that he is Little Thomas again, the Blind Tom that the world knew. A three-headed song — how many melodies can the air hold? — that pulls him this way and that, and that pulls her into the circle of melodies. See, silence could not hold him forever, because he is who he is, a Wiggins (not a Bethune), her and him both, one, same blood, like to like.

Then his fingers stop making sense. Why has he stopped playing?

Why you stop?

The ox is on my tongue.

What? What did you say? Willing herself futilely to be calm. In fact, she can hear the calmness of her own voice as if from a distance. Thomas, please tell me—

Take me. The only one.

Thomas?

But the words wilt right there. He turns wordlessly back to the piano. Holds up his big hands and shows her them, front then back, knuckles on display. She has no idea what this gesture means. Tom gathered in his own arms.

Wire thinks back to last night when the ocean claimed so many, passengers busy underwater, their mouths and throats full like overflowing chalices even as their eyes were burning, red. Not that he could see them in full detail really since he could only make out the contours of bodies trying to keep above the waves and the ferry hanging on the horizon as if pinned to the sky before it was carried under. And then he was being drawn down too and could hear his fellow passengers, the wet groaning language of his brethren and sistren through his soaked skin, the ocean wild around him with foam and glitter and swarming colors. In unison they upped and downed and scissored their arms and legs. Then as the light began to fan out and open up and land and sky began to assemble themselves around him, he realized with astonishment that he was as much excited by what he had dreamed as he was terrified. Why?

Defined against the sky, the dhows consume him with their overwhelming presence, teetering and tottering under the constant force of water and wind, bewitched currents that dance light and wood to their own needs. Only yesterday he had blessed the boats to start the fishing season. May you open your eyes to water and may the creatures of the sea open their mouths to hooks. The serenity and calm in the ocean, in the land, and in the heavens, even in the straight still trees, is almost enough to distract him as he makes his rounds through the camps, but once inside an encampment with its dark little tents and stooped figures in rags, misery in drabness is thrown back to him, tells him where he is. The tents turn around to look at him and the refugees mutter suitable thanks and praises, their attention commanded (he tells himself) through his simple unadorned presence rather than his height, his learning, his profession, his verses and prescriptions and treatments and medicines. The refugees line up in a long queue, as if they have come to present their lives — well, in a sense they have, haven’t they? — his hands active and his eyes full. One by one he takes the measure of them. Each person he examines tenses up and assumes odd angles like a model sitting for a portrait (study). The human body dazzles the imagination with existence from crown to heel bone, from the brain riding in the head to the winding provinces of the intestines and the heart that branches with its wild arteries and the muscles of the back that somehow remain steady and strong under stress and strain. These Freedmen suffer in silence, try to hide their hurt (sorrow just sits and rocks), although here in the camps heartache and sorrow have nowhere to hide.

How are you feeling? Which part is paining you? Are you able to eat?

They kill his ears with their barely audible words. So he composes habits for the camps so that these Freedmen’s expectations will be neither gluttonous nor starved. Liniments and elixirs that can bring the blood back to the cheeks and heat to numb digits and limbs. His method of strengthening and enlarging the circulatory and respiratory systems by diet, rigor, and breathing. (See Avicenna.)

The refugees burrow their bodies under damp blankets, settling in for the night. (The thought of them that evening in the camp.)

Now the song calls him.

Oh for three words of honey, and two strips of fatback

that I might tell but one wonder of thy wedding night

That seems to be the song of the moment in the camps, can’t miss it, it is everywhere, and he makes a record of it in his head for future reference, no telling how the information may prove useful down the line — words you say to show that you are one of them, words to put in a sermon. So let them sing. (Sing yourself to where the song comes from.) Whenever he is lost deep within himself their songs call him out. The children follow him around the well, singing. Dear water, clear water, playful in all your streams.

Who does not love to hear them and see them, perfect in music and movement? With his listening funnel, he hears the way history sounds in a chest—Into the air, as breath into the wind—the lungs taking up their work. Judges the force of circulation with just the lightest touch along the wrist, feeling the sequence of intervals — loud and soft, regular or irregular — as they abide in the pulse, the blood banging in the body. He finds the true extension of himself in them, in all of the refugees, these Freedmen, but the landscape (what he sees) is inexact in its slant of figures, facts of the flesh suggesting fewer souls than are actually here. The city still has nowhere to place them all despite the makeshift and quickly constructed houses put up on new streets. And so much is in short supply. Victuals, medicine, clothing, soap, tents, blankets and bedding, lamps, kerosene. The provisions of food and other necessities made available to them through the Bureau and through the Christian goodwill of the Red Cross, Action Now, and the League of Churches dwell in awkward distribution inside their silos. The body is owned by hunger. So the body says. But not even these shortages can spoil the children. Take this as proof: a group of boys have made glassless spectacles from orange rinds. It is your own self you hunger for. How clever.

In the last camp on his rounds — each day this human coming and going into the camps — the refugees are busy with grief. They carry a coffin high above their heads and move in equal pace, swaying from side to side. They believe in giving the coffin a dance, action that is not work, but matter itself through which the work navigates, the commandments of metal and wood. Once the coffin is comfortably tucked into the freshly dug grave, he says his say then they pour their libations. (All in man that mourns and seeks.) And he trembles inside himself, undone for a moment by the three or four things that can happen to a man in the camps. He and the mourners turn away.

For whatever reason, he looks back to see bored children leaping over the grave.

Ah, that dead nigger is going off to glory.

Around their wood fires the refugees melt into light, but there is nothing luminous about this. (In the fading light does the sound of the water also darken?) Holy is that dark which will neither promise nor explain. He is no fool. Knows that their bodies, as the bodies of us all, are promised to something more certain than Emancipation or Liberty or Happiness: Death. However, the trouble with them — his people, us—is that we are always preparing to die.

Body, ain’t you lonesome?

Lay down a little while

Body, ain’t you tired?

Lay down a little while

The challenge (always) is to win their hearts and their minds and change the way they view themselves and their situation. He has to both kill the nigger (slave) inside and bring the African out. Such are the selves they struggle with and are struggling out of.

What pains have we not felt? What suffering have we not known? (The thoughts of a wise man in the language of common African folk.)

Who understands better than he does their hunger and desperation? Slavery taught them the ways of doubt so that they may believe. Life knows no time or limits. Even death makes life.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Jehovah has double blessed him with the gift of gab (mouth) and the gift of healing (hands), talking and touching his way into the truths these professions require. Once more he put his hands upon the man’s eyes, and his sight was restored and he saw everything clearly. So illuminate he can and illuminate he will until every single person in the camps, until each refugee in the cell of himself is convinced of his freedom.

Brothers and sisters, the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. But behold, I tell you that we stand at the edge of centuries facing a new era of ten thousand years, and He, Almighty Jehovah, stands with us. It all comes together here, all there ever was is now. Soon you will rise and walk away from this life. You and I both, together, will rise and enter a holy house, on this earth, not in the heaven above. Until then hold on.

His heart beyond both worry and anguish: Light breaks where no light was before, where no eye was prepared to see, and animals rise up to walk.

These ideas have their satisfaction. They turn a rambling and brutal chronicle of bondage and pain and abuse and injustice into a neatly structured story of triumph where the African (black sheep) awakens to the fullness of his strength and inherits a plentiful earth, some forty thousand acres along with a million mules.

Bright stars fixed in thick light in the black night sky beckon. Jehovah willing, he can now go home and take a moment to grieve, catch some shut-eye, then rise fresh and resume work on Sunday’s sermon, “God Has a Hand in It.” Holding on to God’s unchanging hand. My people—

My people? People don’t belong to you. You belong to them, but only if they let you. So let me. Whatever it takes, he will do, he is willing. By any means necessary.

Doctor Reverend. Mr. Reverend. Pastor, Doctor, sir. Reverend Doctor. Pastor, sir.

I’m listening, he says. Tell me what you have to say. He can’t help thinking that there is something mysterious about the way the boy accosts him.

The boy speaks his piece. Them soldiers paid me this quarter, the boy says. The boy holds it up so he can see it, as if he needs convincing.

He wishes he could pay the boy two quarters or a dollar, bargain some sum that will relieve him of the obligation to travel to the soldiers’ camp in Central Park. He can’t. The hour of his seeming quiet has passed. So he dismisses the boy and simply stands there waiting for his second wind — is he struggling for breath? — and diligently gauging his own mood, not proud about what he is thinking. God means to impose impossible tasks on him and others like him until they breathe their last.

Central Park is a distance he can cross by foot, and he will cross it by foot no matter how tired he is, moving hesitantly as if he fears stepping into a hole. He sees big gashes in the sidewalk, unusual colors showing through, and has the distinct impression that the buildings are sinking into their foundations, dwellings freighted with the city’s past, year upon year. His eyes seek out something else. (The city does not tell its past.) Outside of him — way back, beyond — are others of unknown number. He knows that they are watching him even if the city to him is his own tongue. Is it possible for him to forget the rank and rancid odors that wafted across the ocean into Edgemere after he had taken up exile there? Most terrible of all in those first months were the rumors, yet to be proven these many years later, circulating among the fellow exiles on Edgemere (and even a few of the natives) about profitable new industries on the mainland, hats and ties and vests and chaps and belts and shoes made from African skin, which, for a time at least, surpassed the same products made from chupacabra leather; vials filled with the semen of hanged men — sales surpassing (supply and demand) gourds filled with morning dew and wineskins filled with Italian, French, or Spanish water — and tea made from weeds that had sprouted up where men had pissed themselves moments before death. Is memory (the facts and rumors and the speculations created by the facts and rumors) what spurs him on?

Trees at a wet and dripping distance mark his progress across the Main Lawn of Central Park. Grass sprouting from the ground underfoot. (The landscape is something he moves across.) What is that large feeling he notices spreading in the air even before he reaches the guard-(gate)-house? The entire bivouac gripped by an apprehensive energy. The blocky house is stark, self-announcing, and though the room is austere and cramped inside, it is oddly partitioned into two distinct apartments with rifles and bayonets and trunks of ammunition in the first, and a table-dominated sitting area in the second, where the men, veterans of the war to free the Negro, are engaged in voluble discourse, gazing into each other’s eyes as they talk. Aggression holds everything together: room, arms and ammunition, table, the light coming from kerosene lamps that casts murals on the walls from the shadows of the animated men, the afterimages of light. He has long been curious. They have killed. They have killed white men. But he has never said anything to them about it and they have said nothing to him. Still, they are part of something, and he is part of it with them, a simple allegiance.

With cognition of his presence the room plunges into complete silence. He walks briskly to his usual place at the table, although he knows that there is no reason for him to hurry. Why are you hurrying? And before he has even gotten fully comfortable in his seat he is wholly given over to their troubles — it would seem that the city has demanded that they relinquish their arms — all talking at once — in their urgency they forget to thank him for coming — voicing ideas that strike him as unacceptable.

He feels a little dizzy with the cacophony and also because the table has been wiped down (polished) with kerosene to keep the flies away. (This act performed much earlier in the day, for surely they know that flies don’t fly at night.) The entire room smells like fuel, like burning, smoke, fire.

Wait, someone says. God damn it. I said wait. Have you loss your hearing or something? Well, shut your goddamn mouth.

Around the table all of the men in uniform follow Drinkwater’s lead, hands gathered together on the white surface of the table along with the bottles and glasses. Although he is a lieutenant, Drinkwater is a man of silence who is happier listening to others than leading the conversation himself. He accepts a glass of whiskey — emancipated from some dead Confederate’s pantry (the planters are all dead)—and seeks the face of the soldier who puts it in his hands.

You think I want to sit here listening to all that jawing and whining? Sound like a bunch of women. I want to hear what Reverend Wire has to say. But yall carry on if you like.

Drinkwater is an intense young man but pleasant usually, easy to see how he became a lieutenant.

Now that Drinkwater has commanded silence, the veterans are all waiting on him, Wire, so he says, Do I have to be the one to say it? then frowns noncommittally.

Yes, Reverend, you do. Deacon Double looks him in the eye. Several of the soldiers nod their heads in approval. Until that moment the Deacon had escaped his notice, just another shadow blending in with the other shadows on the wall, but sitting there now — his sun-touched skin and his hair close and curling as if he has all he can take. Is there any reason why you should not?

In the expression on Drinkwater’s face Wire detects a hint of unease, as if Double’s question conceals some other question, both provocative and wounding.

He wants to give wise advice without forcing it on anyone. Be that as it may, he says, because they have already inked it into law. They did not deliberate. They did not survey our thoughts and recommendations. Because they know full well that we can put up no challenge to their laws since they hold suzerainty over all articles and declarations and ordinances and codes and decrees.

With his impassive face Double looks like he has nothing better to do than to sit there and listen to him say what he already knew he would say. Does any man here care about their laws?

God damn they law.

Spit on every one of they laws.

Piss.

Shit.

What law?

I got they law. I got they law right here.

And they are all talking at once again. He tries to think above their shouts to and at each other. He goes deep into himself for a visit to his own knowable connections to them. (Move in memory.) Even in later years he will encounter by chance some man of the Race who will stop him on the street and remind him that it was he, Wire, who had recruited him to the war cause so many decades ago. The campaign to put men of color in uniform and on the battlefield had required herculean efforts, a crusade sown with false starts and sidesteps and humiliations and betrayals and failures.

Mr. President, in order to prevent enrollment of Negroes in the rebel services, and induce them to run to, instead of from, the Union forces, the government, you, Sir, must undertake the commissioning and promotion of Negro men now in the army, according to merit. How, you might wonder, can you overcome the inevitable objections of white officers and conscripts to the commissioning of Negro officers? I have the remedy, Mr. President. It is my most important suggestion to you. And I think it is just what is required to complete the prestige of the Union army to penetrate through the heart of the South, and make conquests, with the banner of Emancipation unfurled, proclaiming freedom as they go, sustaining and protecting the freed men, leaving a few veterans among them when occasion requires, and keeping this banner unfurled until every slave is free, according to the letter of your proclamation. I would also take from those men already in the service all who are competent for commissioned officers, and establish at once in the South a camp for instructions. By this we could have in about three months an army of forty thousand Negroes in motion, the presence of which anywhere would itself be a power irresistible. Mr. President, you should have an army of Negroes commanded entirely by Negroes, the sight of which is required to give confidence to the slaves, and retain them in the Union, stop foreign intervention, and speedily bring the war to a close …

Yours, subscribed,

Penning and talking the flashy errands of his dreams into existence. (Word anything into being.) A thousand bodies he made active by one slogan or another—White people must learn to listen. Africans must learn to talk—although, truth to tell, the men he had approached required little persuading. In the future when he encounters a man that he had recruited, he and the former soldier will exchange the usual kind of polite talk before the latter begins to interrogate Wire about his present life — a doctor still? a man of the cloth? the name of his church? wife? Seed? grandseed? names, ages, and number? — at which point Wire will find some reason to excuse himself. Not that he will feel either guilty or ashamed about his past actions and deeds. Indeed, he will still be able to hold his head high about the things he had tried to do.

So how can he back away, back out of this now? Up to his eyes in it. I have heard a lot of talk, he says, plenty of talk, although in theory he has nothing against talking for the sake of talking. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you are looking for.

Go tell them no, we won’t give up our arms.

Yes, Reverend. Put it to them.

I ain’t givin up what’s mine. I don’t care what their law say.

Yeah. They want my rifle, let them come here and take it from me.

He notices a murky exchange of glances between Drinkwater and one of his men, his second-in-command.

What about my house? Drinkwater says. I haven’t heard them say one word about that. They want my rifle, they give me back my house.

Our day is our loss, Double says.

I understand how you feel, Wire says. I know what you feel. You don’t think that I feel the same way? I feel the same way. Am I not one of you? I am one of you. But you know these people. I don’t need to tell you, I don’t need to tell any man seated at this table. You know these people. They will invoke some statute or decree and demand notarized deeds. He can see his gloomy words move like black slugs over the bodies of the men seated around the table.

So we invoke, Double says. We demand. We bargain, exchange.

The right to return.

What they took from us. What they owe us.

You put it to them, Reverend.

Eyes bright, Double is looking with a question, a challenge, as it seems he was born to do. Always both for you and against you at the same time. A contradiction.

Wire hears in the silence that follows their desire for his approval and thus his support, advocacy, agency, his willingness to author acts on their behalf. Who will speak for them (us) if he doesn’t? He belongs to them.

Although the hour is late, the first thing he does when he arrives at the Home is to go visit with the boy Tom and his reserved mother in the rustle of fine fabric that Tabbs has provided her (at considerable expense).

Preacher, Tom says, you smell like dirt.