Song of the Shank

Bird That Never Alights on the Trees (1849–1856)

“… gossiping with two hands.”

HE CAN’T SEE IT, CAN ONLY FEEL ITS WARMTH ON HIS SKIN, feathers of light and shadow. Steady light. Everything waits to be seen, wants to be seen, and remembered. The world taunts him with its sights. But touch is his primary means of witnessing the world. Taking stock. Fingers the patterned ridges of tree bark, which reveal less of what is actually there — weight, density — offering only the skeletal outline of some longing.

Sound too. Birds warbling in motionless air. A barking dog. Snakes in tree branches that repeat the same songs. And frogs that croak slowly in day and crickets that chirp quickly in night. And ants that dance a frenzy over a meal. And the crackling noise of a flame.

Animation surprises him. (What lives leans into the sun.) Flies hovering about his nose, a mingling of pleasure and suspense. He does not drive them away. The world rushes at him alarmingly from every side. How do his fingers measure and remember?

In vibrations of grass earth records the sound and intensity of falling shafts of sun. And things man-made too: the peanut-shelling machine’s gyrations forever imprinted in the soil below. Arms and legs moving at the same time. Big circles and small circles. Tiny rituals (ceremonies). Accidents of air.

Nothing strange about sound pressing in, showing a sense of mission. Place. Names rise from locations. Hundred Gates. These few sounds, segments of breath, he rehearses. The syllables of his name skip across his tongue. Thomas. Where do you live? Whose boy are you? Boy, where do you live? Even if there is tangible distance between saying and meaning, a distance that keeps enlarging in breadth and range.

The sun drifts back inside, hidden behind a curtain of clouds, already damp, beginning to swell. Stars penetrate along with the smell of the fields, the stable, the shed and the gardens, paths and roads. Freshness, a shift in the way he feels.

His legs hold him upright, his head floating off where birds fly past. This body isn’t his (he doesn’t own it) but moves when he moves, takes him traveling. Easy-gaiting. The long way round. Knows it, knows it all the way.

He can hear the sound of his own breathing. (Does he own it?) His feet working harder now on the earth.

Home. (What else would he call it?) The keys line up like hogs in a pen. They are cool when he touches them, as if he is submerging his hands in a cold stream. Trees bend toward earth in strong wind, the longest leaning touch, each a shadow of the other.

Is it any wonder he sang like that? Why he played like that?

A pail of water remains near the stovepipe in case of fire. Its cousin, a larger wooden tub, positioned a few yards in front of their cabin. When the door is open it frames a tree-occluded sky. Dirt, the solitary chair, the rough table — all that is sparse here makes it enough to see this wooden tub, set off in a grass-free area of the yard, where they often wash in the morning. It is here that what she remembers happened.

No one missed his shadow moving before the house. Nothing unusual there. Familiar in fact. Little Thomas quick and secretive that way — some shadow scurrying across your shoulder beyond vision. It is a struggle even to hold him, to cuddle him, Little Thomas, all vigor and resistance. So easy to lose the chain of connection. His form appears clearly among the leaves, and just as quickly, in a surge of color and motion, you see two brown legs sticking out of the wooden tub like ladles, your eyes surprised, well before understanding catches up. (And this part she has either reconstructed or invented: his head disappearing, one arm thrust out of the water and then nothing more.) Words of panic. She runs to the tub and sees him splashing beads of light. An onrush of angry swells, all of the world’s seas lashing at the baby. Remembers lifting him from the tub, hugging his chill limbs to warm them as she carried him to the cabin. Heads and bodies rising in guilt and alarm — you must keep up with Little Thomas — everyone (her daughters) except her husband, Domingo, who continues to slouch, a bony-shouldered hump. He is a small slim man, quietly sensitive about both his height and his weight, refusing to allow things of denser body or stronger elements to torment him. (No sun or heat is enough. No spiraling rainstorm.) He even resists the ease of a man-made chair, preferring the uneven planks of the floor. She hugs the baby against her chest, his breathing infinitely far from his heart. She closes her eyes. Whispers a prayer in the dark. Her body is cautious and will not ask too much, just this one thing. Let him live.

She opens her eyes to find herself looking through the open doorway. Sees herself taking a clean rag to wipe down the baby’s body. Her hands lifting him like a plant destined for a pot and plunging him into the wood tub. A sound slips out of the corner of her mouth.

Mingo gets to his feet, shaking off tension and fret. Casually — do not get caught up in the uproar of the moment — takes the baby from her and holds him up and out for inspection, rough assurance. Kisses the baby and hands him back over to her. But he doesn’t have quite the skill to pull it off, to calm and convince. (Which comes first?)

In the days that follow, the near tragedy works on and into all of them, even the girls, everyone silent and uncomfortable, nervy and on edge, muted and mutual disgust at their failings, although Little Thomas’s injuries are few. This will not be the last mishap, his last escape from serious harm in the formative years. Her unusual son. (She prefers the term curious. He seems receptive to things that usually escape our notice or that notice tries to escape: shit, piss, spews of dirt, foul odors such as the smell of stagnant water or boiling chitlins, what crawls or flies, buzzes or hisses. Seems to imbibe as much pleasure from the sound of sucking sap from the stalk as from the taste of the sap itself.) So she devises this method of keeping an eye on the baby as she goes about her work. She puts him in a cotton-bale box that she can carry around with her. But he soon masters the ability to crawl over its high sides and scramble away, on the prowl, the border between him and the world thin. (He can’t observe the universe so the universe is without boundaries.) In this way rusty nails puncture his knees. (She is convinced to this day that the metal found its way to his skin less by accident than by choice. Put simply: he had unearthed them. Recall the dirt under his fingers and impacted in the map-like creases of his palms.) Splinters embed themselves under his fingernails and make wood claws out of both hands. His injuries become a discernible point of reference, crawling and walking one continuous thing to her. For the first fifteen months of life he either lies or sits, shaking in his own noise. Then the helpless scatterings that typified his first attempts to push and pull himself. He never seemed to get better at it. Never seemed to move forward or back, but remained, immobile, confined to his belly, like a worm. (Forgive her for thinking this about her own child. Forgive me.) Almost never saw him sitting in an upright position unless he was propped up against a leg of the piano while Mary Bethune or one of the Bethune girls sat prim and proper playing above him. Even took his food while prone on the floor on his belly.

But all that changed when he learned how to crawl. She remembers it this way: she was sitting on a stack of logs a few yards behind the mansion, where she usually took her break under the shade of a tree, a block of time that belonged to her, short as it was, a few minutes after she had finished serving supper to the family and before she had to begin the tasks that would carry her through dinner and beyond.

She enjoyed that spot, her husband’s handiwork all about, wood he had neatly cut and stacked. Almost like an unfinished house (hers), the laying down of some promised future. Not that she ever really thought about it that way. Her break afforded her the opportunity to go slow with a coffee, provided a chance to be starkly alone with Thomas, belly down on the ground beside her, her thoughts soft, faint, and faraway. She remembers the silence of this day, just the sound of her sipping coffee, turning her little spoon in her big cup, and the usual curious noises of the boy, harsh and moist. The Bethune residence an amazing sight, as light was actually pushing up from the ground so that the mansion seemed to be floating on a blanket of illumination. She lowered her head and brought the cup to her mouth and the next thing she knew Thomas had somehow managed to climb up an inclined stump of wood to perch at the top of a pile, a deliberate elevation of self.

That was the start of it. Crawling brought a striking transformation, a living thing changing before your eyes, some lowly creature confined to dirt, his hands directly under his chest and his knees bent outward at odd angles, allowing him the sideways motion of a lizard weaving between legs and chairs. By this means achieving ambulation, however odd. And then, once more, he became unhinged from time. No slow progression from crawling to standing to the first stumbling steps with hands balanced against the wall. Instead the crawling went on for years, his legs refusing to allow him to stand upright let alone step a foot forward.

After a frustrating year or two, he somehow upped his crawl and acquired speed and lift, so that he was able to actually lope catlike above the ground.

But the miracle of walking brought new challenges. (The lineage of a thing in its later stages.) He never mastered the ability to go up or down stairs unaided, or to sit down or get up from a chair. Trying to perform one action or the other he would totter backward and forward, and from side to side, his otherwise strong legs brittle and uncertain. (Not unlike General Toon attached to his black canes.) And rarely could he put one foot in front of the other with natural recognizable rhythm and ease, his gait either so heavy that he seemed to be sinking into the ground, or so light (in Miss Toon’s presence) that there seemed nothing solid about his person.

He squeezes the pale shell until it cracks open, rubs off the crackly brown skin with a set rhythmic motion of thumb and forefinger, and tosses the nut into his mouth. The husk remains on the ground, collecting water and sound, one among many, humming gourds. A numbing buzz in his hands and feet — there is a nerve that stimulates, another that slows down — music entering him as far from the voices and fingers that made it.

The sun appears as to one looking through smoked glass.

Where is Little Thomas?

Smoke rises in shafts of pure black illumination.

Where is Little Thomas? You must keep up with your brother.

Glass glints, half smoke, half sun.

Thomas?

Why doesn’t he respond to the sound of his chanted name? Truth be told — she knows it, her whole family knows it — he is caught in the grip of a habit to flee the restraints of their scrutinizing presence — his conspirators, pigs and chickens rush to greet him — and find his way into the mansion. In fact, he can find his way all over, seemingly no place or thing he can’t pry his way into. Rambling. Has even wandered miles to trespass on neighboring farms and estates and march into people’s homes and lives. His escapes, invasions, necessitate new secrets and new lies. No one can check his ability to go sightless wherever his feet will take him. Quick and fearless like a carriage hurtling along in the darkness.

After dinner each day Mary Bethune plays the piano like a medical regime. She returns to the piano to give her daughters lessons in the long deep lull after supper and before retiring to bed. Tom leans out from between the lower levels, the legs of the furniture, the side of a cabinet. He sidles up to the piano while the daughters practice, his body writhing to the tones.

It’s okay, Charity. Leave him be.

One day like any other after she has completed the lessons, put an end to her daughters’ complaints and hesitations, and called for Charity to see them off to bed, one day like this as she is walking off, she hears the music that had just ended begin again, the same piece. She turns and sees Tom with his chin at the keyboard, his hands in their mischief toying with the keys. Struck by the moment, they all stand and look, her, Charity, and the girls.

Charity gives her an expression, half-amused, half-apologetic, unable to invent some excuse. No, Thomas, she says. I’m sorry, ma’m.

He certainly takes to the instrument, Mary Bethune says. I’ve never seen anything like it. Thinking, They surprise you this way every so often. (One day he is crawling behind her as was his habit and the next day he is walking behind her. Skips a stage in his evolution.) She picks up the blind boy, his bare feet kicking the piano keys as she hands him over to Charity.

Anything else, ma’m? Charity shifts her gaze. I best be getting these girls off.

Although the other tries to veil it she detects a bit of admiration in this event. More than a little. No doubt about it. Charity seems pleased by the look on her mistress’s face.

One afternoon not long after, she hears music rising from the room and enters it expecting to see one of her daughters at the piano. (Any excuse to avoid their other studies.) Can’t believe what she sees. What she hears. Before the moment can overwhelm her he hits another chord, tinkles out another melody. Hands flashing everywhere.

She sends for the mother, her other, who is not sure she sees things clearly. Eyeballs humming. Ears spinning. A feeling in her body, light, tilting over, all link lost to her surroundings. Ah that’s it. I’ve finally gone off the deep end. Jumped the plank.

She sets out to retrieve him.

Little Thomas drops down to the floor and embraces a piano leg. A small target of conflict. Refusing to let go. She has to pry his hands away, finger by finger. Another time he actually crawls under the piano itself, slides and burrows into the cramped space between mahogany above and pine below. Stays a long time, calm and happy.

General Bethune stares at his oldest daughter indifferently, taking in her report. It is a disagreeable feature of her character that she always seems to enjoy revealing secrets in her possession. But he hears what she has to say, half believing, and dismisses her with instructions for Charity and Mingo to appear before him immediately. Not later, now. His daughter skips off in excitement. While he waits for them he tries to reassemble the essential facts from his daughter’s garbled telling. This much he knows: if what she said is true, his wife hasn’t told him about it. Why hasn’t she told me? Not a question really, but a rumination, a reflection. How well he knows the sentimental attachments of the weaker sex.

While he is busy with one thing or another he will hear music drifting through the house. This is not listening, a conscious effort on his part, far from it, only the music’s lurking presence following him from room to room. No way he will ever sit and watch the girls and the women — his wife, his daughters, his servant — and the boy at the piano, an act of spectating that is as much vulgar as it is awkward, like spying on someone engaged in an intimate act.

He gets to his feet with a certain effort before they enter the room. (Best to be on your feet in situations like this, assume a stance of authority and command.) On first sighting he fixes them with a ferocious glance before they can avert their eyes. He means business. General Toon means business. They come in cautiously, as if the house might collapse under their footsteps. Come before him slowly and quietly with heads bowed.

Suh, you wanna see us? The woman, Charity, saying it, not her husband.

He doesn’t even bother to reply, to speak at all and ferret out their account, but waits for a lifting of their gaze before he casts his eyes first upon Charity then upon Mingo — he knows they can see him, even if they pretend not to — his look itself demanding a full and factual explanation.

If he wants to play, play he will. She will see to that. Any right-minded person should be ready to do the same, be willing to afford a pitiful soul this much. The crude but touching expression that bares his innocence and devotion. Little more than simple curiosity perhaps, explainable by some of Nature’s extraordinary aberrations. What matter the source? The motive? (Could you call it that?) Let him play. Under her guidance. Not training exactly. (What would you call it?) She sees his face go bright. He is enjoying this immensely and she begins to enjoy it too.

At the piano he is strong and loose, no matter how awkward and ungainly he is at other times. Mary Bethune is quite careful in her instruction. Everything is shown in motion and in harmony. Whenever he plays a lesson correctly — well, truth to tell, he plays everything correctly; he shows himself capable of great technical variety; demonstrate a scale and he will play it; show him a melody and he will bounce it back, working the pedals as she worked them; she can only fault his playing for being excessive, too forceful; all that frantic passion (on one occasion he embraces her, laughing into her neck); then too there are times when he duplicates her exactly in volume and intonation, the original inflection — she rewards him with, Admirable! An odd calm completes each lesson, as if he is waiting for her to say the word. Admirable! She comes out of the room exhausted after she finishes her lessons with him, for she can never show him too much, his desire an insurmountable force, hands having made a hundred exertions, ready for a hundred more. Given an attentive pupil — no, that is not the word; given a faithful pupil, timing, and technique — his left hand may even be better than the right, the Negro’s natural sense of rhythm — are easy enough to demonstrate, familiar ground under our feet. But the finer things — a definite feeling for order, a communicable clarity, an accurate sense of form, the lucky finds and the discovered refinements, the ascendance of beauty — are untranslatable, locked away in the farthest and darkest corner of the soul. No instructor or academy can teach that. And what can’t be shown can’t be mimicked. A long way of saying that these lessons are headed nowhere, are the proverbial dead end. Nothing gained. For the Negro race can never produce a Mozart. The world has never known and will never know a Negro genius. Still she feels inclined to continue the lessons as she notes some change in his playing — she wouldn’t exactly call it growth, development, more a polishing, the mastery of repetition until something shines — as each day he performs some little note or phrase that causes her to look at him with renewed interest and surprise. And when they are done for the day, he sits with his dark hands on the ivory keys, fingers spread wide, a settled pleasure.

So it goes. Then one day several months into their lessons, she rises from the piano at the close of a session, ready to summon Charity—Take the boy and tidy up a bit—when Tom’s voice springs up. He is singing. What she sees and hears tells her that he is transplanting the foreign lyrics to the unrelated melody she just taught him. She knows the words to the song. He gets some of them right, some of them wrong. No. Something else. In fact, he is mixing the verses of three different songs her daughters are quite fond of singing away from the piano. Somehow the phrasing and timing are just right, perfect.

He bites into the pink skin of the boiled pig snout. Admirable! he shouts. He drains his glass of lemonade and places it back on the table. Admirable! He tastes his potatoes. Admirable! He gets up from the table and walks around the cabin touching things. Admirable!

Or this: Standing still, taking pleasure in the idle noises his shoes make. Steps can form whole words. But the words do not move his feet forward. In the shed a cow with a large belly standing as cows do, standing and staring stubbornly. He stretches out his arms to caress her muzzle, saliva collecting on his fingers, tongue lolling in its mouth. Admirable!

General Toon beckons her to sit. Her legs will not move at first, fearing they have misunderstood his command. He points at a chair. She sits down.

Your boy, General Toon says.

Thomas?

Her glance briefly meets his steady gaze. Her eyes fall.

Your boy, Thomas. Grant her this. Can you explain it?

Thomas knows what he has to do, suh, she says. He is smart, she thinks. He clacks a little, she says.

You call that clacking?

Here comes trouble, she thinks. Thomas is out to expose them. No, suh. Some of my other ones had it, she says. What she doesn’t say: she even stammers herself sometime. Certain words drawled strangely. So she’s been told.

You call that clacking?

Yes, suh. I mean, no, suh.

Little Thomas’s body is renouncing speech while amplifying every other sound that enters him. Unusual — she will admit that.

Miss Toon wants answers, too — of course, Miss Toon also gives advice; she is anxious about Little Thomas — her interest and concern amounting to a challenge. But the questions don’t annoy or anger Charity — they are decent enough questions — for the light in her mistress’s eyes, the other woman’s pure excitement, is enough consolation. Tom issued from her body. No denying it, no changing it.

But more and more in the days and weeks that follow her meeting with the Toons, Thomas deserts them to spend all his days in the mansion. Tom, where you at? They summon her again.

The culminating structure of the house, set in this landscape, a natural part of it, no other place it can or should be, rising white out of the ground like a mushroom. She stands wincing in the light. Takes a deep breath, fills her lungs. Call it a gathering of courage. She hesitates to go in. General Toon looks bad-tempered, the room otherwise cool and pleasant. Only an accident of timing has allowed her to get here now, late as it is.

No one to blame but herself if she is here standing before him yet again, if she hasn’t already figured out a way to tell him once and for all what he wants to hear and in so telling put an end to the accusations. Not that she is eager to aid him. Of course, she has thought it over, she is prepared, armed with excuses, ready to count the hours and the days, sketch in what only exists for him for them in shadow outline. Easier said than done. Already her story starts to lose coherence.

He looks sourly at her. Instructs her to bring Tom to the house in the morning to begin daily obedience lessons. As well, he details a list of chores he expects the boy to perform. Starting tomorrow. Bright and early.

Sit, Tom. Good.

Stand, Tom. Good boy.

Be quiet, Tom. Quiet down now, Tom. No blubbering.

Good.

They are walking briskly now, a constitutional, under the elms at the edge of the garden. A walk seems to help settle him, make him easier to cope with for the day. Mary Bethune always takes the lead, with him behind her, though they take turns at varying the pace, a shifting distance. A hot day, and the air so still that it seems to absorb all sound of their footfalls. Then something changes. She isn’t sure who first steps up the pace, only knows that she turns to see him following her as fast as he can, arms pumping, head bouncing, a charging bull. She picks up speed, and so does he, matching her pace. It is not unlike watching your shadow following you. And she will admit that this unsettles her. For she has reason to believe that the skin of another is no barrier against his advances. In fact, there are times when she swears — has seen it with her own eyes — that he assumes the look of other persons, their stances, their gestures, their posture, his face a mask of theirs, changing expression when theirs did, their bodies and identities like clothes he can hang on his person, a total embodiment. Where some see the presence of the supernatural in his feats of imitation, feel a foreboding, the first elements of some danger to come, she seeks a physical cause that will — she is sure of it — eventually reveal itself. (Although she is a believer in both the Man Above and the Man Below, she is not inclined toward either fundamentalism or superstition.) Granted, she will admit that his behavior on occasion unnerves her, but these occasions are rare. She is perfectly at ease around the boy and finds a certain comfort in his presence. They leave the shade of the trees, bright light now, sun in every step. Perhaps you don’t need to see a thing to be it. (Can she help it if she thinks this?) After all, this boy is bonded to sound. There must be some way that his ears are able to register and measure the exact rhythm of her footfalls and his. An interesting notion, even moving in a way. She turns her head to look back at him and sees him take one step, two, before he also turns his head and looks back over his shoulder.

Steeple. Church. People. The congregation is in step with the church and the church is in step with time. After service ends the lead deacon comes out front to give poor farmers and such unlikely beings to understand that the pastor does not converse with ordinary mortals. They must put everything in writing — ask the impossible — and hand him a note the moment he leaves the church. He never leaves through the front but goes through the back. Where Negroes push and shove each other amid a hubbub of noise and gossip while they wait for the pastor to appear before them and lend an ear to their secrets and complaints and mouth opinions and advice, usually in the form of biblical scripture but sometimes in plain English if you are lucky. When he appears in the doorway, the world draws to a hush. Ritual perfection. He holds up the bottom of his black gown to avoid tripping over it as he comes down the stairs. One after the next they begin to pour out their sufferings. She hears him say to one man, But after all, who is your father? Moves on to the next person. She thinks she is going to faint, everything whirling around her. Does her best to breathe the air at calculated intervals. Deeply moved, he squeezes one woman’s slender bony hands. As the solemn moment draws near she quiets her breathing. He puts a hand on her shoulder, leans forward some, and turns his ear toward her face to hear what she has to say. Saying done, he draws back and looks at her with a stern expression. You ought to be ashamed to ask me such a question. How is it possible for a mother to pray for the peace of a living soul? It’s a great sin, I tell you, and it is forgiven only because of your ignorance. Your son is alive, is he not?

The Doctor has an inkling. Once, not many years ago, he successfully treated a three-year-old Negro for this same incurable and often terminal affliction. The boy had poked himself in the eye with a twig, what at first seemed a minor injury, a scratch, a doctor’s poor diagnosis setting the stage for greater injury. A week later the eye became infected. After a second week the other eye became infected, both eyes causing the onset of brain fever. Then he was called in. Upon a careful review of the case, he decided to remove both eyes, and remove them he did and in so doing he not only saved the boy’s life but also prevented any further physical and mental deterioration. A paper detailing the case had been published in a British medical journal.

Now he has the opportunity to study the effects of the illness in its later and perhaps even final stages. (This Bethune boy promises much. He senses it and trembles at the possibilities.) Does the fever seep down to the most profound layer of the mind, rooted, biding its time, never to rise again until the terminal moment? He can see another paper on the horizon. How he would love to deliver it in Paris, or at some other open and welcome gathering on the Continent, before the most distinguished men of his profession who are attuned to the latest advances in science and medicine. How slow the progress here. How thick the ignorance. A matter of endless frustration for him. So good to have an ally like James in the scientific cause. But he is as much struggling to comprehend James’s uncharacteristic stealth — why had James kept silent about the boy, kept him hidden, and for all these many years? — as much as the strange case of this boy Tom. So unlike James to keep secrets from him. They are old friends, best friends perhaps, although he doesn’t always agree with James’s national and ethnological policies and prophecies.

He is moving briskly but not urgently, headed toward the Bethune mansion. Although he is preoccupied he makes it a point to tip his hat to all he meets, regardless of their position in life. He has yet to reach the height of his fame, but he has already developed something of a reputation as a man of science bent on ridding the men and women of their region, their country, of their faulty and dangerous notions and traditions. In particular, he sees no way of holding his tongue against the planter’s wasteful practice of forcing expectant mothers to work in the fields down to the period of delivery. No way to prove it, but he is convinced that either maternal anxieties or industry itself cause crippling and irreversible effects on the brain of the unborn. Hence, a mentally weakened infant enters the world, fulfilling the prejudiced hypotheses about the Negro’s limited intelligence. Indeed, he is convinced that the planters can do away with many of their numerous complaints against the Negroes if only they take it upon themselves to rear a better crop of workers.

Some of his beliefs rub his fellow citizens the wrong way, but his authority is too great for them to disregard his opinions.

How quickly he arrives at the mansion and how gracefully he steps down from his carriage without the assistance of his Negro driver. He arrives on the porch, out of breath, out of words. The Bethunes’ Negress Charity opens the door, and he removes his hat and bows a little, lets his hat return and says a few casual words to her, the way one makes polite conversation, before she takes him in and shows him to the library, him on guard, observing and evaluating, beginning his inquiry as soon as he is one foot inside the mansion, looking for the signs.

She wonders if she should thank the General for bringing the Doctor. (The vague hope that the Doctor may reveal something useful.) That is, she wonders if she should feel thankful. Even if she decides that the General’s action warrants her appreciation — she is only beginning to mull that over, hasn’t had long to think about it, all so unexpected and sudden, in a rush of minutes — how can she voice the words? Not her place to. And even if it were, she doesn’t think she could bring her tongue to do so.

No, it doesn’t surprise him, for the Negro, like his Anglo-Saxon superior, is an imitative being. How wrong of them to sneer at any act of simulation, no matter how peculiar or extreme. Might imitation be proof of buried intelligence, the first stirrings of coherent function and knowledge that, when thought and deed come together in noble agreement, form the basis of culture? The question warrants further investigation.

His thoughts on medicine mingle with the voices of fellow doctors and surgeons he has reviewed the case with, all rank outsiders in matters of research. So easy for common eyes to refuse to see what they should see because they don’t wish to see it, for common mouths to parrot the same reductive beliefs in the same old weighted language. Freaks of nature. Oversights or accidents of God. He longs to get the examination under way. He has never been so upset by waiting. The thought hardly out of his mind before he feels something shift around him. It takes him a moment to locate the subject, sitting still and quiet on the sofa, blending in. How had he missed the boy’s entry? Might he have been here the whole time? As impossible as it seems, he senses that the boy had deliberately tried to catch his attention only moments earlier, for he sees a definite alertness in the face. (Later, he will recall having heard a noise — a cough or a clearing of the throat — a sound coming before the sight. This addition.) No doubt about it. The boy is listening and smelling.

That’s when it hits him. This is the boy. The other’s dark complexion glows before him, mingling with the light and odor of candles, body and face causing him to draw back as before a vision of rare life. What difficulties an artist would have in painting his portrait. His physical advancement, certain aspects of his appearance — the bulging forehead, his ample mouth and cheeks, the wide neck, his broad shoulders, the height and strength — evidence of the vital spirit within. In the struggle to survive his illness the strong thing within has stripped him of all unessential thoughts, hindrances to living. Confined as he is to his world of darkness, is he even capable of detecting the ailment present but hidden within his person? How difficult to get to the ordinary life behind a thing.

He can scarcely sit on his chair. The skin is not that different from any other he has touched. He runs his fingers across the ridge over the brow — a feature common to the African species — testing the strength of the skull. The eyelids are impossible to lift, dead weight, even against maximum force of the fingers. The ears show no sign of under-or overdevelopment. (Some wax inside.) Two rows of shining teeth — he has never seen such clean teeth on either Negro or Caucasian — well enameled and formed. The spine seems somewhat soft to the touch, like a plant’s lacy skeleton. He lifts one arm by the wrist — he can both hear and feel the patient’s breathing change. The lips move. Is it a strange wild smile or a silent conversation? He puts a hand on the knee and feels a softening then opens his bag and takes measurements with the latest instruments. Takes in his entire form and structure.

James enters the room, working his noisy canes, a smile spreading slowly over his goateed face. He holds back on reporting his findings, asks that the boy be removed from the room and the parents brought forth. A short time later, they appear before him — ah, so she was the Negress who had answered the door — heads bowed, hands cupped. Both before he begins and after he finishes interviewing them, he and James talk in low tones and try not to look at Charity and Mingo. (Those are their names. So James informs him.) He does not rush his questions. Had he fallen into some calamitous illness? Suh? A calamity? They look at one another. Yes, suh. Thomas did indeed suffer a serious injury in childhood. A fever? They look at one another. Was he weaned on a cow’s tiddy? Did they bathe him in homegrown wine? (Both are practices he has observed firsthand.) Did he crave the thick taste of goat’s milk? He awaits each answer, looking at them, openly evaluating. Their awkwardness causes him to feel embarrassed. (He considers himself a quiet champion of the Negro cause.) He can see plainly enough how hard it is for them to respond to his unusual inquiries and suggestions. His feelings of sympathy offset by a certain anger as he senses that they seem determined to keep the full facts from him. (How foolish his fellow white men to trust every word and smile and expression of glad thanks and plea of innocence or ignorance from their slaves.) If only they could understand that a full confession might aid him in a precise diagnosis and an effective course of treatment and possible remedy for their son.

Satisfied that he has elicited the best answers he will ever get, he dismisses the parents. He returns to his original place on the couch, while James remains standing, leaning forward over his canes. He drinks in all of James’s concerns, matters more troubling for Mary, he suspects, than for James himself. Tom might wander into serious harm in a barn or under the wheels of a speeding carriage, stumble into a well, or come to accident by fire. He sits passively and digests the information. From James’s lengthy report, it is clear that this matter has been troubling them for some time. (They already have enough trouble with their son Sharpe, who is constantly on the go, running here and there. Away. Always away. Cooking up reports for the newspaper. Brought him up the best they could, although he had been a handful and still is. Trouble spares none of us.)

The end of obedience is protection, James says.

How poorly his good friend understands that the dangers within are the ones he must fear most.

Would this have been the moment when Mary entered the room?

Dr. Hollister.

Still formal after all these years. Her hands spilling from the sleeves of her dress, pale against the cloth’s dark shine. Her skin toneless, almost gray, the color of stone, a heavy contradiction given her slight figure. She still looks young if you catch her in the right light. (The wrong light now.) He recalls the one time he saw her with her hair down — what circumstance made that possible? — black strands falling freely to both sides of her face. The novelty of that sensation as she stands before him now hair fixed in place and dressed as he usually sees her in plain unassuming garments. Despite her noble stature and bearing she is not a vain woman; nor will she allow James to be carried away by exaggerated feelings of self-importance.

James, he says, why don’t I have a look at your legs while I’m here? His offer is an excuse to push Mary out of the room. They all know it. She won’t stay around and watch her husband with his trousers down around his ankles before a third party. No fool, she knows that the men want to be alone with the boy, and she will concede, as a woman of discretion and taste should.

Without a backward glance she reaches the door and goes out. James begins again, but he holds up his hand in a gesture of silence. I’ve seen this many times before, he says. My own person has treated many a case. You should have spared yourself any feared embarrassment. Where had they kept the boy hidden these many years? Why didn’t you call me sooner?

James does not answer.

He drops a knowing smile. Don’t vex yourself, James. He has already formulated some very precise ideas about the nature of Tom’s improbable condition. Through research and meditation had sought out and outlined the etiology of a vicious disease and discovered that it is numbed here but not quelled completely, and that it still roams free in the jungles and deserts and savannas of Africa. If I were a man who had not been out in the world, he says, you would find yourself hard put for answers.

James looks at him, measuring the words. What can you tell me?

The organs learn to adapt themselves to an existence that at first sight would appear to be utterly impossible, he says. My own eyes have seen it. My own hands have examined it.

What? What have you seen?

Brain fever, a cruel malady that lasts for a cruel length of time: a lifetime. A debilitating sickness that began long ago, before the invention of medicine.

James stands and listens, eyes alive and searching.

I’m not talking about this religious foolishness that so many of our people spout from bench and pulpit. That black people are children of the devil and such nonsense.

No one here is questioning your knowledge or experience, James says.

I trust you would.

So we’ve said that.

Yes.

And you will tell me more?

Yes. It’s a simple matter, really. Africa is the chief stronghold of the real Devil, those reactionary forces of Nature most hostile to the uprise of humanity.

Go on, James says. He will take it all standing. He refuses to sit down.

Here Beelzebub, King of the Flies, marshals his vermiform and arthropod hosts, insects, ticks, and nematode worms, which, more than on any other continent, convey to skin, veins, intestines, and spinal marrow of men and other vertebrates the microorganisms that cause deadly, disfiguring, or debilitating diseases, or themselves create the morbid condition of both the persecuted human being and lesser forms — beast, bird, reptile, frog, or fish. The inhabitants of this land have had a sheer fight for physical survival comparable with that found on no other great continent, and this must not be forgotten when we consider their history.

His good friend remains silent. Looks at him as if he hasn’t understood a word of it. Or was it something else completely? Perhaps James gets nothing, accepts nothing except by instinct. Or maybe it is simply hard for him to define exactly what he wants, both what he had hoped or expected to hear and what results he expected.

I suppose that’s more than you care to I know. I’ve laid out the pertinent facts.

Indeed you have.

James, we’ve known each other a long time. You trust me completely, just as I trust you. So why your delay in contacting me? If only you had called for me sooner. Much sooner. Years ago.

Years.

The best I can do is to provide you with a powder that might restore the use of his tongue. Otherwise he might lose his voice forever.

Once he is outside, he angles his hat on his head to let his hair breathe some. How different was the former age of healing. Jesus cured the blind with his own spittle. In the beginning was the deed. If only the methods of modern medicine were equally effective. Unfortunately, the body is holy no longer but a thing of Nature. Every day, knowledge of how to put the constitution in such a state that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. Thus, it is most annoying to have to deal with facts that cannot be completely or adequately grasped, and only right to expect a doctor to hate the things he cannot explain. Invisible and unknowable things.

Such are his musings and meditations, the line of inquiry and examination, as he leaves the house on approach to his carriage. His horse raises its face at the sound of his shoes on crunching gravel. Neighs and lifts one hoof then another, all four in turn. It is only then that a simple fact registers. He can’t see me. The thought strikes him again. He can’t see us.

Listen, Tom says. Rain fall and not a drop fall on me.

But, Tom, your clothes are all wet.

My clothes is all wet, but my skin is dry as can be. He lifts his arms outward from his body shoulder-high and cranes back his head like a bird in flight.

The thought of the lives and houses embedded in her skin. The stresses on head, legs, feet, and hands. Still, she holds together well after all these years. (The testimony of the mirror.) She awakens with all her past hardened into the blue of morning. Perhaps it is for this reason that her first activity of the day is to sit alone at the table, with her palms flat against the wood. She stares down and sees light breaking through between the fingers, light that is nailing her to this place, fixing her in the moment. She turns her hands over, palms up to the light, either a morning offering or a morning collection. Dues paid, debts settled. Let’s be plain about it. Her head is full of so many pressing memories. While she is safely lost in one thing or another, in an instant and without provocation, all the dingy rooms and dusty cabins of her past pass through her mind. Friends long vanished, their words and prayers now hers, part of her. (Belonging. By one name or another she has always known him. His silence is mine. His eyes, mine. His hands and feet, mine.) How many times has she entered a new house and parted from it? (Count them.) A parting that lingers, no way (what way?) to transfer the bitterness. There is this: not a single day, not an hour passes that she does not tell herself, I have four left and four is better than nothing.

Look, she says. I see three of you, and only two of us. Do what we ask. Keep Thomas outta the house.

Although the girls are caught between waking and sleep, they are quick to speak; their apologies seem already formed on their lips, calculated in advance.

There three of you, she says. Girls. She has long held the belief that the female sex are the most capable of managing the world. Three of you can keep him out of the house.

The girls raise a chorus of excuses.

I tried to.

He too fast.

I was doing my choirs.

She feels an irrepressible rage building up inside of her. Far from learning from their blunders the girls, her three daughters, continue to heap more errors on top of the existing ones. Little by little, they are destroying everything that she has been trying to build, this cooperating workforce — call it family — she and Mingo have both longed for all these years and have tried to nurture since their arrival here at Hundred Gates.

Take your brother out and bathe him.

The girls raise a chorus of refusal.

We did.

He won’t stay in the water.

He bit my hand.

Do it every day, she says. You must. Can’t you smell him? Smell him. Do it when you do it, she says. The girls are also creatures that hate water. And don’t let your brother waste himself in the house.

He just went.

He always smell like that.

I can’t smell.

Find a rag and clean it up. You help her. And, you, come and help me wash him.

They prepare the tub. Get his clothes off with minimal damage. He will not step into the water. She has to lift him into the air, and when she does, he spreads his arms wide, believing he can fly. Although he is far larger than the tub, he steadies himself inside it, careful to remain completely still, water silent under him. She and her daughter wash him while making sideways glances at each other. Soap and water and dirt are easy enough to understand. Plain facts her girls can’t deny or disown. But how can they know the tremendous effort required to build this union? A whole history lost to them. Unaware of the many who’ve come already. (Once again back in her mind. How much easier to roll through the day under a stray tumble of thoughts.) Can’t recall the last time she counted all twenty on her fingers, one by one, a way of remembering their names. The sixteen she will recall although even in recollection she no longer speaks their names. Gal, you’ve set a record. How many loaves can you bake in that there oven? When was the last time? A ritual she used to often perform. Certain things she never speaks aloud — some days how painful it is simply to open her mouth — even to a husband, especially to a husband — Domingo. The silences, the distances. (How can she hear the void?) So much the eyes don’t see when they examine another.

She imagined (defined) her history (theirs) as a single rush of air sweeping all their past days toward the Bethune mansion and their own cabin of logs hacked sloppily and fitted together in haphazard hurry. (They did not build it. Have built many others but not this one. The smell of the previous occupants, a thousand men and women, all that remains.) You are born where you are born, but a person’s true soil is not the place of birth. You bide your time, you continue to make all the small improvements you can — more food, more clothing, less toil and torment — with quiet hopes for the future. But more than hoping and waiting. More a matter of scheming and planning — although you are at the mercy of chance — of figuring out a way to position yourself so that the next shuffle will land you a few inches higher than your present state, and knowing the right thing to say or do when you are so positioned for such a move. All of this contingent upon life lasting and things holding out, for how quickly the world can change in an hour.

How well she remembers that moment when Domingo first spoke to General Bethune, a man whom she (they) had no knowledge of, save the name she heard spoken only moments earlier—

Why yes, General Bethune. It’s an honor, sir. Glad to have you with us today. I was just down at the printing office.

— as the trader began positioning them in a horizontal line before his buyers. The words trickled down her body with the sweat. At first she misunderstood the nature of the General’s physical condition. She realized that he walked with a limp. No, that was not the word. (Even now she can’t describe the moment properly.) He did a little wobble to throw one leg forward then the other, as if each weighed a ton.

A number of men began circling them at top speed, their wives remaining behind in their buggies and carriages. A constellation of white faces shooting past her eyes, orbiting this band of eight or nine niggers, of old-marrieds and their unsightly children, standing — some just barely — tattered in the wind, heads slumped, feet swollen, drowsy and cold in bright clean heat.

Sorry, the trader said. Wish I could be of service to you. These the last I got.

The trader was a tall husky man — a few inches taller and a few pounds heavier than the General — well into his thirties but who tried to mask his age behind a light youthful mustache and adolescent glasses. A loud man, no force in this world capable of shutting his mouth. She stood absorbing the noise and movement, every few seconds his announcements bouncing off her body. Already woozy from the long day’s drive march to this clearing in the woods, she didn’t have the strength to correct him when he got her name wrong. On the silent march here, their feet built a common language. Some started to come undone, some already undone even before her family joined the little band. She heard someone murmuring pleas to Jesus. And words whispered in consolation. But she was not caught up in this, prayer the last thing on her mind. What was happening before her now, around her, neither awed nor moved her, for it was more tremendous than religion or church. Days of blind faith and belief behind her. She was past the point of crying. Important to her to know that there were others who felt worse than she did.

She pondered these men swarming around her, something hungry and desperate in their speed. Some stopped to look and listen, getting the drift of the trader’s pitch and seeing if their eyes could verify his words. Someone leaned forward hoping to catch a glimpse of the baby she held in her arms, mummified in blankets. She pulled the baby closer to her bosom. Still they came, a flurry of white hands (and feet), poking, prodding, tugging and testing, opening mouths and closing them.

Careful now, the trader said. You break it, you own it.

The details of contact. She watched in a spell, unable to speak even if she wanted to. Her voice would be too small.

No, ma’m. They are not rejects. What in God’s earth would possess you to say such a thing?

This General Bethune did not rush, but moved slowly with a composed eagerness, his hands folded behind his back. From what she had overheard he made no attempt to conceal either his intelligence or his eloquence. (In the years to come she will see and hear both often.) The essence of high breeding, of intelligence itself is to be perfectly natural under the most artificial circumstances. And the trader chose to cling to this general’s presence even as he argued and bargained with his other customers, engaging them in plenty of hassling and haggling, mostly for show. Who was this sprawling elastic creature so capable of being everywhere at the same time, his smile here but somehow also over there? The General seemed to resent the trader for some personal reason unknown to her, a man unworthy of sight, looking at him only casually and briefly, perhaps wanting to be done with the introductions and advertisements and ready for concrete terms, negotiations. She would be happy to be rid of him as well. Had known him only a day or two — depending on how you counted the hours, where you began — insufficient time to make a studied judgment, but she had come to the conclusion that he had crippling doubts, was unsure of himself.

Sir, Domingo said. Just that one word. It was the greatest thing anyone had ever said in the history of the world. She felt something leaping under her skin. His strength in these matters, turns of mind, made her want to join him. He was a smallish man, and she was a woman of average height, which made it possible for them to look each other face to face without any lifting or lowering of heads or adjustments of feet. They were both slight as well, and she liked to imagine them as two units conjoining to form one substantial body. People (a person) of few words, able to set the silence against each other’s doubts.

Sir, Domingo said. He never called any white man master. Look at us standing here, he said. He held his palms out at his sides, like a Bible-mouth pausing midsermon to hook his congregation.

The trader gave Domingo a look expressing silent betrayal. He stuck his hands in his pockets, nothing better to do with them. But from the look in the General’s eyes and the smile on his lips she could tell that he already knew what Domingo was asking. Seemed to expect it in fact. Had he not lingered before them? Had he not passed them by on several occasions only to return again? His gaze sliding over all of them — her, Mingo, the baby blanketed in her arms, their three girls, who stared hard at this funny-legged white man.

Then Domingo did the impossible. Took two steps forward. Sir, we been put out cause a white man couldn’t keep up with his affairs.

She saw the trader’s fisted pockets go heavy. The trader made some clever remark, trying to draw a laugh from the General, but the other man said nothing, acting like he hadn’t heard. Sir, could I interest you—

No, the General said. He looked at the trader. Tell me about this.

They are foreclosures, the trader said.

From where?

Out by Thirty Wells. A little run-down habitat called Solitary.

Solitude?

Yes, I believe that’s the name.

And what is the other name?

That would be a Johnson. Should I get the papers?

You mean Jones?

Yes.

A Wiley?

Yes, the trader said. A Wiley Jones. He had to say something.

Now how hard was that? the General asked.

Sir?

Then Domingo cut in. Sir, maybe I don’t look it, but I’m two niggers in one. I can work like you ain’t never befo seen a man or any two men work.

The trader pulled his hands from inside his pockets. The General seemed to take pleasure in his anger and discomfort. I can assure you, the trader said.

Is that something you wish to spend your time doing? the General asked.

This gave the trader reason to pause. Sir, I am deeply disturbed. I really need to get these off my hands. I’m getting wed in two days.

The General looked at him. That’s pressing business. And here you are, he said. I commend you on your locomotion, with so much else before you.

I could be convinced to give it all up.

The General didn’t look at him. How much for this bunch?

The trader worked some numbers.

That’s not what I’m asking, the General said.

Sir, I’m deeply sorry if you misunderstood me. The trader started on his numbers again, like a drunk man who couldn’t stop himself. Then he said, I’ll even throw that uncle over there in at a five-dollar discount.

I don’t need an uncle.

Okay. Perhaps—

What would I do with an uncle?

The trader said nothing.

Now, what am I asking?

I’m sure we can arrive at a fair sum, the trader said.

Or I could go rob the treasury.

And so it went. While the men worked figures, she and Mingo looked at one another, exchanging unspoken thoughts. They did not hold hands. They did not hug. They did not kiss.

It did not take long to finish the negotiations. The trader seemed satisfied, happy even. That is a price I can live with, he said. I’ll throw in the blanket warmer for free. Eyeglasses glinting in the sun, he shook the General’s hand in farewell. I’m forever in your debt, he said. You really learned me a thing or two about a bargain.

Despite his casual disposition, General Bethune took the discovery of Tom’s talents with more than a grain of salt. Within a month of learning (seeing) what the toddler (crawler) could do, witnessing with his own eyes and ears, he instituted a new routine. At least once a week, he would instruct her to bundle Little Thomas up in a carryall and bring him out to the carriage, where she would hand him up to the General’s wife, already seated there. Then the driver would help the General take his place beside his wife, the toddler cooing in her arms, and she (they) would assume charge of Thomas, the couple partnered in some secret cause — never revealed to her, even now, though she has her suspicions — lasting from that moment until Miss Toon returned Thomas to her later that evening, comfortably asleep. She would stand at the gate and watch the carriage pull away, escape vision, leaving her to imagine, without forming detailed images — that would be too much — Miss Toon accompanying her husband to the printing office and aiding him in whatever activity transpired there. (Either openly or clandestinely, she never heard them discuss what went on.) An odd calm would set in. Indeed, if called to judgment, she would admit that she met these weekly separations with an uneasy mixture of fear and relief. For during this period of her life Thomas dominated and consumed all her mental energy even when he was not directly present. If nothing else, the weekly separation gave her, both physically and mentally (what could she do about it? Out of her hands, beyond her control), a safe and justifiable withdrawal from her son for that short spell of hours, during which, in matters of child rearing only the Bethune daughters, and her own, were left to her care. They were proud girls, arrogant, and bashful only among themselves. Twelve frenzied limbs that made daily chaos of the mansion.

The good thing, she always knew that Thomas would be returned to her that same evening. (She is not making excuses.) She understands that her separation from him was always temporary, could never be anything more (glad to have him with her, back where he belongs), and not something that she either wanted or willed. But suppose that she in fact secretly desired longer periods of separation, that she wished somehow to prolong the displacement? Could anyone blame her? Knowing as we do that in the course of normal activity, on those days when the transfer didn’t occur, the Bethune girls and Thomas formed part of the weight of her day. She and Domingo would dress quickly at first light, bright and clear-headed to do their sweat-drenched work. Their paths would rarely if ever cross during the day. Her husband — tending to the acres of gardens and lawns, tending to the stable of horses, sharpening the axes and knives, varnishing the General’s spare (backup) canes, blacking boots and shoes, drawing water, cutting wood, making repairs to or fixing up the house (every week, Miss Toon or Sharpe wanted one room or another completely altered), leading a cow to the shed and butchering it. I feel like eating meat. (It fell to her to knife chickens and the hogs and to shape the meat.) Then curing the leather. Hides hung up and drying like linen. Service the carriage and when called to, take it and drive on an errand to town or a neighbor or up-country. It often fell to Domingo to drive the General and his wife and bundled-up Thomas to the town hall, where he would wait outside with the carriage, while Thomas performed on the stage inside — an old piano, a rotting splintery thing, badly tuned — for some unidentified strangers Domingo had spied arriving in his carriage and entering the hall, always well-dressed travelers.

And herself: open out the curtains in every room of the mansion so light falls clean over and brightens objects (an array of familiar shapes) and skin, prepare the bathwater, prepare the stove, set the table, cook breakfast, clear the table and wash the dishes, polish the piano (rubbed shine), scrub and hang the laundry (they will dry quickly in the sun), scrub the floors, prepare the stove, set the table, cook dinner, clean the table and wash the dishes, tend to the mistress, remove the bright laundry from the line (they dried quickly in the sun), iron the next day’s clothes, fold the clothes and put them into their proper drawers, prepare supper for the family, clear the table and wash the dishes, and see the family off—Anything else, ma’m? — to the evening, sometimes even to bed, tucking and kissing. Time finally to go to your cabin, barren of those things (possessions) most people surround themselves with, attachments to the past, sentimental items endowed with emotional richness. Your lopsided door resistant to shutting, especially on humid days. Feed your family. (Food makes you happy for a time.) Get your children off to sleep then settle into your small bed next to your husband. A man is some comfort. Then the steady rise and fall of his chest beside you, two nestled under the mess of blankets sharing sleep, his head heavy beside yours in the low space — their bed stunted, no right to rise far from the floor — a ripe full day coming to term followed by an appalling night — in the dark where do all the painful noises, sighs, and creaks come from? — to look forward to after the day’s exertions. Wake at the line of light glowing up at the bottom of the misshapen door and dawn entering through cracks between the poorly fitted planks of the walls and floor. Rise, touching ground gently like a migratory bird landing after a long pauseless flight. One day just like the next. Come Sunday, you have to remind your body to keep to the bed. Hey, fool, it’s Sunday, the day God rested. She and Mingo would drowse for as long as they chose, relegating the breakfast, laundry, dinner, and such, the usual maintenances of family, to her oldest daughter, she allowing Mingo to be the first to rise, her husband off to trap, hunt, or fish — cage, rifle, cane pole — always cleaning and cooking (supper) catch and kill himself.

So it was. When the Bethunes purchased a second girl, Antoinette, to assume her chores, while assigning her a new single duty — she was to accompany the General on his daily visits to the printing office and attend to whatever needs he had there — she welcomed the purchase and transfer of responsibility with a sort of silent celebration, as it brought a fundamental change to what had been a life of unvarying routine. Her time at the office freed her of constant responsibility for Little Thomas. (It was not a question of renunciation, of love, that permanent resident in her heart.) And it brought something else she might not have expected. It raised her in the eyes of others. At the office or in the street, woogies rich or poor greeted her as Miss Charity — some even slipped up and called her Miss Bethune — according her a position of respect, finding something admirable in her constant service to the General, her presence in his privileged company. And she had to admit that their acknowledgment made her feel favored and charmed, would encircle her in a bubble of light-headed pride that floated her through the next hours. The General often spent much of the day receiving visitors, prominent men, magnanimous men with loud voices who talked out their ideas and plans, devised plots and election schemes. He usually heard it all while seated behind his desk, one black cane unashamedly placed in full view along either side of the desk. He often seemed bored with it all, murmuring in irritation and making no attempt to disguise it. Men of lesser status called upon him too, an ant heap of travelers from all the regions round about, filling the office and rushing up to his desk, here to consult him, each one with his troubles. (White folks and their troubles.) General Toon seemed to take greater interest in these men, the desperate and needy, while she performed her duties — on call, standing off to the side or in a corner, observing, listening, or moving but keeping to the edges of the room as the men complained or conversed — feeling a measure of detachment from the matters at hand, her attention drifting along the factual edges, hearing but not really listening, seeing without really observing, other and apart from the General and his visitors but also miles and years removed from whatever might be happening back at Hundred Gates.

When can I get a look at that boy of yours? How come you stopped bringing him down to the office?

On occasion the General would send her down (belowdecks) to relay a message (an order) to the man in charge of the Negroes operating the big noisy machines, or upstairs (the nest) to one of the men cramped over a square of board with ink and pen, usually a notice to hire or fire. Quiet days too when it seemed he had no true reason to keep her around, no visitors calling upon him, nothing to do but sit reading a big book at his desk, rapidly flipping through the pages at times, she seated not far from him, in one of the chairs normally occupied by a guest. They took dinner at his favorite restaurant down the street, she waiting out back and eating her meal there while he stayed inside for as long as he wanted. (She could live with the waiting, although the food could have been better.)

This new life uneventful by comparison to the old one, so much so that she had to fight to keep Little Thomas in her thoughts. The one drawback, the office required her constant presence before the General and forced her to give up the one good thing labor at the mansion had rewarded her with: a few minutes of privacy thickening in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee, big cup little spoon, or to slip undetected into an unoccupied room, the steadiest satisfaction of her day.

She whispers into his ear, Wait for me here.

He hears.

Cut that out. She squeezes his hand affectionately. Don’t talk so loud.

He knows from experience that she will only be so long. So he stands and waits for her to return in the coolness of the shade, sunlight noisy around him. Heat transforms into hay under his feet. Wait for me here.

Despite the caution with which he advances — he has been learning to slow down, their soft voices aiding him in this — despite running a hesitant hand along the barn wall, not anticipating any obstacles, he sends a pail crashing to the floor. Hanging empty. But the cows hang full. He leans his head on her shoulder. He gently probes her udders — this is a word he does not know — with his fingers. Cows and trees have branches. He gets on all fours and crawls into the cave beneath the cow, the animal spreading her legs farther apart to facilitate him, his entire body fully under the belly now, letting the soft branches above trail along and across his face. He pulls and squeezes and sucks. In a low voice the cow encourages and supports him. More.

Milk spreads across the barnyard floor. More. He feels milk warm around his ankles. Hears it rising around him in the hall-filled barn.

Truth be told, General Bethune is neither the best nor the worst man to serve under. Many pluses in his favor. He maintains an unimpeachable position in the public mind, among his own kind, for his continuing service to country, his advocacy of their national cause, its voice both in print and at the platform, his flair for coming up with the right ideas in laymen’s terms. Not just this — many think him a kind man, as he rarely speaks dark sentences to his wife, children, employees, or slaves. Rumors that it is enough for a man to express a desire and the General will take pity on him and help in whatever way he can. Has she not seen this herself? Perhaps this aspect of his personality, his shining and noble sentiments, feelings of generosity and altruism, might help her now. Knowing also — what is most important for her — he is a man from the outside who has neither understanding of nor affection for plantation life. But she must not feel tranquil standing before him as she is now. A white man — a master — has limits. Through experience she well knows that a good servant (nigger) must be able to cross both fire and water.

So when — yet again — the General confronted her about her little Thomas, she gave the answer she thought he wanted and waited for him to reply as she thought he would — he did — and dismiss her for the night. She started for her cabin, her bosom swollen and heavy. She remembers how her Little Thomas would nurse with unexpected pauses and interruptions, a herky-jerky rhythm. He would stop sucking every so often, quiet and still. Then it occurred to her — or it occurs to her now — that he was actually stopping to listen to the sounds of his nursing. And if she, Mingo, or one of the girls spoke or made any sound he would pull his lips from her breast altogether, leaving the uncomfortable impression that the family, her included, were intruding on his feeding.

By the time she entered the cabin she had recovered her outlook. Mingo was sitting on the bed, Little Thomas and the girls conspicuously absent. In his face she saw uneasiness and anticipation, but this time he did not ask her about the outcome. Her own nervousness and expectancy gave her a painful sensation in her chest. What if she were to tell him her feelings, namely, that she cannot think of any solution to gain time? How often noted the silent conversation between husband and wife, air itself projecting words that need no tongue to speak them. She was unable to acquaint her husband with the thoughts that had been passing through her mind for the last hour or more, so she sought to minister to his pleasures before the children returned.

With something of the feeling of the night before a decisive battle, she was unable to sleep. This night, and the next, and many upon many. She is part mother, part more.

Tell it fresh, she says to her oldest daughter. Not the same ole lies.

The three lined up before her, elbow to elbow, like links in a chain. The expressions the same, threatening and at the same time afraid. (Was the fear of one the fear of the other?) Was she being unfair? Her own eyes told her that only the voices of the Bethunes, master and mistress, for whatever reason seemed to give Thomas pause. She suspects that the girls are willing to engage in the lowest imaginable tactics to manage their brother, bring him under control. Then too the more painful thought, the possibility of vile means for vile intentions, anger, spite, and ill will pushing the girls to punish him for all of his trouble, transactions of skin — she has not spared the rod — repaying in kind all she has paid them. He is bruised, black areas in the skin. He draws back from her touch. He wiggles out of her arms when she tries to hug him, a frantic animal chewing off a limb to limp free of a trap. What punishment will suffice? Her daughters (or is Thomas to blame?) have suddenly returned her the thoughts, the feelings, and the black griefs, which from her earliest childhood she had permanently entrusted to her white owners.

She holds her most severe admonishments for her oldest daughter, whom she believes — she must believe something — is leading the other girls astray by the contagion of example.

The girl watches her, hard-eyed and defiant. Don’t know why they always blaming me.

She gives her a bold and specific instruction. (What alternative does she have? Plans, chances, undertakings. Hard questions, harder choices.) Starting tomorrow, tether Thomas to a post or tree. She goes so far as to suggest a location. The order fails to surprise the girl.

Silently and with solemn slowness Mingo continues to eat his supper. Knife and spoon are instruments of wonder in his hands.

Which tree? her daughter asks.

In outrage Mingo allows the utensils to spill from his hands then pounds one fist on the table, the table splintering in the center, spreading an infectious silence, all in the room, all words, sound and language, caught in the web-like splinter. Startled too perhaps at this quiet man who rarely displays anger, who loses all of his powers of reasoning at the sight of violence. He gets up from the table and leaves the cabin.

She goes out to check on him, to comfort him. Finds him sitting in the grass a few feet from the tub. She takes the tub and flips it over to use the bottom as a stool. Facing one another across the night. The first thing she does is to take his hand gently in hers and check it for signs of injury. I should send for the Doctor to inspect you, she says.

Better you send fo God, Mingo says.

No appeasing him. What tone will first light assume?

The following day, she travels to the printing office with the General in customary fashion. Nothing different about this day except he doesn’t speak a single word to her. Come evening, together they return to Hundred Gates, the General to his white mansion and she to her knotty cabin, and after she has finished feeding her family, the new girl, Antoinette, all speed and efficiency, shows up at her cabin door; she stretches out a hesitant hand and meets Charity’s hand on the way; informs her that the Bethune—those exact words; what she always calls him, them — would have her up at the house.

She finds herself in a vast green drawing room. General Bethune speaks her name. Then he says something about his regrets at having to impose a better discipline. Instructs her to fix a pallet in the back pantry off the kitchen. Tom will live and sleep here from now on.

She stares directly into the face of her master.

I suppose my wife will have to look after him, he says. Count yourself lucky, he says. Note my generosity. What might another man, a lesser man, have done in this circumstance? Always remember that. And be thankful.

What a wild state he is in. Clattering, hissing, whistling, blowing off gauge cocks. Fire up the engine! Ringing his bell, thundering over bridges, whooping through tunnels. Fire up the engine! What muscles and what wind, dreadful hour after hour. Heavens, she thinks, will his devil never run his viewless express off the track and give her a rest? Fire up the engine!

Tom chases his own voice about the room from one corner to the next:

Tell him to come up

I’ll do your Topley

I met my mother in the morning

Poor thing

There there there

Now comes the tutti

Don’t be in a hurry

Poor thing

You hurt your Topley last night

There there there

Now he has gone up

Into his mansion

Poor thing

Don’t be uneasy

Until I see you

Tom bites into the hard green apple. (Whale of an appetite.) The cold sweet grain against the roof of his mouth. Seeds perhaps. The shape of words enter and play at making sense. Leaves hover on the verge of speaking. Clutching at the air. Words rise to sky with the chickens but drop back to earth after a brief flight. Worms whisper marvelous things into his fingers and feet. And when others speak he can taste their language and thoughts in his mouth.

She taps the backs of his hands, just hard enough to hurt. No, Tom. Don’t put that in your mouth.

No, Tom. A horse is not a big mouse.

Tom, don’t eat standing up like a cow.

This is food, Tom. Feel its heat enter your teeth.

This is water, Tom. Feel the cool on your tongue. Note how it gives way like nothing else. And this is a flower. Put your nose right here and smell. Each color also has a smell. Both scent and touch allow us to distinguish one color from another.

He repeats what she says, word for word. Tries it again, doing her voice a little longer.

Tom punches the keys, pinches her awake.

Miss Antoinette, he says. Who your pappy? He lets out a little scream of delight. Miss Antoinette, who your pappy?

Tom makes a motion of swatting at the keys, as if warding off a swarm of flies. His arms are too short to span the entire ivory length, eighty-eight in all. (Proportions at work.) So he rocks from side to side on the stool to reach them. Music so foreign to the figure of the boy.

Tom is a delight. A happy rumble. A welcome change of pace from her previous students. Rarely has she had one worthy of her efforts. Most of the parents refuse to invest in a piano at home, and when they do, it is something secondhand and second-rate. Might she make a diligent effort to drum up a better breed of trainees, because taking up with the inhabitants of their town doesn’t bear thinking about. She is in no mood to waste any more time at the pretense of instruction. Tom is a solid way to pass the time, seconds, hours, and minutes otherwise impoverished. Either in the town itself or on her estate how few entertainments or distractions. How similar it all seems after a while. A series of laboriously linked actions. Many affinities here. A sameness intensified by this uniform landscape and climate. No change in the weather really, no turning of the seasons, just an easing off of sun and heat twice each year, like the lowering and dimming of a lamp. (The female sex are said to be more tolerant and resistant.) And how deep the dark gets. The dim liquid lights of the lamps no match. How seldom have they gone on holiday in their many years of marriage. Such are the drawbacks of lifelong attachment to a man of importance, a Race man. And how seldom to spend sundry affairs with the man you love when he is rarely at the house, busy days and some nights, taken up with the dealings of his newspaper and politics. (Is she right in bemoaning her fate? After all she lives in a free city.) People’s real home is where they lay their head. She prefers Culture, and for this reason she prefers big cities, the bigger the better. They live in a town offering a poor impersonation of a city, empty miles stretching left and right. She would love to relocate to New Orleans — she has expressed this to James one or twice — Charlotte, or Atlanta, but preferably somewhere up North. (Blasphemy! If James knew. She dare not confide in him, although he wants it too.) True, age brings the advantage of history, insight, and wisdom, but also the disadvantage of the exhaustion of experience. The mind is locked in the fortress of the skull as the soul is forced to join the congregation known as the temple of the body. And the tired mind, tired soul, requires a new stimulation.

Her pupils have repented. They are urging her to return, to take up their guidance and instruction again. They have drawn up a letter and taken the trouble of direct and immediate delivery through the quick medium of a servant’s hand, having subscribed themselves on the best paper in the best ink. The missive assures her that they need her, that they are lost without her. They swear to listen. They swear to obey. They swear to practice. They swear hard work and deep sweat. They will look lovingly at sheets of sound during all of their free hours. But Tom is her judgment, the solid basis of all her hopes. It is not the miracle that makes a realist turn to religion. A true realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability to believe in a miracle, and, faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.

After the rain, the air is rinsed clean, the light precise, every line and edge firmly in sight, the farthest distance diminished, as near as your hand, lands across the oceans captured in a single glance.

The wood is dry. Who will saw it?

Tom.

The fireplace crackles and smokes. Smoke whistles and sings, rising its way through the chimney and out into the world where the pines run. Tom’s arms rush forward at acute angles.

What is that you are playing?

The fire sounds like loud kisses.

I am playing the rain, he says.

She takes several clean sheets of paper with staffs already printed on them. Tom has already moved on to another piece, one she recognizes.

Tom, would you play it for me? she asks.

Tom does not answer.

Play the rain for me, she says.

He switches melodies without interruption. Once he finishes it, she has him repeat it, and once more after that, five times in all until she has completely scored the composition. At the top of the sheet where the first bars begin she writes “The Rain Storm.”

James, look at this. She holds the pages of sheet music before his face. Good God. The woman has lost her mind. Trying to get him to read music was like trying to teach Sanskrit to a Choctaw.

Mary—

He wrote it, she says.

He looks at her distrustfully. Mary, now this too. He actually stands up, bad legs and all. What are you trying to tell me? Have me believe only so much.

No, James, she says. He wrote it.

Sound lending sense.

His first composition. (Could you call it that?)

She sits with her husband. We should have it published, she says.

He does not answer her right away, a good sign. Whenever she outlines some idea that he doesn’t agree with, he interrupts her before she fully lays it out. But if he agrees he keeps quiet until she concludes, then closes his eyes as if searching his dark places only to discover that the words she had spoken were the same ones he had already formulated himself.

Nothing of that now. He gives her an odd look, one she has never seen before. Why? he asks. Suspicion in his look, watching her like a potential thief.

The following day he purchases an upright piano for his printing office.

Would you use the word composer?

Let us consider the possibilities.

Though she would not be so bold as to describe herself as a technician, let alone an expert — an artist? not even; never that word for herself, something shameful even in pronouncing it — she has known music all of her life and considers herself well versed on the subject, both in mind and in heart. Understands a thing or two about the complex and complicated (murky) process of inspiration and composition. Start here: all sounds are not the same in value even if they share external similarities. So much in what lies behind the utterance, the hidden life, and we must seek to recognize and identify this spirit, learn to distinguish one motion from another lest we confuse conscious intention with simplistic assertion (reaction). Would we accord the same musical weight to a nursery rhyme as to a sonata?

Countrymen and foreigners alike have noted the Negro’s special gift for song. Melodies snap through their blood. Rhythms wholly specific to their skin ambulate their breath and limbs, animating their bodies in a perpetual eye-exhausting frenzy. These are facts we all agree on. But how little or how much does this really tell us? And how useful, she wonders, is it in helping us to understand this peculiar boy Tom, a full-blooded member of his race and also its singular contradiction? Tom’s playing and preferences pose the most urgent questions. Granted, he has God-given and blood-driven talent. No lesson he can’t master — she takes some credit for his achievements; she is a teacher, a director, fine at what she does — even when she applies the most advanced pedagogic methods. Surprised at the occasional error in his playing or singing. Has come to expect a flawless response; he seems to know what you want and gladly provides it. But can he do anything other than parrot what she does? Can any Negro be more than a parrot? True genius creates. A recital is more than a reproduction. The player must animate the preexisting piece with his own breath and in so doing put the idiosyncratic self on display, in all its glory but without hiding any of its imperfections. She has yet to witness — what she has been waiting for — the unexpected in Tom’s playing, that something more that would tell her that Tom is doubly conscious. For no mind can engender until it is divided into two. (She has given some thought to this matter.) Creation in either composing or playing involves the vital interaction between opposing forces to bring forth an even more vital third.

Knowing thus, she concludes that Tom is fully of a piece with his race. Shut eyes and bulging forehead, he lacks the needed spirit. (He does not have the spirit. He does not have spirit.) Yes, his details are exact, his description is accurate, but his interpretation and conclusions are random. Where is the conscious breath? (Easy to let your lungs operate on their own, under the unconscious rhythms of habit.) He plays others, never himself. What we have to consider, Tom does not survey the world with the eyes of an explorer, adventurer, or builder. No. He never stirs from the field of the possible, however much he might like to enlarge it. (Assuming that he possesses such a lofty desire. Assuming much.) Should not a song disturb the ear, the senses, even as it pleases? Deformations are not foreign to a composer. In Tom’s case the only thing disturbed is a certain order of whatever is already possible. If he has complex (divided) emotions, are they not entities he can neither locate nor name?

The name is a crucial point of entry. So much in the heading, the title of the composition, where a few words or numerals can convey an entire story. And the lack of a proper heading closes down the melody and brings a corresponding absence of involvement in the listener. Disregard at your own risk. I am playing the rain. On first hearing Tom you seem to detect the richness, the precision, and the balance of high classical manner, accomplished through an agreeable variety of techniques. Upon closer examination — have another listen; listen — you realize that a song, or composition (your call), is for Tom a mere means like any other. You hear the presence of imitation not far behind what at first strikes the ear as an original melody, the distillation of one or two eternal truths. The mundane veiled in a flourishing of riffs and rhythms. (After all, he is only a boy, only a nigger. And he suffers a malady, one or more.)

Art is expression, and for lowly forms expression is an impossible act. Would a sow show its love for mud and oats by means of a grunt, or a cow moo in appreciation of cud and grass?

His head sways on his shoulders, as if he has a hard time controlling it, is barely able to keep it upright.

An idiot and a nigger — lord have mercy — Tom is doubly short of self. (Perhaps triply short. She had not counted his blindness.) Though he cannot see and he hardly (rarely) speaks — or communicates at all for that matter; often he just sits or stands, doing nothing in particular, other than smiling or baring his teeth — his manner at the piano, his ambience, his bubbling over with happiness, suggests that his primary reason for playing is to please the family, especially the female sex, her and her daughters, and his mother and his sisters. But true expression is independent of occasion.

It seems impossible that he should ever do anything different from that which the best have done already. (The speed an accuracy of her reasoning. How logical she can be.) Would it not be impertinent to suggest that he wishes to? Can he wish, aspire, set goals? Other than in the bodily longing of a chicken desiring feed, a bird desiring a worm, a duck drawn to a pond? Other than in the set demands of Nature, essentials, such as the changing of the seasons or the earth’s need for rain?

The evening is drawing in, the dim lamps seeming to gain strength.

Your colors sing, Tom says.

You can imagine her surprise when Dr. Hollister, after yet another examination — they have not digested his previous few visits, let alone got him out of their system completely — tells them that Tom can actually see large bright objects held up right before his eyes.

All would like to believe they have saved Tom from serious harm or irrevocable death more than once. Belief along the lines of a confession, as in, I bit off more than I can chew, as the saying goes. Count him among these confessors. Granted, Tom is enough to break down the courage and resolve of even those well accustomed to the Negro’s frequent aggressions and outrages. (Imagine the dangerous consequences of all this seeing its way into print — a comic front-page headline: A Scentoriferous Fight with a Blind Musical Nigger. See p. 18. Containing Adventures, Melodies and Scrapes.) So what should one do now, install him in his room (pantry) for all eternity? Or leave him to his own devices, come what may?

This is what I’ve been saying, his wife says.

Let him, he says. The dim light from the lamp outlines his bent shoulders and twisted legs. I’ve never met or seen a nigger who can’t get himself out of something he got himself into.

From then on she starts to leave Tom alone at the piano for hours at a time. Days and days of this. But what of those moments when no music comes? What does he do with himself? She can only assume.

Say what you want, his wanderings establish a routine, this element of habit that develops a muscular sense of place. He knows the land, this space called Hundred Gates. Breathes its air and absorbs its sun. Not that all of those invisible and silent hours are taken up with wandering. She learns as much when a neighbor, some planter, calls to inquire about their blind nigger. Only then does she discover that her daughters have been spending much of their free time secretly presenting Tom for impromptu performances for a handful of their neighbors, have been transporting him by foot to their parlors — ones with pianos — to demonstrate his peculiar talents. Of course, she is shocked, and the revelation causes her to question the why, what the girls stand to gain from these activities, holding out the possibility that they gain nothing at all, pride motivating them perhaps, vanity — showing off their possession — or some lesser transgression, such as pure childish indulgence. More than a bit of planning in all of this, for the next day, even before she has a chance to confront the girls, she unearths a new fact: her daughters — the oldest is behind it; she is sure of that much, proof not long in coming — had actually begun sending written notes, crude advertisements, to the other farms through the hands of the nigger girl, Antoinette — such insubordination; now they will need to purchase a new girl at the first opportunity; tell James — discovers this when she intercepts Antoinette, message in hand. But it doesn’t end there. She is even more surprised to see how the note expounds glowingly upon Tom’s abilities but also how it praises him far too lavishly, speaks of him in an almost reverent tone, like a superior being. His mouth speaketh great swelling words. His hands bringeth forth great swelling sounds. Her oldest had penned it, no doubt there: her language, her syntax, her wonderment, her high-sounding romanticism. She will outdo them. She will present Tom to the world.

With a roll of wheels and the tramp of horses’ hooves, the guests arrive. Some stand looking wide-eyed at their surroundings, as if they have never seen a mansion before, while she stands outside the main door, evening air cooling her face, observing them. All smiles and courtesy she welcomes them into the house, and each guest greets her accordingly. How are you this evening, Miss Charity? Once they are comfortably inside the music room — the General receives them warmly, shakes hands, even mock salutes — she and Antoinette work diligently to bring out the prized vessels and begin serving the guests refreshments. Many of them have brought along their slaves, musical instruments attached. They strike up a tune. And the men turn jubilant, sharing circumstances, anecdotes, and memories as they share the smoke and embers of their cigarettes and pipes. The harsh sounds of their niggers’ banjos and violins like so much distant backdrop, commanding about as much recognition and concern as a mosquito’s irritable buzz. They inquire about Sharpe, who is never in attendance at these gatherings, his time consumed in speculative affairs on the General’s behalf. (So the General says; for all of us.)

The General’s parties are not exclusive to men. Sometimes wives accompany their husbands, all joining in conversation, the women taking dainty sips of water (no spirits) while the men imbibe brandy and whiskey. (Best savored in moderation.) But the men always find a reason to leave their wives and wander out to the garden — how well one breathes out there, she thinks while she remains inside to attend on the wives, fully hearing their chatter or demands (requests) but also half listening to the men, the private cadence of voices outside, the pungent trail of tobacco in the air, smoke trailing their gestures and words — each man buoyant when he returns to the room, as if he has just delivered the punch line of a joke. Antoinette goes out to the garden and sweeps up the ashes.

On one occasion, the boy Bible-mouth, H. D. Frye, came with his wife, who, for whatever reason, was the only white woman present besides Mrs. Bethune. Frye by some accounts was no older than fourteen — no telling, he keeps quiet on the subject — the wife twelve. Sharpe had discovered the boy, an itinerant or circuit rider — unclear the distinction — during his many travels, and after much discussion, convinced him to come back to their town and take over the church the Bethunes attended, as the cholera had recently put their pastor under the earth (en route to heaven). He dressed the same at the pulpit and in the street, assuming a single garment, a black robe fitted at the waist that flared out at the ankles like a woman’s dress. He was rather tall, fresh-complexioned, with prominent cheekbones and clever observant eyes. Despite his youth his face wore an expression of absolute reverence, the skin reddish, burning with faith. He was thoughtful and seemingly abstracted. She never understood a word he said either from the pulpit or from the floor. Providence moves through time as the Gods of Homer through space. She suspected that his congregation was as much impressed by his impenetrable sermons as by his prodigious memory. Name any verse — Isaiah 2, verse 4—from the Good Book (of Trial, Affliction, Punishment, and Eventual Redemption) and he could recite it word for word. Even more, he could rearrange the words in any order you requested and seemed to take pleasure in delighting children and niggers alike by reciting verses backward, forward, upside down, and sideways.

He was otherwise a quiet boy, never talkative, saving his words for the pulpit. (The entire evening she never saw him once speak to his wife, equally quiet as her husband, the plain-faced girl speaking as much with her hands as her mouth.) With the exception of the General, all in the room seemed both highly impressed and highly honored by his presence. The visitors rose from their seats and greeted him with a bow. He did not bow in return, or greet them at all. No words or bodily contact, only a gesture resembling a slight forward tilting of the head, barely discernible. With a show of feeling, Miss Toon went up to him and kissed his hand. But he only returned her a blankness of face suggesting that the kiss had never happened, a moment now excised from time, which caused her to doubt the doings of her own lips. She quietly disappeared from the room. Without pomp or ritual the General touched the boy between the shoulder blades as if he were any other youth. Maybe this was the way he had once touched his own son, Sharpe. (She thinks she recalls such scenes. Even forms a picture. But wasn’t Sharpe already a man upon her arrival at Hundred Gates? Possibly. So whatever it is she sees now must have occurred before her arrival. No other way.) The two had come to know and like each other — only Dr. Hollister commanded equal time, attention, and respect from the General — and almost daily he would show up at the printing office for some coffee or cakes, the General fondly observing the boy while he ate. She also remembered how the boy cried out behind the church after he had preached his first sermon — power in his words, eyes glowing with administrative fire — a show of emotion that required a strategic response from General Toon, who went over and began patting the boy on the back, solemnly confirming him in his new function.

Just as things began to settle down and as the visitors were managing to elicit a few curt and reluctant sentences about church matters from the Bible-mouth, Miss Toon returned to the room, leading Thomas by the hand. Charity was as surprised as anyone to see him, and almost didn’t recognize him. How much he had grown since she had last seen him several months ago and how well they had outfitted him in a little black suit. Miss Toon released his hand and faced the assembled. Where he stood Thomas was full of agitation, turning his head up and down, this way and that, his hands and arms and torso twisting about, like a wet dog shaking dry. Miss Toon made her announcement then concluded by asking them to take a seat and maintain silence during the performance.

The guests were clearly disenchanted at first, casting a glance over the wild nigger boy who would supposedly be entertaining them at the piano. In their faces they made no attempt to disguise their true feelings of disgust for the nigger. Some even trembled, fearful. The boy Bible-mouth stepped back in revulsion. They looked at General Bethune as if they were questioning his sanity — he was indifferent as always — for what man in his right mind would bring before them a wild untamed animal and even worse, a creature who was apparently feverish, rabid?

Undisturbed by their reaction Mary Bethune ushered Thomas over to the piano, where he sat down on the stool, positioned his hands above the keys, and moved his head around him with some curiosity.

That’s when the men broke out in a chorus of laughter. (All but the Bible-mouth and his wife, two silent peas in a pod.) James, you are a prankster. Hands down the best. You have it in you after all? Whoever heard of a nigger playing the piano? Where’s his violin? Someone please fetch his banjo. His spectacles. But they all saw that General Bethune (their James) was indeed serious. One and all, they seated themselves as Mary Bethune with great formality of voice instructed Tom to begin his recital.

Thomas teased out the opening notes, the men by turns startled or impressed — read their faces, record their gestures — at Tom’s performance, not wanting to believe but enjoying it all the same. (And Charity watching and listening, but feeling nothing.) Not surprisingly, the Bible-mouth and his wife sat in solemn gratitude. By the end of his recital, the last crescendo of chords, their eyes and ears had grown accustomed to Tom’s primitive condition, responding with smiles and laughter to his strange movements and gestures. Basking in the high revel of event, they all wanted to touch the nigger — and touch they did, the men almost fighting one another to get a sufficient number of feels and caresses — their previous discomfort dispelled, all acting and behaving as though they had known nothing else, at ease with this nigger like all the others they had known. The only holdout was the one planter among the group — how rare it is for General Bethune to even allow a planter in his house; but it was necessity, duty, a way of both keeping the peace and preparing for longed-for war — who deliberately did not change his expression to show his sophistication.

Brethren, the boy Bible-mouth said, it disappoints me that you find mirth in this remarkable display of the glories of the Almighty’s unchanging hand.

One man spoke up. You said it, Pastor Frye. It’s monstrous kind of our almighty father to send such likely niggers for our convenience and pleasure.

You should learn from this gift, the Bible-mouth said.

The men in the room eyed him one and all then gave each other slanted looks. Did I hear correctly? What did he say? Does he mean it?

Hold back on your words. Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? The Bible-mouth looked at each man in turn. Do you question the Almighty’s handiwork? For it is He alone who directly assigns to each nationality its definite task on earth and inspires it with a definite spirit in order to glorify Himself through each one in a peculiar manner. Every nation is destined through its designated organization and its place in the world to represent a certain side of the divine image.

He’s starting early, Charity said to herself. Can’t wait til Sunday.

The whole of mankind is a vast representation of the Deity. As the good book says, Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.

Frye’s wife had pushed to the front of her seat in excitement, as if she were seeking a moment to applaud.

Therefore we cannot extinguish any race either by conflict or amalgamation without serious responsibility.

Charity thought she heard someone whisper, Save it for Sunday.

The merciful aspect of the Almighty’s economy shines out in history as clearly as His justice and judgment. Who among you is chosen? Who among you is free? — for as every man here knows, submission to the Almighty turns out to be the only true freedom.

General Bethune squeezed the boy’s shoulder. No harm done, he said. He smiled at the boy and turned his inclusive face to the men before him. These intelligent gentlemen are kindred spirits, he said. How often have I had to relay to them these very same sentiments.

Sentiments are not facts, the Bible-mouth said.

Okay, General Bethune said. Facts.

I am prepared to believe you, another guest said, at least in principle.

On the contrary, the planter said.

He’s the preacher.

I admit to minor moral stagnation.

Do you not have greater sins to acknowledge? the boy asked. Yes? Then admit to more. My aim is to win you over.

The men looked perplexed, at a loss for answers. General Bethune rushed to save them. So this means you enjoyed the performance?

A blessing, the boy said.

Indeed.

Very much.

What a find.

No, the Bible-mouth said. General — he always called General Bethune “General”—do you not feel some sabbatical obligation?

Sabbatical? one of the men said.

It means Sunday, someone else said.

I know that.

Yes, Sunday. I do not mean to confuse. I am here to humbly serve all of you. General, unbeknownst to your person, you find yourself in the honorable position of holding the power to save our Sabbath.

General Bethune just looked at him.

Would you assign this boy to play in our service this Sunday? As you are well aware our pianist is abhorrence.

General Bethune looked at his wife. I don’t see what would prevent it, he said. You but ask.

I ask. Your boy would be a welcome respite. God willing.

For a single Sunday? Mary Bethune asked.

We might first begin with a Sunday service, then try another Sunday, and another, and by and by through the Sundays, for a long-standing tenure could not possibly exceed our needs. Not to exclude the nonsabbatical services during the week. At present these services present us with less need for musical accompaniment. This Sunday would be the trial for all else. The Almighty will see to it as He sees fit.

Thomas began fussing with his clothes. Mary Bethune went into action to quiet him down. His animation disappeared as quickly and as suddenly as it had appeared.

It would be an interesting experiment, General Bethune said.

Hardly, the Bible-mouth said. Our dilemma surely is real and constant. The boy is chosen.

Tom don’t play no Sunday school music, Thomas said.

His affront registered on every face in the room, although no one voiced complaint.

Party over, guests gone — Charity goes so far as to kiss Antoinette on the cheek in farewell — she returns to her cabin surprised to discover that the three girls are still awake, fresh-faced and happily seated in a circle on the splintery floor where Mingo is indulging and tantalizing them with some sleight of hand involving forks and spoons. She offers her family a brief and censored report about the party, gone from her whatever element of detachment she felt earlier during the actual event, images developing clearly and cleanly now in her mind as she retells it and as she concludes with an emphatic paraphrasing of the boy-mouth’s request-offer. (Does she pass on Thomas’s demurral?) Only to herself, inside her own skull, does she sing the old melodies, religious or secular, she learned on other farms.

O massa take that bran new coat and hang it on the wall

Darky take that same ole coat and wear it to the ball

Has she not caught her girls, at work and in play, singing the tunes? Songs Thomas has never known in their isolation, their withdrawal from the world of the plantations at Hundred Gates.

One of her daughters asks, Is that preacher a man?

He ain’t no preacher. He a Bible-mouth.

Same thing.

No.

Like water and rain.

Mud and dirt.

No.

Tell her, Mamma.

Tell her, Daddy.

It’s the same thing, she says.

See. I told you.

That ain’t what you said.

Did too.

Did not.

Is he really a preacher? her oldest daughter asks.

Yes, she says.

See.

But he my age. He a boy.

Yes.

Where his mamma?

He ain’t got no mamma, cept God.

Can I go over to his house sometime?

Why?

So we can play.

He don’t play.

How you know?

Cause I know.

What, he ain’t got no toys?

He don’t play with toys.

And he white, another daughter adds.

That’s not the play he means, she says. He wants Thomas to play the piano and sing in the church.

I wanna sing too.

Me too.

You can’t sing.

This gets them singing.

I can see the coming—

— of the glory—

— of the lord. Hallelujah.

Amen.

Glory be.

She bustles the girls off to bed, where they go gently into good sleep with a few final words.

People don’t dance no more.

All they do is this.

And this.

She lay down beside her husband, her mind astir with her daughters’ chatter, with Thomas’s sudden appearance and her family’s lack of interest in it, and with the boy-mouth’s show of interest and his offer. She thinks about his church.

The Bethunes and other prominent people of the city take up the first rows of pews, an empty row separating them from ladies and their daughters dressed in white cotton sunbonnets and long-sleeved dresses and their crude husbands and sons outfitted in coarse cloths and unraveling ties — their Sunday best, meaning some clothing other than their tattered work garments — hair and clothing glistening with fish grease. Niggers take up the last rows of pews if any are left — the small church has yet to construct a balcony for them — otherwise congregating about the open door outside, some leaning in to look, slipping in their Amens and Hallelujahs, humming responses between verses, and joining in on the hymns, these activities competing with, made all the more difficult given the discomforts of the sounds and the smells of the poor farmers’ bony mules and skinny horses hitched to run-down buggies and wagons. (The better grade of horses and carriages are afforded a lot behind the church.)

I can’t say I see nothing wrong wit it, Mingo says.

She turns her head and stares at him in the dark.

The thing you spend your time at is what you are, he says. A hewer of wood is a hewer of wood, even if he spends all day fancying he’s some big-timer driving a carriage.

He continues to whisper to her. A man can spend all his day fancying he’s laid up in bed with the queen of England while lil Sally is the only flesh he knows. You are what you live. Mighty fact, I can’t see not a damn thing wrong wit it.

She is left to think. Yes, she wants to say, but will this be the last? How many Sundays? Thomas is chosen. The boy-mouth said that Thomas had been chosen. God had handpicked him. Like walking down a dark road, then somebody up and clobber you over the head. Chosen like that. How come nobody had chosen her?

A rapid gust of wind. Tom alone in the river tangled with fish, color washing across him. His mouth jumps and every few seconds his nostrils flare, breathing words and breeding air. How it is. See Tom leaning away. He scarcely disturbs the water.

Certain things even God can’t repair. In hindsight, looking back to piece it all together, Charity will recall it this way. The image of Mrs. Bethune piled up on pillows in her bed, her bloodshot eyes glowing in the hollows of her withered face, Mrs. Bethune upset to the point of sickness over her husband’s decision regarding Thomas. Go only so far, as Dr. Hollister has forbidden all to enter the bedroom, although no one can keep out Sharpe, who arrives from overseas even as others are trying to escape, hurrying along in poor light, cloaks wrapped around them, shifting shadows who seem to be whispering in foreign languages, even as General Bethune implores them to remain, because his wife is not long from the grave. Long legs, long boots, Sharpe will come up to Charity and ask for certain information with a penetrating glance, at once both skeptical and kindly — he stands up with real devotion when she enters the room — eyes and cheeks aflame, a little black mustache like a pencil balancing on his top lip. Days of this, sickness and questions.

Then, on an impulse, she heads down toward the river, and finds Thomas on the bank where the harsh water flows, a sight that both chills and excites her, just out of view herself, spying as Thomas piles up little stones to build structures that resemble towers. What she sees now before her she sees again. Had he not constructed such structures before? Had not her girls in fun or anger kicked them down?

She sees him rise and start up the bank. Sees him stop to embrace first one wet tree then another and still another. Embrace the air itself.

And then she sees her body embrace a new dress, a black garment that reveals her form, elongated in the sunlight. Her breasts sag and her stomach too. Holy sounds reverberate beneath her feet. True, this is another Sunday, but it is also a day like nothing else. Sun, heat, smell — she sheds these elements as they appear. Her family stands around, watching and waiting without seeming to look, masking their true intentions with lackadaisical ambling, taking advantage of the usual assumptions about their race, namely, that the observer will fail to see anything beyond a handful of niggers — one, two, three, four — on pause from their chores and activities, niggers lazing about as niggers are supposed to. Thomas emerges. Never before has she seen him so well dressed. The sight brings a clear sharp pause in her thinking, much like that day many years ago when she spied his legs sticking up like ladles from the tub. In one prolonged instant she sees the strange escort take Thomas’s arm and guide him by the elbow toward the carriage. Thomas. Almost not wanting to believe. Thomas. His face is trained on the carriage. Thomas. He picks up speed and almost leaves his escort behind, the grass unbelonging to his feet. Heat shimmer on the horizon. How can the world shine from that far away? There is less fear in her now. She is upset. Why try to hide it? How tell about it later? All of the fragments of her life collect around this one afternoon, meet at the point right there in the grass where her sweating feet are planted.

Domingo and the girls move forward to help Thomas up into the carriage. No need now to draw back or to be timid. He wrestles his arms and hands away and lifts himself up into the carriage unaided. She can’t understand. There is nothing to understand.

Get these niggers away from me, Thomas says. Pulls away as though he has never known them, carrying with him all the light and air.