Song of the Shank

Voice of the Waves (1856–1862)

“The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. This am I …”

HE PLAYS “DIXIE” WITH HIS LEFT HAND IN THE KEY OF A, “Yankee Doodle” with the right in the key of E, and sings “The Girl I Left Behind Me” in the key of E.

He plays the Moonlight Sonata with his back to the piano and his hands inverted.

He plays a four-handed arrangement of Rossini’s Semiramide with two hands.

He plays “Voices of the Waves” with his tongue and teeth, as if eating the ivory keys.

He plays “The Rain Storm” in a minor key with his bare feet, walking melody across the black keys.

He sings the song about his mother (“Mother, dear Mother, I Still Think of Thee”), and every woman in the audience starts crying.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, Blind Tom will perform for you one of his own compositions, the latest from his growing catalog. Feel honored, ladies and gentlemen, as your ears will be the first to hear this beautiful tune outside my own. It is titled, and I assure you that you’ll see why, “Rattlesnake Charm.” Speaking slowly to get it right.

You, Perry Oliver, the Manager of the Performance, call for a challenge from the audience. Who here in the house can make history by confounding Blind Tom? A man produces a composition of his own construction that he points out is some twenty pages in length. Please, sir, come to the stage. As soon as the challenger sets hands to his tune, Tom bends his head nearly to the floor and with one foot raised and stretched out behind him, begins to turn round and round upon the other foot, gaining speed as he spins, the entire figure agitated, rotating about itself on its own axis, performing implausible acrobatic contortions, in poses and expressions beyond the limits of the ridiculous and expressive. Now he begins to ornament the gyrations with spasmodic movements of the hands. He makes some members of the audience dizzy with his spinning. Some of the women cover their faces, or their husband’s hands do it for them without their asking, but you don’t think it odd. Tom looks like nothing more in the world than a man taking his daily exercise, strange gymnastics essential to his bodily health. Something strangely peaceful in the activity, Tom winding deeply into a private place, the eye of his own storm.

Tom ceases spinning about and seats himself at the piano. He plays back the melody note for note and in the exact rhythm, begins to play it again, seeming to inspect the melody first, run through it once as if to check it out before reshaping and revoicing it, weaving variations and building a continual stream of countermelody and changing textures, transposing the melody and harmony to another key, revealing all of the song’s hidden permutations, one hand now active on the keyboard, the other fluttering in the air.

Another man in the audience takes to his feet and issues a different challenge, hoping to confound “the eighth wonder of the world.” Rumor has it that Tom can recite certain passages from Plato, word for word. Does he know the fifth chapter of The Republic? Why indeed, you say. He does know it. And for the audience’s additional pleasure, he will also recite chapters six and seven. So Tom does, reciting one chapter in Greek, the next chapter in Latin, and then the last in French, Tom’s voice, the way it holds each person in the audience like a hand gripping a face, a kind of hypnosis. Now he gives — further amazement — an oratory in Japanese followed by in quick order selections from the Gospel according to Mark, several Articles of the Constitution — why stop there? — and the first chapters of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, performing the pages in the exact voice of the master British novelist—If it is too cold or wet I take shelter in the Café de la Régence and amuse myself watching people playing chess. Paris is the place in the world, and the Café de la Régence the place in Paris where this game is played best, and at Rey’s the shrewd Legal, the crafty Philidor and the dependable Mayot sally forth to battle … — saying what the day demands, his voice slow and measured, beautiful and powerful, all the intonations, syllables, and inflections exact, each member of the audience watching and listening with dark redolent attention, rapture, bodies stiff, listening with all their muscles.

Soon the lights come up, startling, each person like a puzzle piece in her/his seat collectively holding the light together. Applaud with everyone else. Impossible not to.

Light burning Tom into fame, into history.

The audience huddles near the orchestra pit, talking greedily, forming a tight arc around Tom, even as the navigator leads him backstage. Tom has no choice but to give himself up to the melee of greeting and compliments and handshaking. The needy who flock to Tom’s dressing room like sick pilgrims, in a terrible hurry to touch or kiss Blind Tom’s hands, forehead, neck, or cheek, to lay hands on his woolly scalp. Seated in a chair and moving as little as possible, Tom tucks his hands safely away into his lap and so doing keeps them out of view, hidden. For the most part, he remains silent in the face of their praise and pronouncements, their inquiries and entreaties, wincing at the smells of these strangers’ colognes. Then the surgeons, doctors, and physicians, who politely or hurriedly wish to examine Tom and supply him the latest remedies and research. (No illness can be concealed from trained sight.) He barks out at those few who seem to agitate (annoy) him — the poking, probing, and prodding, medical fingers sounding his chest, tugging at his nose and ears, tapping his eyes as if testing an eggshell’s firmness, prying his teeth apart; what it means to live in a body: maximum anatomical tension — but by and large he remains quiet and still. Nor does he perk up when the musical professionals inquire about some chord voicing or the tempo of a particular movement, or his feelings about the Moonlight Sonata, his own “The Battle of Manassas,” or why such and such a composition is not in his program, or what songs did he love that he never sang? All those fussy unseen hands, all those heard or ignored or not understood voices. Tom in need of a good night’s rest, two or three good nights, and something to fill his stomach and cool his mouth and tongue (hunkered at the table). Lait.

He sat on his stool a full half-yard distant from the piano, this awkward position making it necessary for him to stretch out his arms to their full negro length, like an ape clawing his food. His feet showed no better understanding of proper, keyboard posture; when not on the pedals, they twisted incessantly, rubbing into the stage floor like a boar snorting up a well-buried black truffle. When given a theme for improvisation, he would take some ludicrous posture, expressive of listening, but soon lowering the body and rising on one leg, spinning round and round, moving upon that improvised axis like a pirouette dancer, but indefinitely. The muddled notes went stumbling into dots. When he finished playing, he would applaud himself violently, kicking, pounding his hands together, and turning away to his master, the self-named “Manager of the Performance,” for an approving pat on the head. All in all, his music was a conventional affair, uncomplicated in melody, rudimentary in harmony, exact in rhythm and pace, and basic in structure and form. Still, many carry on with the belief that this was the most remarkable performance ever witnessed in our city. A vaguely perceived hare is nevertheless a hare. Indeed, to the amateur ear, Blind Tom’s “exhibition” would put to blush and shame many of our so-called “professors” of music.

— The Columbus Observer

The ship bellies into the harbor, faint birdsong sounding above. At last. He steps free of the deck, down the slanted plank, a sea-bleached wreck, a string of stirring bodies (passengers) behind him. (Pied Piper.) Always on the go, chasing an audience for Tom. Maps make the getting there look easy, foreshortening distance, the world small, flat, and manageable, a constellation of names — Chicago, Berlin, London, Boston, Memphis, Paris — laid out before him as prodigious as stars in the sky, names that bring together an elemental union between earth and flesh, ground and Blind Tom. So he draws up plans, his ideas bright forces quite apart from himself. He sees them rise, turn, spin, fall, as light as golden birds.

The taxis, hotels, and inns, the luggage damaged or lost, the saloons and restaurants. So much that can go wrong. Acts of man and God. Only when he sees multitudes rush in to take their seats inside a concert hall or auditorium does he unwind, thankful for the perfect alignment of events.

Days glide by like birds. Weeks ocean-wide. So much sky. (What is here must also be there.) Time measured by the number of seats filled, the number of tickets sold, his thoughts and speech full of facts. Like unnumbered pages the repetitions prevent him from counting the hours and the steps. Repetition. When the word is the same day after day, words like travel, tour, recital, concert, performance. Time does not change, it does not move, nor does his mind or his feet, even if they bear the illusion of coming and going, of getting to somewhere — perhaps not a place — important.

In Little Vicksburg, he sees a road adorned with the most magnificent carriages ever constructed. In Macon, he expresses his admiration for the brilliant uniforms of militiamen who pass before him. In Augustus — another city another recital. He flies through the minutes, feeling the draw of some vast venue opening up, all river, all ocean, all sky. Even before leaving one town or city for the next, he senses he has lost something he might have gained had he stayed longer. He steps on boat or train already thinking of home, the tour’s end, and thinking beyond that to the next season. In his sleep he has to shake off thoughts of leave-taking, and when he is awake he feels firmly reassured at the sight of his locked suitcases, proof of future engagements. Nothing is as it used to be. His sense of the world is thrown off. Experience has set him in the firm belief that travel is a way of measuring where he is in his life. If things go smoothly his life is running as it should. However, if things go badly — trains off schedule, luggage lost, reckless or route-altering taxi drivers — his life is off course. But a tour throws even this sense of judgment out of whack. What he comes to desire is rest.

Tom, how do you like New York?

I don’t like it one bit. Too many fellow beings.

Like a line of ants, the would-be pianists and professors of music climb up to the stage and gather around the unguarded post-concert piano. The floorboards beneath them sponge sound back. First they examine the ivory keys with their eyes, the magic there. Now put their fingers where Blind Tom had put his hands, his warmth still there. Close their eyes, seeing and feeling the ghost of this man, handprints. Touching keys. Arguing from the man to the music.

Tom, do you like talking to us? the journalist asks.

I am surrounded by friends, Tom says.

Are you looking forward to your concert tonight?

It will be better tomorrow. Tomorrow we will really begin.

And why is that?

It is the design of my head.

Will you play “Moses in Egypt” tonight?

I don’t know what I can do. I promise nothing complete.

Tom, how does a person stand up under all of the traveling you do?

I am standing now.

Do you ever suffer from fatigue?

I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space.

Hurry up. He coming.

Voice that brings faces to the windows.

Yall better hurry up.

Doors opening, pouring Negroes out into the afternoon, so many faces brown and beaming bright, cheeks swollen with pride. Oh happy day! Tom puts words into their mouths and movements into their bodies. In parade formation, they cross a Japanese bridge above a dark yellowish brown stream of open sewage into a field of flowers — gladioluses, petunias, tulips, chrysanthemums, and sunflowers — on the other side, and march on into the grove of Japanese cherry blossom trees in full bloom on the White House lawn.

There he is.

He looks bigger in person.

Praise be.

They look up at the sky to see if God is watching too.

Tom, would you like to say a few words to the people?

Yes, Tom says. I am Blind Tom, and so are you.

He sounds just like the Lord.

Praise be.

Tom walks right past President Buchanan, positions himself before the Chickering full grand piano, and starts to play. About the first song, the president’s niece is heard to say, I never felt that song as I did just now. About the second song, a prominent senator in attendance will remember majestic rivers winding over the floodplains, while his wife will opine, Away flew the notes. Of the many journalists present, one will later sum up the recital this way: Music broke out on Blind Tom like the smallpox.

Even before the applause for his last song has ended (no encore), Tom makes his way over to the members of the Japanese delegation. Says, You don’t understand our music.

Outside the White House, more journalists with their paper, pens, and questions. Tom, you’re a big boy.

Yes. I’m a behemoth.

The photographer. His heavy plates, black scrim, flash. The camera he must carry tortoise-like on his back. He crawls inside the black scrim. The shutter falls, a puff of blinding smoke.

Tom says, A photograph is a mirror that remembers.

Where to now, Tom?

Tom is off to glory.

In the first place he will represent the Southern army leaving home to their favorite tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which you will hear in the distance, growing louder and louder as they approach Manassas (the imitation of the drum and fife). He will represent the Grand Union Army leaving Washington City to the tune of “Dixie.” You will recollect that their prisoners spoke of the fact that when the Grand Union Army left Washington, not only were their bands playing “Dixie,” but their men were also singing it.

He will represent the eve of battle by a very soft sweet melody, then the clatter of arms and accoutrements, the war trumpet of Beauregard, which you will hear distinctly; and then McDowell’s in the distance, like an echo at first. He will represent the firing of the cannons to “Yankee Doodle,” the Marseilles Hymn, and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” With “Dixie,” you will hear the arrival of the train cars containing General Kirby’s reinforcements, which you will all recollect was very valuable to General Beauregard upon that occasion after their arrival of which, as you will hear, the fighting will grow more severe (shouts and yells, and the imitation of horses, musketry, and death).

A tribute to genius, presented to Tom, the blind colored pianist, by Messrs Knabe & Co, Baltimore, Front Street Theater July 3, 186—

Testimonial:

I well remember in Charleston where a party of us had him with us on and off for two or three months, and a young lady sat down at the piano and began to play. Tom was at the dark end of the chamber, spinning upon his hands and heels, and mumbling to himself. He caught the sound of the instrument and stood for a moment still and upright. Then, like a wild animal, he made a dash and swooped down upon her. Terrified, the poor girl shrieked and ran, while the rest of us held him writhing and trembling with what seemed to be rage. “She stole my harmonies,” he cried over and over, “she stole my harmonies.” And never again did he allow her to come near him. If she were even in the room he knew it somehow and became restive and angry.

Attaining his zenith, the height of public regard, Blind Tom is a sun setting everything in the world ablaze, radiating excellent reviews, parades in his honor (the clamor, the sureness of gesture and step, the rousing speeches, the swells of fellow feeling), delighted and devoted concertgoers, invitations and entreaties from worthy personages and distinguished delegations who seek a private audience with this singular phenomenon of Nature (the decorum of Tom’s hosts), the journalists who want to exchange a few words with him, and the many ordinary and cheerful well-wishers who go out of their way to simply catch a glimpse of Blind Tom in the flesh during those lapses and lulls when he is not onstage or otherwise on display. Open the gates of heaven, for everything in the world is either outside or inside Tom. Tom the everything in everything. Never before has Perry Oliver felt so recognized, so understood, so vindicated. Free.

So why then day after day this troubling disquiet that came upon him without warning several months ago — where were they then, in Seattle? Chicago? the war benefit in Charleston? — and that never seems to leave him? He sits up at night with his ledger of water-stiffened pages, trying to plan (order? predict?) the future in his clean penmanship, trying to escape the feeling that he is being carried helplessly toward some pitching instant.

That feeling even more so after he starts to notice three weeping women in black at every concert. Three weeping women dressed in black. Seated next to each other in the blue-black dark, tears flowing and mouths stunned open. Each woman assumes a distinct set to her body. The first with her face tilted to one side. The second woman holding the sides of her face. The third forehead gripped in the vise of her right hand. He watches their heaving bosoms without hearing their sobs, drowned out by the music perhaps. Sees them swallowing deep breaths then spilling the breaths out again. They become a familiar presence, concert after concert, city after city, three weeping women in black. They seem to have no idea that their gestures are extreme — bawling, wringing their hands, shouting meaningless phrases over and over. Do they assume that no one hears them? From the stage he searches out their countenances, trying to detect features around their expressions of penitence and grief. Strange remote faces. How old are they? Are they sisters of the Race? (This brutal looking into.) That’s when he begins to notice that the faces actually change at each concert. Never the same three women, but always a set of three women in black, comely or ugly, young or old or of indeterminate age. Perhaps these women are all part of some union of the female sex a thousand members strong. Ten thousand. Besides their black garb, one fact holds true from concert to concert: although they are weeping he can see that their eyes are alive, registering and interpreting, taking in everything.

Then the night when red moon and red sun compete in the same sky above fog that rides low to the ground. He closes the curtains, canceling light, and starts fingering the keys in the dark. And he continues to finger them. An owl hoots in the ghosted air and he hoots back. In no one’s name but his own let this long night end.

He dreams. Covered in dirt, the planters are hacking the earth with broad flat plates, no cutting edge. Their crops ground underground, down into the earth. What tool can reach them?

You just can’t take him from me, Perry Oliver says. With no fair warning.

You will thank me for it, General Bethune says. The quicker you suffer, the sooner it ends. The General speaks slowly and fluidly, with great power. All the doors in the room are closed. (Every door tells a story.) And the Greek and Roman faces carved into the mantel near the ceiling look down on the conversation, Perry Oliver seated in a chair so tall that it rises three feet into the air behind him, General Bethune seated on the other side of him in a similar chair, chunks of ice sizzling (the sound) inside two squat square glasses filled with whiskey on the small round table between the two men, behind them a neatly bricked fireplace like a big wide yawning mouth ready to swallow them.

But, sir. Perry Oliver loosens the clasp joining the two ends of his string tie. All these years I put in. All those years.

And you prospered.

Yes, I have. Is that what this is about? You want more money, a percentage? That can easily be—

No.

Then what, sir? You are an honorable man, having spilled blood and directed others to spill blood, including their own.

Mr. Oliver, General Bethune says, no matter how self-activated, every man finds himself caught in the grip of forces that hold suzerainty over every vessel of his person and every aspect of his life, small to big. Despite his uniform — his medal-decorated chest, the heavy epaulets perched on his shoulders like upturned birds’ nests, his sleeves thick with insignia, his legs leathered in black boots up to the knee — General Bethune is an ailing old man now it seems, beard and hair completely gray, a gaunt man now, hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes, his arms and legs thin, grotesque twigs, his hands brittle and weightless, bone on bone.

Perry Oliver speaks a reply, his voice quiet and serious, but his words seem to drop midair and plunge to the floor, exhausted, doomed.

I cannot put you before my family, Mr. Oliver.

Nor would I expect you to.

No, you wouldn’t. But you are, Mr. Oliver. Do you see now? You are asking me to elevate you above my family. Understand, this is a family matter, not a matter of commerce.

I understand. But we helped the cause again and again.

We all did our part.

But we did more than most. More. And we can still—

Your country will recognize and thank you. You have my word and assurance. There is sadness then tenseness (worry, anger) on the General’s face. A meager music hovers in the air (somewhere). The fireplace is trying to flame. In his gray suit General Bethune seems the focus of darkness in the room, under the ceiling repellent of light. Perry Oliver can’t talk back to the other man’s power.

But why now, just when—? Something has gone out of his voice.

You don’t see it, do you, Mr. Oliver? But of course you do. The South will fall, no two ways about it. As a military man I can tell you that there is no chance for us to win this war. So what I am supposed to do: lose everything?

Perry Oliver removes his tie. Free now, unguarded, the tie coiled around his fist like a constrictive serpent. His tongue is equally constricted, trying to form words but curling up to the roof of his mouth and getting stuck on his teeth. So Seven knows at that moment that he has to speak for him, utter words that can save Mr. Oliver, save Tom, save himself. All he has to do is tell the General what he himself feels. That he is closer to Tom than to any person he has ever known. Tom sees what he sees, feels what he feels. Each of them is alone in the world. If he tells it just like that then the General will understand and let them be. All there is to it. As simple as that. Now if he can just say it, cover this gap of the silence with speech.

Now, look. I have nothing more to say. I have given you reasonable explanation for the termination of our contract. That is the only explanation I need give you. So let’s get on with it.

No, Perry Oliver says.

What? General Bethune speaks a bit more savagely, his face unguarded about what it reveals, and Perry Oliver’s mouth flinches. So stop me. There ain’t a goddamn thing that a person like you could do ever to stop me. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not never. Now, remove yourself from my presence. Go buy a farm. Go build a factory, or go do anything else you want with your worthless life.

The General’s words go deep and draw out Perry Oliver’s history like a splinter in a finger. Seven is appalled. He vows: never (again) will he put himself in a position where he can so easily be humiliated, hurt, shamed, treated like a nigger.

On the train afterward — after it is done, Tom relinquished, Tom gone — Perry Oliver keeps his gaze directed on the coach window, looking out at the passing world with a vision smudged with grief. (Seven looking as he looks, looking through his eyes.) Looking through not-tears at houses and barns, hills and valleys, lakes and rivers (the South, Confederacy, Dixie), scrolling countryside, birds untroubled in the sky, sunlight fractured by the thin trunks of tilting trees. Seven tries to hold the thought of Tom in his mind. Then the train takes a bend, and he can see through the window one coach linked to the next like sausages. Where does one begin and the other end? All those months moving together, all those years gone. (So the earth moves to make time.) And thinking thus sees the past shrink to a black dot behind them, him and Perry Oliver.

Never forget. Never forgive.