Song of the Shank

Once a week, she left the Asylum and went in search of fresh orphans, venturing away from their Midtown locale to explore the narrow twisting streets of the Black Town, the city’s most densely populated district, where surfaces (sidewalks, roofs, shutters, corners, walls) pressed together in unexpected ways, noisily in place, life here chambered inside a ramshackle accumulation of tenements leaning over the sidewalks, as if bent against a winter wind. Eliza advancing softly with a sense of mysterious invitation, feeling the uneasy force of all those lives hived within, families (four or more) jammed up against each other inside a single room, unable to confine respective kin to respective corner, assorted limbs jutting out of slanted windows and crooked doorways, Eliza dizzy with forms all about her. Clusters of Negro men toting pyramids of firewood and Negro women dangling strings of fowl, and men and women and children alike in slow drift with satchels of sweat strapped to their backs, or water pots or baskets (fruit, herbs) positioned on their heads. Faces staring accusations at her, bitter in an undirected way. She would stare right back — hopeful tension — pushing against refuse and waste thick and abstract at her feet, and ask the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies from the two or three or four that she extended invitations to, willing to give themselves up to her then and there. Candidates collected, she would then taxi on to the Municipal Almshouse and spend hours cycling through a maze of warrens where monstrous forms — albinos, pinheads, she-hes, worm-like legless and armless torsos stationed on wooden carts, pig-child hybrids with snouts and curly tails, deer-children (fauns? satyrs?) with horns and hooves, mermaids swimming in their own urine, Cyclops, Blemmyae, three- and four-eyed Nisicathae and Nisitae, a boy with an underdeveloped twin hanging out of his abdomen, as if the hidden head was only momentarily absent, mischievously peeking into the keyhole of his stomach, a girl with a second canine-toothed and lizard-tongued mouth chewing its way out of her left jaw, and rarer creatures shackled and chained — huddled in dim light against the smell of sawdust, some folded monk-like in cloaks and hoods, others completely nude. Eliza careful to appear curious and concerned, a desperate devotion undercutting her probing looks, her riddle-solving, translating texts of skin and eyes.

Back at the Asylum, she saw to it that the new arrivals were thoroughly washed and comfortably dressed, each child’s hair combed free of lice, each body put to bed under folds of fresh linen in the Inspection Ward, awaiting Dr. McCune’s examination. The admissions were naturally reluctant to undergo examination, poking and prodding, but before Dr. McCune all their defenses vanished. They gave in with trustful surrender, the ready-made quality about the way he spoke. Disrobe, please. Including shoes and undergarments. Miss Viel here will take care of your belongings. At times she found herself speaking the diagnosis even before he had. The cleared would be taken immediately to the appropriate ward housing their peers, Whole Orphans or Half Orphans, and the wing therein specific to their sex — the wards could amalgamate during meals, boys on one side of the dining hall, girls on the other — where they would be ghosts for several days, invisible, suffering at arm’s length a brief trial of discretionary exclusion before they were accepted into the fold. The eye-sick were afforded the opportunity of surgery to remove the diseased orbs. (One darkness defining another. Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see.) To aid in healing and lessen the chances of inflammation, Dr. McCune would apply a thick paste made from crushed peanuts and water—peanut butter he called it — over the empty eye sockets, two six-inch-high brown mounds that would remain in place for up to a week. Eliza was there to fan flies away and pluck ants and cockroaches from the paste. To wet fever with cold compresses and diminish pain with warm opium. Once the paste was removed, Dr. McCune had to judge that no part of the infection had escaped to another region of the body, before the patient could be assigned his/her own bed in the Eye Ward. Dr. McCune put a high practical value on his work at the Asylum, believing that it aided and enhanced his research and his private practice in the homes of the city’s wealthy Negroes and in his own home, those packs of proper Negroes who made daily pilgrimages to his apartment (3A) in their well-cut clothes, depending on his dogged efforts to keep them in top form.