Song of the Shank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That must be hard to do, the man said.

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

Blind Tom?

Ain’t no Tom here.

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

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

Why do you sing like that?

A person puts all of his body into his voice.

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

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

Lait.

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

She pours when I say it again.

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

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

Mrs. Bethune.

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

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

Mrs. Bethune.

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