FICTION
“Song of the Shank”
By Jeffery Renard Allen
Graywolf Press
584 pages; $18
“Everyday I put on a new head,” exclaimed Thomas Wiggins, the 19th century pianist from Columbus, known to the world as “Blind Tom.” At the time of his death as a recluse in Hoboken, N.J., in 1909, the former slave had made his guardians millions of dollars by today’s measure. The subject of a witty history by Deirdre O’Connell published in 2009 (“The Ballad of Blind Tom”), Wiggins now returns as the main character in Jeffery Renard Allen’s explosive vanguard novel “Song of the Shank,” a chilling orphic drama full of polyrhythmic shakers and shells.
Born in 1849, Thomas Wiggens grew up on the plantation of his owner, Gen. James Bethune, a Columbus lawyer and secessionist newspaperman. Bethune exploited Tom, contracting him to the Americus impresario Perry Oliver. After the Civil War, the General engaged in a fierce legal battle for Tom with Tabbs Gross, the so-called “P.T. Barnum of the African Race.”
The autistic prodigy was sometimes billed as an “idiot,” or, more kindly, a “savant.” By the time he was 4, he performed his own piano compositions, which often interpreted the sounds of daily events such as rainstorms and sewing machines. At 10, Tom had become a touring professional, his musical program consisting of classical works by Beethoven and Chopin.
As a legend, Blind Tom came to occupy a blurred cultural zone where autism, naive genius and freakish fascination confounded the boundary between art and novelty. In part, “Song of the Shank” is Allen’s 10-year project to reclaim Tom from this no-man’s-land and to position him in the pantheon of America’s great black artists, though Allen’s book — a landmark of modern African-American literature — is no conventional chronicle.
Deliberately unreliable as a fictionalized biography, “Song of the Shank” operates against the “official” narrative of Wiggins’s life. In Allen’s fantastic version, the same actors appear, but they are now flung into jagged ellipses around Blind Tom. General Bethune is depicted as a weirdo and a cheat. He leases Tom to the resentful Perry Oliver, who says, “One day I’m gonna come back and buy this city and stuff it in my shoe.” The hustling Tabbs Gross, Allen’s most expansive recreation, finds himself elevated above his otherwise unscrupulous nature.
Blind Tom presides over this surreal enterprise like “some timid insect with wings folded.” The novel’s minor characters, all products of Allen’s imagination, often steal the show: Vitalis; Wire; Simon Coffin; Deacon Double. Best of all is Seven, Perry Oliver’s understudy, who forms a deep bond with Tom. Sitting at the piano bench, the pair “unite with angles and corners, [and] make themselves invisible to the population.”
“Song of the Shank” is focused on the years immediately before and after the Civil War, roughly the second decade of Blind Tom’s life. The language is rich with arcane religiosity (“Providence moves through time as the Gods of Homer through space.”). Exquisite imagery offsets the harshness of subjugated reality (“the night hanging in the air like trailing silk.”). The mundane observation becomes a pithy revelation (“A photograph is a mirror that remembers.”). Allen accompanies these numinous moments with history’s singular command: “Put your ear to a tombstone and hear the sound of the dead trying to rise.”
Throughout “Song of the Shank,” Allen probes the psychopathology of slavery and how it warped the American universe. The South’s “brutal geography” becomes a disarranged science fiction antiquity; locations in Georgia have no specificity. (The town of Columbus, for instance, is never mentioned by name.) An atmosphere of paranoia prevails as Tabbs Gross navigates cautiously within a white tyranny controlled by “Alabasters” with “cold bitter eyes.”
Imagined by Allen as an alternate to the Bethune plantation, the mysterious all-black haven of Edgemere is a “bright world lost at sea,” a utopian island that might be located in the mist of New York City’s East River. But, as the Civil War ends, Edgemere comes under threat from both the mainland and internal dissension. In the exciting climax, Tabbs, dressed as a woman, escorts Blind Tom back down South by rail, but they are soon threatened by a party of Alabasters, who discover the real meaning of the shank, or blade, and not to their personal edification.
Allen, a poet, is an associate professor of English at Queens College of The City University of New York. This is his second novel, and it does not give itself up quickly or easily, perhaps because it fulfills the role of a “Shadow Book.” Atlanta author Kevin Young explains that the Shadow Book is “situated on the cusp of fiction and history, a secret book found just behind all the others, its meaning never to be fully revealed.” Reading through this sagacious volume is like stumbling on a crooked monument covered in celestial carvings, something that aims for the stars and ends up reconfiguring constellations.
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