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Summary
Summary
A contemporary American masterpiece about music, race, an unforgettable man, and an unreal America during the Civil War era
At the heart of this remarkable novel is Thomas Greene Wiggins, a nineteenth-century slave and improbable musical genius who performed under the name Blind Tom.
Song of the Shank opens in 1866 as Tom and his guardian, Eliza Bethune, struggle to adjust to their fashionable apartment in the city in the aftermath of riots that had driven them away a few years before. But soon a stranger arrives from the mysterious island of Edgemere--inhabited solely by African settlers and black refugees from the war and riots--who intends to reunite Tom with his now-liberated mother.
As the novel ranges from Tom's boyhood to the heights of his performing career, the inscrutable savant is buffeted by opportunistic teachers and crooked managers, crackpot healers and militant prophets. In his symphonic novel, Jeffery Renard Allen blends history and fantastical invention to bring to life a radical cipher, a man who profoundly changes all who encounter him.
Author Notes
Jeffery Allen is the author of two collections of poetry, Stellar Places and Harbors and Spirits, and two works of fiction, the widely celebrated novel, Rails Under My Back, which won The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, and the story collection Holding Pattern, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His other awards include a Whiting Writer's Award, a support grant from Creative Capital, The Chicago Public Library's Twenty-first Century Award, a Recognition for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from the African American Literature and Culture Association, the 2003 Charles Angoff award for fiction from The Literary Review, and special citations from the Society for Midlands Authors and the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.
He has been a fellow at The Dorothy L. and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library, a John Farrar Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a Walter E. Dakins Fellow in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
In 2015 he was named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for his title Song of the Shank.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Allen (Rails Under My Back) spent nearly a decade researching and crafting this ambitious but unwieldy novel, based on the true story of "Blind Tom," ne Tom Wiggins, who was born a slave in mid-19th-century Georgia. In this retelling, Allen looks to illuminate Tom's troubled legacy. A blind musical prodigy and so-called autistic savant, Tom played the piano for audiences around the world and was, as a child, the first black American to perform at the White House. "He infuses our best melodies and harmonies with a barbaric element," Tom's master claims. Both the conception and the underlying history behind this story will leave readers with a profound understanding of the inhumanity of slavery and 19th century racial attitudes. This is a dense and admirable book that invites an important excavation of the past, yet ultimately provides neither intimacy nor perspective. Agent: Cynthia Cannell, Cynthia Cannell Literary Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
One of Americas most gifted novelists projects dark and daring speculations upon the incredible-but-true 19th-century story of a child piano prodigy who was blind, autistic and a slave.In the waning years of antebellum slavery, a rapidly fracturing America was introduced to a stunning musical phenomenon: Thomas Wiggins, a young black slave from Georgia known only as Blind Tom, who sounded out his first piano composition at age 5 and, five years later, was famous enough to play before President James Buchanan at the White House. What made Tom even more remarkable was that he was both blind and autistic, thus compounding audiences astonishment at his extraordinary ability to not only perform classical works, but to spontaneously weave startling variations on American folk ditties into original musical tapestries. Because most of the details of Wiggins' story have been lost to history, there are many blank, enigmatic spaces to fill. Chicago-born Allen (Holding Pattern,2008, etc.) assumes the imaginative writers task of improvising shape and depth where elusive or missing facts should be. What results from his effort is an absorbing, haunting narrative that begins a year after the Civil War ends when Tom, a teenager, and his white guardian, Eliza Bethune, arrive in a nameless northern city (presumably New York), where they are contacted by a black man who intends to reunite Tom with his newly liberated mother. The story rebounds back to Toms childhood, during which he struggles to feel his surroundings despite his compromised senses and finds his only warmth (literally) beneath the piano belonging to Elizas slaveholding family. Allens psychological insight and evocative language vividly bring to life all the black and white people in Toms life who, in seeking to understand or exploit Toms unholy gifts, are both transformed and transfixed by his inscrutable, resolutely self-contained personality.If theres any justice, Allens visionary work, as startlingly inventive as one of his subjects performances, should propel him to the front rank of American novelists. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Now a fairly obscure historical figure, Tom Wiggins, born a slave, became an international sensation as a pianist. In the extraordinarily talented hands of Allen, Tom is a mysterious and compelling figure, a blind black boy at a time when his perceived infirmities, including his race, should make him insignificant. Apparently an autistic savant, Tom exhibits both giftedness and odd behavior, which unnerves and enthralls those around him. Allen uses Tom as the central figure as the novel explorescomplex relationships and the interior lives of black and white folks, including a mother with little authority over her child, a fairly benign but self-absorbed slave owner, ambitious promoters, an assortment of orphans and former slaves at wit's end about their future, and a genius oblivious to the tumult around him. Told from various perspectives, shifting between the pre- and post-Civil War periods, Allen's tour de force sweeps from the rural South to New York City and between lonely apartments and raucous refugee camps, encompassing the strife of war and the draft riots. Amid the larger drama of slavery and its injustices, Allen offers the more intimate drama of one young boy's life and the financial and emotional investments involved in the question of what's to be done with his exceptional talent. A brilliant book, with echoes of Ralph Ellison and William Faulkner.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BEFORE THE CHITLIN' CIRCUIT, before the Cotton Club and eons before "Soul Train" or Black Entertainment Television (BET) put black talent on display, there was Congo Square in New Orleans. During Louisiana's 18th-century French and Spanish colonial era, slaves were allowed to convene near the square on their Sundays off from work to sing, dance and play music - a practice that continued beyond the Louisiana Purchase. Word spread of the spectacle, and soon the slaves began to draw crowds of whites. Later the attempted suppression of "savage" African music by the Protestants helped transform Congo Square into a phenomenon sought by visitors from far and wide. You could argue that in that square, located in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, the American black as an entertainer was born. In that sense, Congo Square was also the birthplace of one of the 19th century's most famous entertainers, the blind piano prodigy and autistic savant Thomas Wiggins. Blind Tom - actually born into slavery in nearby Georgia, in 1849 - entertained thousands across the country and abroad, including Mark Twain, Willa Cather and other high-minded types. As if world touring weren't amazing enough for a child, Tom made history as the first black known to play at the White House when he performed for President James Buchanan at the age of 10. Now, to Tom's list of accomplishments, we can add his role as the protagonist of Jeffery Renard Allen's masterly new novel, "Song of the Shank." The novel blends Tom's personal history with the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It sagely explores themes of religion, class, art and genius, and introduces elements of magic realism (mermaids and mermen appear, as does a man who is inexplicably healed of short leg syndrome), resulting in the kind of imaginative work only a prodigiously gifted risk-taker could produce. "Song of the Shank" is set primarily on an island called Edgemere and in an unnamed city that closely resembles New York. The mosaic-like narrative opens in 1866, a year after the Civil War ends, with a teenage Tom living in the city with his guardian, Eliza Bethune. After they're contacted by a man who promises to reunite the prodigy with his recently freed mother, the story backtracks to Tom's childhood on a plantation owned (like Tom himself) by Eliza's father-in-law, General Bethune - a rich newspaper publisher and die-hard secessionist who even Tom's mother believes "maintains an unimpeachable position in the public mind." As a toddler Tom is found to be blind and "feebleminded," and therefore allowed to roam free on the plantation. One day his gift for music is discovered by Mistress Bethune during her daughter's piano lesson. She takes Tom under her tutelage, and before long, her husband discovers he has a "conundrum of nature" in his midst. This prompts him to usurp Tom from his parents, move him into the big house and allow his wife to develop Tom's innate musical talents. Still, it isn't until the general's daughters begin to showcase Tom to small local groups that Tom's master realizes he has a moneymaker on his hands. General Bethune hires a renowned piano teacher, who trains the young savant not only to play several famous compositions but also to improvise and create his own music. Thanks to his virtuoso performances - along with immense marketing savvy by his master and manager, and a nation of whites and freedmen who disbelieve blacks can achieve genius - Tom becomes a world-famous pianist. This success propels Allen's inimitable novel, which covers about 20 years of Tom's life as he becomes the object of intense scheming and fighting on the part of General Bethune, other members of the Bethune family, Tom's mother, his former managers, mentors, caretakers and businessmen, even a preacher. The contentious lot includes whites and blacks, men and women, the poor and affluent, the religious and nonbelievers, Northerners and Southerners, all holding Tom to be a vital part of their sustenance or their legacy or the key to their dreams. As his first hired mentor says to Tom's piano instructor: "Teach him all you can. . . . He has money in him." Allen, who was born in Chicago and now lives in New York, is a scholar, professor, poet, short story writer and novelist. His books of prose include the story collection "Holding Pattern" (2008) and a widely celebrated and award-winning debut novel, "Rails Under My Back" (2000), which the critic Stephen Donadio called "dense and ambitious" in these pages. In "Song of the Shank," a novel some 10 years in the making, Allen's ambition once again challenges readers. There are shifts in time and perspective without much cue or context. There are also asides that on occasion are tough to interpret. Allen helps by including a map at the outset of the book and noting dates at the beginning of every major section. Even so, on occasion it takes a moment to regain the context of particular passages. In the hands of a lesser writer this could be seen as a weakness, but you get the sense they are willful decisions on Allen's part - maybe even attempts at allowing readers to experience the world, if only for moments, as Tom did. Tom, who was touted as the eighth wonder of the world, had other talents, including a superhuman memory - in the novel he recites Plato's "Republic" in Greek, Latin and French - as well as the ability to sing and to mimic animals. I'm not sure if Jeffery Renard Allen can mimic animals, but he can certainly mimic people; one of his immense gifts is his skill at imagining his characters' piquant voices, the most memorable of which belongs to his protagonist. Tom speaks seldom and briefly, but when he does, it almost always amounts to a kind of cryptic aphorism. After a performance, when a journalist asks him about fatigue, he answers, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space." After his White House performance, he tells a fumbling photographer, "A photograph is a mirror that remembers." Taken as a whole, Tom's indelible voice gives the sense that he is often more lucid and knowing than the unafflicted who surround him. Within the past year, stories about slavery have received grand critical praise: James McBride's novel about John Brown, "The Good Lord Bird," won the National Book Award, and Steve McQueen's movie "Twelve Years a Slave" won the Academy Award for best picture. Though both were celebrated, they also engendered a fair amount of criticism, arguments that often amounted to myopic cynics questioning whether the culture needed another story about slaves. What McBride, McQueen and now Allen remind us is that the answer last year is the answer this year and will be the answer next year: yes. "Song of the Shank" brilliantly portrays the story of Blind Tom while providing keen insight into the history of Reconstruction. But at its heart, it also reminds us denizens of never-will-be postracial America of one simple but everlasting essential truth: "Them chains is hard on a man. Hard." The blind savant often seems more lucid and knowing than the unafflicted around him. MITCHELL S. JACKSON'S first novel, "The Residue Years," was published last year.
Library Journal Review
This long and obscure novel by the PEN Discovery Prize winner of Rails Under My Back is loosely based on the life of Blind Tom Wiggins (1849-1908), a former slave and piano prodigy who achieved some acclaim in the late 1800s. Tom and his music are not the main focus of the novel, however, which instead features hazy, dreamlike scenes initially involving a woman named Eliza, who seems to have known Tom since she worked in an asylum where he was a resident and is now his chief caretaker. As the novel progresses, Tom and Eliza relocate from somewhere in "the country" back to "the city" and then maybe to a place called Edgemere Island; at some point, Tom's real mother sends an emissary to return him to her. Other sections hint at a manager who has made deals to take the pianist on tour, having signed a contract with the landed Southerner who owns Tom. We also encounter a music teacher, some preachers in the vicinity of Edgemere, and a violent confrontation. The Civil War and its aftermath figure prominently in the dark and indeterminate background of the characters' interactions and relocations. VERDICT There is no reason to doubt this highly regarded author's seriousness of purpose, but this remains a challenging work: long, dense, uncompromising, and mysterious. For sophisticated readers.-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
