Rails Under My Back (2 page)

Whether Jeff Allen is primarily influenced by James Joyce, William Faulkner, or Ralph Ellison is something I’ll let other literary scholars decide, because one obvious fact overrides the question of literary pedigree: Jeff Allen is, first and foremost, an incredibly gifted poet. And when I say “poet” what I mean is that he is sensitive to the inexhaustible ways language can operate in a text, and how a novel is capacious enough to contain many forms. For this reason, you must read
Rails Under My Back,
a work eight years in the writing, slowly. You must savor and reflect upon every evocative sentence (and read some of them two or three times) as you would highly compressed poetry, for the density of Allen’s figurative language (language that “resembled the body of a trained athlete where every muscle, every sinew, is developed into full play”) is a literary world away from the typical garden variety novel that offers de-totalized, minimalistic, and utilitarian prose. The sometimes-elliptical language that bodies forth Allen’s characters is as much a performer as the characters themselves. It’s worth taking a moment to parse a characteristic passage to unlock the logic of composition in Allen’s prose. Here is a passage that appears early in the novel as Jesus takes a ride with No Face the Thief:

No physical object is ever neutral in this novel; each image is “charged” with a sudden radiance. Here and throughout the novel, Allen deploys vivid, often startling metaphors and similes, metonymy, and synecdoche to transform the ordinary lives of black men and women, and the landscapes across which they move, into something extraordinary and epiphanic, thus restoring—as poets often do—an element of mystery and a feel of the uncanny to their world. He wants to liberate our perceptions with every page, to let us see the urban and Southern landscapes of his characters with unsealed vision. In the lines above, a form of internal monologue, which is recognizable as a limited form of stream of consciousness because it is italicized (
Word, nigga poured acid into his eyes to win a bet
) brings the reader into such intimacy with the character Jesus that the third-person narration easily morphs into the second-person “you.” Allen eschews quotation marks for dialogue, a Joycean decision that creates a dream-like blurring of spoken speech and narrative description. His prose overflows with sentence fragments. He cuts from one scene to another—moving “in many directions at once, backwards and forwards in time, sideways and up and down”—without a narrative bridge, as films do. Allen’s contract with readers of
Rails
demands that the reader work hard (because
he
is working hard with every sentence, as John Edgar Wideman once said of his work, giving “every bit of himself, on every page, head and heart”), to take a moment to figure out on their own (as a journalist or detective would) the
who, what, why, when, how,
and
where
as the drama unfolds. A patient reader is usually rewarded with answers for the questions his story raises.

It is important to add that Allen’s ear for the uniqueness of black voices, in the South or a Midwestern city (
he fired up a square
), and their hilarity (
I don’t know but I been told, Artic pussy mighty cold
), is the most finely tuned that I have encountered in years, and recalls the exuberance of black speech in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man:
“So Khaki Two was Keylo, legend in the flesh. Word, drove an old red ambulance with a bed (stretcher?) in the back. His
ho buggy
he called it. Say he never changed the sheets.” As someone raised in the Chicago area, I marvel at the way Allen has captured the riffing and signifying black male patois I heard all around me in Evanston when I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s. In his hands, language can range from Hatch busting a rhyme …

To John cracking up his Sunday school class with bawdy irreverence …

And then to descriptive set pieces with a lyricism as beautiful as any to be found in our literature …

Everywhere in this rich world Jeff Allen has created we find “distance-seeking trains” and “the complicated network of trains and lines: subway and Elevated, A train and B train, express and local, rush hour, the Englewood line, Howard line, Jackson Park line, Evanston line, Ravenswood line. On and on.” Like the Chicago subway so important at the beginning of Richard Wright’s
The Outsider,
these ubiquitous rails in Allen’s story are, at least on one level, a metaphor for modernity, perhaps for black America at mid-twentieth-century, a trope for escape, travel, transitions, and the means for black migrations. They appear as “a fleeting locomotive,” on boys as “the skinny rails of their legs,” and significantly in Hatch’s reflections: “he’d read that humans have lead in their bloodstream, had believed the tracks might snatch him—
call
him, a steel mother commanding the child inside after a day of play—like a magnet. Now he knew, the speed, the momentum could suck you up.”

The mysteries and majestic language in
Rails Under My Back
will, I believe, “suck you up.” And this novel will answer the question “How is great measured?” with every page of its unique literary performance.

Dr. Charles Johnson is a novelist, essayist, literary scholar, philosopher, cartoonist, short story writer, a MacArthur fellow, winner of the 1990 National Book Award for his novel
Middle Passage,
and recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.

LONG BEFORE JESUS ENTERED THE WORLD, blades of southern grass sliced up the soles of his grandmother’s feet. Her blood leaped from the danger, drew back into the farthest reaches of her heart, and the roots of her soul pulled away from the sharp earth which had nurtured her. But nothing escapes the laws of gravity. We martyr to motion. In step with the flowing sweep of her garments, an undercurrent of rhythm, she cut the final strings of attachment, her children, and on a rich spring day cut a red path to New Mexico—what business had a nigger there; New Mexicans had yet to invent the word—for a man eternally bound to a rakish fedora, his sweet face like a mask beneath it, pinstripe suit, diamond horseshoe tiepin, and two-toned patent-leather shoes. Drawn by the power of nostalgia—
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour
—she swept back two years later without a word about her lover, the father of R.L., her oldest child. A decade later he would be thrown through the windshield of his sparkling green (red?) Edsel (Eldorado?)—the squeal before the thud, the skid after—his decapitated body slipping the surly bonds of earth, sailing kitelike over a California highway, arcing over and beyond a thicket of treetops, to touch the face of God. Jesus was convinced that her exodus had strangled any impulse her surviving children—his mother and aunt—had to get close to her, and had ripped open his life, for an eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow. The years only deepened the sorrow his family had in common. Even a hatred like hot ice could not halt destiny.

Jesus thought he could never recover from his grandmother’s betrayal. While his mother and aunt had long purged their thoughts and feelings of the act—it escaping through the back of their heads, into space—it continued to haunt him, a wallet photograph that he carried everywhere. He moved with a sort of amazement in the world, anger fueling the furnace of his heart. With ceremonial rigidity, each day he wore red, symbol of his unflagging fury.

He leaned over and spit. The saliva held and gleamed, suspended, rust-flecked, then curved down to the pavement. Crashed, sizzled, and cooled. A red coin. He leaned over to pick it up, but the coin refused his touch. Sirens sailed into the sky, a spiral of red sound. He drew himself erect. A strip of white asphalt stretched hot before him. He walked. Only his brain moved. Tall earth-rooted wrought-iron fences hovered before a cluster of houses. And beyond the fences, black and green rhythm of trees. Trees full of birds, plentiful as leaves. The vapor-kissed spires and steeples of North Park. The sky in fanning torches and soaring flames. And heavy white clouds hovering, flying saucers. The street opened into a broader one, the space between two massive rows of skyscrapers black with a continuous throng, two busy streams of ants. He walked with long scissors stride for Lawrence Street, where he would catch the train to South Lincoln. The cradle of the week, the sunny street filled with competitive radios, anxious engines, car horns, hawking of wares, footsteps, and conversation—disembodied voices—a kiss blown from the lips of the square, floating, rising, and hanging above it. The sidewalk steamed with city sprinklers pulsing wet rhythm. Jesus sang:

He felt air currents from the movement of cars, shoes, skirts. Rumble and rustle tingling the blood in his rubber-soled feet. Suits and ties and skirts and heels were beginning to change color in the spring heat. A constant weight in their faces, the suits and ties lugged briefcases, newspapers tucked under the left arm. The skirts and heels sported ankle socks and gym shoes—
tennis shoes,
his grandmother called them—as if they gon shoot some b-ball in the office, arc crumpled bills (fives, tens, twenties) into steel wastebaskets. Cut a V for the express train into Central, slowed somewhat by purses bulging with thick paperback novels. A flyer curved around a lamppost: MOTHERFUCK THE WAR! A hang-tailed hound jogged out of an alley—Jesus hoped he would stray within range—and past a knot of beggars hunched over in a corner doorway, rained-on ghosts.

Kind sir, could you—

Hell nawl. Jesus did not pause in his walking. Get a job.

Go to hell and take yo mamma wit you, just for company.

Jesus kept walking.

Cheap nigga.

Jesus kept walking.

Goofy-looking motherfucka.

Bitch, Jesus said, stopping, turning at the beggar, facing the spit-thickened beard. Wash the fart out yo draws. He continued on.

He hadn’t gone far when stench stopped him. Eighth and Lawrence, the subway entrance—A
blind man could find it. Follow your nose
—a funky mouth, with worn, broken, and dirty stairs like neglected teeth, descending to a dark throat. The subway breathed him in. He tugged at his ear, his fingers rough against the diamond there. He knew all about the purse and chain snatchers who rode the trains. Rough niggas versed in all tricks of the trade, killin, stealin, and gankin to get paid. Once, he saw a thief hack off a woman’s earlobes with a straight razor to loot her diamond earrings. The thief wiped the blood from his razor onto her blouse, slowly and smoothly, as if buttering a bread slice, and Jesus wondered if the woman screamed from the sight of blood, from the pain, or from the sensation of reaching for her lobes to discover they were no longer there.