Read the book: «John Henry Days»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE: TERMINAL CITY

Now he blesses the certainty of airports

J. sits in the backseat of an

After the killing is over, after the

Dave Brown’s byline is a roach whose

Benny waits for gravel to become hail

No one, it seems, wants to go

Everything on him is free. His black

It has been six months since her

J. catches up with Dave Brown in

The List possessed a will and function

This inveigler of invites and slayer of

What makes him tick, this collector of

Applause, hands sliding toward slanted forks, as

PART TWO: MOTOR LODGE NOCTURNE

The first blow shattered half the bones

It was custom on nights like this

Sometimes it happens. Nothing he can put

Benny said he didn’t want to go

Bobby Figgis began his career as a

Yes, her father would have loved it

Soon it will be time for the

Junketeer lore holds that when One Eye

Alphonse Miggs lies on his bed half-naked

J. lies on his bed in room

PART THREE: ON THE EFFECTS OF COUNTRY AIR

The assistant paymaster delivered word of the

Sunglasses: where are they? Sunglasses prevent arrest

It does not take Guy Johnson long

Even when he doesn’t want to Bobby

Every day in that place reduced his

The individual who wishes to purchase a

The place mats of Herb’s Country Style

There is a peaceful listlessness in the

It’s like living in a bum’s tin

Sneaky Petes, both of them, aware of

Excerpts from Hamm’s Stamp Gossip, “The Year

Adventure as she steps on the bridge

J. and Monica the Publicist were fucking

Look, there’s Paul Robeson on Broadway, in

It’s me. Calling to see if you’re

It is odd because it is just

PART FOUR: THE STEEL-DRIVING THEORY OF LIFE

They come out of cars. Out of

Don’t find a lot of white men

How do you fit all that in

When the Sepia Ladies Club convenes in

The citizens practice their aim. Some shoot

Soon after her father died the temp

The old connections re-form, and Lucien is

At the all-night bodega of souls the

The biggest spud in Summers County is

They were all there, from the eminently

PART FIVE: ADDING VERSES

Even this late in the performance, there

The purpose of the blackout curtains utilized

“When we finally got the dishwasher, my

The day in the mountain was almost

That spring there were pipebombs and pipebombs

Every Sunday morning is a blessing from

The same night as the shooting in

She wore blue. The song said never

As he did every morning to prepare

John Henry stood in the work camp

J. Sutter stands in the parking lot

About the Author

Also by Colson Whitehead

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

About 45 years ago I was in Morgan County, Kentucky. There was a bunch of darkeys came from Miss. to assist in driving a tunnel at the head of Big Caney Creek for the O&K railroad. There is where I first heard this song, as they would sing it to keep time with their hammers.

HAVING SEEN YOUR advertisement in the Chicago Defender, I am answering your request for information, concerning the Old-Time Hero of the Big Bend Tunnel Days—or Mr. John Henry.

I have succeeded in recalling and piecing together 13 verses, dedicated to such a splendid and deserving character of by gone days. It was necessary to interview a number of Old-Timers of the Penitentiary to get some of the missing words and verify my recollections; so I only hope it will please you, and be what you wish.

In regards to the reality of John Henry, I would say he was a real live and powerful man, some 50 years ago, and actually died after beating a steam drill. His wife was a very small woman who loved John Henry with all her heart.

My Grand Father, on my mother’s side, was a steel driver, and worked on all them big jobs through out the country, in them days, when steam drills were not so popular. He was always boasting about his prowess with a hammer, claiming none could beat him but John Henry. He used to sing of John Henry, and tell of the old days when hammers and hammer men could do the work of the steam drills.

Being pretty young at the time, I can not now recall all the stories I heard, but I know John Henry, died some time in the eighties about 1881 or 1882, I’m sure which was a few years before I was born.

I am setting a price on this information; I am a prisoner here in the Ohio Penitentiary and without funds, so I will be pleased to expect what ever you care to offer.

IN 1890 PEOPLE around town here were singing the song of John Henry, a hammering man. I was working in an oyster house here in Norfolk, Va. for Fenerstein and Company, and I am 66 years old and still working for them people.

JOHN HENRY WAS a steel driver and was famous in the beginning of the building of the C&O Railroad. He was also a steel driver in the extension of the N&W Railroad. It was about 1872 that he was in this section. This was before the day of the steam drills and drill work was done by two powerful men who were special steel drillers. They struck the steel from each side and as they struck the steel they sang a song which they improvised as they worked. John Henry was the most famous steel driver ever known in southern West Virginia. He was a magnificent specimen of genus homo, was reported to be six feet two, and weighed two hundred and twenty-five or thirty pounds, was a straight as an arrow and was one of the handsomest men in the country—and, as one informant told me, was a black as a kittle in hell.

Whenever there was a spectacular performance along the line of drilling, John Henry was put on the job, and it is said he could drill more steel than any two men of his day. He was a great gambler and was notorious all through the country for his luck at gambling. To the dusky sex all through the country he was “the greatest ever,” and he was admired and beloved by all the negro women from the southern West Virginia line to the C&O. In addition to this he could drink more whiskey, sit up all night and drive steel all day to a greater extent than any man at that time. A man of kind heart, very strong, pleasant address, yet a gambler, a roué, a drunkard and a fierce fighter.

MY NAME IS Harvey Hicks and I live in Evington, Virginia. I am writing in reference to your ad in the Chicago Defender. John Henry was a white man they say. He was a prisoner when he was driving steel in the Big Ben tunnel at the time, and he said he could beat the steam drill down. They told him if he did they would set him free. It is said he beat the steam drill about two minutes and a half and fell dead. He drove with a hammer in each hand, nine pound sledge.

MY UNCLE GUS (the man who raised my father) worked on the Cursey Mountain Tunnel and knew the man. He said he was Jamaican, yellow-complected, tall, and weighed about 200 pounds.

I AM A steam shovel operator or “runner” and have heard steel drivers sing “John Henry” all my life and there are probably lots of verses I never heard as it used to be that every new steel driving “nigger” had a new verse to “John Henry.”

I never personally knew John Henry, but I have talked to many old-timers who did. He actually worked on the Chesapeake & Ohio Ry. for Langhorn & Langhorn and was able to drive 9 feet of steel faster than the steam drill could in Big Bend Tunnel. Then later he was hanged in Welch, Va., for murdering a man. After sifting out the “chaff” I think I can assure you above is correct.

I have heard three versions of the song, mostly in the same section of the country, that is West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, seldom elsewhere except by men from one of the above states. I have worked all over the South, South West, and I have heard the John Henry song almost ever since I could remember, and it is the song I ever first remember of.

I THINK THIS John Henry stuff is just a tale someone started. My father worked for the Burleigh Drill Company and told me for a fact that no steam drill was ever used in the Big Bend Tunnel. He was a salesman for Burleigh.

JOHN HENRY WAS a native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, and was shipped to the Curzee mountain tunnel, Alabama, to work on the AGS Railway in 1880. I have been told that he did indeed beat the steam drill, but did not die that day. He was killed some time later during a cave-in.

HAVING BEEN BORN and raised in the state of Tennessee and, therefore, in sufficiently close contact with the negro element there, it happens I have heard these songs practically all my life, until I left that section of the country six years ago.

I have been informed that John Henry was a true character all right, a nigger whose vocation was driving steel during the construction of a tunnel on one of the Southern railways.

THE BALLAD, BY special right, belongs to the railroad builders. John Henry was a railroad builder. It belongs to the pick-and-shovel men—to the skinners—to the steel drivers—to the men of the construction camps. It is sung by Negro laborers everywhere, and none can sing it as they sing it, because none honor and revere the memory of John Henry as much as do they. I have been a “Rambler” all my life—ever since I ran away from the “white folks” when twelve years old—and have worked with my people in railroad grading camps from the Great Lakes to Florida and from the Atlantic to the Missouri River, and wherever I have worked, I have always found someone who could and would sing of John Henry.

JOHN HENRY THE steel driving champion was a native of Alabama and from near Bessemer or Blackton. The steel driver was between the ages of 45 and 50 and weighed about 155 pounds. He was not a real black man, but more of a chocolate color. He was straight and well muscled.

THE LAST TIME I saw John Henry, who was called Big John Henry, was when a blast fell on him and another Negro. They were covered with blankets and carried out of the tunnel. I don’t think John Henry was killed in the accident because I didn’t hear of him being buried, and the bosses were always careful in looking after the injured and dead. I don’t know a thing about John Henry driving steel in a contest with a steam drill, and I don’t think I ever saw one at the tunnel. Hand drills were used in the tunnel. They were using an engine at shaft number one to raise the bucket up when we moved to the tunnel, but they didn’t have any steam engine or steam drill in the tunnel.

I’VE HEARD THE song in a thousand different places, nigger extra gangs, hoboes of all kinds, coal miners and furnace men, river and wharf rats, beach combers and sailors, harvest hands and timber men. Some of them drunk and some of them sober. It is scattered over all the states and some places on the outside. I have heard any number of verses cribbed bodily from some other song or improvised to suit the occasion.

The opinion among hoboes, section men and others who sing the song is that John Henry was a Negro, “a coal black man” a partly forgotten verse says, “a big fellow,” an old hobo once said. He claimed to have known him but he was drunk on Dago Red, so I’m discounting everything he said. I have met very few who claimed to have known him. The negroes of forty years ago regarded him as a hero of their race.

PART ONE TERMINAL CITY

Now he blesses the certainty of airports. His blessings, when he has occasion to perform them, are swift and minimal, thoroughly secular, consisting of a slight nod to no one present, a chin dip that no witness will mark. He nods to luck mostly, to express gratitude for whatever sliver of good fortune drops before his shoes. The day’s first blessing is occasioned by a solemn white rind, a little feather, that J. Sutter notices a few yards away on the carpet and immediately recognizes, without a shade of doubt, to be a receipt.

He looks left and he looks right. He waits for one of those dull marchers to open a fanny pack, turn rigid in horror, and retrace steps to rescue the lost receipt as the wheels of their plastic luggage carve evanescent grooves in the purple carpet behind them. It could belong to any one of these folks. The anxious dislocation of travel causes them to compulsively pat pockets for wallets and passports, to stroke telltale ridges in canvas bags that most definitely must be the ticket and boarding pass, but not so definitely that the ridge must not be checked again, the bag unzipped and inspected for the hundredth time that day. In this queasy awareness of their trifling, they might notice the disappearance of a receipt more readily and start searching for it. He factors this consideration into his calculation of how long it will take him to salvage the receipt from its immediate peril in the walkway.

It taunts him, vibrates flirtatiously. What does it record? There are all sorts of things you can buy at an airport, they are becoming more and more like cities every day, one lumbering transcontinental metropolis. Double-A batteries, a teddy bear, a toothbrush to replace the one forgotten back home on the sink. A nourishing lunch—he hopes for lunch because he is hungry and the next best thing to an actual sandwich right now is the paper trail of a sandwich. Something nonspecific, even better, just a fat total at the bottom, he can tell them it records anything he wants it to. Within the elastic confines of reimbursable expenses, of course.

The receipt flutters and taunts. He is at Gate 22, at the mouth of Terminal B, and any one of the laden and harried pilgrims might be searching for the receipt at this very moment and contest his ownership should he in fact make his move. Witnesses at the counter. J. dislikes scenes. As if airport security would take his word over some middle-aged mom from Paramus. Pharmacy bin sunglasses hooked askew into the neck of her striped outlet T-shirt, her faded Cancun souvenir baseball cap, those taxpayer details, he’d have no chance.

This little boy in bright green robot gear, merchandise from whatever kids’ show is big now, contemplates the stray receipt just as intently as J. from across the walkway in the opposing camp of Gate 21, Flight 702 to Houston. He reckons the boy is waiting for one of the travelers to step on it, to relish that dinosaur foot carnage, and when this image occurs to J.—the receipt mangled by designer sneaker tread or so smudged that it would be useless to him—he immediately evacuates the plastic bucket seat, strides confidently out into the walkway with nary a guilty twitch, and after one quick glance back to make sure that no one is stealing his stuff, he bends down and grips the lonesome shaving between his thumb and index finger as gingerly as an entomologist stooping for a rare moth. No one raises a ruckus. The little boy sneers at him and performs a baroque martial arts move.

J.’s neck eases, his chin dips and he makes his blessing as he sits back down. For this is pure luck, a pristine receipt newly plucked from the great oak of consumption, and deserves a blessing. Airports bloom receipts as certainly as standing water bubbles up mosquitoes. He chides himself for waiting so long to pick it up. Why would anyone want it besides him? It is litter. Early afternoon in terminal city: most of these people are civilians, off visiting relatives or wherever normal people go, Disneyland. Not executives who will log every transaction on their corporate expense forms, and definitely not junketeers like him. No one was going to fight him over a receipt lost on the floor, tumbleweeding from gate to gate as footfall gusts urged it to some far corner. He feels foolish, but glad nonetheless that he still has his instincts. There is sure to be some hectic receipt wrangling over the next few days.

J. inspects his bounty. He brushes purple carpet fiber and a curlicue hair from the paper, runs his finger over the serration at its head. He makes a wish and scrutinizes. The printer of register #03 at Hiram’s News could use some new toner; only twenty minutes old and the receipt is already affecting a world-weary languor. Not a great haul, it won’t rank up there with the great found-receipt frauds he’s perpetrated over the years, certainly not another Planet Hollywood Paris or Prague ‘92, but still useful: one magazine and one item of candy, both identified only by strings of scanner numbers. J. makes the candy for chewing gum, puts the purchaser as a smoker in for a gnashing ride wherever he is going, but the magazine. Looking at three bucks and ninety-five cents, he puts his money on a perfume-packed lifestyle glossy: I’ll take something in a Condé Nast, please. DeAngelo Brothers Distribution has most of the Northeastern airports locked up and an agreement stipulates that Nast gets strong point-of-purchase display. He figures that on the expense form he’ll write down the magazine as research and slip the gum in as food. J. tucks the receipt in with the rest of the morning’s take, the cab and hotel receipts, and resumes listening to the airport announcements. He feels serene. He is a citizen of terminal city and he keeps every receipt in a chosen nook of his wallet and wayward receipts catch his eye from time to time.

It is safe in here. He watches his fellow shufflers queue before the gate attendants, who carve up the airplane cabin into certified tracts. This seems to him an orderly system, one of many in this concrete aviary. The giant brackets lulling the prefab sections of the terminal into peaceful aggregation, the charged and soothing simulated air, automatic flush urinals. He likes the new sound of cash registers, no more chimes: Instead this novel theater of validating purchases, the electronic scrying of purple ink across paper, that tiny pulse that reaches out to the network testing the credibility of credit cards. True, each foray through the metal detector still feels like a prison break and there is no stopping the animal jostling when boarding is announced or when the plane sidles up to the destination gate and all those grubby moist-toileted damp hands grope for the overhead compartment latches, but these are expressions of human weakness, no fault of the design of airports. J. locks his carry-on bag (he is allowed only one on this flight) between his heels. Even the cramped chaos of embarkation and debarkation can be overcome with the right attitude. People movers and white courtesy phones. Food in convenient trays. What the meals lack in taste, they compensate for in thoughtful packaging. He’s never found a human hair in airplane food. What else are plastic shells for. Iceberg lettuce contains important minerals. New advances in legroom, he’s noticed this in the last few months he has been a resident here. J. is confident that they (an air carrier coalition, squabbles checked at the door, this agenda before them) are dedicated to attacking certain essential problems and have platoons of ergonomists sequestered on a suburban campus working on the problem of legroom, circulation, the facts of biology versus the exigencies of cabin space, and that is why, even though the fruit of this work is difficult for the eye to discern, he has fewer leg cramps these days.

A gate attendant announces boarding and he waits for them to call his row. A gate attendant rips a large section from his boarding pass and he slips the remainder into his pocket as he walks down the chilly declivity to the loading door.

He forces his bag into the trim space beneath the seat in front of him as instructed. He is an aisle man, has been for years. Middle seat is a ham sandwich, and there is nothing to see out the reinforced windows, just the undigested blur of the nation. J. feels he works more efficiently if he does not think of his audience, where they live. He likes to keep his obligations to meeting the word count, a number readily verified by a feature on a pulldown menu of his word processing program.

People carefully push items into the overhead compartment only to have their thoughtful arrangements undone and encroached upon by other passengers. The flight attendants check the overhead compartments and latch them.

A plump white woman in a slim turquoise pantsuit informs him that she has been assigned the window seat. As he allows her room to pass, he composes in his mind an ad for her perfume that describes a versatile essence appropriate for both the office and evenings out. Then he places the scented ad on a page toward the front of the book, between the contributors’ notes and letters to the editor. She slides her leather briefcase beneath the seat in front of her and pulls down the shade. Her feathered red hair is as leveled as an ancient pagoda. In unison they fasten their seat belts.

It is a time of checking and rechecking of clasps and buckles and latches throughout the body of the plane, an assembly of minutiae that might make a liftoff.

He is always up in the air.

The woman in the window seat wins the first round by lifting the armrest that divides her seat and the middle seat into discreet pens. She folds her jacket in half and pats it down in the empty seat. Beats him to it. J. tells himself to wake up. He is going to need all of his skills this weekend; this woman is a civilian, a minnow compared to all those other pilot fish he’ll be competing with over the next few days.

J. watches the flight attendant nudge the metal cart up the aisle in the dot dot dash of cabin food dispensation. A snack flight, just a little jump south and east. He unlatches the food tray and slides his palms across its unblemished factory surface. The flight attendant smiles at this and deposits a square foil packet of snacks and a nonalcoholic beverage. He turns the package so that it is parallel to the edges of the tray and contemplates his lunch. Pretzel logs dusted with orange cheese flavor. The hotel this morning gave away doughnuts and coffee on a table near the registration desk, so that was one free meal he could easily categorize—even by the standards of normal people—as breakfast, and this is the second free meal of the day because another party had purchased his ticket, and then tonight there is some kind of opening-night banquet, free meal numero tres. He’ll count this package of pretzels as lunch and gorge himself on the buffet, it is sure to be a buffet, it always is, J. figures he can hold out that long. He can always hold out for a free meal. J. sucks the cheese dust and salt from the pretzels, dissolving these substances by rubbing them against the roof of his mouth before biting down into the pretzel proper. He sees the benevolent and nurturing crimson light of the heat lamp over prime rib, the cheerful blue fire of the sterno cans beneath the metal trays containing local produce. He wipes the orange residue into the cushion of his seat, which doubles as a flotation device if certain situations arise.

The woman in the window unlatches the tray of the middle seat, where she places her empty snack package and plastic glass. Round two, J. observes, flexing her might. Sending the gunboats to Cuba. She refastens her tray and after slow survey of her domain resigns herself to the unalloyed distraction of the airplane periodical.

The magazine contains, scattered among global itineraries and capsule descriptions of inflight movies, informative articles of sundry nature. A few years back J. landed a piece in there, an endorsement of new Zairian hotels; President Mobutu had been trying to rustle up some tourist traffic for that oft-overlooked country. J. observed no rivers of blood while there. It was a junketeer’s ball. Every slob on the List roused themselves for that one. Their credentials were never verified. Hepatitis a regular topic of conversation. Only J. was naive enough to actually write an article about the trip. He was green then, nervous about repercussions, clinging valiantly to an abstraction of journalistic ethics. The government flew in crates of liquor from Europe. He got two dollars a word and bought some new pants.

J. looks over the woman’s shoulder and notices Tiny’s byline on an article about the French Quarter of New Orleans. Fourth or fifth time the fucker has sold that story. At least—there are too many outlets these days for him to keep track of his own stories, let alone his comrades’. You have to admire Tiny’s nerve. A junketeer among junketeers. J. wonders if he bothered to change the lede this time. The woman notices J.’s attentions, scowls, and gestures toward him as if to remind J. that every seatback is stocked with the latest volume of the airline journal. His stomach gurgles in hunger.

After a time the flight attendant moseys up the aisle bearing a white plastic bag with a red drawstring slotted into its lip. Same kind he has at home, a convenient model that flatters his farsightedness whenever he purchases a box. J. deposits his trash and the trash from the middle tray into the bag. He returns his tray to the upright position. He almost shuts the middle tray too but then realizes that he may have trespassed by disposing of her trash. She had extended her zone to cover the empty seat fair and square. At least his armrests are uncontested. Just to make sure he grips them tightly. When the plane comes to rest at the gate, the woman grabs her briefcase and coat and shuffles toward him. His only revenge for her excellent gamesmanship during the flight is to sit still and patient as she fidgets beside him, her hand rapping her thigh and eyes prying open the overhead from afar. She is not going to move through him. J. stands when he is good and ready, when it is their row’s turn out of the bottleneck. I take it where I can get it, he says to himself.

Forget the South. The South will kill you. He possesses the standard amount of black Yankee scorn for the South, a studied disdain that attempts to make a callus of history. It manifests itself in various guises: sophisticated contempt, a healthy stock of white trash jokes, things of that nature, an instinctual stiffening to the words County Sheriff. One look at the cannibals massing at the arrival gate and his revulsion rubs its paws together and hisses. The faces are different: He always feels this fact keenly when he touches down in a place he has never been before. But on this occasion his dread expresses itself so forcefully that he has half a mind to scurry back up the ramp for the protection of his aisle seat. He has arrived at a different America he does not live in. The undiagnosed press toward the gate waiting for kin. Placed hip-to-hip, the rivulets and shadings of their acid-washed jeans describe a relief map of blighted confederacy. Powerline kids suck fingers. Between the hems of oversized shorts and lips of polyknit athletic socks sally bright red lobster flesh and craggy knees, dumb and unashamed things, sea-bottom tubers uncataloged by any known system of biological taxonomy. (None of this is true, of course, but perception is all; to and from each his own dark continent.) One man had fashioned his beard into a slim rattail, they all draw from the same tainted well, it is simply disturbing.