Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“I was exhausted. Andy and I had been going on for too many hours before we even got there for us to enjoy the concert, no matter how it went down in the end. But to put up with this, with my body dehydrated and my head throbbing with a red wine hangover? Shit, man. It was fucking unreal. And it only got worse.

“I’d seen him before when the Stones appeared with the Angels and everybody started moving forward. Tall, skinny black cat in a lime green suit and black shirt — he stuck out. He’d waded past me and was two or three people in front of me, closer to the stage. Now there were two or three Angels right in front of that part of the stage and I’d been watching them suck back Budweiser and push people who got too close. They’d been laughing and pointing at suckers in the crowd and were definitely guys to watch out for. I had gone up as close as I wanted to get and was happy where I was; I got into that space at a concert where you’ve staked out a spot, your legs are braced to prevent being moved, and I was glad that there was a human buffer between me and the Angels. I saw the Angels getting more and more anxious as the Stones started up. That was the most horrible thing. I saw what was going to happen. I saw them start to fixate on the black dude and choose him. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew they had chosen him before it came to actual violence. The black dude was bobbing his head and dancing and I saw the look in the Angels’ eyes and knew.

“Up onstage, the Stones started into ‘Under My Thumb.’ After what happened with ‘Sympathy,’ I think they convinced themselves that they were going to get through this song without a hassle. So they kept playing all through what happened and later claimed that they didn’t know that anything had gone on. It was like a Vietnam GI saying he didn’t know there were children in the hut he just torched.

“What happened was an Angel touched his hair. One of the Angels came up to the black dude and laughed and grabbed a big chunk of his Afro. His dirty paw went for it once and the dude moved his head away, and then the Angel sneered and the fucker went for it again, this time getting his hand deep into the guy’s Afro. The guy jerked his head away and swung at the Angel with his right, not putting the Angel down but knocking him back a few steps. The two other Angels came up to join their buddy in his fun — it was quick — and the black guy went down, just kind of dipped and when he came back up I could see the gun in his hand, a little nickel-plated revolver he’d pulled out of his pocket or something. He kind of bounced up from the ground and had a gun in his hand. And then I saw the knife. The guy was looking at the Angels who were hassling him but didn’t see the Angel at his back who swooped out of the crowd — this greasy creep came up behind him, grabbed his arm to steady his kill and sunk the knife into his back. The Angel followed through with his thrust, pushing the black dude forward and suddenly the wolves just ate him up, they dragged him away. The girls were screaming. I rushed forward to follow them and a space had cleared where they had him on the ground, half a dozen Angels standing over him. Blood already gushing out from his clothes. He said — these were his last words—‘I wasn’t going to shoot you,’ and one of the Angels lifted a garbage can high over his head and brought it down into his face. Then the other Angels joined in and kicked his head and body with their motorcycle boots, laying into the black guy like they were going to wipe him out totally, like they were going to make him and his fucking extinct then and there. And we stood in a ring watching. There was this kid next to me, a teenager with curly red hair and this silly suede bandito hat on his head, who started to move forward and I held his arm and told him, ‘You can’t do anything.’ The Angels would have killed him and me too if we’d dared do anything. We understood that there was nothing we could do and stood there watching this horrible event. The Angels possessed the night.

“It was horrible and we watched it. All the negativity of the day, of all that year, came down to this violence that we witnessed. And those thousands at my back who weren’t right there and didn’t see it could feel it. The Angels did what the people demanded, even if they didn’t know they demanded it. They were going with the flow. They kicked and stomped him until he was just a puddle and when he wasn’t moving anymore they stopped. He was flat on his back in the dirt, his elbows dug into the ground propping up his hands like weeds and I could see into his skull. I could see the stuff of his brain. A young guy moved forward to help him and the Angel with the knife told him to back off. He was going to die, it’s too late, the Angel said, and there wasn’t anything you can do about it. We stood there like that for a minute, the Angel defending his kill, and then the Angels took off. Two guys came up and took the man’s body to the Red Cross tent. His girlfriend, a blond from Berkeley, followed them, sobbing hysterically. She was wearing a crocheted dress. You don’t see crocheted dresses anymore. And onstage the Stones played ‘Under My Thumb,’ a song about getting over on your girlfriend, to hundreds of thousands while the Angels performed their sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice to what?”

“To the culture. The kids had brought a new thing into the world, but they hadn’t paid for it yet. It had to be paid for.”

“Why did he have a gun?”

“For protection, I guess. And he needed it. He died in the Red Cross tent. He’d lost too much blood and there was no way they were going to get him to a hospital in time anyway. The Rolling Stones flew away in the helicopter and left us in the desert. And we found our way back to our cars and went home.”

“So this guy is like the Crispus Attucks of the seventies.”

“That’s a new spin.”

“Alas, who cries for the lost counterculture?”

“Who indeed.”

“What was his name?”

“His name? I can’t remember.”

“What about Andy?”

“I didn’t see him until the next day. I caught a ride with some HaightAshbury kids.”

“And what about the Angels?” “The Angels split.”

Sometimes it happens. Nothing he can put his finger on, an effect maybe like the reverse of dynamite: noise and fire, white light, these elements flying not apart but together into a compact thing. Him, an afternoon. Putting the ruin back together to what it was. Looking over the past few hours, what does he see: an extra ribbon of bacon at breakfast, half an hour less sleep, a portion of seconds considering the dead robin next to the birch tree at the side of the road he walked here. Nothing really and yet he feels different. The peculiarities of this morning collect, they persist, stand at odd attention on his self like iron shavings on a magnet, drawn by invisible forces. Charged, attracting this day and life to him he sits on a stump and writes his song.

A drying puddle bristling with gnats; twigs like lizard legs, all knees; a cobweb on his brow. A breeze.

He’s on the top of the hill. He has to let out the tune he’s been humming under his mind for the last few days now. Try a line and let it hang in the air. The last word of the next line comes first, it shines, obvious, newly there, and the rest of the line creeps up on it. That’s half a verse right there. Like picking a pocket. Sometimes he thinks rhyming is cheating. First man to rhyme building a whole new world should take his place with the man who invented brick. He’s practically stealing the song today; it’s not his but he’s got his fingers on it and that’s half the battle.

Where’s that chord from. Some man like him hundreds of years ago sitting on a rock, arthritis not so bad today, a wind came out of nowhere and knocked the clouds away, then this chord on his fingers, been in his fingertips all night: plucks the chord on his mandolin, something else, whatever instrument the man favors. Zebra sinew stretched tight across a torso of wood that makes sound. Sounds good. So good he thinks he invented it, he’s the first person in history to do this thing.