Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

The contest was arranged on a sunny afternoon. The referee stepped up with a stopwatch, chest cut by black and white stripes, an anachronistic joke not lost on the inmates of Mrs. Goodwin’s fifth grade class. John Henry stood with his big smile, hammer at the ready, and the salesman clambered up the machine and took roost in the tractor seat on top. The salesman pulled a lever and the small dustclotted speakers of the projector filled the classroom with the sound of hooting and chugging and put-put-putting. The steam machine rushed ahead of John Henry, the tiny metal block pushing the ready spikes down into the earth at a healthy clip. John Henry swung his hammer home but he couldn’t catch up. His smile was gone and sweat streamed into a mouth tight with strain. The onlookers worried after their local hero while the Yankee on top of the machine sneered and twisted his mustache. (And these rosy-cheeked folks are the ancestors of his hosts — the ones who had watched him choke at dinner — the hardworking founders of Talcott watched John Henry lose.) The machine pulled farther ahead and it seemed all was lost. The children ensnared in the clutches of suspense, rapt at their desks; not one spitball splattered a neck, doodles went undoodled. The institutional clock above the classroom door, the first lover to these children and the best one, faithful to each despite a thousand furtive assignations an hour, ticked neglected. And then they saw John Henry smile. John Henry’s smile returned and his hammer pummeled the earth; little black action waves of force emanated from the ground and soon the sound of the pounding drowned out the corny whistling of the machine. This earthshaking man. The makers of the cartoon kept close on the hammer. (Cheap and easy to repeat a couple of animation cels over and over again.) The sound, the beating heart of man, grew louder and louder. Wasn’t no machine going to beat this man down. The referee’s face filled the screen, which was pulled down over the blackboard to obscure a sentence diagram in chalk, he looked down at his stopwatch and blew his whistle, cheeks billowing out. John Henry pounded down the last spike, looked back at the groaning folly so far behind him, the failing machine, and fell to the ground. The witnesses jumped up and down and the salesman threw his big-city chapeau to the ground and said, Darn! Foiled again. The music of victory (standard victory music familiar to J. even then, before its untold repetitions in films and television shows over the next two decades, the young learned their responses early and thoroughly) swelled in symphonic crackling mono and then died — John Henry wasn’t moving. He was flat on his back in the dirt. A doctor rushed up to him, stethoscope around his neck. John Henry raised his head: did I beat it? The doctor said yes, and took the hero’s wrist between his hands. (This cartoon doctor deigned to touch nigger flesh, of all nineteenth-century Southern doctors this man served all of God’s children with equal care, such is the magic of Talcott.) Old doc shook his head. John Henry was dead. He died with a hammer in his hand, just as he said he would on the day he was born. He beat the machine and died doing it.

The screen returned to whiteness and the tail of the reel slapped around and around until Andrew Schneider turned off the machine. After the cartoon finished, J. was sure Mrs. Goodwin had led a discussion about the lessons of John Henry’s story and its ambiguous ending, but he doesn’t remember it now. Mrs. Goodwin, why did he die at the end? Mrs. Goodwin, if he beat the steam engine, why did he have to die? Did he win or lose?

The assistant paymaster delivered word of the contest with the week’s wages. He walked the camp. He talked to the men. He looked down at his ledger and looked into the eyes of each man and gave him his pay. The assistant paymaster counted out coins slowly as if the men did not understand the meaning of wages. As if the men did not know how to count money and did not know what they had earned for their labor. It was payday and all the men knew he was coming. They had learned not to rush up to him and crowd him like begging dogs. He paid each man as he got to his name on the list, which did not follow any order but his own. The list was not determined by name or salary or seniority on the site. It was determined by the mind of the assistant paymaster and over time the men had learned their places in the order. John Henry was toward the back of the list and he waited in his shanty for the assistant paymaster with a dull and rigid patience. As the strongest driver he was paid the most. Most of the men did not resent his salary because they knew they could not beat him and that was a natural fact. Some did resent him. The assistant paymaster gave John Henry his wages for the week and told him that Captain Johnson wanted a contest tomorrow.

The company could not stop talk about the deaths. The men had been told not to talk about life on the mountain and had seen with their own eyes men banished from the site for complaining about the conditions, the injuries and the hours and the deaths. But neither Captain Johnson nor his bosses could keep the men from talking about the mountain at night. Camp life could not be tamed by daylight threat. Night was a release from the mountain in the shadow of the mountain, beneath the outline of the thing against dark blue night. They drank and wagered and told stories, and when they drank their tongues loosed and they dwelled on the violence. Jokes curdled quickly at night and lately the men dwelled on the cave-in at the western cut. It was like a trick, the mountain. The shale resisted hammers, steel and blasting but it gave to rain and wind. Water from Heaven melted the rock of the mountain and the rainwater was red on the ground. After rain, their boots were caked with red grit from the puddles. The first day after last week’s rain, the roof at the mouth of the western cut gave way, crashing through the timber arching, and killed five graders who stood there to get out of the sun. It was a trick. In the shade of the cut the mountain came down on them like a hammer and killed them. A cry went up. The other men mucked out the rock and pulled out the bodies. They knew the men were dead but hurried anyway. When the doctor arrived he looked at the twisted bodies and talked to Captain Johnson. They talked and Captain Johnson gestured to one of the bosses. The men buried the dead men in the fill of the western cut and no warning from the company was going to stop the talk in the camp.

John Henry held his pay and stepped out into the sun. The cheer of payday animated the men in the camp. The men who drank their wages swiftly and had gone a day or two without whiskey drank. Debts were repaid. Some men with families calculated how much money to send home. John Henry fingered coins in his hand and considered the cunning of Captain Johnson. A contest raised the spirits of the men, even if they all knew who would win. One day John Henry would be beaten. Men bet on the challenger and men bet on John Henry. The excitement, John Henry knew, would put the cave-in out of the minds of the men. Until the next accident. The contest would cure the discontent throughout the camp.

L’il Bob scampered over and wondered to his partner, who will challenge you? John Henry didn’t know. When the word came a few hours later that it was O’Shea he was not surprised. He lifted his eyebrows slightly and no more. He knew the Irishman did not like getting paid less than a nigger. Captain Johnson kept O’Shea in the western cut for that very reason. He didn’t want to know what would happen if the Irishman had to work next to John Henry every day. The black man’s hammer on steel might sound like coins to him, the sound of coins falling out of his pocket. He might decide to use his hammer for something else besides eating into the mountain. Take a swing. O’Shea had arms like stovepipes. Yet it was probably Captain Johnson’s idea that the two men compete in the steel driving contest. The winner got fifty dollars; probably O’Shea would get a bonus if he beat the black. The white men would bet on O’Shea and the black men would bet on John Henry. The contest between the races would distract them from the mountain’s vengeance all the more. If the black man won it would make the men feel good about themselves and they would forget about the mountain for a time. If the white man won it would remind them of their place in this world and the hate would drive the work. The work progressed in either event. Captain Johnson had a timetable.