Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

Mrs. Thompson was a rawboned woman with a quick stride and keen intensity; Guy imagined her hurrying from task to task around her house with ruthless efficiency. She rarely had the occasion to take in a boarder, she explained as she showed him up the stairs, past sepia photographs of her clan, but when she did she always enjoyed the company. Guy was to stay in her son’s room, she told him; her boy had moved to Chicago, where he had a good job on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, and had recently taken a wife. The room was bare, save for the bed and the dresser; the Thompson boy had taken all he possessed when he moved North. Once Guy was settled, he joined her in the parlor and, after employing the usual methods of setting an informant at ease, asked her about John Henry.

“That’s an old story,” she said simply, face betraying nothing.

He had established previously that her father had worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio a few years after the completion of the tunnel, and inquired if he had ever shared any information about the tale.

“Can’t live around here without hearing about ol’ John Henry,” she granted, but offered no more.

He was not advancing the heading, as it were. He pressed her, attempting to talk around the subject before broaching it anew. She told him about her husband, who had died in a railroad accident some years before, told him about how hot it got around here in the summer time, and how often the ice salesman came around, but when he tried to bring up John Henry, all she would offer was, “Can’t live around here without hearing all those old stories,” and returned to him that obscure expression. She left to prepare dinner, which turned out to be fried fish and biscuits, a delicious meal that consoled the professor after his long trip. Over this repast they talked about life in the town, and the relationship between Hinton and Talcott, which slept on the other side of the mountain, but he never did get anything out of her that related to his investigation.

His first interview the next morning resulted in similar exasperation. One of the many responses he received from his advertisement in the Hinton Independent had tantalized Guy with its possibility. “Dear sir,” it began, “I am writing on behalf of my father, who as a young boy carried water for the C&O on the Big Bend job and witnessed with his own eyes the struggle of ‘Big’ John Henry and the steam drill, to which you are inquiring. As my father is in poor health, and of weakened constitution, he urged me to write you to inform you of his knowledge, which he is willing to share with you in exchange for a small fee to help defray the bills from the doctor, as well as his medicine. He has always related to me his stories of those Big Bend days …” From there the informant wandered into a secondhand account replete with the customary details of the legend, but he redeemed himself by his residence in Hinton, as well as his direct relation to a person who had toiled on the construction, a person who, most important, was still among the living. Once Mrs. Thompson advised him that the man lived in town, a short walk away, Guy decided to make it his first stop. In retrospect, he misinterpreted the expression on her face as he departed.

It was, to say the least, a disappointing encounter, relieved only by its brevity. “You wrote me?” Mr. McLaugherty asked through the screen door. Between his heavily freckled cheeks, his nostrils widened as if confronted by a ghastly stench.

“About John Henry, yes,” Guy offered. “This is the letter you sent.”

“Let me see that.” After extending a callused hand through the door, he reviewed the contents of the letter, looking up at Guy every few lines. Finally he said, “I don’t know where you got that, but I don’t have nothing to say about that letter, boy.” He shut firm the inside door, hazarding one last appraisal of Professor Johnson before he turned away: “I see it’s been a long time since I been to North Carolina.” It later struck Guy that in addition to Mr. McLaugherty’s obvious prejudice in matters of race, appealing for money from a Negro might not have been the most pleasant prospect for the man. What bothered him the most was that when Chappell arrived, he would have access to McLaugherty and those like him.

On his return to Mrs. Thompson’s there was a young Negro boy waiting for him in the parlor. “Sir, my name is Herbert Standard,” he said with an extended hand. “Mrs. Thompson told me you needed someone to take you around.” Mrs. Thompson nodded from the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a thin kitchen towel, and could not help but smile.

Herbert was a youth of twelve years, a student at the local colored school, Lincoln. Guy quickly gleaned that the young man possessed a quick mind and exceptional manners, not to mention a patient disposition, this latter quality being the most appropriate for their enterprise, given Guy’s apparent inability to ingratiate himself to the local populace. It was soon revealed, in addition, that the boy was well regarded in the community, among whites and Negroes alike, in Hinton as well as Talcott, and with him as pilot, Guy was able to advance his heading.

Guy looks at his watch. He has another ten minutes before they climb into the Standards’ wagon and start out to Talcott for the next scheduled interviews. He has two more days before he must return. There is still much to do; while he tells himself he should take pride in what he has accomplished so far, the customary feelings of well-being attendant to satisfaction evade him. In the journals, Cox’s John Hardy hypothesis is receiving no small measure of interest at the moment, but what Guy has collected from his informants discounts the theory that the outlaw Hardy and steeldriving Henry were the same person. Guy’s larger sample of variants reveals that while the John Hardy songs possess numerous lines common to the most popular John Henry songs, the Hardy songs have more similarities to Irish and Scottish ballads than to Negro workaday songs. From all the evidence, the Hardy songs are confined to the Appalachia area, and sung by whites, whereas the Henry songs have been disseminated all over by itinerant Negro workers, who carried the song from construction camp to construction camp; the song traveled the rails with the men who laid the rails, from state to state, accruing texture from all who came to hear and sing it. This is not to mention the problem of dates. Hardy was hanged in 1894 for his crimes; John Henry’s fateful race, however, is said to have occurred in 1871. Cox may have uncovered informants who maintain that the man who beat the steam drill and the villain hanged in Welch in 1894 were one and the same, but that would make Henry one improbably long-lived steeldriver. Most of Guy’s interviews — and he has collected far more informants than Cox — place John Henry in his thirties when he came to Big Bend; it is, at the very least, unlikely that after forty years of steeldriving the same man was able to make the kind of mischief attributed to Hardy. (One can always count on white folks to get a bit confused when it comes to describing the age of colored people.) When Guy’s book is published, it will contain, if nothing else, this contribution to the study of these songs: John Hardy is a white song and John Henry a colored song. At least that one thing! But he still feels a bit of envy for Cox, for John Hardy was, without a doubt, a real, breathing person. His colorful life, his gambling exploits, sundry criminal activities and the murder that got him hanged are a matter of public record, verifiable from newspaper accounts. Ex-Governor McCorkle, who signed the death warrant, is still alive and available. In the strange case of John Henry, however, all Guy can rely on is what people can wring from the years, hard-fought drips and drabs.