Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

When the book is published. Guy is not the first to come here to study folk songs — two have been here before — but he is the first to devote an entire study to John Henry and his legend. Until Chappell arrives, he thinks, amending his statement. Guy won the race to get here first, but Chappell possesses the better credentials. When Guy first proposed this trip to his department, he was sure that their initial reprovals were the fault of Chappell, who has talked of his own John Henry study for years, but has yet to come down here himself. “There has already been work in the area of darky songs,” Professor Asbell told him, waving his spectacles as if shooing away a mouse. “Do you truly believe these ditties to be an appropriate avenue of scholarly research? Especially for a young professor trying to establish a reputation?” It took months of cajoling and nagging; ultimately Guy had to produce all the correspondence he received from his advertisements before he garnered what little support he has now.

Who else is there to preserve the body of Negro folklore against the march of time? White folks? He remembers hearing Milton Reed’s address at the New York conference. Guy thanks God that Reed is not planning a full-length study of John Henry; the man is apparently satisfied with his paper on the “ribald” versions of the ballad. Reed takes the tale of John Henry to be the God’s truth — it coincides with his romanticization of the Negro, his ascription to the colored people qualities Reed cannot find in his own. When Reed delivered his paper in New York, Guy cringed as Reed gloried over the more vulgar versions of the ballad — the ones containing verses attributing a voracious carnal appetite to the steeldriver and describing extravagant sexual conquests — and he did not like the look in Reed’s eyes. He resembled a carnival barker gleefully describing the nether parts of the Hottentot Venus, with his frothy thin lips and wild eyes. Reed’s research started from the veracity of the John Henry legend and proceeded from there; in the songs he found confirmation of his ideas about the bestial aspects of the Negro. For Guy, the question of whether the John Henry legend rests on a factual basis is, after all, not of much significance. No matter which way it is answered the fact is that the legend itself is a reality, a living functioning thing in the folk life of the Negro.

Then why, he asks himself as he watches Mrs. Thompson tend to her wash, does he continue to hope that each new informant will give him the affirmative, irrefutable proof?

He made much progress with Herbert’s aid. Herbert introduces Guy and his business, and it seems that having one of their own community vouch for this bespectacled colored stranger, who claims to be a college professor, makes the reluctant loose their lips, and the already-inclined to speak more volubly. Their work is cut out for them; Hinton is a town of five thousand, Talcott another two hundred. Most of them, naturally, claim to have firsthand knowledge of the event, and although the present and former C&O workers he has contacted lead them to others, the task remains monumental. If only he had arrived here sooner! Decades before. The few people he can find who lived here at the time of the construction of the tunnel and are still with us offer their fanciful and extravagant stories; the years have pulled a veil across their memories. On occasion his mind tries to convince him that he is not even in the right place, but he defeats these nefarious schemes of his intellect. He is in the right place — after all the false leads of the myriad variants naming the Cruzee Tunnel or the Alabama State Southern railroad or whatever locale was simply the closest to where the respondent resided — Big Bend is the tunnel named in three fourths of the ballads. Or 70 percent, more precisely. Yesterday Herbert took him out to the place itself, to the place where John Henry met his Waterloo. He could not help but feel a bit of disappointment. He had imagined after all this time a monstrous cavern, a gate into the pits of hell. As he stood there, looking up at the gray arching of the mouth, he might have been on the threshold of any railway tunnel in any part of this land. It was unremarkable in its surface effects, and yet it had generated out of its rich soil such an abundant crop of lore. Among the Negro workers John Henry has become a byword, a synonym for superstrength and superendurance. He is their standard of comparison, they talk him and sing him as they work and loaf. But here, he whispered to himself, I can see merely a mountain, and nothing more. I can study the legend but I cannot conceive of the man.

Here is the neat problem of weighing of evidence and the discovery of truth, the challenge he has set for himself. He understands the rules of this particular competition. When someone like Mr. Curry, an old-time Hinton resident who worked as a mechanical engineer on the site almost from start to finish, claims on paper that there was no steam drill used, but reverses himself as they sit on his porch drinking tea, Guy understands that this setback is to be expected. When one considers the abnormalities and errors to which the human memory is subject, especially when it is dealing with something far in the past and tinged with the dramatic, such occurrences are to be expected, indeed counted upon. But his heart sinks nonetheless. Herbert’s own grandfather is such a case. Guy met the colored gentleman at his home four miles east of Talcott. His cottage overlooked the Greenbrier River, and Guy thought the man truly blessed to live in such a bucolic locale, in the very embrace of nature. “John Henry,” Mr. Standard began before trailing off, “John Henry?” He seemed to address the river itself, and not his visitor. He was such a slight man that his physical body seemed to disappear beneath his clothes; his bones were like tent poles sturdying his shirt and trousers. “Which John Henry do you want to know about?” Mr. Standard murmured. “I known so many John Henrys.”

“The one who worked on the Big Bend Tunnel,” Guy offered. He waited patiently, with his pen flat against his notebook.

Whereupon Mr. Standard expounded upon how small Talcott was when he moved there fifty years before, about the day the Hinton roundhouse burned down, and what kind of fish ran in the Greenbrier at this time of year. When Guy finally met success in returning the subject to the steeldriver, Herbert’s grandfather said, “I don’t know any John Henry. Who’s that?”

On the trip back to town, Herbert apologized for his grandfather, explaining that just a few years ago he used to tell him John Henry stories all the time, but now he has trouble remembering anything at all. If only Guy had made it up here years before. Even a year might have made the difference. In terms of oral testimony, at any rate. Documents remain elusive, yesterday and today. In that tower of paper by the door, there is no evidence that a steam drill was used here. Some positive evidence, yes, from second-person accounts, but no paper trail. Captain Johnson, the contractor for the site, died years ago and left no journals or work papers of his job on Big Bend. The Chesapeake & Ohio files for this job were lost in a fire — convenient enough for the railroad company, given their deplorable safety record. It is an undisputed fact that the C&O used a steam drill on the nearby Lewis Tunnel in 1871. It is an undisputed fact that despite the unreliable nature of the machine, it was certainly cost effective — about 5.5 cents an inch versus the 11.2 cents an inch for human labor. Of the forty steam drills sold by the Burleigh Rock Drill Company, three are unaccounted for; if one takes into account that the drilling contest was arranged when a Burleigh salesman came to demonstrate its effectiveness, and that John Henry’s success resulted in a failed sale, it makes sense that there would be no paper record. And given the machine’s tendency to failure — as some versions of the ballads sneer, “Your hole’s done choke and your drill’s done broke”—it is possible that a man could have beat the machine. Again, he catches himself. The veracity of the man’s existence has no bearing on his mission here.