Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

He borrowed it from the Visitors Center when Miss Carmine was not around. He thought maybe she was in the bathroom. When he walked into the Visitors Center it was empty for the first time since he had decided to borrow the hammer so he walked up to the wall where it was hung with nails with a little sign under it and took it. He tried to put it under his shirt but it was too big so he ran. He ran up Temple and then down Third Street and then he started walking. He put it under his jacket and the handle stuck out but nobody looked at him funny when he walked by them. He felt like a bug with the frogs looking at him.

When he goes to the pond the frogs get scared and jump across the water making circles or go underwater. If he stands still they start to come back like magic. He’ll look into the water close to the edge and see a frog sticking its eyes and mouth about the water. It looks like leaves but it is a frog. They are the same color up there but the legs of the frog are brown and look like twigs. That way no one can see them. Then there will be a bunch of frogs there with just their heads above the water, all of them trying to act like they’re leaves. He’ll see a flying bug like maybe a dragonfly start getting close to them and Bobby will say, watch out, you’re going to get it. If the flying bug gets too close the frogs jump at it and try to put it in their mouth. They have been watching out for bugs to eat. They do that all day. Sometimes they go underwater but a lot of the time they wait for flying bugs. That’s why he felt like a bug when he carried the hammer. He could be a flying bug people were on the lookout for.

It wasn’t heavy. He wasn’t John Henry but he carried the hammer without trouble. He walked in the woods. When he got it to the clearing he moved the brown pine needles apart with his sneakers and then he dug with his hands until the hole was big enough. Then he put the hammer in it and put dirt and pine needles on top of it. When his mother said what have you been doing, he said, nothing. If someone had said to him, did you take the hammer, he would have said yes. But no one did.

He moves the dirt off the hammer. It is a hammer like John Henry had. Since it has been in the ground the wood of the handle has gotten wet and it is damp and cool when he touches it. The wood of the handle was already split in the middle when he borrowed it. In the woods the handle will get old and crumbly like the other trees and branches that fall. Maybe it will get termites. The head of the hammer has little dents and many scratches on it. Maybe it will rust in the woods like the metal in the cars in the back of his father’s garage. If the hammer is out here it can get old and older and go back into the ground. It can be part of the forest and the mountain again. It will take a long time but already if he sticks his fingernail into the wood he can scratch it because it is soft. He covers up the hammer. He starts back down the trail. The John Henry Days is today and everybody is going to be there. His mother said there will be a lot of fun stuff to do.

If you ask him why he took the hammer, he would say because it wants to go back to nature. And his mother would tell you, you never know what occurs to the boy.

Every day in that place reduced his notions. Reduced the first day by the serried fluorescent rods in the ceiling panels; diminished by the pallid green light on the neutral prefab sections of the cubicles; made entirely small by the rectitude of the scratchproof desks, which were not alive with the artifacts of fabled counterculture, like maybe vermilion-tinted bongs encrusted with resinous murk, or rainbow posters detailing the famous gigs of the psychedelic dead, not even an errant roach, a little something to lubricate the old brainstem under deadline. Downright corporate, J. thought when he first walked into the offices of the Downtown News, the oldest and largest alternative weekly in the U.S. of A., consulted each week by J. as the supreme hipster tipsheet. No bumper stickers preaching common sense about big issues like whales or unionized grapes — they were forbidden, he learned later— nowhere was there tacked up a funny cartoon with a clever pun about Uncle Sam. Notions reduced apace as he discovered the intelligence behind the height and placement of the flimsy cubicle walls, which fostered the illusion of privacy but at all angles abetted intrusion, random observation by those at the top of the masthead. That first day when his boss, Metro editor Winslow Kramer, left for lunch, J. hazarded a call to Freddie, to find out which one of the bars that tolerated, indeed relied upon, underage drinkers, they would meet at later. And if any girls were coming. Turned out, Freddie remembered, that Monday at The Blue and Gold was Greta’s night, and she was a capricious old bat who might let you buy one beer, get comfortable, and then card the whole table on the second round, kicking them out after everyone, it seemed, had left their driver’s licenses at home. They were about to decide on another amenable establishment when he felt the man’s eyes upon him. He was a short white guy with slick black hair, dressed in neatly pressed khakis and a light blue oxford pinned down by red suspenders. The man looked into J. and of course knew he was sneaking a personal phone call when there were a million stories in the naked city waiting to be told. He walked on, nodding slightly to himself, and of course making a note to berate Winslow Kramer about the necessity of sedulous and go-get-’em interns. J. hurried off the phone and thought, it’s just like Big Brother. They were living in the year of the book and if you looked around you could see it was all true.

Was the prim buttoned-down man the publisher? J. wondered. The liquor magnate Reinhart Becker, who had purchased the ailing News out of financial boredom, fiscal inertia, in order to expand his empire into the realm of the printed word. According to the paper’s vigilant media columnist, who regularly railed at the man in the name of free speech and an independent press, Becker wanted to sit on his acquisition for a few years and sell it at a nice profit when the market was right. Or was the man who made the rounds of the cubicles the new editor in chief, Jimmy Banks? Jimmy Banks, who had been one of the early editors of the News during its famous fifties era, gone on to various big-name dailies in all the big markets, even soldiered through a stint at Time magazine, before coming home to his first love, you never truly leave your first love, the Downtown News. J., staggering through a dizzy bout of rookie paranoia, walked over to the candy machines for a Snickers. In the first scenario the circumspect air of the man marked him as a farmer patrolling the hen house, counting the eggs he’ll take to market soon. In the second scenario his weary, distracted calm said that he’d seen it all before, interns will slack off, it’s part of the business, and it doesn’t really matter as long as they put the paper to bed on time. In either case, J. still felt like he fucked up, and he returned to collecting phone numbers for the factchecker of the exposé of the parking meter scandal.

“It’s not what I thought it would be like,” J. told Winslow Kramer on Tuesday, and Kramer told him that’s what everybody said: They think everybody’s smoking Humbolt joints in the bathroom. He explained that these were the new offices. The News had recently moved into this space after thirty years on Fourteenth Street and things were different. Becker Distilleries owned the property and had forced the paper into the building because they had trouble finding tenants, despite the recent blossoming of the economy. Now they were finally collecting rent on the place.

“He’s a real bastard,” Kramer said, “but he leaves us alone.” J. remembered the boycott two years earlier, called by the staff on the eve of the sale. At the tail inches of the columns and reviews, the writers urged the readers not to buy the paper the following week if the sale went through, to show Management that they didn’t want to read a paper published by a liquor manufacturer who engineered ad campaigns to urge underage drinking and put up big billboards in minority neighborhoods, just bad vibes any way you looked at it, who knew what kind of changes this supporter of various conservative groups might impose on this vanguard of the left. The sale went through, and newsstand sales dropped the next week, but nothing major, comparable to certain heatstroke weeks in the summer when the folks still in town were too weak to read, or when January blizzards kept the citizens indoors and uninformed about city hall’s sundry machinations.