Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“A coffee table is not a coffee table … I didn’t make that up. I’m not that clever. But I did my humble effort to urge Egon coffee tables into deserving living rooms across the country. They are stark and scratchproof and fit easily into any preexisting design motif or lack thereof, they do not stick out, are unobtrusive, but they have their own subtle radiance. They shine in their own right. I don’t know you. I can’t describe your life, but I know the world. The world is full of undiscovered treasures waiting to reveal their true light. Are you a kind man? Are you a forgiving man? I don’t know, I’ve just met you, sir. I have picked up on a few things. You cross your legs and uncross your legs and you have that thing you do with your chin. I have learned that you are an attentive listener, but if I said I knew you I would be lying so I’m not going to insult you by saying that I do. But I know the world, and it is full of light.

Here and there, it leaks out, and this is where I come in. Lumens and lumens. Talcott is full of light. It is a silent star. It is a superheated solar furnace that is dark and waiting to become light. You have plans and ideas. I will give them to the world. All I ever do is release radiance. This is light bulbs, sir, and this is why I say I am in the light bulb business. This is light bulbs.”

It’s like living in a bum’s tin cup; one thing rattles and they all rattle together. Right now he hears everything except the words he strains to remember, all his neighbors’ livid faces horde around him, but he cannot make out the shrouded face he seeks back there in the snow when he shivered with a broken face. Stick a baboon in front of a piano and that’s what this building sounds like at all hours. Before Mickey it was the Mailers arguing, and their cheap things falling on firetrap floors as he knocked her around. The fight lasted an hour and he didn’t get a single word down all the while. Tomorrow what blood she cannot remove from her housedress will be seen on the wash line outside, pinned to those looping linen grins across the facade of every tenement, one every story, dangling ropes bearing dun-tending sheets, underwear, pajamas. Love and hate and gossip hung out there. Fistfights and puberty. If the damned yelping doesn’t tell you, all you have to do is look for baby clothes on the wash lines to see who just delivered. The familiar clothes of the dead disappear suddenly. The Mailers’ fight finally stops and then it’s Mickey, because it is Saturday night, crashing wide the front door and making his rot-gut stumble up the stairwell, finally thrown out of the last basement dive of the night and mistaking every door for his. He lives on the top floor, so floor after floor of mistakes. When he tries his keys in their locks, one by one they say, move along, Mickey, and he fumbles along to the next apartment. Jake thinks “Move along, Mickey” might make a good saloon song; he’ll try after he gets the John Henry ballad out of him and on paper. When Mickey finally gets inside his place, it’s a gang of drunks yelping down Essex, then a baby, or a gang of babies, or those wretches who live in the basement. If all other distractions cease, there are always the rheumy bitches in the basement, who cough up things from their lungs at remarkable volume, things that must be chairs or wardrobes from the sound of it. He has never seen them, only heard the heavy basement door scrape behind their scurrying, so he is left to imagine what they look like from their harrowing coughing fits. Ruth says they’re gypsies. Everything’s cramped. In the heaving tenement, in their two rooms, Jake looks down at his music-paper, hands stoppers at his ears, pressing hard until all he hears is his own heart bass-drum in his skull. But he can’t remember the words. A song is just words on paper until it is sung, that’s what they say at the office, but he can’t even get that far. Every minute he spends struggling against the disharmony of his world is money out of pocket; in his line Saturday is the biggest night. The dance halls and beer joints and vaudeville houses are overflowing at this hour, this is the time he waits for all week. After a year of Saturday nights his blood naturally jumps at this hour, and he thinks of all the people spilling in and out of establishments, fumbling through gaudy signs for the key into this evening. But Mr. Yellen is off to the Philadelphia office on Monday morning and if Jake doesn’t get the manuscript to him before his departure, he has to wait another week. That won’t do. Uptown at Cunningham’s Rosie Clifford is beginning the first set of her week-long engagement, and he should be there plugging. Buying beer for Handsome Boy Morton and his band, seeding the gallery with chorus slips. Instead Slim is probably there in his place, plugging the latest song from Ames Bros., probably a drinking song, knowing them, another attempt at the next “Down Where the Wurzburger Flows.” They can try as much as they want but Ames Bros. hasn’t had the stuff since Dolzier and Finch moved over to Patriot, and everybody knows it. Songs like that don’t just happen, million-sellers. Yes, Jake should be there tonight, plugging for old man Yellen, going song for song with his rivals, but he’s here, with stillborn sheet-music on his lap and lyrics that have picked up stakes, nowhere to be found. Now it sounds like somebody’s getting killed out there. The coppers playing dice when they should be out protecting the citizens. It would be quieter at the office on Twenty-eighth, but some of the real contract men, as opposed to aspiring tune-smiths like Jake, might be there, filling up the warren of little rooms with cigar smoke, and they’ll crack wise with him. What are you doing at that piano, song-plugger? Particularly if they’re playing whist and tipping elbows. He’ll take a lot of ribbing. He’s just an errand boy to them, even after a year. They are the artists and he might as well be one of the Negroes who drop off the boxes of sheet music at the novelty stores. As if their scribbled songs sell themselves. As if with dozens of music publishers hustling every day and night at the same joints, trying to get the attention of the same talent, trying to get the ear of the public, their songs just sell themselves. Most of them are hacks anyway, rhyming sandwiches with languages and Doherty with majority, the dumbest stuff, trying to copy whatever song made it big last week. If this week it’s tot songs, those hacks are thinking about Little Sally and her red balloon, temperance songs this week if that’s what the papers are talking about, beer-drinking songs the next week. Stealing wholesale the melody of the latest saloon favorite, trading Molly for Dolly, but they’ll stuff newspaper into their pianos to stifle the sound because they think their fellow songsters in the next rooms are going to steal from them. A gang of thieves. One step above rag-pickers, the way they root around looking for some scrap to sell. They have the gall to look down on him. Least with this John Henry song, if he can remember it, he’s trying to do something unexpected, bring back a ballad after all this hopped-up ragtime stuff everybody’s doing today. The two-step is big so they got to make up songs to two-step to. It’s a merry-go-round. He looks at the upright in the corner. Maybe if he could play around on its yellowed keys, the night he heard the John Henry song would come back. But he can’t touch it if Victoria is in the house, he’s learned that. His baby sleeps through every aggravation the street and tenement assails her with, but let Jake play one note on the upright and open go her eyes and wide goes her mouth and out comes the wailing. Even if he sticks newspaper on the strings to muffle like they do at the office and plays as softly as possible, she’s crying. Cacophony upon cacophony in this ramshackle, and his baby girl can’t bear a note of actual music. It could be a million-seller, it could be what everyone in every saloon needs if only they heard it once, and his baby will scream like a banshee. Smart thing to do would be to sell the damned thing anyway. Big Danny ain’t coming back. Back when the police closed down McGinty’s, on account Man McGinty wasn’t giving the syndicate their proper take of the back room stuss game, Big Danny broke into the saloon the next day in broad daylight and rolled the rickety upright straight out the front door. For wages earned and owed — Big Danny had been knocking the keys for four months and only got paid for two. He stayed on for the free liquor, but it gets to a point. Once he got the piano out on the sidewalk, he had nowhere to put it, because the house rules at the flop he called home said that every one of his possessions was to be stolen the minute he left the premises, and he was tired of combing the shelves of the corner pawn to buy back his pilfered stuff. So he called up from the street, Jake looked down into the Essex hustle, and a few hours later Jake was explaining to Ruth why this beaten-up piano was taking up precious space in their tiny two rooms. Victoria wasn’t born yet, but once she arrived they’d need all the space they could get, and that hunk of junk was out of tune and out of place. Smart thing to do would be to sell it. He saw Big Danny one more time after he brought the piano over. Looked like he’d been dragged out of the Hudson. Big Danny said, I’ve placed songs with every top-notcher at Tony Pastor’s and now look at me. Jake gave him some bills. McGinty might have been tight with the cash, but no one else was going to hire Big Danny, no legit place, not with those opium eyes of his. Word was Big Danny had disappeared into a Pell Street hop den, disappeared down with the Orientals, and that was months ago. Best to sell it and buy things for Victoria, pay off the doctor. Makes him feel awful bad to think about Big Danny like that, Big Danny’s the one who broke him in after Old Man Yellen recruited him. “You got the lungs,” Yellen told Jake the day he picked him out of the choir, “you got working papers?” He had working papers, he had a valise full of neckties. Jake’s first job had been selling neckties for a friend of his father, but after Yellen came that day, he hadn’t set foot in his father’s friend’s necktie shop since, or his father’s synagogue now that he thinks about it. Getting a chance to sing was the only reason he went there anyway at that point. Guy walks in says he can get paid to sing, what does he need to go back to synagogue for? Singing for free. Jake was entering into a long-standing Tin Pan Alley tradition, he later discovered. All the publishers come down and canvass the Lower East Side synagogues in search of strong pipes to steal from the choirs. You need a new plugger, you come downtown. Jake noticed Yellen’s suit right off, it wasn’t none of that cheap Orchard Street stuff; see a guy in a nice suit like that and no way he was going to go for one of Jake’s cheap neckties, it was a skill he had learned from doors shut in his face. The guy had made something of himself. Of course one of those doors not shut in his face revealed Ruth (who said her father was not home but of course he saw her father plenty once Jake started courting her) so he has to thank the job for that at least. “Can you read music?” Yellen asked him when they stepped outside. Yes, he could read music, was he a blind man? It was also the last time he wore his threadbare Sabbath suit, too; first thing he got paid, one of the contract composers tipped him to a tailor on Thirty-fourth Street where all the guys went. Sure Jake could read music. He got the job and that night was his introduction to New York City at night. Big Danny his guide inside. They met up in front of the Alhambra, at eight o’clock as Yellen instructed. Jake was early, watched the couples swagger arm in arm through the beautiful doors to be devoured by globed light. The night was young and the couples made their way up to Fourteenth Street seeking any available mischief, a promising joint, the men in tilted brown derbies and tight checked suits, the women in pinching corsets that unclenched into long dresses, faces painted to coquettish blush beneath hats plucked completely except for one long feather. He had never been inside the famous Alhambra, or any of the other places on that bustling row. A gorilla tapped his shoulder and introduced himself — Big Danny. Big Danny said he’d been playing a game of spot the rube, and look it, he’d won. He was still big then, could have been mistaken for a strong-arm man, and talk about lungs. He was a boomer, no fooling, and when he started in on the plug, he got the song heard above all the saloon racket. Could be a full orchestra playing a march and you’d still hear Danny. Big Danny, Jake’s guide for the night, showed him the ropes and only talked down to him occasionally, when he asked a stupid question or spent one moment too many wide-eyed at one of the chorus girls. (They kicked so high.) Big Danny said, Staff notes into bank notes, that’s the word, and we’re the men who get the songs out there. You got to know what kind of place you’re working. If it’s a dance hall, and you got couples trying to have a good time, you plug the rag, something that will get them all two-stepping. If you know the bandleader and your firm has a reputation, maybe all you got to do is buy him a drink and he’ll play the song next thing. Maybe you got to buy drinks for the whole band, so remember what everybody drinks, do they got a taste for beer or do they got a taste for whiskey. Dance hall, it’s a rag so it’s an instrumental and you don’t have to pay stooges to sing the chorus, just clap your hands in time to get them dancing. But a saloon, once you get the song in the hands of the bandleader or the singer, you got to get the chorus slips out there into people’s hands, lay some coin on a beer-bummer so they’ll join the refrain. Once again you got to remember if they want money or drinks. Some of these rummies’ll do it for a shot. Once the band gets to the refrain, that’s when you start booming. You start singing loud. Louder than the singer if you have to but you got to get the crowd on your side. The people you gave the slips to, they’re joining in, too. What do you think the rest of the crowd’s going to do? Join in and remember. Could be the first time the song’s been played in public, just got back from the printer’s that morning, but they see you and a bunch of stooges singing it and they think it’s already a hit. Everybody knows the song but them. You have to believe that too — that the song is a hit. It might be “Lost Little Child” with a couple of words changed, or maybe one of the boys slowed it down, or maybe it’s the tenth coon song you tried to plug that day. But you gotta believe it’s a hit or else they’re never gonna believe it. That’s what’s going to get them into the music stores and five-and-dimes looking to buy the sheet music. This is the way we do it now. Got million-sellers all the time now, and this is how they start, with us, boy. We plug ’em, we get ’em in the hands of the right people to play ’em, and people buy ’em. He blew out a tart cloud of cigar smoke. Jake was dizzy, felt he’d been on the dance floor ten numbers in a row. He figured if he could sell neckties he could sell songs. Big Danny nodded to the bouncer and they went inside. Jacob watched and played stooge. At the Alhambra, Big Danny waited for the tearjerker to end (it was the summer’s hit, “No Flowers for Amelia,” with the melody reworked and an extra chorus, another Whitman Bros. hack-job) and approached the bandleader with professional copies of Yellen’s latest drinking song, and ten minutes later Big Danny was singing the refrain, with Jacob backing him up from the other side of the room, winking, reading words from the chorus slip. At Cunningham’s half an hour later, Big Danny took the headliner in a bear hug between her sets — she looked like a limp daisy grabbed by a gorilla (they went way back together he said later) — and she sang the song first thing when she got back onstage, a rags-to-riches yarn with an easy chorus that the crowd would have picked up on even if Big Danny and Jake hadn’t been booming it out. But they were booming and Jake couldn’t stop laughing. It was a new kind of singing; he felt like a newspaper boy hawking a gory headline, or one of those chest cases holding sandwich boards for the latest remedy that he couldn’t afford. At the Arabian Nights Jake got swept up in the final chorus and bumped into a Bowery boy and got a face full of stale beer and peanut shells. Lucky that’s all he got. They got thrown out of Leary’s, the first but not that last time Jake would be tossed out like a slop bucket by management for no good reason. At Bob Preston’s Variety, Big Danny bought the entire band beer, and they cheated him, tucking the professional copies (stark, no frills, without the fetching cover art that attracted the civilians, back sides bereft of the usual cheap advertisements for nerve tonic and rocking horses) underneath the music of their scheduled set and never got around to Yellen’s song. Big Danny bunched the chorus slips into balls and threw them around the room as the people danced to competitors’ songs. It happens. They’re at the mercy of the musicians. Place after place, from saloon to burlesque house and back again, bribing and cajoling, failing or not, they moved the music in the modern way, the little guys in the new industry. The next morning Jacob had become Jake, pruned his surname too, to a simple Rose. His parents didn’t cotton to that, no sir, but this is America, this is the twentieth century. A guy’s got to get ahead. His father still gives him grief about it, but Jake gives grief back when he catches his father crouching over his kid, speaking that dead language to Victoria even though he’s told the man he doesn’t want him speaking that around her. Old man’s hovering over his baby girl like an old world ghost. This is the twentieth century and there’s his gloomy father trying to import a Lithuanian village into Jake’s two tiny rooms. Victoria’s a classy name, a royal name, and royalty doesn’t need any peasant stuff dragging her back. His father makes a vague old world grunt whenever Jake says this is the twentieth century, and the sound isn’t musical at all. To heck with it all, Jake hasn’t the time. Barely enough time for the sun, some days. He started sleeping past noon once the rhythm came in. He learned the flow of the New York City evening, which joints hit their peak at what time, distinguished the drinking joints from the dancing joints, memorized the bouncers’ names and the tactics of competing pluggers. He made the rounds, wore down shoes that his cousin resoled for free if Jake told him stories about bawdy houses and what went on inside them. He got the songs out there in a good percentage. He’d pick up the new batch from the office on Twenty-eighth Street every night and hear the contract men in their cubicles attempting alchemy on their battered pianos and thought to himself, they shouldn’t call it Tin Pan Alley because all their racket sounds like tin pans clanging together, but because more often than not what they conjure up is just tin and not the gold of a bona fide hit. It didn’t take him long to figure out that if you became a contract man, a composer or a lyricist, you got a decent salary plus royalties. Knock out a few popular songs and you’re set up on Easy Street. He looks at those drunks at the office banging away at their plagiarized ditties and thinks, half these guys started out pluggers like him and they got nothing on him. But he’s the littlest cog in the machine. The women work in the daytime, demonstrating numbers in music shops and department stores, and the men work at night, plugging the dance halls. The songwriters knock them out, then above them the hit-makers spend their royalties. And above them the publisher got the best of it. The walls of Yellen’s office are crammed with framed copies of hits and above the names of the songwriters is his name, bigger than everything. Big Danny, before he got on the hop, before he got fired, said the minute he figures out the system it changes, a guy can hardly keep up. Some places got music machines, player pianos that play songs that are already set, and there’s no use for a plugger when they got a machine to do it. No need for a musician that breathes and bleeds when you got a machine to do it. Some places now got kinetoscopes showing motion pictures of what the lyrics say, so you don’t have to imagine what a song’s about, it’s up there on the wall in a picture. First it was slide shows and now it’s kinetoscopes. From where we are, out there hoofing it from place to place, we can’t see the whole thing. You ask Yellen about the distribution and he’ll tell you about how this new printer can cut up thousands of copies a day, and how long it takes for the train to get it from here to Chicago and Philadelphia, and how much he makes off the ads on the back, and how when Harper’s prints a song, how many of their readers will buy it the next week. We’re just two guys, Jake. They got more than twenty music publishers on the Alley alone, and that’s not including the big guys like Von Tilzer moving uptown. We’re just two pluggers and they got a whole system over us. Jake said, this is the twentieth century. Big Danny said, no fooling. Now outside some man is beating his horse. How is a man supposed to get ahead with all this noise. He doesn’t know how Ruth and Victoria can sleep through this night after night. They slept through him being beaten, it was only two blocks away. He rubs his bent nose and drags a finger across the groove in his cheek. With his bashed-up face he looks like any Bowery brawler. No longer the choirboy. This is what the street has done to him. What gang they were from there was no way of telling, but they beat him good, came out from beneath one of the El struts and knocked him down with a brick. It was the first heavy snow of winter and he cut his plugging short because no one was out, but short meant it was still late. With his face pushed down into the piled snow he could still smell the horse manure beneath it. They cut his pockets straight out of his trousers and grabbed his meager bills. Sent that night’s songs soaring on a gust. But maybe his wife and child didn’t hear him because the snow swallowed all his screams. They left him in the snow, with a different face, a different nose and exploded cheeks that now testify to violence before uninterested juries of passersby, and only the people who knew him before say his kid looks just like him. This city is a crime. He pulled himself from the snow and leaned against the El, on one of the odd bluffs the wind made because it didn’t know what to make of elevated trains, he rested on halfhearted dunes and cutoff cliffs of snow. The mayor gets himself elected on a reform platform and still the gangs own the streets and the coppers turn a blind eye. Stephen Foster got paid ten dollars for “Oh! Susanna” and made millions for his publisher and died broke of drink at a Bowery flophouse just over there. He tried to lift himself up. You can fall into the city and no one will ever find you. When the snow melts they will find his body and a bunch of frozen drunks no one missed. He scraped frozen blood from his eyes and peered into the snow. He felt like he was at the bottom of an hourglass, it was coming down so hard. The man came up the street singing. Jake never saw his face. He had to have seen Jake, or at least the dark wings of blood around him. But he didn’t stop. No one cares about their fellow man. He walked by singing that John Henry song, coming up the street right in between the tracks above. It was only when Jake finally marshaled himself out of the blizzard and Ruth had cleaned his face and he was falling into bed like it was a chute that he was able to think, that was a pretty good song. To a guy like him, you hear a melody like that and think it will be a tough plug. It doesn’t have the syncopated push of a rag, the rollicking swagger of a saloon song. It does not describe the orphan girl’s escape from the sinful life when the millionaire falls in love with her and then they take tea with Carnegie. But it has a power. The song of the horse getting beat reminds him of him getting beat, and some of the lyrics start coming back. He’s got to get them down on paper before they go away again, even if they were pounded into him that night. He touches his scar, and remembers how he hauled himself up from out of the snow. John Henry went home to his good little woman, Said, Polly Ann, fix my bed, I want to lay down and get some rest, I’ve an awful roaring in my head, Lord, Lord, I’ve an awful roaring in my head. Ruth’s tiny hands wrung the rag into the basin and turned the clean water pink. What the man was doing out in that kind of weather, who knows. Why he was singing that particular song, who knows. Walking into the wind, beneath the elevated, maybe it was the tracks that made him think of the song. Jake looked it up and no one had published a version of the ballad. Asked one of the contract men about it, the guy said, yeah I know that old song, what do you care about that slow stuff for? Jake thought with everybody chasing after the latest fashion, a ballad was going to sneak through. Yellen has coon songs coming out of his ears, and there is no way Jake is going to be the millionth guy to rhyme mother with love her, no matter how misty-eyed it makes the room. Him and Ruth and the kid moved into these two rooms and it was better than living with the airshaft blowing God knows what sickness into Victoria’s lungs. With all the garbage they throw down there it’s no wonder the gypsies in the basement are sick, but that isn’t going to happen to his little girl. Now they have a front room and their bedroom looks out on the street and when it gets warmer they can sit on the fire escape. They got air now, but it costs money. This John Henry isn’t going to be a million-seller, but it’ll show the old man he has initiative. A fellow’s got to start somewhere. This is the twentieth century and you got to make your own luck.