Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

Once in a while one of them said I love you, to flat sonant agreement from the other pillow, and it always took them a while to fall asleep when that happened.

Passion at first when it appeared as if their relationship might one day accord with conventional ideals. J. saw Monica first, as she handed out press packets by the coat-check room one night. He thought she was pretty. Monica met him a few events later, when she came over to massage a junketeer who was conversing with him. She introduced herself, as was her custom at events, because she never knew where a stranger might fall in the scheme of things. They ended up kissing a few events later, a friendly good night peck on the cheek that quickened sweetly. As they would never do again once the arrangement asserted itself, they did the normal things, saw movies and ate at restaurants. Monica put the dinners on her corporate credit card because J. was a writer and expensible. He bought her flowers. Their comrades in the business, on both sides of the events game, thought they made a nice couple. They were a good-looking couple, and besides how are you going to meet anyone real in this business. The cab rides back to Monica the Publicist’s home often embarrassed the drivers in those first months, but J. tipped well, and there were worse things that could happen in a cab.

One of them wanted to end it, and the other did not put up a fight. Neither could recall exactly who brought it up; they each had their own motives. Apart from their individual reasons, there was one common to many citizens in the metropolis: They believed there was something more in this city waiting to be discovered, something just for them. They parted as friends. J. had never left any item in the dark building and that simplified matters. It had curdled, things like that curdled and there was nothing that could be done about it except move on. The city was big. Two weeks later they were back in Monica’s bed, and two weeks after that, too.

Of course they loved each other. The ceiling above the bed twinkled with a universe of events, they picked out and named the familiar constellations to make sense of their lot in life. Whole mythologies up there, sundry pantheons. There blazed the Doughnut, right there, the loose ring of stars named after a certain kind of event held in formerly hip establishments groaning through the final days of their decline, where the salsa was tepid and deracinated, the greens inevitably soggy and depressed. There, a quadrant below, was the Greenstein Belt, named after the Park Avenue plastic surgeon whose clients booked large banquet halls in the fancier hotels to hawk eponymous perfume, where the sick lighting livened the scars of designer surgery into ugly relief. There, spinning there, was Ursus, whose distant, serried stars signified publishing events where the literary heavyweights who had done their best work in the fifties smoked cigars, got into fights over who would be remembered sixty years from now and puzzled over feminist attacks on their hirsute corpus. They came quickly, in silence always, and disengaged and chatted about their private constellations, arid boredom drying their secretions swiftly, they picked out stars until one realized that the other had not said anything for some time, and they were alone.

Biweekly and biweekly through years. They had squabbles like any couple. One spring Monica adopted a distracted air, nibbled petulantly at crackers, arrived late and departed early at events. She waited for J. to comment on the change in her behavior, for she felt it was obvious that inside her something was shifting and so she exaggerated the symptoms to get his attention, and when he did not remark upon it she told him one night in her bed that she wanted to leave the publicity racket. She had a friend who had a farm and had been invited to spend a few months there, to clear her mind, rearrange her priorities, whatever, it was a healthy and nurturing environment with fresh air and farm animals. J. chuckled and said he’d like to see that. He slept on the couch the rest of that night, found his advances disdained two weeks later, and did not accompany Monica to her apartment. Their arrangement resumed two weeks after that, but various precedents had been set. Half a year later, when J. lamented what he perceived to be a certain hollowness within him and confessed to revisiting the old book proposal, Monica scoffed and said that would be the day. He rebuffed her two weeks later, they resumed two weeks after that and then they were even.

Certainly in a city of contracts and bargains, of pacts and compromises, theirs was not the most decrepit. It made sense. Certainly the city had produced unions more unholy than theirs, brokered alliances more profane and withering. They endured, they held each other, plummeting through fads and flavors of the month, through a universe of events and beyond, in fevered biweekly embrace, deep into cold pop.

In a different world perhaps. If he were a soldier instead of a mercenary, and she a healer instead of a handler. Circumstances had thrown them together, life under pop had forced them to find solace wherever they could. He was a soldier in the French village, he brought her chocolates and stockings, real treasures in these times of scarcity. She was a nurse tending the wounds of our boys, she taught him that it is enough to make it alive to the end of the day, that it was okay for a man to cry. Always the sound of the shelling to remind them of what the world had come to. After the Armistice, they’d go their separate ways, return to their former lives. But this war was peculiar. It would not end, it discovered new markets every day, the fighting spilled over into new demographics each day, none could remain neutral in this conflict, and no side could ever win. So it continued, and the soldier and the nurse comforted each other. In a different world perhaps.

Look, there’s Paul Robeson on Broadway, in his dressing room backstage at the 44th Street Theatre, winter of 1940. He is John Henry. For one more performance, anyway, because they’ve closed the show. Everybody hates it. Word is it’s a real stinker. And word is getting around. They had a short run in Philly a couple of weeks ago, and the critics hated it. Normal people, too. They reworked it, stuck chewing gum in the breaches, cast off here in New York last week, but they’re still waist-deep in bilge, good intentions bobbing around them along with other buoyant sundries. So the money guys are strapping on life jackets aboard the good ship John Henry. Every man for himself!

Blame, point the finger: The scrivener responsible is one Roark Bradford, who adapted the musical from his 1931 novel. A best-seller, that. Standing there deliberating in the bookstore, one look at the author bio and they knew they were in good hands. “Roark Bradford is amply qualified to write about the Negro,” it read. “He had a Negro for a nurse and Negroes for playmates when he was growing up. He has seen them at work in the fields, in the levee camps, and on the river. He knows them in their homes, in church, at their picnics and their funerals.” Very impressive credentials indeed. Especially that bit about the picnics. He might as well have a Ph.D. in Negroes. His mastery of the Negro idiom is quite startling. The reader is invited along as big bad John Henry swaggers through a series of picaresque adventures, such as picking cotton (“Hold yo’ fingers a little bent and let yo’ hands pass by de bolls. Efn they’s nigger blood in yo’ fingers de cotton will stick an follow.”), loading cotton on to a steamship (“You’s a cotton-rollin’ man on the Big Jim White, so wrassle dat cotton down. Hit’s cotton and you’s a nigger. So wrassle hit down, son!”), and rousting hogs (“Line up, you bullies, and make yo’ shoulders bare! ’Cause when I h’ists dese hogs outn de pen, you gonter think hit’s rainin’ hogs on yo’ weary back.”). The pages, they turn themselves.