Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

Romance as well as action between the thick blue covers. Transplanted to the colorful world of Louisiana river life, John Henry’s big test here is his relationship with Julie Ann. It is love at first sight and they have much in common. “I’s six feet tall, too,” she purrs, “and I got blue gums and gray eyes.” Hearty recommendations all. If only Julie Ann could keep her hands off that nigger Sam, that good for nothin’ specimen of N’awlins lowlife. They hang around the wharf, snort coke, sip whiskey. At the end of the chronicle, John Henry, upset by Julie Ann’s latest dalliance with Sam, stalks the dock and discovers that his captain has retained the services of a steam winch that loads “cotton like ten niggers.” It is ambiguous whether it is John Henry’s romantic woes or the steam winch’s affront to his prowess that causes him to call for a race with the machine, such is de ’nigmatic ’fect of Bradford’s prose. At any rate, he croaks in the middle. Julie Ann rushes to finish the race herself, she croaks, and the star-crossed lovers are united in death. The book flew off the shelves. Of course it would make a lovely musical.

Paul Robeson sits in his dressing room. Soon he’ll walk onstage. Out there the audience doublechecks seat numbers and squints at the programs. The next day boxes and boxes of unused programs will fill the alley behind the theater. In these moments before the performance he holds all the words tight. The people out there, the tilted heads arrayed from orchestra to balcony, are not his first audience. Twenty years in the business, he’s had some experience. In a debating contest in high school he stood before his teachers and recited some Toussaint-L’Ouverture. As Napoleon dispatched thirty thousand troops to Haiti to squash insurrection, L’Ouverture told his people, “My children, France comes to make us slaves. God gave us liberty; France has no right to take it away. Burn the cities, destroy the harvests, tear up the roads with cannon, poison the wells, show the white man the hell he comes to make!” The Haitians kicked the French’s butts; Paul Robeson came in third place in the debating contest. He said he didn’t understand the meaning of the words, what it was to say those words to white people, he just thought it was a good speech. This was before he came to make his own speeches. Around this period he also played Othello for the first time, his comet role, returning and returning to him throughout his days. The performance was a fundraiser for a class trip to Washington, D.C. He was a hit. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t join the field trip because the hotel didn’t allow black people to touch their sheets. Later on when he had some juice he’d cancel shows in segregated theaters, but this was before.

What are bad notices, critics’ snipes, when you’ve been pulverized and punished bodily. At Rutgers he played football. The man was big, what can you say? At his first practice they jumped him, piled on him, broke bones. He got up. These were his own teammates. Next practice one of them drove cleats through his hand. He kept playing. They laid off him once the season started and it was the opposing team’s turn to bloody him, when they weren’t forfeiting, preferring to lose rather than share the field with the black man. He knocked them around. He scored. He won games for them but what exactly is his expression out there on the grass, it’s hard to make out, let alone interpret. What is he thinking.

They thought he was going to be the next Booker T Washington. Smart colored fellow like him. He dropped his law career to perform. Made his mark working with Eugene O’Neill, in All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Emperor Jones. In God’s Chillun the races mix. A white actress touches his hand in one scene and they thought there might be rioting. There was no rioting. That would come later. Good reviews mostly, although there were naysayers; some white critics thought the play was an insult to the white race, some black critics thought it was an insult to the black race. Around this time segments of the black press started to get on his back for playing the “shiftless moron” and the “lazy, good-natured, lolling darkey.” Not the last time they’d make this point. His singing career got into full swing around this time, too; performing bills mixing black spirituals with secular songs, he hit upon a new formula. In Show Boat he sang “Ol’ Man River,” drawing deep OOOs from deep black wells. Sang around this country and then in other countries. Visited Africa, Europe. Sold out the Albert Hall in Merry Olde. Stayed away as much as he could from the U.S. of A. for ten years.

It was when he traveled that he began to change.

Outside his dressing room, the bustle of preparations, location of props.

In Moscow he dined with the Prime Minister. Eisenstein had invited him over; turned out he was into Touissant, too, and wanted to make a film about the man. Small world. They probably discussed this by a samovar. He dug the Soviets and they dug him. One night at the theater, a little Russian kid ran up to Paul Robeson, encircled his tiny arms around the big man’s legs and implored him to stay, saying he’ll be happy if he stays in the bosom of Mother Russia. Little moppet. Pretty moving. He moved on. Hung out with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. The soldiers adored him. It wasn’t every day an international celebrity toured the front lines. He made the rounds, waved out the window of the Buick. Occasionally shells passed over his head. There was something changing in the world and in him, too. He said, “I belong to an oppressed race, discriminated against, one that could not live if fascism triumphed in the world.” All those people dying over there were dying here, in him. He said, “I have found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mines, they understand the common language of work, suffering and protest.” The Negro sharecropper, the Welsh miner, the Slavic farmer. He said, “Folk music is as much a creation of a mass of people as a language. One person throws in a phrase. Then another — and when, as a singer, I walk from among the people, onto the platform, to sing back to the people the songs they have created, I can feel a great unity.” We are our songs. He said, “I am sick of playing Stepin Fetchit comics and savages with leopard skin and spear.”

He came back to America a new man.

Tonight he’s John Henry. Already in costume. Dark blue dungarees held up by a broad brown leather belt. Sleeveless T-shirt, brown cowboy hat. The dialogue is terrible, the characters racist, the situation appalling, but in John Henry, a man of the land, Paul Robeson sees the folk. The masses. He wants to represent the experiences of the common man. Out of this folktale, even if diverted down ruined streams, flows the truth of men and women. They sacrifice and give. It didn’t turn out the way he wanted it to. Some guy in the press said even Robeson “could not carry on his back 800 pounds of bad play.” Ouch. But he is trying. He’ll be back on Broadway and knock ’em dead in “Othello.”

Someone knocks on his door, hey it’s five minutes to curtain, Mr. Robeson.

This is a turning point. No thunderbolts from the sky or neuron-zapping epiphany, nothing flashy, but there was something going on inside him. Where was America when the blood of the Loyalists spilled in rivers? Where was America when the blood of the lynched spilled in rivers? He performed at rallies for the Communist Party, benefits for socialist causes. No card-carrying member, but still. Brushes are made for tarring. Down in D.C. Hoover opened a file. He was always opening files. Open a file on a box of cherries for being too red. The file got fat, that’s what FBI files do. Still performing, making movies, making the scene on Broadway again in “Othello” but Paul Robeson’s making speeches, too. Defending the Soviet Union, watch out. In Paris ’49, he said, “It is unthinkable that American Negroes would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” Actually, he didn’t say that, but the Associated Press attributed the remarks to him and there you have it. Who is this Negro to speak this way? Here we are trying to get this Cold War thing off the ground, and there’s this guy talking our heads off about human dignity. Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he did not denounce himself. The paper of record said, “We want him to keep singing and being Paul Robeson.” They cannot recognize this man.