Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

An accident that’s lucky. He brings them home.

He watches her all night and he goes to her table after he finishes the set. She sits with a couple, the odd woman out. He asks her, how did you like the show, and the man at the table, this big guy in a brown suit, says those sure were some good songs. Moses knew he liked them; fool jumped out of his seat half a dozen times and waved his hammy arms around. The woman has full red lips and a wide, solicitous mouth. Moses asks, can I join you, always like to ask the people who come what they think about the songs. The man says I’m Al and this is my wife Betty and this is Mabel. He says let me buy you a drink and Mabel says I liked that song about the woman with the sweet heart (the song he sang as he looked into her eyes). He tells her how he wrote it one brokenhearted evening when he was crying over a woman who was not half as pretty as her. Mabel, Mabel, he tells her, he has an aunt named Mabel and he always thought it was the prettiest name.

Al is a doctor. He and Betty have to get up early for church, Al says. Betty and Mabel consult. They’ll see each other tomorrow in church, Mabel assures her friend. Mabel is a waitress at Clement’s Luncheonette and no doubt can cook.

She has a clean room in a clean building a simple stroll away. Moses staggers a little on the stairs but he is behind her (ass for miles) and he doesn’t think she notices. She lets him into her room and goes to use the bathroom down the hall, she’ll be right back. Moses drops his jacket on a bedpost and leans his guitar against the wall. He walks over to the Victrola and sees a Lemon Jefferson record on the turntable. He looks at the silver nipple poking through the heart of the record and closes the lid. She has twenty records stacked between the wall and the Victrola’s little stand; he sees this and retreats back into the center of the room. He’s beat and sits on the bed. Loosens his tie some more.

Those are my nursing books, Mabel says on her return, pointing to the books he rests his hand on. He hadn’t noticed; he thought his hand was on mattress. I’m studying to be a nurse.

Uh-huh.

Waitressing is nice but being a nurse, that’s something. So I got those books out of the library. Al’s a doctor and he said he’d put me in touch with some people who need a capable person.

He hears her erase her accent from time to time, it slips in, a leak into her city bluster before she puts her finger in it. He says, your parents still down South? Where did you say you were from?

They’re down in Pacolet. In South Carolina. They keep thinking, oh, she’ll be back soon enough. They’re still of that same attitude, but I’m not going back except maybe for visits.

What made you leave? He removes his suspenders from his shoulders.

He watches her wince for a second in recollection or something else before she says, I got tired of working for those lintheads.

Lintheads?

They called them lintheads because it was a cotton mill and when they came out they were covered with it. They got seventeen cents an hour, poor as dirt, but they still had more money than us. They wasn’t going to let no Negroes work in that mill. So they paid us to keep their houses and take care of their children. They worked from six in the morning until six in the afternoon so that’s when we had to be there. My sisters, we all worked in the Liberty Street houses, all my cousins on my mother’s side. You could stick your black hands, stick your black hands in their dough for bread, you could lay your black body in their beds to nap with the children, but you couldn’t walk through the front door. I did that for going on almost two years and then I said I’m going to Chicago. They couldn’t stop me. They tried but I was going to Chicago.

Sounds about right.

We had a colored school in my town. I knew how to read so I left.

I’m sure you have a lot of stuff up there in that pretty little head of yours.

She falls asleep after he shows her how people do it back where he comes from (verbatim, that), she snores on his arm and he thinks, what is it, what is it: he felt he had to bounce back from the afternoon’s session. What is it: this could be his one chance. Fifty dollars a side, his name on the records on Goodman’s wall, his name up there for all them to see. This night he nailed it. Like he was in competition with himself and he had to take each song higher. He was reaching for something all night and then he switched “Long Time Blues” with “John Henry” and that was what did it, he changed his mind, didn’t know why, half a second before he chased the first chord out he knew that he had hit it. He starts falling asleep and thinks, he wasn’t competing with himself, he wanted to beat the machine. The box on the second floor of Goodman’s, the diamond needle cutting his fame into beeswax. People could buy him for seventy-five cents, after payday, and he’s in rooms on layaway Victrolas, him and his guitar drifting through screen doors into the night air in Natchez and Meridian, some hot young girl listening to him, swaying in sweat and getting ideas.

When he wakes up she’s gone and he doesn’t know where he is. Then he remembers, remembers she said she had to go to church and would he still be here when she got back. He mumbled in his sleep and she put that mouth on his forehead and kissed him a kiss that stuffed him back down into sleep. He looks around and thinks, no breakfast. She didn’t cook him no breakfast. What kind of women they raising up here? Waking up by himself — might as well have gone to bed by himself if that’s what’s going to happen. His temples pound like hammers when he lifts his head from the pillow. Good God. He rummages around her room and comes up with a small bottle quarter-full of a liquid that a sniff tells him is rum. He takes the bottle, leaves, and thinks she’s lucky that’s all he takes, shit. Next time, he’s sticking with the ugly women. No way he could live up here. These are some people with some new ideas.

The pipsqueak kid at the register tells him to go on up, he’s waiting for him.

Goodman unpacks records from a large box labeled Columbia. That new Patton record is really going fast, he says.

Let’s do this, Moses says.

I’ll be just a second.

Don’t got all day.

Goodman frowns and prepares the equipment. Moses tells his fingers, I’m going to get it right this time.

Goodman says, how about we start with that John Henry thing you did last night?

You like that.

It had a nice mood.

Moses wouldn’t call it nice. He’d call it something else. Most John Henry songs he’s heard from people, they tend to talk about the race and the man’s death. He sang a version like that a few times but it never sounded right to him. The words “nothing but a man” set him thinking on it: Moses felt the natural thing would be to sing about what the man felt waking up in his bed on the day of the race. Knowing what he had to do and knowing that it was his last sunrise. Last breakfast, last everything. Moses could relate to that, he figured most everyone could feel what that was like. Moses certainly understood: that little terror on waking, for half a second, am I going to die today. Am I already dead. When Moses woke every morning he had to think hard about where he was, what town and whose bed. But it was one thing to possess that fright for a moment, he thought, and another thing entire to know it for sure, that today is your last day. So he figured that was as good place as any for his song to start. What a dead man thinks.

He only sings it occasionally. He sings it in cities mostly. The people in the bigger cities respond to it better for some reason. He plays it second-to-last in a show, to make them think about the night that is passing and almost over, what they have shared and is closing, that loss, before going into “Little Snake Man,” which really gets them stomping. Placing those two songs back to back like that he always gets a reaction. Like John Henry gets them thinking about the grave and then the adventures of the Snake Man make them say, fuck it, I’m going to have a good time. They pick up on it. John Henry gets on them slow, creeping up on them like a shadow and their heads begin to nod with the beat Moses keeps with his old shoes and his broken fingernails on the guitar’s body, he beats it like a drum with his hand, and then their palms head for the tabletops, in time, to this slow and mortal beat. It spreads from table to table and that is the best part, when he knows the song has got them and they know that it is them he is singing about. Moses has done this thing. He’s shut up the voices at the back of the room with their talk of wages or women, undone the low hands of lovers and forced them to the beat. His mother always said, James, you should have been a preacher.