Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“Let’s see what you got here,” the owner says, trying to touch as little of the sheet music as possible.

“Look at that shit,” the man with the toothpick says, “Why don’t you just let her have it for free, man?”

The owner barks, “Is this your store or is this my store? If someone wanted to kick some lazy, hanging around all day doing nothing but smoking other people’s stuff never has any on himself out of here, would that be you or me?”

The man shrugs and shifts his toothpick from the left corner of his mouth to the right.

“Here’s ten cents,” Jennifer says.

“That is indeed a dime,” he says, opening the register and dropping the coin into a clinkless hollow. “Knock yourself out.”

The sun is twice as bright once she leaves the store, until her eyes adjust again to this average world. She almost walks past the Tip Top, then doubles back, takes her usual long route around the prohibited saloon. At each sewer grate she looks down, below the street, but does not see what she thinks one day she will see.

She feels that the piano has been waiting for her whole life, on its sculpted paws, and before that. Her mother and father do not know how to play, and her brother Andrew prefers his models and sports. Her parents bought the baby grand for Jennifer alone, it seems, for the day she would take her place in the scheme, setting the piano in the corner of the parlor room where the sun attends for whole hours in the late afternoon, the light charging facets of the crystal vase atop it as the star heads west. All for show, for years, until Mrs. Sutter retained Mr. Fuller, the piano instructor, said to be the best in all of Harlem, a bit expensive but well worth it, and Jennifer learned how to play. “It’s never too early for a little girl to get herself cultured,” her mother informed her, and her free time retreated before the advance of lessons and practice, half an hour of practice a day and now an hour. After school, on weekends. The old piano had a use now beyond decoration, and Jennifer attended to her instruction. The first thing Mr. Fuller does each lesson is to remove the vase from above the piano with a tsk-tsk-tsk, and Mrs. Sutter replaces it after every lesson.

Jennifer hears some kids laughing outside and closes the window. Above the music it reads, “Another fine musical composition by Yellen & Company Music under the auspices of Dr. Simon Ramrod’s Patent Medicines.” On the back is an advertisement for Dr. Ramrod’s Essential Tincture of Gridiron, Otherwise Known as Nature’s Grand Restorative, in which a contented gentleman dozes against the bark of a weeping willow, in supreme repose, anodyne lulled. She places the music over the oppressively familiar staffs of “Shortnin’ Bread.” She knows that piece as well as she is ever going to, even though her mother shakes her certitude at every opportunity. There was no way, Mrs. Sutter reminded her daughter, that she would stand to be humiliated at the club’s recital next week, when the Sepia children, or at least the ones blessed with the gift of music, will perform familiar ditties from the Hit Parade while their parents sip tea and clap dainty hands together. She pays Mr. Fuller good money and will not stand to be disappointed.

“The Ballad of John Henry” by Jake Rose hides the music for “Shortnin’ Bread,” which Mr. Fuller has decided will best showcase Jennifer’s facility with the pianoforte. Mean Mr. Fuller, whose skin reeks of a sharp cologne, who breathes loudly through his nostrils as she tries to concentrate on her finger drills, who reminds her to turn the thumb under the hand and not over. There’s a notion forming in Jennifer’s head, not yet articulated but understood: if it’s in another language, it must be culture. Mr. Fuller knows many languages. He says, “Music is a tonal art, but we must always remember the words of Liszt when he first heard Henselt—‘ Ah ‘ , j’aurais pu aussi me donner ces pattes de velours’ —‘I, too, could have given myself these velvet paws.’ Tone is the means, not the purpose.” Which means nothing to Jennifer. He says things like, “We must strive to embody Michelangelo’s words, ‘La mano che ubbidisce al intellecto,’ to be the hand which obeys the intellect.” Which means nothing to Jennifer except a few moment’s respite from her next attempt at middle C. Whenever Jennifer tries a new composition, the words of Mr. Fuller and her mother shout: he tries to remind her of what to look for in the piece; she tries to remind Jennifer of the importance of being a lady. The melody of “The Ballad of John Henry” is not complicated. But this time she does not hear any of the usual voices as she starts the piece. As she looks down at the yellow and stained paper, she hears something Mr. Fuller said once, a few months before at the end of a lesson. She can’t recall the German words or the name of the man who said it, but she remembers this: you think you push but you are being pushed. Her first round through the song is remarkably easy. It speeds by, like a walk down a street she has been down a thousand times before, something seen but not seen, gone in a blink but navigated without mishap as she thought of something else. She tries it again, top of the wilted page, and this time is even easier, there’s something sad about the song, but what she feels most is — pushed. The song pushes her. There is something in this song that does not exist in the music that Mr. Fuller brings, it quickens inside her. It doesn’t go to church and cusses, wears what it wants. For a second she thinks, this is what I should play next week at the recital, not that other song. But she knows that won’t happen. The afternoon light glides along the dark wood of the baby grand, reminding her of sunlight on the Hudson River, something here in her vision for a little time before it goes into the ocean, joins a larger thing. The last note withers in the empty brownstone, down the hall and up the stairs into empty rooms, and this time she decides she’ll sing the words. She’s in a heat right now. She sings lyrics that tell a story of a man born with a hammer in his hand and a mountain that will be the death of him: you think you push but you are being pushed. She sings it again and is so pushed that she doesn’t hear her mother come in the front door, only hears her mother yell, “Do you think your father works ten hours a day walking up and down the neighborhood treating sick people so that he can come home and listen to his little girl play gutter music?”

Unexpected accompaniment. Jennifer jumps off the piano bench, fingers recoiling from the keys. “No, ma’am!” she says. Gutter music. Gutter music always conjured in her head the image of an orchestra in a sewer, neatly dressed gentlemen in tuxedos, their tails dragging in the muck beneath the city. She used to always look down into sewer grates to see if she would see them playing, sneaking a peak surreptitiously, but all she ever saw was glinting liquid and she does this less frequently now. Today she did, because she has always wondered: what music do they play?

Her mother drops her shopping bags in the doorway and strides over to the piano. She rips away “The Ballad of John Henry” and shakes it in the air, the cheerful stanzas of “Shortnin’ Bread” restored to vision and dignity. “Where did you get this?” she demands, her hat slanting off her hair.

Jennifer looks down, cracks her foot and grinds her shoe tip into the new carpet, which is a self-satisfied regiment of whorl much admired by the good soldiers of the Sepia Ladies Club, expensive, alluding to the European.

“Where did you get the money for this, Jennifer Sutter? You used that dime I gave you for candy, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jennifer settles into this dressing down by her mother, winded, still trembling a little from being pushed. She hadn’t thought she was doing anything wrong, but apparently the sheet music was part of a larger transgression that she had never considered. When she was older, she thought, she’d know where everything lay.