Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“Look at me when I’m talking to you, young lady.” Her mother takes her daughter’s chin in her hand. “This afternoon when I left for my club meeting you said you wanted a dime for candy because I always try to do the best for my only daughter. Don’t your father and I always try to do the best for you and your brother?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Often when their parents walked them down the street their clothing was tight and constrictive compared with that of other children their age, whose parents were not as cognizant of the role appearance played in social standing, whose parents did not know that people will talk. These other children invariably looked more comfortable.

“Does this look like candy to you?”

“No, ma’am.” If the sheet music was that much more horrible than candy, it must truly be horrible. Of such low social standing.

“When we walk to church on Sunday morning down Broadway,” her mother said, cheeks red in her light brown skin, “you see the dirty men with their shirts all out their pants, drinking the devil’s liquor and stinking to high heaven when good people are going to church. Do you know what they’ve been doing all night?”

“No, ma’am.” She did know, because now this discipline had wound its way down the hills away from the music and into a familiar body, and Jennifer was well acquainted with its currents and undertow. She knew all about the good-for-nothing niggers who passed bottles back and forth and were an eyesore. But it seemed best to feign ignorance.

“Staying up all night drinking and listening to music like this!” her mother screeched. “Because they are good-for-nothing niggers who don’t care about making a better life for themselves. They want to stay up all night and carry on and pretend that just because they don’t have to pick cotton they have no more duties to attend to. We can’t do anything about good-for-nothing niggers who don’t want to take their place in America, but we can watch ourselves. This is Strivers Row. Do you know what striving means?”

“It means that we will do our best,” Jennifer recites.

“It means that we will survive. Now I want you to promise me that you will never play that music again. Will you promise me that?”

“I promise, Mother.”

“That’s the girl I raised,” her mother says, this tempest now just draining damp. “Now I’m going to put my bags away,” she says, reassuring herself, “and I want to hear that song that Mr. Fuller has been teaching you so you can be ready for your recital.”

It’s always that song. Her mother doesn’t know any of the names of the composers. They’re just nice things to her, more nice things to have in the house. Her mother disappears with the groceries and leaves Jennifer alone in the room. Her eyes fix on the good and pleasant notes of Jacques Wolfe’s “Shortnin’ Bread.” She hears the instructions of Mr. Fuller and her mother’s explanation of why it is important to be a lady. She thinks as she starts to play: no, it wasn’t candy but it sure was sweet.

The citizens practice their aim. Some shoot BBs at tin cutouts of fowl, which are dragged in ellipses by iron chains and tip back ninety degrees when hit. Some shoot water pistols into the mouths of clowns to fill a balloon, and others toss baseballs into cupped targets. This is good old American know-how. It’s all rigged. The prizes for excellent marksmanship hang on hooks, dingy teddy menageries. Alphonse quiets the temptation to engage in a little target practice. It would be a little perverse in light of his plans for the next afternoon, and besides, he’s already put in his time at the range over the last few months. Plus there’s nothing more ridiculous than a man hauling a gigantic miniature green elephant.

Tiny hollows, pits, and chips pock here and there the skin of the tin ducks, and these depredations prove them kin to the John Henry statue on the hill above. The targets take the shots and persist. His fingers fall over his purple fanny pack; through the thin plastic he can trace the barrel. It would be perverse to take a shot at the ducks or the clown, he thinks, but it sure would be a nice piece of color for a journalist. Trace back the steps of Mr. Miggs of Silver Spring, Md. over the days leading up. One of them might ask Eleanor if her husband often attended stamp-related events. Would she remember? He rarely goes to expos or conventions outside the D.C. area. Then they might ask her, why do you think he did what he did in Talcott? What they should ask, Miggs thinks, is why the mountain chose him.

He can’t decide if he should walk faster or slower. There’s more to see that he might miss and so much he cannot savor if he speeds. He allows his legs to take him, sniffing the fair into him, receiving a gutter bouquet of popcorn, beer, children’s vomit. There’s a table full of stuff no one wants in tableaux of disappointment, silk wraps, tin rings, family heirlooms offered up after debate to help out with the mortgage. That woman there selling her bad paintings — he recognizes them as paint by number specials, produced in a factory for people to fill in. She’s chosen some bizarre colors — residence in her mentality for one second would be too long — but at least she’s stayed in the lines. (More than he can say for himself.) He overhears conversations he doesn’t want to overhear and wants to sprint past them but he can’t. This is all so important. He might miss something. Alphonse looks around for something to dissuade him but nothing he sees offers argument or counterpoint, not the couple in romance sharing a public private smile, nothing in all the human connections he magnifies through the lens of his disquiet into infinite love. Of course these people don’t know he is seeking something from them. Of course no matter how hard he tries to avoid looking at the mountain, he knows it is still there with its unavoidable message. The twin tunnels are like eyes.

If he keeps his eyes on ground level maybe he can avoid it for a while. A little redheaded girl in overalls holds a goldfish in a plastic bag. She slides her left hand across the bottom of the bag and raises it and for a few moments the poor fish doesn’t know what to do. It can choose one half of the bag or the other. By a casual gesture its world has been halved into inevitabilities. He watches as the girl disappears to catch up with her mother. Alphonse thinks the fish will be lucky if it makes it back to her home alive. Asphyxiation. Drowning in water, invisible plenty. They never had children. It bugs him only occasionally, generally at times like this when he sees families and families out together. He has small hands but he could take a smaller hand into his own and lead. He has things he could pass on to someone, a message to communicate beyond tomorrow’s dispatch. What would it sound like if he heard it aloud, he wonders, and heard it for once outside his head. He could scream in this crowd and no one would hear him because of all the happy noise.

The announcer says, “Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. Lost child Kevin Graham is at the information booth. His mother’s name is Carol.” Alphonse looks around — no woman runs through the crowd toward the information booth with tears of relief on her face. He spots the man whose life he saved last night, over near the kegs with some of his journalist pals. The man seems none the worse for wear. Alphonse waves — for a second there it looked like the black man was looking in his direction. But he doesn’t see him and there’s no way Alphonse is going to go over there. To say what, I saved your life last night, remember me? If he had done nothing, he would be no less a stranger to that man. Alphonse could be another one of the man’s readers, anyone in this crowd.