John Henry Days, page 18
He can’t think of anything. He gives it a full five minutes and decides to take a piss instead.
He takes one last look and clambers up the dirt. He approaches town and whistles without recognition the tune he heard at dinner the night before.
It does not take Guy Johnson long to realize that he is the bug. From beneath the creature’s russet carapace erupt segmented legs bristling with tiny spurs. Soft antennae droop from its head in a dejected parabola half as long as its body. The bug probably discovered the lemon sour with its antennae, but that is conjecture for entomology is not Guy’s field. At the university entomology is housed on the other side of campus from the humanities and he never has occasion to visit there. Guy has been watching the bug for a while now. Reconstructing likely narratives is Guy’s enterprise these days, and it extends even to his rest break, as he sits on the hard mattress staring at the floor. The bug sniffed around the room until it arrived at its present location a few feet from Guy’s bed, straddling a gritty slit between two floorboards; its movements before he first noticed it are unknowable. Nibbling and sniffing at the candy he dropped a few minutes before, the bug discovers what he discovered, that the enticing discovery is in actuality a trick, and the tongue will curdle on it. Yet it feasts.
He wonders if the proper word is mandible, not tongue. If one jumps to conclusions, one will corrupt the research. One wrong step and one is investigating an entirely incorrect avenue. He unlaces his shoe, fingers clenched around it in a traditional insect-squashing manner and he places it slowly, not without a touch of sadism, above the inquisitive creature. He stays his hand, watching. He waits for the insect to tire or grow sickened of its find. The lemon sour is too big, there is no way in God’s green earth that the insect can devour it all. But it does not tire. It nibbles, making progress imperceptible to the eye, and Guy replaces the shoe on his foot. He realizes he is the bug. They do what they must.
When he departed this morning, his papers were spread across the room according to the manner in which he had organized his vast materials, which is to say not organized at all but entirely submissive to the disorder of this project. Transcribed versions of the ballad crouched beneath correspondence received from his informants, notes tossed off in an elusive moment of inspiration secreted themselves in a sheaf of entirely unrelated sections. Amber scraps bickered in piles, contradicting each other in a crumbling din; one half of an interview skulked in one pile while the other half brooded in a pile across the room. He rode herd over crafty fugitives. If he were to die tomorrow, no one would be equipped to make sense of his investigation. He did not have a choice but to let his research roam as it pleased. If all his accumulations were organized properly in well-marked folders, in coherent groups, he would be lying, declaring that he had bested this dragon. He has not. He cannot make sense of any of it. He can savor one or two triumphs, of course. Guy has disentangled the John Henry tale from the John Hardy tale and traced their commingling in certain ballad variants. He has eliminated the false leads generated by regional versions, disentangled the Alabama State Southern and Norfolk & Western from the Chesapeake & Ohio. All those routes in a gnarl. Still he has refused to organize his material to reflect this. He is transfixed and paralyzed by the confusion, and when he returned from this morning’s interviews and saw that in addition to making his bed and sweeping the floor Mrs. Thompson had erected one looming and impenetrable stack from his strewn papers, his initial flush of anger eased into gratitude. She had reminded him that he had still not found his way into the mountain.
It had started as such a modest proposition: to trace the origin and transmission of one of the ballads he and Howard had collected for The Negro and His Songs and Negro Workaday Songs. He had done his best to preserve Negro songs for posterity; now he would concentrate on a single one, “The Ballad of John Henry,” explore the regional variants, separate the Irish and Scottish influences from the Negro derivations, and excavate deeper still, determine if the great steeldriver truly lived. If he had known the journey he was about to embark upon! It had brought him here to the very mouth of the Nile in the first true heat of summer. As the end of the academic calendar closed, a trip up here had seemed the perfect balm. It would be work, doubtless, but the prospect of remaining in North Carolina without interruption disheartened him. He had completed the advance work. The dispatches he posted to all corners of the country—from the largest metropolitan newspapers to the smallest county gazette—in appeal for any knowledge of John Henry, no matter how small or half-remembered, had resulted in hundreds of responses. Pick-and-shovel men from Mississippi replied with personal favorites, retired engineers from defunct lines related what they still retained of the old work-song, descendants of railroad men, former hoboes and dockhands, the eloquent and the illiterate alike offered up precious clues. (He looks balefully at the tower on the floor and shakes his head.) This is the method of gathering folklore, accumulating, sifting, tracking with ineffectual magnifying glass the footprints of ghosts. But he had not reckoned on the variety and plenitude of the accounts. No, he had not foreseen the true extent of this adventure at all.
One man against the mountain of contradictory evidence! He has been here three days. Three days, and Guy thinks he can see a little into John Henry’s dilemma: the farther he drives, the deeper the darkness he creates around himself. “The Ballad of John Henry” has picked up freight from every work camp, wharf and saloon in this land; its route is wherever men work and live, and now its cars brim with what the men have hoisted aboard, their passions and dreams. Whole crates full of names, the names of women they have loved and the towns in which they toiled. He sorted through that mess and what he found was Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia. Now that he is here, he is left with the human respondents, and they are a disappointing bunch. Each interview he conducts dodges, feints like a boxer. Whether he is following up on correspondence or randomly canvassing longtime residents and old-timers, he cannot get two stories to coincide. One informant maintains the contest never happened, another maintains her long-dead grandfather took her on his knee and related the story as a true adventure. One insists the Chesapeake & Ohio never used a steam drill in these parts, and the next claims to have helped the Burleigh salesman set up the drill for the contest but cannot remember his own name. Some have heard the ballad so many times that they manufacture their own spectatorship, stealing lines from the song and offering these in their eyewitness accounts.
Each time Guy peers into their milky eyes, observes their slow and exhausted movements as they greet him at the door, he is reminded anew of his problem. He has come too late. One by one the first-person accounts collapse under his interrogations into second-person accounts, or worse, complete falsehood. The contest (if indeed there was a contest, he corrects himself) took place over fifty years ago in 1871 or 1872. But some brain-fogged Hinton and Talcott men place the drilling contest in the 1880s, the 1890s, long after the completion of Big Bend, countering historical record and immediately casting shadow on all they say. Even more maddening, they often repudiate their written testimony altogether, remembering events differently once Guy appears on their doorstep. In one letter, a man claimed to have seen the event with his own eyes; when Guy addressed him in person, the informant admitted to have toiled on the western cut, not the eastern, and merely heard the tale repeated from another. Guy opens his satchel and presents as rebuttal their replies to his newspaper advertisements and all they can do is shrug, or shake their heads in confusion, admitting to a faulty memory at times. He adds this morning’s interviews to Mrs. Thompson’s pile. What’s another spade of dirt thrown up on a mountain?
Soon the boy will knock on the door of his room to fetch him. He would be lost without Herbert to guide him. His adventures upon his arrival assured him of that. The train ride from Chapel Hill had been routine enough, if beset by numerous delays, but once he retrieved his bags and stood on the blanched, worn planks of the Hinton Station platform, his trials began in earnest. The station manager, a stocky white man with a thick mustache and acute gaze, took one look at Guy and irritation twisted his countenance; when asked where one might find the McCreery Hotel, the man gestured vaguely over his shoulder and returned to his timetables. Guy’s overtures to other white men at the station met with similar failure. Finally, what he should have done once he got off the passenger car became clear, and he approached one of the Negro men who sat across the street from the station in the rickety chairs arranged in front of Riffs Mercantile. The man introduced himself as Al and assured Guy that the easiest thing to do, given the circumstances, would be to take him to McCreery’s himself. Guy should have wondered then what the “circumstances” were; actually, he should have already been aware. He voiced his concern that he was interrupting the man from his discussion, and the men chuckled.
He was the boy from the city. As Al helped him with his bags and led him down Third Avenue to the hotel, he asked Guy what kind of business he had in town. “I’m looking into the legend of John Henry,” he responded, thinking in a moment of self-importance that this might impress the man, for his little work would help spread the names of Hinton and Talcott and their importance to an American legend. Al looked at him with a queer expression. He muttered, “Funny line of work,” bid the bags jump in his palms, and they did not speak again until they arrived at the establishment, when Guy offered to pay him for his trouble.
Al shook his head. “Sure you want to stay here?” the man asked. “They other places you might want—”
Guy cut him off, thanked him and was promptly refused a room by the proprietor of McCreery’s, who informed him that he was not in the habit of giving rooms to niggers. Al was still waiting outside, intently tilting a match into his corncob pipe as if this were the first time he had attempted this maneuver He took one of Guy’s bags and led him to Mrs. Thompson’s house. She let rooms, he said. Guy lugged in his wake. Of course McCreery’s had assumed he was white from the university letterhead upon which he had sent his request for a reservation. His earnestness to get to Hinton, coupled with the numerous dispatches he had posted under the whiteface of scholarly research, had caused him to forget the grip of Jim Crow, ever clenched around his people. Unlikely, yes, but there he was with sweat on his neck and dumb embarrassment on his face.
He rises from the bed, brushes aside the dusty brown curtain and watches Mrs. Thompson pin the wash to the line. He sees the shirt he left on his bed this morning; he had not asked her to clean it, but there it billowed. Guy has already enjoyed too much of her kindness. She opened up her house to him without a moment’s thought. Her price was more than fair, indeed he would save a considerable amount of money on room and board by accepting the hospitality of Mrs. Thompson. When he wasn’t pondering John Henry, his energies shifted to worry over his budget. It had been hard enough convincing the department of the worth of his research, and he is concerned the sum they eventually disbursed to him might not be sufficient. He maintains meticulous account of his expenditures, ever mindful of leaving an opening one of his more malicious colleagues might exploit. A Negro in the world of academia must be twice the scholar, and twice the tactician, of his white colleagues.
Mrs. Thompson was a rawboned woman with a quick stride and keen intensity; Guy imagined her hurrying from task to task around her house with ruthless efficiency. She rarely had the occasion to take in a boarder, she explained as she showed him up the stairs, past sepia photographs of her clan, but when she did she always enjoyed the company. Guy was to stay in her son’s room, she told him; her boy had moved to Chicago, where he had a good job on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, and had recently taken a wife. The room was bare, save for the bed and the dresser; the Thompson boy had taken all he possessed when he moved North. Once Guy was settled, he joined her in the parlor and, after employing the usual methods of setting an informant at ease, asked her about John Henry.
“That’s an old story,” she said simply, face betraying nothing.
He had established previously that her father had worked for the Chesapeake & Ohio a few years after the completion of the tunnel, and inquired if he had ever shared any information about the tale.
“Can’t live around here without hearing about ol’ John Henry,” she granted, but offered no more.
He was not advancing the heading, as it were. He pressed her, attempting to talk around the subject before broaching it anew. She told him about her husband, who had died in a railroad accident some years before, told him about how hot it got around here in the summer time, and how often the ice salesman came around, but when he tried to bring up John Henry, all she would offer was, “Can’t live around here without hearing all those old stories,” and returned to him that obscure expression. She left to prepare dinner, which turned out to be fried fish and biscuits, a delicious meal that consoled the professor after his long trip. Over this repast they talked about life in the town, and the relationship between Hinton and Talcott, which slept on the other side of the mountain, but he never did get anything out of her that related to his investigation.
His first interview the next morning resulted in similar exasperation. One of the many responses he received from his advertisement in the Hinton Independent had tantalized Guy with its possibility. “Dear sir,” it began, “I am writing on behalf of my father, who as a young boy carried water for the C&O on the Big Bend job and witnessed with his own eyes the struggle of ‘Big’ John Henry and the steam drill, to which you are inquiring. As my father is in poor health, and of weakened constitution, he urged me to write you to inform you of his knowledge, which he is willing to share with you in exchange for a small fee to help defray the bills from the doctor, as well as his medicine. He has always related to me his stories of those Big Bend days …” From there the informant wandered into a secondhand account replete with the customary details of the legend, but he redeemed himself by his residence in Hinton, as well as his direct relation to a person who had toiled on the construction, a person who, most important, was still among the living. Once Mrs. Thompson advised him that the man lived in town, a short walk away, Guy decided to make it his first stop. In retrospect, he misinterpreted the expression on her face as he departed.
It was, to say the least, a disappointing encounter, relieved only by its brevity. “You wrote me?” Mr. McLaugherty asked through the screen door. Between his heavily freckled cheeks, his nostrils widened as if confronted by a ghastly stench.
“About John Henry, yes,” Guy offered. “This is the letter you sent.”
“Let me see that.” After extending a callused hand through the door, he reviewed the contents of the letter, looking up at Guy every few lines. Finally he said, “I don’t know where you got that, but I don’t have nothing to say about that letter, boy.” He shut firm the inside door, hazarding one last appraisal of Professor Johnson before he turned away: “I see it’s been a long time since I been to North Carolina.” It later struck Guy that in addition to Mr. McLaugherty’s obvious prejudice in matters of race, appealing for money from a Negro might not have been the most pleasant prospect for the man. What bothered him the most was that when Chappell arrived, he would have access to McLaugherty and those like him.
On his return to Mrs. Thompson’s there was a young Negro boy waiting for him in the parlor. “Sir, my name is Herbert Standard,” he said with an extended hand. “Mrs. Thompson told me you needed someone to take you around.” Mrs. Thompson nodded from the kitchen doorway, drying her hands on a thin kitchen towel, and could not help but smile.
Herbert was a youth of twelve years, a student at the local colored school, Lincoln. Guy quickly gleaned that the young man possessed a quick mind and exceptional manners, not to mention a patient disposition, this latter quality being the most appropriate for their enterprise, given Guy’s apparent inability to ingratiate himself to the local populace. It was soon revealed, in addition, that the boy was well regarded in the community, among whites and Negroes alike, in Hinton as well as Talcott, and with him as pilot, Guy was able to advance his heading.
Guy looks at his watch. He has another ten minutes before they climb into the Standards’ wagon and start out to Talcott for the next scheduled interviews. He has two more days before he must return. There is still much to do; while he tells himself he should take pride in what he has accomplished so far, the customary feelings of well-being attendant to satisfaction evade him. In the journals, Cox’s John Hardy hypothesis is receiving no small measure of interest at the moment, but what Guy has collected from his informants discounts the theory that the outlaw Hardy and steeldriving Henry were the same person. Guy’s larger sample of variants reveals that while the John Hardy songs possess numerous lines common to the most popular John Henry songs, the Hardy songs have more similarities to Irish and Scottish ballads than to Negro workaday songs. From all the evidence, the Hardy songs are confined to the Appalachia area, and sung by whites, whereas the Henry songs have been disseminated all over by itinerant Negro workers, who carried the song from construction camp to construction camp; the song traveled the rails with the men who laid the rails, from state to state, accruing texture from all who came to hear and sing it. This is not to mention the problem of dates. Hardy was hanged in 1894 for his crimes; John Henry’s fateful race, however, is said to have occurred in 1871. Cox may have uncovered informants who maintain that the man who beat the steam drill and the villain hanged in Welch in 1894 were one and the same, but that would make Henry one improbably long-lived steeldriver. Most of Guy’s interviews—and he has collected far more informants than Cox—place John Henry in his thirties when he came to Big Bend; it is, at the very least, unlikely that after forty years of steeldriving the same man was able to make the kind of mischief attributed to Hardy. (One can always count on white folks to get a bit confused when it comes to describing the age of colored people.) When Guy’s book is published, it will contain, if nothing else, this contribution to the study of these songs: John Hardy is a white song and John Henry a colored song. At least that one thing! But he still feels a bit of envy for Cox, for John Hardy was, without a doubt, a real, breathing person. His colorful life, his gambling exploits, sundry criminal activities and the murder that got him hanged are a matter of public record, verifiable from newspaper accounts. Ex-Governor McCorkle, who signed the death warrant, is still alive and available. In the strange case of John Henry, however, all Guy can rely on is what people can wring from the years, hard-fought drips and drabs.
