John Henry Days (20 page)

He lies on his free sheets on his free bed and thinks, no money down. Three months into his junketeering streak he tells himself he feels fine. Except for what happened earlier that evening, J. has tuned himself perfectly to the rhythm of events, found parity between what had been his life before and what his life is going for the record. They struggle and win brief inches, but neither side wins him. He neither wants to go home and take a few days off nor submit himself mindlessly to the flux of events. Is this what Bobby Figgis thought at this point? That he was in control, before pop consumed him. One Eye intimating that he wanted out, and to have J. help him tunnel under the wall. Now One Eye pretends he cares. Maybe he is sincere. He’s not supposed to give a fuck; that’s why he was put on the List in the first place. The intent of the List is to have a reliable group of people on call who don’t give a fuck,
who want things for free. The List wants key Americans. And the junketeers are quintessential Americans, J. thinks. They want and want now and someone else is picking up the check. Such model and exemplary citizens that people listen to what they have to say. They follow our lead.

J. takes another sip of ginger ale and waits. He still breathes. Is he so bored that he’ll actually be reduced to reading press material to fall asleep? Maybe he is already over the line and doesn’t even know it. There’s John Henry on the glossy cover of the press packet. The first time he heard of him was in the fifth grade, in a cartoon. Mrs. Goodwin’s boys and girls squirmed in anticipation whenever she wheeled in the projector at the start of class, notes of optimistic juvenile code were smuggled up and down the rows, tiny necks extended to read the white tape along the side of the tin canisters, because when that boxy gray cart with the metal frog perched atop it rolled into the room everyone knew they were going to waste a nice chunk of hour. Mrs. Goodwin was a young woman. She would have been around the same age J. was now. Which meant that no matter how old and wise she looked back then, she knew nothing at all. Late that spring her stomach began to swell and in the last class of the year, New York summer banging on the windows, she told the boys and girls that she wouldn’t be back next year because of the baby. They all felt betrayed. She smiled and told them to remember that she also taught seventh grade and would return, they would be reunited in junior high to pick up the latest installment of
Warriner’s Grammar.
She never came back, but by then her former charges had graduated to novel distractions and no longer felt so attached to teachers, no matter how motherly.

The day the projector rolled into town Mrs. Goodwin told them they were going to see a film about a great American hero who helped build America. (Looking back, J. questions the purview of the class. Mrs. Goodwin taught English, but was this story English or History or Social Studies. What is the exact line of demarcation between History and Social Studies, for that matter.) Mrs. Goodwin—whose kind manner conscripted each of the students, one by one over the course of the year, into calling her Mommy, drawing grateful laughter from the other kids who were happy that it was not their day for that embarrassing error—instructed Madeline Moses to pull down the yellow blinds, those old broad and curved slats that instructed their own elementaries of grime. Alex Minkow turned out the lights and Andrew Schneider volunteered to work the projector, choosing at that very moment his lot in life. Young Andrew’s hand flickered over the stiff apparatus, the crotchety projector initially resistant to his fiddling, and the cartoon began.

J. remembers the bold colors and blocky limbs of the people first. Now J. links them to Malevich in his peasant period, sees the elemental forms of cones and squares lodged in their arms, legs and faces, social systems inexorable in the skin, but back then the people just looked strong. People of the Earth. Plankton legions of dust swirled in the swath of projector light. What else does he remember. That it was the first time he saw a black mother and father in a cartoon. John Henry’s parents held him the day he was born and John Henry was born big, forty pounds and gifted with speech straight out the womb. He demanded food, two pigs, a generation of chickens, acres of collard greens, yams by the bushel, and a pot of gravy to wash it all down. He ate the food in great inhalations (J. wondering from the summit of the Talcott Motor Lodge, who is that little boy down there in the classroom who shares his name, and where did they get that food. He was born a slave. His parents were slaves. Where did they get all that food?), he ate it all up and belched and informed his parents that he was going to die at the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Railroad. Casual, like that. Such talk from a kid one-day old. The child J. took it all in stride. They were taught about Greek gods, and prophesying witches popped up everywhere you looked, scurrying around the Doric columns like rats. Curses, omens, the odd swan rapist: they were as common as eviction notices, overdue bills, utilities shut off for lack of payment. The gods said how-do-you-do all the time, why not in the glowing shack of this cartoon, depicted by the animators as a warm haven bathed in gold light, where a young black boy was born with a hammer in his hand. (J. almost forgets that part, the most important part of his birth, right? “John Henry was born with a hammer in his hand.” Warning to pregnant women to watch out for excessive amounts of iron in their diets. Perhaps Mrs. Goodwin wondered at this part just what was kicking in her stomach.) John Henry’s mother, a fleshy woman with chocolate skin and pinchable face, told her bouncing baby boy to get some rest: born that day and already talking about dying. There it was. Womb-wet and already saddled with the knowledge of his destiny and doomed to fulfill it. (Talk about baggage.)

The cartoon furnished the children with a montage of the doomed man’s adolescent feats. Big as a man at the age of six, he outran horses, chucked boulders, played hopscotch across chasms. (A hormonal imbalance causing spectacular and unnatural growth, J. notes as he rubs his throat, and a hyper-activity calling for a prescription of Ritalin.) But he always loved his hammer. He smashed rocks, knocked over trees, pounded tidal waves from silent lakes with a blow from his mighty hammer. (Criminal mischief, mucking up the
environment, our nation’s greatest resource.) And of course the medium of animation well suited for these shenanigans. The children cheered him, reminded of that afternoon’s later appointment with Tom and Jerry and other luminaries of Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera. Primary color mayhem. John Henry tore shit up, summoning havoc in a manner familiar to the sons and daughters of television.

And then came the day for John Henry to go out into the world. He said good-bye to his parents and followed the mountains into the distance, imposing sledge resting on one shoulder like a loyal falcon, his belongings wrapped up snug on the end of a stick across the other shoulder. (And where did that trope enter the world: the hobo’s possessions wrapped up in a red cloth and knotted on the end of a stick. Footloose into the American adventure.) He walked into the sun. Free. No mention of slavery. This was a cartoon for kids. They were assigned one-page essays on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., year in and year out, instructed sternly not to plagiarize from encyclopedias and the standard texts. Learning to paraphrase. No one wanted to be the kid, usually Marnie Pomerantz, who was asked if her parents had helped her with her homework. Points off for not mentioning the March on Washington. When the teacher mentioned slavery, swiftly, usually only in terms of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation, as if the peculiar institution only came to be in its ending, invariably two or three white kids turned around to look at J., putty faces full of something, curiosity or compassion he didn’t know, they always looked away when he met their eyes and he grew warm. (Or did he stare straight ahead fixated on the stapler on the teacher’s desk and merely see them fuzzy in his peripheral vision. Which version flatters the boy he wants himself to be.) But no mention of slavery in the cartoon. Were they supposed to take his walk from home in search of his fate as the slave’s walk from the plantation? No, the children were supposed to find their own experience in John Henry’s retreating back and his parents’ tears: Mom closing the door after tucking them in, their first day of school, the view from the old school bus ferrying them to camp. These American particulars, because John Henry was an American. J. lay on his bed in the Talcott Motor Lodge. He walked from a slave economy into an industrial economy, the twentieth century loomed and man-killing machines, steam-spitting machines. There was a black kid in every grade. The one in Mrs. Goodwin’s fifth grade class was named J. Of the children who looked at him at the mention of slavery, none were Jason or Patrick, whose parents had raised them well and were glad they brought black friends into their homes to play, they talked about it in their
beds at night while they watched Johnny Carson before proceeding to the more pressing matter of the building going co-op.

The projector clicked off frames, twenty-four per second, creating motion on the white screen that pulled down from a metal rectangle screwed above the blackboard. The bulb raged through the frames, Commodore Andrew Schneider waiting for impending mishap with his hand on the rudder. John Henry found work on the railroad, the Chesapeake & Ohio, driving from Washington, D.C., to Cincinnati, the very same C&O named by the steeldriving man on his nativity. He was glad to get the job. The Captain welcomed him aboard and extended a hand. (In a more monochrome world this freed slave worked for pennies, wandering from job to job in search of circumstances promised in the good Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation. The railroads hired the niggers for pennies; you could tell a nigger what to do like you couldn’t tell an Irishman, no matter how down and out the immigrant was.) In four-color glory, John Henry worked two-handed, crashing down one hammer on a spike while the other swung up in ecstatic arc, sparks erupting in blasts and gusts of orange and red; he made fire, he left the other workers in the dust as he moved west, ever west, with two unerring compass hammers in his hands. John Henry was always smiling. Even though the sparks burst up and dominated the frame, his smile shone through. (Testifying to an overlooked part of his myth: formidable teeth that overcame the primitive dental technology of his day.) In the cartoon the other railroad workers were white men who set down their sledges in wondrous admiration as John Henry outpaced them, outraced them, fulfilled their nation’s destiny with what he had in his arms.

Adam Horning had a nosebleed and tore off a piece of college rule loose leaf and stuck it up there. He could have gone to the bathroom and loitered there a while according to his custom, but today they had an exciting cartoon. John Henry mashed the spikes into the ground, driving a mythology into the ground, as if carving it letter by letter into the earth would make the dreams of men live. All admired his strength and fortitude and if the great man entertained dark thoughts after his fate—the image of which had radiated in his head since that first light beyond his mother’s legs, he took his death into him with his first breath—who could tell. He smiled and swung. And all the children in the room, in their private school uniforms, immediately distrusted the man from the mechanical company in his white suit, cosmopolitan venality writ in the seams of his fancy-dan clothes, so distant from the rough cloth of John Henry and his merry band. This big-city charlatan came down South
with Yankee lies, and said his machine could drive steel faster than any man alive. What did J. and his classmates think of this used car salesman bragging about his machine. The animators clearly had a fun time with it. The machine was silly and big as a barn, part hot rod, part vacuum cleaner, all discombobulated monstrosity familiar to them from the blueprints of Wile E. Coyote. A junkyard machine whose purpose, for all its bulk, was finally expressed in a meek little square that moved up and down when the huckster turned on the device. This little square block was to beat John Henry’s hammer? Clouds of steam exited pipes, the metal creature shook furiously, all to a ridiculous chorus of toots and whistles. It was the foolish dream of a mad scientist, and yet the railroad workers were in awe. In fear. Except for our man John Henry, who saw in this comic and elaborate concoction the seamless assembly of his fate. John Henry spat into his hands and said he could lick any machine made of man and could drive more steel than that hunk of junk any day of the week. (Hubris, sin of the Greeks. One of them, anyway.) He wasn’t going to be replaced by big-city devilment.

The contest was arranged on a sunny afternoon. The referee stepped up with a stopwatch, chest cut by black and white stripes, an anachronistic joke not lost on the inmates of Mrs. Goodwin’s fifth grade class. John Henry stood with his big smile, hammer at the ready, and the salesman clambered up the machine and took roost in the tractor seat on top. The salesman pulled a lever and the small dustclotted speakers of the projector filled the classroom with the sound of hooting and chugging and put-put-putting. The steam machine rushed ahead of John Henry, the tiny metal block pushing the ready spikes down into the earth at a healthy clip. John Henry swung his hammer home but he couldn’t catch up. His smile was gone and sweat streamed into a mouth tight with strain. The onlookers worried after their local hero while the Yankee on top of the machine sneered and twisted his mustache. (And these rosy-cheeked folks are the ancestors of his hosts—the ones who had watched him choke at dinner—the hardworking founders of Talcott watched John Henry lose.) The machine pulled farther ahead and it seemed all was lost. The children ensnared in the clutches of suspense, rapt at their desks; not one spitball splattered a neck, doodles went undoodled. The institutional clock above the classroom door, the first lover to these children and the best one, faithful to each despite a thousand furtive assignations an hour, ticked neglected. And then they saw John Henry smile. John Henry’s smile returned and his hammer pummeled the earth; little black action waves of force emanated from the ground and soon the sound of the pounding drowned out the
corny whistling of the machine. This earthshaking man. The makers of the cartoon kept close on the hammer. (Cheap and easy to repeat a couple of animation cels over and over again.) The sound, the beating heart of man, grew louder and louder. Wasn’t no machine going to beat this man down. The referee’s face filled the screen, which was pulled down over the blackboard to obscure a sentence diagram in chalk, he looked down at his stopwatch and blew his whistle, cheeks billowing out. John Henry pounded down the last spike, looked back at the groaning folly so far behind him, the failing machine, and fell to the ground. The witnesses jumped up and down and the salesman threw his big-city chapeau to the ground and said, Darn! Foiled again. The music of victory (standard victory music familiar to J. even then, before its untold repetitions in films and television shows over the next two decades, the young learned their responses early and thoroughly) swelled in symphonic crackling mono and then died—-John Henry wasn’t moving. He was flat on his back in the dirt. A doctor rushed up to him, stethoscope around his neck. John Henry raised his head: did I beat it? The doctor said yes, and took the hero’s wrist between his hands. (This cartoon doctor deigned to touch nigger flesh, of all nineteenth-century Southern doctors this man served all of God’s children with equal care, such is the magic of Talcott.) Old doc shook his head. John Henry was dead. He died with a hammer in his hand, just as he said he would on the day he was born. He beat the machine and died doing it.