Authors: Colson Whitehead
At their backs they hear, “Think you’re John Henry? You ain’t no John Henry, I’ll tell you that.”
“I still haven’t seen the tunnel up close yet,” he says. He can’t think of anything else to say.
“That’s where we’re going.”
The biggest rock in Summers County sits on a wooden stage, bulging eight feet high, one side sheared off into an almost level surface. Red, white and blue streamers dangle from posts, patient for wind that will marshal and inspire them into patriotic ruffle. Two ruddy white men, shirts off, take practice swings with sledgehammers; they stretch muscles and suckle water bottles.
J. and Pamela force themselves into the biggest clot of people yet. It’s almost four o’clock and time for the show.
“The steeldriving exhibition,” Pamela says. “I don’t know how they plan to do it,” pointing up at the flat front of the rock. “See those two holes there? I think they drilled a little ways in to start them off, and then the two of them will hit into the holes and see how far they get into the rock in a set amount of time.”
“Gambling allowed in West Virginia?”
“They need someone to hold the bits straight—they need shakers.”
“Water boys, too, Ah reckon.”
“And the shakers better hold those bits straight or else they’re going to lose a hand.”
He looks up at the two white guys up there warming up. They live for this. They wink at confederates. Nothing life or death here, just a chance to show off for the crowd. Buy each other beers after the match and the loser has to endure jokes until next year’s rematch. What is at stake here? he wonders, looking over the well-scrubbed faces of the crowd, drawn here across miles, to the main event after an afternoon of sugar-rich foreplay. Their steps get smaller as they approach; they press together, dropping individual fancy for group delectation. An unkind part of him says
mob
but he knows they are not bloodthirsty. What will happen will be entertainment. A few pictures on a roll of twenty-four that will be picked up at the drugstore on Tuesday. And what would it have been like that day in 1872? On that ghost day. Who did they root for before legend and meaning accreted around the competition between the man and the device. Progress or the black man. A wife or girlfriend rubs the latest sunblock into the arms of one of the steeldrivers. This is where they stood, after all, right? On mashed grass like this. Waiting outside the tunnel for news of the competition. Today it is entertainment. Gift from the bounty of pop. They can see for themselves, the way they always do nowadays. Real-time, and they can almost touch it, all participants in this competition, this spectacle.
It will be a fun time, pay per view.
“There’s still time to see the tunnel,” Pamela says, and they squirm through; she leads him with a warm touch, batting back balloons held by tiny sticky hands.
At the edge of the fair, finally, he sees the tunnel for the first time. He thought it would be bigger. This is the John Henry tunnel, not the one over there that has replaced it. The functional tunnel draws in the modern freight,
the John Henry tunnel old wives’ tales. Rain and dirt have sullied the dignity of the entrance but the cut and arranged stones announce a tamed mountain. The message out of the black mouth is not that of conquest but shrugged failure. The county has recently repainted the words GREAT BEND TUNNEL in smart white paint, an effort at renovation that merely forces the weather’s violence to stand out in relief. He looks right, over at the new tunnel, past the barricade. An electrical cable glides into its mouth, steel tracks shiver along the ground into it, testifying to utility. What does John Henry’s tunnel have on that? The sun just dips over the mountain and a fantail of shade sets the tunnel into obscurity. Whatever crowd gawked here earlier has decamped to the steeldriving exhibition; in their wake popcorn boxes and cups lay scattered like abandoned tools. A trickle of water from above scratches its way down and into the face of the tunnel. Slow work, but it gets the job done, melting stone and the arrogance of men. Repair the damage, what human beings have done, and the mountain will close its wound.
They move up on vague feet to the wide black mouth. Five haphazard and ineffectual slabs of concrete have been lugged over to block entry, just for show, really, satisfying some city council subordinance on keeping the kids away from the town treasure. Five teeth for this maw. A cool cemetery gust scrubs their faces as they get close. He looks up when he gets directly beneath the tunnel’s mouth, eyes tracing the irregular black stone of the arch and then the burst of dirt and greenery advancing on the tunnel entrance from above, the sky beyond the mountain; it is a vista of scorched land and the renewed, regenerating growth inching up on it. They don’t have to discuss it; he clambers up on the top slab and extends a hand to Pamela’s warm hand and they jump inside.
He feels sleepy and calm. The ground is muddy with pooling water, confused by where to go, why this tunnel is here where familiar rock should be. It hasn’t sunk in. He looks up at the arching of the tunnel above them and can make out only darkness from which crags and broken pieces occasionally emerge, breaking the surface of the ocean darkness like scattered atolls. His eyes need to adjust.
“What do you think it looked like to him,” Pamela’s voice, “before he was an inch in, before he started. He had a big mountain in front of him.”
He hugs the statue closer to him, for comfort, for an anchor in this novel gloom. It smells like every dank basement he has ever been in. He remembers the stories of accidents from the p.r. packet, where the miners were caught by cave-ins, crushed or trapped by rock and left to asphyxiate. He read
about a train that got stuck in this tunnel during a cave-in or mechanical failure and people suffocated on the engine smoke. After last night he can imagine suffocating in here, choking on soot. This feeling seeps into him and resounds against his bones, where he can feel the angry tonnage of the mountain pressing down on his body, as if he has the mountain on his shoulders. Or he is in its fist, and it is squeezing. A touch of claustrophobia? No previous indications of this condition so no, more than that.
“Standing in here now, I thought I would never be here because I hated it all. Listening to the same stories out of his mouth every day. John Henry, John Henry. But being here now.”
Toes cold. His shoes are soaked through from the water. The puddles are deeper than he thought or else he’s sinking. Like he has ghouls grasping his ankles to pull him beneath. Puddles, dejected bits of rock that continue to rain from above, but no tracks. They’ve been melted down or relaid in the replacement tunnel. No respect for the obsolete. Air from outside is pulled in here and wrung of all good things by diseased alveolae, converted into pestilential exhalation, pushed out of this mountain’s diseased lungs. But this place is not diseased, or evil, or anything more than rock. Surely. An echo rises from unidentified critter or natural event and in him surges almost an impulse to run, quickly stifled by reason. This is merely a tunnel and a few yards away the real world spins at its normal rate. As his eyes adjust he cannot make out any graffiti. No looping declarations of love or lust, the name of the local football team in fuzzy exclamations, the latest band rules. Kids dare each other to step inside but no one gets very far in or stays too long. How does the song go?
Big Bend Tunnel will be the death of me, Lord, Lord, Big Bend Tunnel will be the death of me.
Why didn’t they wall it up. They need something from it. Need their ghosts. And what else?
“Of course they say if you listen hard you can hear his hammer and it’s a bad omen. Can you hear it? Why don’t you say anything?”
He has half a mind to set the statue down on the floor of the tunnel, make a puppet show of this scene. Diorama of the big day, the John Henry miniature making literal the scale of his competition. So small beneath this grand arching and the infinite tons crouching above him considering pounce and collapse. That’s how he feels now—small. Step in here and you leave it all behind, the bills, the hustle, the Record, all that is receipts bleaching back there under the sun. What if this were your work? To best the mountain. Come to work every day two, three years of work, into this death and murk, each day your progress measured by the extent to which you extend the darkness. How
deep you dig your grave. He wins the contest. He defeats the Record. This place confounds devices, the steam drill and all that follows. This place defeats the frequencies that are the currency of his life. Email and pagers, cell phones, step in here and fall away from the information age, into the mountain, breathe in soot. Unsettling but calming, too. The daily battles that have lost meaning are clearly drawn again, the opponents and objectives named and understood. The true differences between you and them. And it. He presses a hand to the cool blasted wall. There are no rough edges to the stone; they have been smoothed away by falling water, decades of healing and forgetting. How long does it take to forget a hole in your self. He wins the contest but then what?
“If I asked you to help me do something tomorrow, would you do it?”
She has been squeezing his hand for some time now but he hadn’t noticed. Some time ago this became a silent movie. They are in the seats, shifting thighs, as the outside world and those other people from the fair unspool on the parabola screen of the tunnel mouth. The competition is about to begin, all the characters have been set up. The bit players move through the fair, staring past each other, waiting for cues; they have spent their whole lives rehearsing. All that rehearsing is cutting-room floor discard, the outtakes from the perfect American movie no one will ever see. In the middle rows are J. and Pamela. If they did what the audience never does and turned in their seats, they would see the light of the projector, the white flickering projector that is the light at the other end of the tunnel. A dream projecting itself from the west.
He says, sure.
Out of the mouth of the tunnel, on that screen, it is time for the main event. They are all there.
T
hey were all there, from the eminently fuckable to the differently attractive, the not conventionally handsome and the walking airbrushed in complimentary pairs, the critics’ darling and the promising newcomer milled about. Miracles abounded in that room. The recovering nicely thank you and the unknowingly metastatic discussed a summer share. The shy and awkward essayed the latest dance. The junior professors dismissed their dread over the upcoming tenure review and the last to know were informed by the gatekeepers of scandal while teetotalers guzzled and juicers sipped fizzy water. The Wall Street warriors in their surreptitious girdles felt secure. The easily startled possessed a beatific calm later unrecallable. The muscle boys did tricks with their pecs and the feeble were happy in their own bodies. The lipstick lesbians and the baldheaded butches traded stock tips and the rhinoplasty specialist chuckled on meeting a performance artist named the Nose, an individual renowned for spectacular inhalations. The secret diarist took notes. The shortlisted for the position and the recently eliminated shook hands, unaware of their fates. It was the main event. They were all there. And it was only nine o’clock.
J. was there. He alone was not carefree, this night he was a chap of heavy heart, unswayed by ambient and intrusive cheer. He had read about a death in the newspaper just that very afternoon. It weighed on him.
The devout danced with the dissolute and they traded numbers they would never call. The chairman of the board stooped to tie his shoe and the boy from the mail room attending tonight via intercepted invitation later splurged for a taxi home. A faint smell of jasmine filled the room. The coat check girl needed a fix. The bathroom attendant hovered over a stack of white towels.
J. had never met the dead man. He encountered the obit on the jump page of an article describing a Hollywood actress’s new animal rescue charity. The obit ran down the dead man’s greatest hits, his days as a student protester on the steps of Berkeley and his strut over to the Oakland offices of the Black
Panthers. The day he changed his name to Toure Nkumreh. The shoot-out with police and his flight to Cuba, where he drove Russian cars under palm trees, and his return to America. The dismissal of the murder charges after his lawyers convinced a jury that the police raid had been in fact a contract hit, his two years in prison for the lesser charge of weapons possession. That was it, until he was found dead in Tallahassee, of unknown causes, an autopsy would reveal all. Dead in his apartment for five days before the neighbors noticed the stench. That was it for the obit except for the cool archival photograph of Nkumreh in his Black Panther gear, black leather jacket, sunglasses, the tilted arrogant beret, automatic rifle pointing up at the photograph above, at the abused puppy who had found a new home thanks to the actress’s good efforts.
The spinach dumplings deposited a green rot on the incisors of all who consumed them and everyone was too polite and malevolent to remark upon it.
They had gathered in a club called Glasnost to partake of the spread, the panoply of bite-sized widgets laid out by the publisher of Godfrey Frank’s
A Chiropodist in Pangea,
a fifteen-hundred-page grimoire of mysterious content that would debut in a few days on the
New York Times
best-seller list. There was some question as to whether it would be categorized as fiction or nonfiction. Someone had to finish it first. It might debut sandwiched between the memoir of the man who got lost in the ice and the volume of the Akita’s wisdom as collected by his enterprising owner, or between the novel about the magical patriarch and the one about the CIA cryptographer who gets caught up in a conspiracy. Waitresses dressed in the red uniforms of the Czar’s honor guard distributed victuals and refreshments from platters to open hands. The party was cosponsored by a vodka manufacturer that had rethought its advertising campaign a few months prior. The guests walked and chatted while a large painting of Lenin’s angular visage frowned at them.