Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  Once on the ground, and being chauffeured from Charleston to Talcott, Sutter finds that it’s the terrain that first gives him pause: It’s “a concatenation of cliffs and banks, as if some hobgoblin roosting on the side of the hills had shoved up the earth. Like a giant kicking a bunch of green carpet. Hearty folk, the mountain people.” Though he makes a concerted effort to enjoy the scenery, “It is hard; all the trees look alike to him. The route slips between the places the government blasted through, the hills, and the scarred rock faces stare at each other from the sides of the road, grim, still grudgeful after all these years at their sunderance” (18–19).

  In striking up a conversation with Arnie, his driver, Sutter betrays his misgivings about his surroundings. In response to the chauffeur’s comment that Sutter sounds like a southern name, he quips, “Maybe my ancestors were owned down here at some point,” which Arnie finds amusing. Sutter experiences a “burp of paranoia” as they move farther and farther off the interstate along ever more desolate back roads. With images of Deliverance or perhaps the West Virginia–based Silence of the Lambs in mind, he muses: “What if Caleb here is driving him up into the mountains, down to the creek, out to the lonesome spot where his family performs rituals. Boil him up in a pot, ritual sacrifice that helps the crops grow.” Sutter worries whether the FBI will be able to follow his trail, thinking it unlikely, given that Arnie’s cousin is probably the local constable. As they leave him boiling in a pot, “they watch wrestling on TV. He figures that even the most remote shack has a TV these days. The cable carrier in this region serves a special clientele, entire public access shows devoted to dark meat recipes” (22–23).

  Whitehead is at his most clever and entertaining in these satiric takes on outsiders’ fears and stereotypes of Appalachian people, but he quickly abandons the comic and dramatic possibilities of this rather conventional scenario to explore other, more original issues. The menacing mountaineers fade away as the scene shifts to Talcott and Hinton and more traditional small-town folks become the social reality of this “new America” Sutter faces. Once there, other characters and subplots are introduced and then interspersed throughout—a postmodernist collage that never fully untangles itself. Postal officials, stamp collectors, folksingers, journalists, publicity agents, local officials, and entrepreneurs—all interact in a swirl of culture clashes, cynicism, and self-interest. Yet the heart of the novel lies in the fact that, for certain key figures, it is John Henry himself who holds special meaning, though in very different ways that are revealed only sporadically over the course of the fragmented narrative.

  Parker Smith is a Postal Service public relations man from Washington charged with staging the stamp’s unveiling. For him, John Henry provides a chance to plug into small-town Americana that national media all too often bypass. “If no one gets excited about presidential candidates anymore,” he reasons, “they certainly come out in droves to support their beloved heroes and artifacts. On stamps” (295). He talks in the typical banalities of “official” endorsements: “Part of what we at the Post Office hope to achieve by our issue of the Folk Hero commemoratives is to create awareness of the trials of men like John Henry, to invite Americans to walk in his shoes. That each time they use one of our Folk Heroes stamps they think about the men who died to get us where we are today.” In response, one cynical observer asks, “Is this man talking about a stamp or taking the beach on Normandy?” (66).

  Yet in observing the town’s own overzealous take on the occasion, Smith finds himself baffled why John Henry means so much to them. Given the illusory nature of his fatal feat—whether it ever took place, and if so, whether it had indeed happened here—Parker muses on the town’s commitment to that legacy. “There are canned preserves and old men walking around in old conductor uniforms,” he observes. “Is this really homey or is it constructed in some way? Is their sincerity actually the hapless grasping for something they believed their fathers possessed? There’s a safe deposit box containing their heritage, but they don’t possess the right documentation” (295).

  Pamela Street, a young black woman also from New York—to whom Sutter is immediately attracted—is drawn to Talcott because of her father’s interest in John Henry. A hardware store owner in Harlem, he had become intrigued by the legend after picking up a ceramic figure of “the hunched black man with a hammer poised to slam a railroad spike” in an antique shop. Pamela, then six years old, asked her father who the figure was. “He told her it was John Henry, and John Henry sat in the back seat with her all the way back to Harlem, swaddled in her favorite red blanket, her blanket.” So, she muses in reflecting on that first encounter with the legend, she felt was sibling rivalry: “John Henry took her blanket” (114).

  Beginning with that initial acquisition, Pamela’s father found a hobby in collecting John Henry memorabilia—from sheet music to records and cassettes, from playbills to hammers to the pants that Paul Robeson had worn when he played John Henry on Broadway. It became a fixation: “Some sixties guy catching that nationalist fever, getting radicalized by Frantz Fanon, save up for a dashiki, revolutionary consciousness. Latches on the steel-driver as an ideal of black masculinity in a castrating country” (189). He created a museum—or shrine—to John Henry in his Harlem apartment, but few people ever saw it. Now Pamela has come to Talcott to deliver all of the boxes of papers and artifacts—the largest such collection in the world—to the town, which has purchased it as the basis for a new museum it plans to build. She brings her father’s ashes as well, which she plans to scatter on the supposed site of John Henry’s own grave.

  Whitehead creates other, seemingly random vignettes that flash back to earlier days and other ways in which John Henry’s legacy affected earlier generations in equally diverse ways. There is the great actor Paul Robeson playing John Henry on Broadway in 1940 between engagements as the Emperor Jones and Othello, just after a controversial European tour that took him from Russia to civil war–torn Spain. Robeson returns to America a more radicalized man, and he announces that “I have found that where forces have been the same, whether people weave, build, pick cotton, or dig in the mines, they understand the common language of work, suffering and protest.” Now playing John Henry on stage, he realizes “the dialogue is terrible, the characters racist, the situation appalling.” In John Henry, “a man of the land,” Whitehead says, “Paul Robeson sees the folks. The masses. He wants to represent the experiences of the common man.” But it was not to be. The production was a flop, with one critic stating that even Robeson “could not carry on his back 800 pounds of bad play” (229).4

  Whitehead also dramatizes the efforts of University of North Carolina sociologist Guy B. Johnson to trace the roots of the ballad that by the 1920s had become so pervasive and had so many variations among American blacks, from the Deep South to the Midwest. Johnson quickly became overwhelmed with all that he found: “ ‘The Ballad of John Henry’ had picked up freight from every work camp, wharf and saloon in the 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” (154–55).

  Johnson eventually zeroes in on Talcott, West Virginia, as the source of the legend and the song, yet even after three days of researching there, he finds that he is “one man against the mountain of contradictory evidence! 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” (155). In what becomes one of his richest chapters (at least for a historian), Whitehead explores the fluid and subjective nature of memory and oral history and the challenges it poses to any quest for truth. Johnson finds that people who claim to remember John Henry change their stories, contradict themselves, or admit that what they’d first claimed as firsthand knowledge was merely hearsay or some vague combination of recall and invention.

  As a black man in Whitehead’s narrative, Johnson’s challenges as a visitor are complicated by the fact that he is still in the
segregated South, even as far northward as he has traveled from Chapel Hill. Finding the room that he had reserved through correspondence denied him when he appears in person, Johnson realizes that “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.” The point of this section, which Whitehead conveys in subtle and not so subtle ways, is, as Johnson states it, “A Negro in the world of academics must be twice the scholar, and twice the tactician, of his white colleagues” (157).

  As powerful as these passages are, it is here that Whitehead unfortunately makes an egregious mistake, in historical terms at least: Guy B. Johnson was white, not black! The author picks up on an error made by anthropologist Brett Williams, who mistakenly identified Johnson as African American in her 1983 bibliographical study of the John Henry story.5 (Did it not occur to either writer that a black man could not get a Ph.D. at Chapel Hill in the 1920s, much less serve on its faculty, as Johnson did?) Johnson’s study, John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend, published in 1929, was one of several books that established him as not only one of the foremost scholars of black culture, folklore, and dialect, but also as one of several influential white liberals from the University of North Carolina who sought to improve southern race relations during the height of the Jim Crow era.

  The “real” Guy B. Johnson could have made an equally interesting character for Whitehead to imagine in Talcott in 1927. Instead, by turning him into a black man, the author unintentionally creates a strange mix of fact and fiction. Whitehead makes the most of the dilemma—and even the opportunities—of a black scholar’s quest for the truth of John Henry and why African Americans had more of a stake in that truth than did whites. Whitehead has Pamela Street speculate on the differences between what white and black researchers concluded about John Henry’s actually existence. In lecturing Sutter on the two foremost authorities on the subject (her father’s collection included first editions of each of their books), she points out that Johnson and Louis Chappell “each came down in the twenties or thirties to interview people around here and find out if he really lived or not. They found some people who said he did and some who said he didn’t.” The bottom line, according to Street, was that the white man, Chappell, believed that the contest actually took place, whereas the black man remained more skeptical. “They interviewed the same people, a year or two apart, and got different stories from them” (187).

  There does indeed seem to be some truth to the discrepancies between the two men’s findings, even if different racial identities can’t explain them. Louis Chappell, like Johnson a white man, was an English professor and musicologist at West Virginia University. The two scholars did indeed become rivals, in that they covered much the same turf at about the same time. Chappell’s book, John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study, was published in 1933, four years after Johnson’s. Both men used similar research methods—on-site interviews along with massive collections of testimony solicited through ads in both black and white newspapers. Despite a similar array of evidence drawn from these sources, Chappell concluded with far more certainty that John Henry was indeed a historical figure, and he seemed to take great offense at the UNC sociologist’s reluctance to reach the same conclusion.6

  As a prologue to his novel, Whitehead has compiled excerpts from the testimonials and memories drawn from both Johnson’s and Chappell’s books. This device effectively alerts readers up front about how pervasive the John Henry legend had become in American oral tradition and folk culture by the 1920s, and indicates the remarkable contradictions and variations it had by then taken on. These quotes establish as well just how ubiquitous the ballad of John Henry was, and how little either the character or his story was tied to West Virginia, much less Appalachia. Of the fifteen or so responses that Whitehead quotes verbatim, some claim that Henry was from Alabama, some that he was from Mississippi, and some that he was from Jamaica—and that his mighty feat had been performed in as wide a range of locales. One testimonial even claimed that he was hanged for murder in Welch, Virginia (3–6).7

  Yet most of these claims seem to agree that Henry lived and died in the Big Bend Tunnel, on the C&O Railroad, and in West Virginia, even though other details are murky or nonexistent.8 Thus, from the novel’s opening, the reader is hit by the uncertainty of truth, the vagaries of memory, and even the personal agendas that account for the particular versions of the story told, themes that will remain in play throughout the book.

  Whitehead reconstructs the final days of the great “steel-driving man” himself in a series of vividly rendered three-page vignettes interspersed, seemingly at random, throughout his novel. Though far too fragmented to carry the impact they would have if presented as a more sustained and coherent narrative, these passages serve to humanize the legend. In his sharply delineated re-creation of the hostile and high-risk environment in which Henry lived and died, Whitehead provides a poignant and complex portrait of a man who seemed to know that he was doomed and of the multiple pressures he faced—from his bosses, from racist Irish workers, and from his fellow black workers.

  When a salesman hauls the new steam drill to the worksite and shows it to the gawking workers, only Henry sees his fate as sealed: “He looked at the thing in the cart and saw tomorrows. Tomorrows and all the tomorrows after that because he understood as he had always understood that that was what this machine was going to take away from him. He saw the future, the very thing the machine would steal from him. Just as he stole from the mountain every day with his steel that which made the mountain what it was” (358). In bringing John Henry so vividly to life in passages such as these, though in the guise of a tragic hero—even a noble tragic hero—Whitehead gives credence to the reality of both the man and the final act that made him a legend, even if his modern-day characters never reach any conclusion—or “truth”—in that regard.

  The most central of these characters remains Sutter; it is his own relationship with the steel-driving man that emerges as the novel’s most meaningful. He sees himself as little more than a “hack-for-hire” who has been commissioned to write up Talcott and the festival as a feature for a new travel Web site. The trip for him means nothing more than a weekend of free food, drink, and promotional materials thrown at him, and ultimately a paycheck for the story he will produce from it all. Sutter arrives as both cynic and skeptic, and only gradually does he come to recognize some linkage between the dilemma of the doomed steel-driver and his own fate.

  It’s not that Sutter hadn’t known about John Henry prior to this. He recalls his first exposure to the folk hero was when his fifth-grade teacher showed the class a cartoon. As the only black student in his class, he was intrigued to see black characters—particularly slaves, as John Henry had been born—animated in film. (This incident seems particularly autobiographical, as Whitehead has stated that this was his own first exposure to the subject, most likely a 1974 cartoon, The Legend of John Henry, narrated and sung by Roberta Flack.)9 The mythic nature of his feats, including the claim he made to his parents just after his own birth that he would die at the Big Bend Tunnel on the C&O Railroad, didn’t particularly phase Sutter. After all, “They were taught about Greek gods, and prophesying witches popped up everywhere you looked. . . . Curses, omens, the odd swan rapist: they were as common as eviction notices, overdue bills, utilities shut off for lack of payment,” so why not, he asked, in the “glowing shack of this cartoon . . . where a young black boy was born with a hammer in his hand?” (138).

  An impressionable Sutter recalls in vivid detail the cartoon’s narrative, remembering that it had mesmerized his white classmates as much as it had him. “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” (141). In some of his most beautifully rend
ered prose, Whitehead describes John Henry’s opponent, the new-fangled steam drill against which he competed in the famous contest that would kill him, as portrayed in animated form for schoolchildren: “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.” (It is revealing that the same fatalistic tragic hero portrayed by Whitehead was inspired perhaps by a cartoon.) When the film ended, Sutter was sure the teacher had led a discussion about the lessons to be learned from the story, and about its “ambiguous ending,” though he can’t recall anything now but the questions raised: “Mrs. Goodwin, why did he die at the end? Mrs. Goodwin, if he beat the steam engine, why did he have to die? Did he win or lose?” (142).

  As an adult though, it is only over the course of the weekend, and particularly through his association with Pamela, that Sutter comes to view John Henry and his story with any personal relevance. Initially a skeptic, Sutter comes to identify and to appreciate both the man and the myth in a cathartic moment when he and Pamela visit the Big Bend Tunnel. “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” (319–20).

  Stepping just inside the tunnel, Sutter asks himself, “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 recognizes that the mountain retains its power over modernization even into the present. “This place,” he concludes, “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” (321–22).