|
|
|
Book Reviews
The Life and Deaths of John Henry
| NELSON, SCOTT REYNOLDS. Steel Drivin' Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 214 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-19-530010-9.
|
|
In his famous 1968 concert at Folsom Prison, when Johnny Cash asked for inmates' song requests, John Henry's name rose above the rest. The song and legend, named for a convict who died fighting against an overpowering machine a century earlier, drew raucous cheers. Like Cash and many of those Folsom inmates, John Henry's legend originated in the South. Following his death in the early 1870s, John Henry's story traveled far into the next century—and beyond. Though the meanings of the song changed, they still rang true, especially to an imprisoned audience. |
1
|
|
John Henry's death has been told countless times. Indeed, folklorists at the Library of Congress believe that it may be the most-studied folk song in the world (2). But few have actually attempted to learn about the man behind the song. The timing of Nelson's inquiry is interesting, as he joins others undertaking similar projects—Cecil Brown's work on Stagolee and Adam Gussow's close reading of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" also offer histories behind legends born in late nineteenth-century black life.1 But where Brown examines the badman and Gussow hears reactions to lynching and police violence, Nelson finds the real John Henry deep in Virginia's postbellum practice of leasing convict labor. |
2
|
|
Henry's legend has been put to many uses over the years. For Nelson, John Henry becomes a way to tell the tragic story of Reconstruction's broken promise and how Southern political-economic modernization came through the brutal exploitation of black workers. Who was John Henry? According to Nelson, he was a five-foot, one-inch, nineteen-year-old from New Jersey who traveled with the Union Army to liberate the South. Like many other young black men after the war, he was arrested on trumped-up charges. With no local patron to advocate on his behalf, he received a long term—ten years for burglary—that proved to be a death sentence, executed slowly during his convict lease to the C&O railroad. |
3
|
|
Steel Drivin' Man is structured in three loose sections. The first two chapters set the personal tone of Nelson's investigation into the John Henry story—Nelson is as much of a character as the elusive man of legend, his self-proclaimed geekiness an affable contrast to the big man's strength. Despite the first-person narration, Nelson remains unobtrusive and exudes an infectious curiosity in his ruminations on historical methods, relating the process of sifting through archives and the thrill of discovery when pieces of the mystery behind the real John Henry begin to fall into place. |
4
|
|
Chapters 3 through 6 offer a deeper social and cultural history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Redemption, lucidly and with an eye for telling detail. Alongside discussion of the evolution of the Freedman's Bureau, Southern railroads, and the convict lease in Virginia, we learn that John Henry and Jefferson Davis were first tried on the same day: Henry's burglary charge netted a lethal decade; Davis's treason resulted in a suspended trial and ended without prosecution (66). Nelson also tells the story of silicosis, the pulmonary affliction caused by stone dust that drove free miners and railroad workers to go on strike, leaving prisoners like Henry to dig the tunnels and lay the rails connecting the New South to the rest of the world. As convicts, they had no choice but to dig and breathe the dust deeply. In the end, it cost them their lives. |
. . . |
There are about 538 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
