Ain't Nothing But A Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry by Scott Reynolds Nelson with Marc Aronson is reviewed in the NYT this week. As the book is about Nelson's search for the truth behind the John Henry ballad it reads as a nonfiction detective/history book (written for 9-12 year olds but I think actually skews older than that) and the reviewer didn't want to reveal Nelson's conclusions in the review. I just read the book and want to talk about those conclusions - so this is post is all spoilers and should be read as such.

The John Henry ballad is as well known as the stories of Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and Mike Fink - meaning if you've read any tall tales in school or at home, then you know a bit about these guys. John Henry was the steel driving man who went against a steam drill and won the contest but died as a result of his exertions. It's a ballad that celebrates men over machine and honors the hard work of those men who laid America's railroads. It is also one of the few American story about an African American man that has completely crossed color lines - John Henry is known just as well to white kids as black, and is just as ever present in literature as Bunyan and all the others. His story is a truly American story and has always been celebrated as such.

In recently reading American tall tales, folk legends, etc. to my son, I've been struck by some odd aspects of John Henry's story. First, the story is born completely from the ballad and the ballad's origins are fuzzy at best. It is clear that it is a "work song" - a song written to be sung by work gangs, in this case gangs of men who work on the railroad. That makes it a story that must date to the mid - late 19th century as it fits perfectly with American's railroad history. Some of the common aspects of the many versions of the ballad are the Allegheny Mountains, C&O Railroad and Big Bend Tunnel. This has lead many people to believe the story of John Henry's contest took place in Virginia and that he died working on the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia (where there is a nearby statue of John Henry). Not everyone believes this though - some think he was in Alabama. But what really bothered me about the story itself is that John Henry died. Nobody else dies in these stories - they just keep having their adventures forever and ever. (Okay, in some Johnny Appleseed dies, but it is of old age after he travels the whole Ohio River Valley planting apples.) I want to know why John Henry had to die. It didn't make sense the first time I learned this story and it didn't fit with the tall tale tradition. As it turns out though, for Nelson it is John Henry's death that explains the ballad and ultimately, for me anyway, what makes it more of an American tale than any of the others will ever hope to be.

The big reveal in his book is that John Henry was probably a prisoner, an inmate at the Virginia Penitentiary where convicts were rented out to the C&O Railroad in the late 1800s for 25 cents a day. Nelson found a convict named John William Henry who arrived at the prison in 1866 and later transferred at an unknown date to an unknown location. Nelson found though that when the penitentiary was torn down in 1992 a contractor discovered 300 skeletons - probably African Americans from the late 1800s. There were no gravestones to mark their bodies, or records revealing their names. It is known that hundreds of prisoners died working on the Lewis Tunnel - in 1872 one out of every ten. Records on the John Henry that Nelson discovered disappear after 1872; whether he is THE John Henry, Nelson can not say. But what happened to a lot of men like John Henry is clear - they died building a railroad and no one remembers them, no one remembers anything about them at all.

Except for a song about a man who had only his strength and his pride to call his own - that man they made sure we would all remember.

If indeed John Henry was a prisoner who worked himself to death in the unsafe conditions of the Lewis Tunnel and if he was buried in an unmarked grave hidden on the prison grounds where no one would or could ever find him then he is the most American hero of any of the tall tales. As much as we like to embrace our hard working frontier image and as much as we salute blue collar workers, in reality America struggles more and more as a society of class based on personal wealth. Right now all the people running for president are arguing over who is more in touch with the "real Americans", (Hillary Clinton thinks swinging back a shot of whiskey in a bar makes her as real as it gets apparently), and yet not one of them lives like a poor American or quite frankly wants to.

I don't want to. I've been poor and I'll tell you right now it sucked. Being poor means wanting more, all the time, everyday and that's the truth. Yet lately it seems like if you pull yourself out of poverty then you aren't a real American anymore. If you go to an ivy league college then you aren't authentic enough somehow. The commentators are falling over themselves to say that the people in dying communities with no jobs are as real as it gets. So John Henry as a working class hero is the uber American story. I wonder what everyone thinks now that he might just be a victim of the racial politics of the American justice system.

Or more to the point: when did we decide that the only real Americans were the ones who struggled endlessly and when did we stop trying to end the damn struggle?

The myth of John Henry is that he was a man who worked with his hands, challenged a machine on behalf of all men who work with their hands and beat it. Then he died like a working class martyr with the words: "A man ain't nothing but a man. Before I let your steam drill beat me down, I'll die with a hammer in my hand." He was never more than what he could do - never more than the work he accomplished for others.

That's not the kind of life my father wanted, not for himself, and not for his children.

The truth is that John Henry probably worked for men he did not choose, at a job he did not choose, in a place he did not choose. And he died there because death was the only freedom he was given. With forty percent of the men in US prisons African American, John Henry's likely truth has incredible power today. The myth is far more appealing but it is a lie. John Henry was not a working class hero, he is the hero of the powerless and poor - which is still the greatest overlooked segment of American society today. Like much of the American middle class and poor, he is a symbol of all that is wrong with this country. Celebrate him for who he hoped to be, and for those who worked by his side and shared his sorrow. But do not give me John Henry as an American folk hero anymore. He is a truth that we all need to recognize - he is the America we all keep trying to deny.

Nelson also has an adult title on John Henry: Steel Drivin' Man. In his afterword to the children's title, he explains that he continues his research into the men who built the railroad.

[Post pic of the John Henry postage stamp and the statue near Big Bend.]