Doing History: Ain't Nothing But A Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry by Scott Reynolds Nelson

Studying history may seem to be about filling up with knowledge--like a car pulling into a gas station. Once you have a full tank, you are done.

But it is just the opposite. The more you know about the past, the more questions you ask.

Most kids feel that studying history is mainly the task of stuffing facts and conclusions into their brains until they know all they need to complete the course. Those of us who have lived through some history of our own realize that "known" history, no matter how diligently we study our "facts," seems like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing and some of the rest apparently from a different puzzle altogether. We "see" history as if through a bunch of tiny peepholes drilled into the wall between us and the past, our brains seeking to make a whole out of the fleeting glimpses provided for us by artifacts, recorded accounts, opinion, legends, and folklore--which together give the illusion of truth. In reality history is a mystery which at once intrigues and eludes us.

Scott Reynolds Nelson's Ain't Nothing but a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry is an engaging look at the process of doing history, of doing what historians do to find those elusive bits of reality that are part of the past. A historian at the College of William and Mary, Nelson has two purposes in this book--to try to solve the mystery of whether there was a real John Henry at the root of the legend and to show young readers how a working historian digs into the past and attempts to prove his historical hypothesis.

In easily accessible but engrossing prose, Nelson takes the reader into his process, which he likens to a scavenger hunt, first honing in on textual analysis of the various versions of the familiar "John Henry" folk song. Although richly overlaid with European motifs and different thematic approaches, the root of the story in Nelson's view lies in a work song which arose in West Virginia during the spanning of the Alleghenies by the Covington and Ohio Railroad (later the Chesapeake and Ohio, or C & O), which cited the Big Bend Tunnel as the setting of the song. Not finding any records of the crews who worked there, Nelson felt he had hit the end of the line until a library catalog search engine led him to the engineering records in the personal papers of the bosses of these railroad crews, which revealed that the C & O rented out chain gangs from the Virginia State Prison to build the tunnels and that an actual race between a steam drill and a hand drilling crew had occurred, not at the Big Bend Tunnel, but at the nearby Lewis Tunnel.

The men that made that steam drill,
Thought it was mighty fine;
John Henry sunk a fourteen-foot hole,
And the steam drill only made nine.

Feeling that he had nailed down the historical event, Nelson then had to tie a real-life John Henry to the event. By chance he had scanned an old post card of the State Penitentiary at Richmond, Virginia, and made it his computer's screen wallpaper. As he read through one version of the song, he made a lucky mental connection. On the screen was a large white building among darker brick structures, flanked by a railroad track; in the book before him were the lines,

They took John Henry to the white house,
And buried him in the san'.
And every locomotive come roarin' by,
Says there lays that steel drivin' man.
Says there lays that steel drivin' man.

Nelson asked himself the obvious question. Was there a John Henry at that prison who was bound over to work on the Lewis Tunnel? Persistent pestering of library staff at the University of Virgina finally paid off when a sympathetic librarian bent the rules to let him open the boxes filled with unsorted, coal dust-covered records, wherein he found a ledger showing a John William Henry sentenced in 1866 to a ten-year term for robbery. The name and age matched up with one John William Henry's census and trial records. Then a chance conversation with a historian at the Museum of the Confederacy uncovered an archaeological find near the Virginia penitentiary of the skeletons of 300 African Americans in unmarked and roughly concealed graves. This finding correlated with a report in the Penitentiary records which raised questions about the high number of deaths, particularly from "consumption," among inmates hired out to the railroad in 1872.

When further investigation suggested that some of the convicts in the work gang might have been dying slowly or suddenly from silicosis, a lung disease with symptoms similar to tuberculosis acquired in the unventilated tunnels, the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit together snugly. Was prisoner John Henry the fabled steel driving man who competed with that steam drill, died suddenly of silicosis exacerbated by exertion, and was buried in the sand by the tracks at the Virginia Penitentiary's white house?

Well, maybe. Nelson has opened up a slightly larger window into that past, scavenging facts and photos from many sources, and revealing, if not the definitive historical John Henry, certainly new information about post-bellum African American life in the mid-Atlantic states. Instead of a symbol of man railing against the machine that threatens his livelihood and pride, as the heroic John Henry was often interpreted in the twentieth century, he can perhaps be seen instead as a victim of anti-Reconstructionism, an abused worker who amazingly may yet have taken pride in his work. Both interpretations are just that, a synthesis which different mindsets from different viewpoints can lay upon the facts as we know them.

Still, Nelson's account is a fascinating detective story which gives young people a different view of history and the work of doing history. Looking at an actual photo, into the eyes of a young black man who may indeed have been the John Henry who inspired the famous folk song, gives the reader a bit of a thrill, that "aha!" feeling that may fuel future scholars to carry on the job of doing history--for the past which seems to need to be known and for the future which needs to know it. As the author concludes,

History had tried to silence many black men, some in prisons, some in graves, some in jobs no one ever recorded. But those men did speak in a song that now we all sing. They spoke, and because of the postcard, and the buried bodies, and the big ledger, and the engineering reports, we all can listen. The trackliners were telling the world.

This old hammer
Killed John Henry,
Killed my brother,
Can't kill me.