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.

Classic Trickster: Liza Lou and the Yeller Belly Swamp by Mercer Mayer

Here's a classic literary folktale that is as nearly perfect as a picture book can be.

Mercer Mayer's Liza Lou And The Yeller Belly Swamp (Aladdin Picture Books), in print and going strong after 32 years, still has the power to knock the socks off the story circle crowd and delight the individual reader.

Mayer carefully crafts this tale, with its sassy, smart heroine and its outlandish but gullible bad guys, using the traditional trickster tale format, by masterfully intertwining snippets from world folklore into a piece which, like Robert San Souci's The Talking Eggs, emerges as a delightful bit of Americana.

Liza Lou's mama keeps her hoppin', poling her skiff all over the Yeller Belly Swamp in a variety of errands for family and neighbors, despite the undisputed fact that that swamp is the lair of all kinds of nasty characters--a swamp haunt in an abandoned shed, a swamp witch lurking in the reeds, a gobblygook under the Yeller Belly Swamp Bridge, and worst of all, a mean ole' swamp devil at the bottom of an old well. But Liza Lou is a girl who's full of "fancy thinking" and "bold as brass" to boot, and she's got some tricks in her little calico dress pocket to outsmart these characters everyone.

Mining European and African folklore, Mayer equips Liza Lou with some of literature's best ploys, beginning with a well-known one of that tricky little guy, B'rer Rabbit. Here's Liza Lou meeting up with the swamp witch as she totes Auntie Jane's soiled Sunday-go-to-meeting finery home to boil and scrub up for her by Friday:

"Liza Lou," that swamp witch cackled. "I'm gonna boil you in a big pot of water, and then I'm gonna chew on your bones."

"Oh, Miss Swamp Witch," cried Liza Lou. "Boil me in your big pot of water if you must, and chew on my bones as much as you like. But please, oh please, don't boil this precious little child I've got cradled in my arms."

Now everybody knows that a swamp witch is meaner than a stomped on polecat, but not everybody knows that she is blinder than a cave bat.

Of course, that old swamp witch just has to snatch Liza Lou's bundle and toss it into her big black boiling pot just for pure meanness, but when she complains that she can't smell anything cooking in the pot, Liza Lou uses the old Hansel and Gretel trick and coaxes her closer and closer to the pot until she can push her right in. The old witch skedaddles with a hoot and a holler, and Liza Lou calmly fishes her Auntie's now-clean laundry out of the pot and collects the promised payment--one of Auntie's pecan pies all her own--on Friday.

In similar fashion Liza Lou, drawing on the Red Riding Hood motif, lures the swamp haunt right into the clutches of her iron skillet-wielding granny when she begs him NOT to take her tote full of sweet potatoes to granny's house and cook them up in a pan. Borrowing a trick from the Goats Gruff, when Liza Lou trucks a wagon load of junk across the swamp bridge, she cons the gobblygook underneath who threatens to eat her into gobbling her precious "treasure" instead, causing the bridge and the now grossly overweight bad guy to sink into the mucky goo where they belong.

Borrowing from Ananse's capture of the hornets-who-sting-like-fire in Gail Haley's A Story, a Story, Liza Lou pulls off her best trick when, carrying a jug of molasses over to the Parson's for breakfast, she pretends to be happy that a mean old swamp devil is planning on stealing her soul rather than the precious parson's soul she's keeping safe inside her jug. Now Liza Lou knows that no swamp devil can resist transforming himself into a fly to take a look down inside, and when he does, Liza Lou slaps the cork back into the jug and traps that devil fly, whom the Parson's wife proceeds to swat into oblivion when she pours him out atop her morning hotcakes.

As for Liza Lou, she skipped all the way back home to her mother. And from that day to this, no one has ever seen hide nor hair of devils, gobblygooks, witches, or haunts in the Yeller Belly Swamp.

And no one misses them neither.

Liza Lou And The Yeller Belly Swamp (Aladdin Picture Books), lavishly overflowing with some of Mercer Mayer's finest illustrations, is filled with details of swamp life--Liza Lou's pet 'possum, partially hidden cottonmouth snakes, alligators, and bobcats--a menagerie of critters that listening children will enjoy spotting on every page. Meanwhile, Liza, with her freshly-ironed little print dresses and spirited body language, is as charming and in-control a trickster as ever strutted her way through a story. As one of Liza Lou's little rhymes puts it,

"One, two, three, four,
Five on the double.
If you mess around with me
It's a mess of trouble."

It's also a beautifully designed and lovingly crafted book, a thing of beauty which is indeed a joy forever!

The Great American Trickster: Two Wileys and That Hairy Man

With the arguable exception of Br'er Rabbit, American folk literature's top trickster has got to be the wily Wiley, who with his mama's help, manages to fool that old conjurin' sack man three times in Wiley and the Hairy Man. According to the retellers' notes, this story was collected somewhere in central Alabama by Donnell Van de Voort and published in the "Manuscripts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration for the State of Alabama." Although Wiley has roots in African folklore, the tale is a fully American "confabulation" in which the plucky boy and his mother use their natural-born sass and wit to rid themselves of a cloven-footed swamp bogeyman.

The tale of Wiley is available currently in two stand-alone versions, both with much to recommend them to the reader or teller. The more recent adaptation, that of Judy Sierra and the Caldecott award-winning artist Brian Pinkney, published in 1996, shows off Pinkney's beautiful oil paintings on scratchboard, featuring jewel-like blues, greens, and golds. Sierra's retelling, which perhaps includes more of the orginally recorded version from the 1930's, is more conversational and meandering, a strong adaptation whose longer text provides ample room for Pinkney's sensuous illustrations to spread out on the large pages.

The older and, to my mind, more satisfying version, however, is the edition retold and illustrated by Molly Garrett Bang, known for her more recent Caldecott book, When Sophie Gets Angry--Really, Really Angry. Amazingly, Bang's powerful version was written as a controlled vocabulary Ready-to-Read edition (Simon & Schuster, 1976), illustrated in her simple but realistic black and sepia drawings. Perhaps the limited language is an asset to the storyteller in this iteration. Although Bang's text is not in dialect, its simplicity and word selection sound authentic to my Alabama-born ear, and in the reading it is easy to fall into a slow Southern cadence which befits the setting. The few but choice words give the text great drama when read aloud, and the suspense leading up to Wiley's and Mama's final tricks will mesmerize any audience:

Then the Hairy Man said,
"I'll dry up your cow.
I'll dry up your spring.
I'll send a million boll weevils out of the ground to eat up your cotton if you don't give me your young 'un.

"Hairy Man," said Wiley's mother, "you wouldn't do all that.
That's mighty mean."

I'm a mighty mean man," said the Hairy Man.

Bang's illustrations are equally strong in evoking the swampy atmosphere. Wiley, in his cutoffs and outgrown shirt, is skinny and long-limbed, and his thin, wiry mother, dressed in a long, skimpy work dress and kerchief, never stops working even as she shares her conjure wisdom with her only son. The Hairy Man himself is a marvelous bogeyman, short and powerfully squat, with a cow's tail and hind feet, and a smugly smiling mouth bristling with long snaggly teeth, his body language full of self-satisfied power until his final comeuppance.

A truly American trickster, the fearful but courageous underdog whose wit sees him through, Wiley is a national treasure, a reminder that size and power and sheer meanness don't always prevail over a hero who knows just how to use what he's got.