A little girl sitting down to a piano to play "The Ballad of John Henry" finds that the song "pushes her ... It doesn't go to church and cusses, wears what it wants." Paul Robeson, starring in "800 pounds of bad play" that is the 1940 production of John Henry, nevertheless finds that out of the folktale "flows the truth of men." And a scholar sifting through "hard-fought dribs and drabs" to determine if the John Henry legend rests on a factual basis, finds encouragement in a notion that "we make our own machines and devise our own contests in which to engage them."
These impulses and inspirations, and the varying interpretations of the 19th-century American ballad and folk tale about John Henry, the black steel-driving railroad man who beat a steam drill in a contest and then died from the strain, may be more deep-seated — akin indeed to something learned "sittin' on my mammy's knee."
"All the people who have heard the song on the radio or had the story read to them from a children's book, they all have their own John Henry," suggests Colson Whitehead in John Henry Days, his dazzling, dizzying and wide-ranging second novel. "You summon him up from verses and he swings his hammer down with the arms you gave him."
But J. Sutter, a modern-day black free-lance writer, can't be bothered. The past is past, the present is just one big deadline, and all Sutter wants to summon up are factoids and sound bites, and then get out of Talcott, West Virginia--John Henry's supposed stamping ground. And now it's his stamping ground in more ways than one: Coinciding with the release of a commemorative John Henry postage stamp, Talcott is holding its first "John Henry Days" festival, and Sutter is here along with a cast of characterless junketeers — "fellow mercenaries in their covert war against the literate of America" — who descend upon even backwater gigs like this in the effort to spew out a fluff piece or two.
Or not: being a vulture is its own reward, and some can manage to sustain themselves quite well on just the free food and paid expenses. But Sutter can't stay too long at the fair, and it's not that he's solely "sniffing comps and gratis" elsewhere, and not because of his suspicion that here "It's always Mississippi in the fifties." Almost unwittingly, Sutter has found himself in pursuit of a junketeering record by running nonstop from one publicity event to another — this current job for a travel Web site marks the culmination of a "three-month junket jag he is too unwilling or too scared to break."
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