John Henry, as told to me in elementary school, was a hard working railroad man who picked up a hammer in each hand and beat a machine in a spike driving race, dying in the process. The only motivation I heard was that Henry needed to prove that man was greater than machine; I did not know about the tracts of land supposedly promised to his coworkers. As such, it seemed to be a nice enough folk tale, but I was intrigued when Scott Nelson claimed to have found the man behind the myth. Scott Nelson found a plausible John Henry, however the man himself is only one small part of the greater legend.
History has lost the documents that could positively identify John Henry, but Nelson has picked out a believable man. Nelson’s Henry is a young New Jersey man, barely over five feet tall, who ended up working on the railroad as a leased prison laborer (39). At first glance, this appears to be the complete opposite of the massively large freedman Henry is often described as.
Nelson, however, thoroughly explains how time and changing interests had morphed John Henry’s tale. By looking at the songs sung about John Henry slightly after his death, the author decides that they were originally cautionary tales meant to deter men from working too fast (32). Nelson made the point that dozens of men died at the construction sites, and lung trouble probably killed the rest, but their deaths are largely forgotten under the shadow of John Henry’s (90). The steamdrill race became part of the story later on, once the workers realized every second on the job was part of a struggle against approaching mechanization (92). Over the years, this idea became simplified and restructured until it was John Henry who singlehandedly battled the machine, and it was only John Henry who died in the process.
Throughout the book, the author does not try to address the concrete details of the man who inspired the myth. His major sources are songs, which provide plenty of details about the legend but none about the man. He traces some prison records, but even these are woefully incomplete. In his conclusion he calls Henry “almost infinitely mutable” (172). This lack of proof, however, does not detract from the big picture.
I agree with Nelson’s point of view that John Henry the man is far less important than John Henry the legend. Unlike other more historically based figures, knowing the specifics of a man named John Henry does not really help put the myth in any more context. The larger story was already contained in the work songs and pictures of John Henry; it only took someone to decode them. When presented to children, John Henry is often called a “folk hero,” so kids are already expecting him to be not quite real. The larger story of black oppression, monolithic railroads, and human struggle existed all along, and John Henry was only the vehicle for it.
Nelson admits that the man behind the legend is unknowable, since crucial details like cause of death, date/place of birth, and family history were never recorded. If Nelson’s Henry is to be accepted, it is remarkable that, in light of all the changes his myth endured, his name was never altered along the way. In any event, the overarching themes of the legend say more about our history than the biographical details of the man.