The particulars don’t matter much when it comes to archetypes. The location of the attic where Faustus conjured Mephistopheles, the logistics of the Tower of Babel, the latitude of Atlantis and the longitude of Eden—none of it matters. What’s of concern is the cost of a soul, the incommunicability of humanity, the direction of paradise. And so, when it comes to John Henry, the American Icarus who bet his sweat and labor against a machine, it matters not whether the folk hero’s famed competition against a steam-powered rock-drilling device happened by the mossy shores of West Virginia’s Greenbriar River, or in the green hills of the Shenandoah, or atop the rich soil of Alabama’s Coosa Mountain. It doesn’t even matter that the “real” Henry, to the best of scholarship’s archival shuffling, seems to have died not from exhaustion after besting the machine intended to take his and his fellow workers’ jobs, but from silicosis in a sanitarium.
There are facts, and then there is the truth, the truth sung in ballads by Mississippi John Hurt and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Dave von Ronk, Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash—that “A man is nothing but a man, /But before I let your steam drill beat me down, /I’d die with a hammer in my hand.” A man who, whatever the accuracy of the accounts, we can easily imagine: the noon sun over an Appalachian valley, sweat-stung eyes and burning muscles, the clank of metal on metal, the grunts of exertion, the high-pitched shrieks of the late summer cicadas. John Henry is an iconic, totemistic, mythic figure: the Black railroad worker famed for his strength and labor, who could drive stakes with a nine-pound hammer into the earth, and while in combat with the steam-powered drifter drill was able to just keep ahead—just—while punctuating the ground on the left hand of the track with the automaton lagging behind on the right, before Henry’s heart gave way, the pyrrhic victory of man against machine.
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