Died With A Hammer In His Hand

JOANNE: Today on the show, we’re diving into some of the stories we tell ourselves about American history, and teasing out fact from fiction, because let’s face it. There are a lot of stories out there.

NATHAN: We’ll discuss the myths we hear most often from our students. We’ll look at Robert E. Lee, the man, the myth, and legend. And we’ll also investigate whether Davy Crockett actually died defending the Alamo.

JOANNE: Over the last few weeks, we’ve been getting questions from listeners about history they heard about as kids, wanting to know what’s real and what’s myth. Listener Natanya Pope-Sohel in Chicago wondered about someone who looms large in American folklore. He’s inspired countless stories, poems, and especially ballads, for more than a century.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: The name of this song is “John Henry.”

JOANNE: This is a recording of a man named Harold B. Hazelhurst. It was made in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration. Hazelhurst had learned the “John Henry” song when he was a teenager working on the Florida railroad.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: See, the fellas from different railroads would come and work on this track with us. And each fella, perhaps he’d have a new voice that he’d add to the song.

VOICE: Well, good. Well, now, let’s hear the way you remember it.

HAROLD B. HAZELHURST: (SINGING) When they brought John Henry to this country, they brought him through by land. The people came from far and near, just to see a steel drivin’ man. Just to see a steel drivin’ man.

John Henry told his captain, not a man ain’t nothing but a man. Before I let this hammer outdo me, I’ll die with the handle in my hand. John Henry, I’ll die with the hammer in my hand.

John Henry had a little woman–

JOANNE: That song lays down the legend of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man who raced against a modern steam drill to carve out a railroad tunnel. He won, but then immediately collapsed, and died. It’s a classic story of man versus machine.

BRIAN: I’m just going to admit it right up top. I didn’t know much more about John Henry than what I’d heard in the songs. So after getting in touch with Natanya, we called a historian at the University of Georgia named Scott Reynolds Nelson. He’s an expert in all things John Henry. And it turns out that the real story of John Henry is more disturbing and less uplifting than the myth. We’ll start with Natanya’s first question.

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: So my first question is, was he an actual person?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes, he was. He was 5 feet, 1 1/4 inches tall. He was born in–

BRIAN: I thought this guy was a giant.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: The quarter, I’m sure he insisted on. So he was a very small man, but that’s what you needed to build a tunnel. To make a tunnel in the 1860s and 1870s, you needed a hammer man who is small. The arc of his swing had to be small enough so that he could go deep into that tunnel.

BRIAN: Hey, Natanya, can I squeeze a question in here?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Of course. It’s your show.

BRIAN: So was he, and the guys he were working with, were they actually racing against another team that was using a steam drill?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes. That would have been around September or October of 1871, according to the construction reports. The steam drills were there. They were being used to try to drill these little holes for the explosives. But there are actual reports at the time, saying that the drillers are drilling alongside the steam drills, and the steam drills are failing.

BRIAN: OK. Let me check in with Natanya. Are you believing this so far, Natanya?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: I am. I do find it believable, but I’m wondering, was he in the context of the Ava Duvernay documentary, 13th, about the constitutional loophole that allows for enslavement of prisoners? Was John Henry caught up in one of the first waves of post Civil War mass incarceration of African American men?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yes, he was. What happened– this is very early in 1865. Andrew Johnson is President. He allows the Virginia state to kind of reconstitute itself as a state. And they take all of these minor misdemeanors and turn them into felonies. And what you see is mass incarceration of African American, mostly men. And 3/4 of the men in the Virginia penitentiary in 1864 are white. By 1869, 80% of the men in the Virginia penitentiary are black.

BRIAN: That’s really remarkable.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Yeah. You get, basically, a labor force that is a critical labor force that allows Virginia– the Virginia railroads to penetrate the mountains and connect to Western Virginia.

They tried to use miners, black and white miners, to do this work, but they went on strike around 1870. Said there was bad air in the mountain, and that’s when they brought in convicts to finish the work. John Henry and about 100 to 200 other folks were shipped up to do the final stages of this construction work.

BRIAN: Right. What led you to believe that John Henry was actually a real person, Scott?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: I didn’t think he was a real person. I thought he was– I thought he was a legend. And I was listening to a version of the song that said, looking at a picture of the Virginia penitentiary, and the song says they took John Henry to the White House and buried him in the sand. Every locomotive comes roaring by, says, there lies a steel drivin’ man.

And next to the Virginia penitentiary, buried in layers of sand in 1995, they found 200 bodies. And they were all mostly black men between the ages of 18 and 25.

So using that, I got access to the Virginia penitentiary records. They show John Henry being arrested for a crime that he probably didn’t commit. He’s listed as stealing goods worth $200 from a grocery store. But you look at the inventory of the grocery store, there’s nothing worth $200.

He finally ends up in the Virginia penitentiary in 1868, but he’ll die by 1871, working on the tunnels at the Lewis Tunnel, right at the edge of the border between Virginia and West Virginia on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

BRIAN: So what is it about this story, Scott, that made it so compelling to become a myth? I mean, what makes for a myth?

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: That’s a good question. I think part of it is that a steam drill in 1871 was a terribly difficult instrument. It was really bulky. It was really slow. The power was transmitted pneumatically. Any two of us– you and I, Brian, could have defeated a steam drill in 1871.

But by 1880, when the song starts to be transmitted, steam drills are so powerful and they work so well, that no human could defeat a steam drill. And so that’s when it becomes– it enters a level of myth.

But what killed most of the prisoners on the worksite was not exactly the steam drill. It was actually the explosives that were creating this rock dust. People inhaled it, little tiny bits of crystalline rock. They cut up your lungs, and basically, your lungs fill up with fluid, and you die. And this is how he and most of the other workers who were doing this construction died, this rock dust from very, very hard rock. People inhale it, and it kills them.

BRIAN: Right. So Natanya, should we let this guy keep going? I mean, he’s convinced me so far. You got any more for him?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: I have just one more question.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Mm-hm.

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: So John Henry is considered a hero in American folklore, and I believe that he’s a hero. But we don’t usually consider people in the prison system as heroes. So I’m wondering, is there a bit of revisionist history at play, or is his story part of the natural evolution of folklore that tends to leave out the sticky parts as time passes.

SCOTT REYNOLDS NELSON: Mm. That’s a great question. I think it is. A part of it is this evolution of the sticky parts. I think one of the amazing things about African American art, and literature, and music, is that it can take the most terrible crimes and turn them into the most beautiful literature and music that we have.

And so this is a way– the story of John Henry is really a story about a terrible crime. It’s about men who are buried unremembered, without gravestones, in the Virginia penitentiary, forgotten. And the song is really about saying, here are the men. They’re buried at the White House.

So it’s a story that takes a terrible crime, but over time, as men and women carry the song forward, and convert it, and change it, they turn it into this beautiful song. It goes from a dirge to, really, the beginnings of blues and what we now call rock and roll.

BRIAN: And Natanya, you made the mistake of telling me something about yourself while we were waiting for Scott. You’re in law school?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Yes, I am.

BRIAN: Is that what piqued your interest in this?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: Actually, no. I also homeschool my kids, and we got to the unit on folktales. And so I was trying to find something that I thought that they could relate to.

BRIAN: What’s your takeaway? What are you going to– how old are your kids?

NATANYA POPE-SOHEL: My youngest is 9. I guess my takeaway is that history is just interconnected, you know, especially with folktales. It’s not always what we see. There’s always a backstory. There’s always an undercurrent.

You know how you have subjects that you constantly think about, like, throughout time, you know? You come back to them, you think about other things. John Henry has always been that for me. And I feel like a lot of my questions about who he was, and why he was, and why he is such a huge figure in folklore has been answered. And I’m really glad that we had this conversation.

BRIAN: Thanks to our listener, Natanya Pope-Sohel for her questions. Thanks, also, to Scott Reynolds Nelson for helping us answer them. He’s an historian at the University of Georgia, and author of Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend.

NATHAN: It’s time to take a short break. When we return, the myths that turned Robert E. Lee from a rebel general into healer of a nation.