by Yasmine Anderson (’16)
Abstract:
This paper focuses on popular retellings of the John Henry legend, from Disney’s animated film to children’s picture books, in order to track the narrative elisions that betray a national investment in paving over racial violence. Popular retellings of the John Henry legend foreground national unity through the figure of John Henry as an “American hero” and fail to acknowledge the legend’s roots in the Atlantic slave trade and others systems of forced labor. With attention to the power relations at play in circuits of rhetorical and cultural exchange, this paper asks several questions: What does the rhetoric surrounding John Henry tell us about national fantasies of Black labor and figurations of the Black body as machine? How is John Henry’s heroism used to further a national ethos of unity? How do retellings of the legend navigate the complex entanglement of national values, slavery, and citizenship? I argue that understanding folklore as a national techne illustrates how popular narratives are used to teach practices of national belonging and citizenship in concert with ethotic values that erase the histories that both undergird and throw the nation’s identity into crisis.
The figure of John Henry takes up a literally large amount of space in the American folkloric imagination. Depicted as a hero of giant proportions, John Henry was said to have died in a race against a steam-powered drill in order to blast through mountainous terrain and build the Big Bend tunnel in West Virginia for the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railway. The Big Bend Tunnel was completed in 1872 and today a statue of John Henry stands at the site to commemorate the mythic proportions of his heroic feat. The plaque alongside the statue reads,
This statue was erected in 1972, by a group of people with the same determination as the one it honors. The Hilldale-Talcott Ruritan Club chose this memorial to mark a page of history, one hundred (100) years after the completion of the Big Bend Tunnel in 1872. John Henry died from a race with the steam drill, during the construction of the tunnel for the C. & O. Railway Co. May God grant that we will always respect the great and the strong and be of service to others.
Most illustrations of the John Henry legend valorize similar attributes of the story: strength, determination, and hard work. However, the final words of the plaque—“be of service to others”—unknowingly speak to the material circumstances that underlie the myth of John Henry and that suffer constant erasure in order to uphold mythic narratives through national ethotic values.
Although I will be invested in exploring the rhetorical production of the legend of John Henry and its significance for how national narratives utilize folklore as techne in order to effectively teach a form of national practice, it is necessary to address some of the factual evidence of John Henry’s life. In Steel Drivin’ Man-John Henry —The Untold Story of an American Hero, Scott Reynolds Nelson works to uncover the factual story of John Henry via archaeological road trip. Some tellings of the story say that John Henry was enslaved and then granted his freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 while others say that he was born free but descended from enslaved peoples. Through Nelson’s narrative, we learn that John Henry was a convict in the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, nineteen years old, and of much smaller stature—just over 5 feet—than the legends would have us believe. He was charged with “housebreak and larceny,” taken in on November 16th 1866, and sentenced for a span of ten years. Notably, he was also from New Jersey despite the fact that many narratives imagine him as being from the South. The prison register that Nelson finds reveals that John Henry was forced into work on the C&O Railway in 1868 (Nelson, 2006, 39). Nelson’s identity as a historian and discovery of the census and prison records takes him on a deeper investigation for the truth behind the story of John Henry. I undertake my own investigation into the rhetorical construction of the legend and the way in which this construction is revealing of national investments in upholding ethotic values and retooling the historical reality of the slavery system in the United States. I use ethotic values here to refer to the large-scale social codes the United States purports to abide by, such as democracy and meritocracy, that regularly come up in the stories the country tells about itself.
In order to explore the variety of ways in which the rhetoric surrounding John Henry speaks to national myth and narrative erasure, I argue that understanding folklore as techne helps us see how popular narratives are utilized to teach and fortify national values — and myths — around belonging and citizenship in ways that erase the histories that simultaneously undergird and throw the nation’s identity into crisis. Unlike common conceptions of epistemology, techne is concerned with the practical not aside from but as knowledge. In the context of its Ancient Grecian roots, the term refers to an art, craft or skill. I begin my conception of folkloric techne by already conceiving of rhetoric as a form of techne — a not uncommon way of thinking about rhetoric as it is, in its traditional definition, the art or craft of persuasive communication. To pair folklore and techne then is to highlight folklore’s persuasive aspect and capacity as a tool. In the case of John Henry’s story, I argue it is used as a tool to craft and strengthen existing national narratives. This critical ability to focus on folklore as a tool for crafting is what we get from the term folkloric techne.
Kelly Pender unpacks various definitions of techne in Techne, From Neoclassicism to Postmodernism: Understanding Writing as a Useful, Teachable Art. In the first definition, “Techne as a ‘How-To’ Guide or Handbook,” Pender addresses the problem of such a definition in that it simplifies rhetoric to its most mechanical aspects, such as grammar. I would argue that many of the tensions that arise in the nationally-constructed narratives of John Henry appear because of the attempt to fit the story into this first definition of techne which depends on an investment in universalism and an erasure of context. Pender speaks to this issue of context when she writes that “Isocrates’s emphasis on the situational nature of rhetoric, that is, the premium he put on a discourse’s ‘fitness for the occasion, propriety of style, and originality of treatment,’ made the idea of a handbook of rhetoric seem inappropriate if not somewhat oxymoronic [171]. After all, how do you codify and teach knowledge about a situation-dependent activity in advance of an actual situation?” (Pender, 2011, 18). In the case of the story of John Henry, the situations that the popular narratives of the story seek to erase in order to universalize are crucial and matters of concern which extend beyond temporal or historical boundaries.
The central questions that I will address are manifest across multiple forms of the John Henry story, such as children’s picture books, songs, and films. Therefore, I will be exploring each of these categories—children’s books, songs, and films—in turn. In beginning with a conceptualization of folkloric techne, I will look at the rhetorical figuring of Black heroism and the way in which the story of John Henry necessitates an erasure of the vulnerability of the Black body in its openness to both systemic and individually-oriented violence. For instance, references to the slavery system in the legend rely on a nationally imagined emancipatory moment. Not only is slavery used only to signal its end and the assumed victory of a national morality, but the prison system does not make an appearance in any of the popular tellings of the story. The fact that John Henry was forced into labor on the railroad, a mode of labor that resulted in the deaths of countless Black prisoners, shatters the illusion of inclusive freedom as a national ethotic value while also opening up the possibility for criticism of the prison system today and its current continuation of the violences perpetrated by the slavery system onto Black bodies in particular.
The man versus machine trope also erases the blackness of John Henry’s body and its significance in relation to his captivity. As Jules Gill-Peterson helpfully points out in her article, “The Technical Capacities of the Body: Assembling Race, Technology, and Transgender,” humanist thought figured the universal human body as a white male one. In the case of the story of John Henry, the man versus machine equation performs a similar mode of erasure of “othered” bodies by swallowing John Henry’s figure into a universal model that pits man against machine in order to envision “man” as a category that only comes in tension with difference when confronted with the mechanical or nonhuman. This equation ignores the way in which Black bodies were rhetorically—and literally—positioned as objects or machines for others’ economic benefit. The attempt to subsume the story of John Henry into a universal narrative also maps onto the ways in which the story has been engineered to celebrate national ethotic values, such as courage, strength, and endurance. For instance, although a variety of musical versions exist, the original songs that were sung about John Henry were sung primarily by railroad laborers in order to keep beat and, therefore, maintain a practically efficient mode of labor as well as to caution fellow laborers to not overwork themselves and end up dead like John Henry. When the songs were taken up by popular musicians, the rhythm became more upbeat, rendering the song a celebration of heroism rather than a warning or practical metronome.
As Frank B. Wilderson argues in Afro-pessimism: An Introduction, the oppression of Black people in the United States is a continued rather than a temporally contained circumstance. He writes,
After the ‘nonevent of emancipation,’ slavery did not simply give way to freedom. Instead, the legal disavowal of ownership reorganized domination and the former slave became the racialized Black ‘subject’…Formally, the Black subject was no longer a slave, but the same formative relation of structural violence that maintained slavery remained. (Wilderson, 2017, 8-9)
If Black life in the United States is a life of continued slavery-subjugation, mainstream uses of John Henry’s life do more than rewrite history by reframing the role slavery plays in the story. They deny the existence and impact of contemporary, systemic racism. A techne-cal approach to John Henry’s story doesn’t have to be inherently intertwined with problematic retoolings of history. Pender’s third definition of techne, “Techne as a Means of Inventing New Social Possibilities” (Pender, 2011, 26), allows for a more progressive reinvented folkloric techne. In this definition, techne has the ability to enact “invention and intervention” (27) in order to effect new social possibilities. Pender offers us two categories in which we can group these new social possibilities: “those that happen as the result of an exchange of power and those that happen as a result of cultural critique” (27). For the purposes of this project, I will engage with Pender’s second category—cultural critique. By critiquing the narratives that use the John Henry folklore to strengthen fantasies of national belonging and heroism, my hope is that we can invite retoolings of this folklore—and others like it—to allow for more rigorous interventions, understandings of oppressive realities, and inclusive modes of narrative construction.
In exploring the existing narratives of this story, I do not intend to argue that the figure of John Henry can only birth problematic erasures of violent reality. In many ways, this project stems from a desire to return to the famous story as a learning site. As a child, I remember being told the popularized version of the John Henry story that painted him as a mythic hero supported by national ideals. The lessons I was meant to gain from the story at that time may have been the wrong ones. However, critically looking at the actual narrativizing and rhetorical atmosphere of the story offers us much more important ones. Therefore, my hope is that this project functions as both a learning and teaching experience, a way to recuperate the lessons that a rhetorical critique of the John Henry story’s narrative life can offer us in addressing today’s critical and immediate concerns.
Children’s Books
It is almost, if not actually, impossible to find a children’s picture book cover about the story of John Henry that does not depict him with his hammer in hand; sometimes, the hammer appears to be the same size as John Henry himself or two hammers are featured.
Image source: https://www.amazon.com/John-Henry-American-Childrens-Paperbacks/dp/0394890523
Image caption: Cover of John Henry: An American Legend by Ezra Jack Keats, Dragonfly Books, 1987
Image source: https://pioneervalleybooks.com/products/john-henry
Image caption: Cover of John Henry by Michèle Dufresne, illustrated by Ann Caranci, Pioneer Valley Books, 2012
Image source: https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Man-True-Story-Henry/dp/1939160855
Image caption: Cover of A Natural Man: The True Story of John Henry by Steve Sanfield, illustrated by Peter J. Thornton, David R. Godine, 1986
Image source: https://www.amazon.com/Henry-Picture-Puffins-Julius-Lester/dp/0140566228
Image caption: Cover of John Henry by Julius Lester, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, Puffin Books, 1999
Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime’s “Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s ‘Idea of China’” offers a valuable methodology for considering the cultural investments of particular visual rhetorics. In the promotional fashion video Vats and Nishime investigate, yellowface, they argue, functions as a visual rhetoric of containment. What this rhetoric contains or confines is cultural difference, and it does so in order to mark white Western culture as cultural “normal.”
Although their focus differs from mine, Vats and Nishime’s explanation of how visual rhetorics can represent attempts to define and distance otherness is relevant to how picture book depictions of John Henry speak to national narrative projects. Vats and Nishime write:
Notably, the desire to contain almost always permits a limited degree of inclusion or access, suggesting that there is a necessary relationship between the drive to purify and the desire to possess Otherness. Stated differently, containment is a mechanism for control, separation, and differentiation, and regulation of longings for Otherness while maintaining the identity of the Self.” (Vats and Nishime, 2013, 427)
The conceptual proximity of longing and differentiation here is particularly helpful in considering the way in which John Henry’s size is often discussed. Many relevant sources point to this twin investment, longing and repulsion or hatred and lustful obsession, in illustrations of difference. Eric Lott, for instance, writes about blackface minstrel shows and—although he is not arguing that audience responses to these shows represented an unproblematic love for an imagined Black culture—the “range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability for what it may tell us about the racial politics of culture in the years before the Civil War” (Lott, 1993, 15). Similarly, Jordan Peele’s film, Get Out (2017), on horrific and obsessive neo-liberal efforts to possess the Black body tells a story in which fascination and repulsion merge and together point to violent attempts to possess the “other” both physically and metaphorically. Thus, what is most often marked as threatening, the Black male body, is fantastically enlarged and subsequently contained in the narrative of John Henry. The imagined strength and force of the Black male body is retooled in order to direct it towards nation-building efforts in the form of the railroad’s construction and, more figuratively, towards a strengthening of the nation’s ethos of heroic service.
As Vats and Nishime point out, these particular illustrations of “otherness” also feed into a drive to maintain “the identity of the Self” (Vats and Nishime, 2013, 427). In the case of the story of John Henry, the intentional crafting of the narrative upholds a sense of national identity that envisions a sense of inclusive citizenship and freedom as uniquely American. Importantly, many of these children’s books invite children to join in this national membership that continually reaffirms an ethotic value of hard work without a critical positioning to historical context or violent systems. For instance, in the introductory note to his children’s book illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, John Henry, Julius Lester writes,
John Henry continues to move us by his affirmation of something triumphant which we hope is in all of us…I called Jerry and asked him what we saw in John Henry. Jerry responded by talking about the transcendent quality of John Henry’s humanity. As he talked, the image of Martin Luther King Jr. came to me…I’m still not certain what the connection is between John Henry and King. However, I suspect it is the connection all of us feel to both figures—namely, to have the courage to hammer until our hearts break and to leave our mourners smiling in their tears (Lester, 1999, 2).
Lester’s introduction reveals its reliance on a humanist drive to universalize as it erases. For instance, it is crucial that we ask what exactly John Henry’s humanity “transcends.” Is it his blackness? The reminder of national racial tensions and systemic violence that can not be disentangled from the existence of the nation itself as well as its standing today? Although, his reference to Martin Luther King Jr. might appear to be, on first glance, an attempt to contextualize the story of John Henry and locate the figure more securely within a history of Black heroism, it ultimately continues to decontextualize by equating the work of Martin Luther King Jr. with that of John Henry. The multiple valences of the term work here are revealing of the tensions that arise in comparing the activist work of King with the forced work of John Henry. The valorization of “hammer[ing] until [your] heart breaks” (Lester, 1999, 2) also translates the material labor undertaken by John Henry into heroic terms and, therefore, retools a depiction of forced Black labor into a depiction of universal, heroic hard work to build the nation. This translation has much in common with the story’s musical manifestations.
Songs
Although the films and books that tell the story of John Henry are popular, the collection of songs on his heroic figure and race against the machine are perhaps the most well-known. In his book, Nelson explores the way in which the popularization and dissemination of the songs mapped on to the story’s general translation into a heroic tale. In discussing historical scholarship on the John Henry songs and ones similar to them that would have been often, but not only, sung by convicts performing manual labor, Nelson writes, “Most interpretations analyzed the words but heard the modern versions, which made it a fast and chirpy country song. Those upbeat versions probably predisposed these scholars to interpret John Henry as a hero, a man who had performed an impossible feat…Most [hammer songs] seemed bitter. They cursed hard work, bosses, and unfaithful women. They predicted pain and death” (Nelson, 2006, 30). As Nelson discusses further, the original songs about John Henry were sung by railroad workers and were constructed in such a way that the rhythm indicated when the group should collectively move the rail track. The general rhythm and call and response pattern was a way of keeping time not just for the sake of efficiency but in order to ensure that the group did not overwork themselves. In other words, it was a way of aligning the body’s labor with a particular pace. In light of this reality and the fact that these songs were more sombre in tone than their popular country counterparts, we realize that these songs originally functioned as cautionary tales rather than as a celebration of one man’s heroism.
Ernie Ford’s rendition of the song is representative of many of the popular versions and performances. Dressed in a checkered shirt and denim overalls, he is leaning against what appears to be a butter churning stick in a barn surrounded by hay with two lambs in the corner of the frame. This scene and ones like it subsume race and class in a move that Afro-pessimist scholars, such as Wilderson, argue misunderstands the way in which Black bodies are made vulnerable to systemic violence regardless of legal transgressions unlike the figure of the white worker whose victimization is often predicated on illegal activity, such as organizing a strike. It is important to note that the depiction of the working class that appears in Ford’s performance is a romanticized one that invites its audience to fantasize about the nation’s beloved mythic tropes, such as the American dream, the journey from rags to riches, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Ford’s performance also speaks to abstraction of the material labor of working on the railroad in that the song begins with a repetitive clacking sound that is reminiscent of a hammer on the railroad track before swelling into a fuller orchestral melody, marking involuntary labor’s translation into popular entertainment.
Merle Travis’ rendition of the song is not unlike Ford’s. Also wearing a checkered shirt and strumming his guitar on the porch of a wooden cabin, Travis enters blowing a train whistle. Although he is engaging in abstraction in a different way than the clacking accompaniment in Ford’s song, Travis’ train whistle evokes the romantic fantasy of train travel and American innovation, erasing the forced material labor behind the eventual presence of the train. Unlike Ford, Travis gives a short speech before launching into his song. He says, “You know, John Henry was a railroad man. They tell me one of the greatest. That is, people all over the country tell me that…Never had the pleasure of meeting John Henry, but I do know the song about him and this is how it goes” (Travis, 1947, 0:20-0:40). Despite the brevity of these few lines, they do tremendous work in reversing the reality of the power structures at play in the context of John Henry’s life. Travis affects a mode of humility to position himself below the figure of John Henry and he does so twice. First, he tells us that other people have told him about the story of John Henry. This locates him in the position of the student rather than the teacher and the shrugging naïveté with which Travis delivers these lines helps to emphasize the charming, working-class persona he is meant to evoke for his audience. Next, his statement about never having had the pleasure of meeting John Henry asks that we suspend any disbelief regarding race relations and hierarchical systems in the United States in order to assume that if Travis, a white country singer and songwriter, were to meet John Henry, a convicted Black man forced into labor on the C&O Railway, he would warmly shake his hand.
Films
In turning to a consideration of the films that depict the story of John Henry, Dan Ben-Amos’ article, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context,” offers a valuable beginning for addressing the commodification of folklore. Similarly to Pender in her discussion of the problematics inherent in defining techne as a handbook or “how-to” guide, Ben-Amos speaks to the concept of context when it comes to the “folkloric act.” He writes, “For the folkloric act to happen, two social conditions are necessary: both the performers and the audience have to be in the same situation and be part of the same reference group. This implies that folklore communication takes place in a situation in which people confront each other face to face and relate to each other directly” (Ben-Amos, 1971, 12-13). Later he accounts for more relational possibilities when he writes that “[i]n theory and in practice tales can be narrated and music can be played to foreigners. Sometimes this accounts for diffusion. But folklore is true to its own nature when it takes place within the group itself” (Ben-Amos, 1971, 13).
In arguing for the existence of a formal folkloric essence in which it is “true to its own nature,” Ben-Amos posits a concept of folkloric authenticity. However, with the complex narrative trajectory of the John Henry story, its conflicting information, and competing versions, thinking about authenticity at all poses a particular challenge. Furthermore, Ben-Amos’ assumption that the group through which the folklore originates comes into contact with an audience group on equal footing does not allow for the possibility of hierarchies. For instance, how would we consider a case in which the originators of the folklore are disadvantaged or have less power when it comes to disseminating narratives through capitalist circuits? For instance, while Nelson references the critical conversations around how to ethically approach the research and archival curation of oral traditions, Disney’s telling of the John Henry story serves as an example of a corporate power’s ability to not only engineer its own version of the narrative but to also disseminate this particular version more widely and, thus, obscure its standing as one version among many.
In Disney’s John Henry (2000), directed by Mark Henn, John Henry’s wife, Polly, who also narrates the film, tells us that she had John Henry’s shackles “forged into a mighty hammer” (Henn, 2000, 0:07). After telling us that the hammer was a present on their wedding day, she goes on to say, “You’d have thought he’d got his freedom all over again. He said ‘Polly, I’ll die with this hammer in my hand” (0:14). Thus, the very material symbol of John Henry’s enslavement is conflated into both a symbol of his newfound freedom and his mission to find work in order to provide for his family. As the story progresses, not only is any mention of the reality of John Henry’s forced labor excluded from the narrative but the film intentionally goes out of its way in order to invent markers of John Henry’s freedom. For instance, Polly narrates, “Now, the C&O Railroad had promised land, fifty acres, to every man who finished the line, but when John and I came up on them, they were already worn out and about to lose their promised land” (0:23-0:42). The fact that Black people in the United States were not counted as full citizens let alone granted the right to possess land, on top of the fact that they were legally counted as property themselves under slavery, is neatly patched over in the film.
In Disney’s depiction of the story, John Henry and Polly might as well be an “unmarked”—white—couple embarking on a journey to possess the rights of citizenship obviously afforded them by the just nation to which they belong. And that is, of course, what they are meant to be. In a narrative movement that belies its investment in problematic humanist attempts to claim universality, Disney subsumes John Henry and Polly into a story of American ingenuity, hard work, and service to others. John Henry’s larger than life shadow arrives on the scene in an anticipatory swell of music as he says to the protesting crowd of railroad workers, “I’ll take you there!” (0:50). Thus, his body is figured as that which happily carries the weight of his fellow man’s dreams and the nation’s efforts to effect industrial innovation.
Although the slavery system is referred to in most tellings of the John Henry story, I have yet to come across any fictionalized narratives of the story that make reference to John Henry’s convict status. If we think broadly about these two systems—the slavery system and the prison system—as being involved in narratives of captivity, national folklore navigates the obvious complications of these systems in order to find teachable values in spite of their violences. In interrogating the political implications behind referring to slavery but erasing the prison system from the narrative of John Henry, the national investment in upholding the validity of the prison system becomes clear. Not only would John Henry’s convict status smudge the mythic proportions of his heroism but an acknowledgment of it would also risk highlighting the way in which the prison system represents a continuation of similar violences to those enacted in the slavery system in the United States.
The amount of material devoted to the story alongside the complexity of the way in which its construction utilizes folklore as techne in order to uphold fantasies of inclusive national belonging means that there is an almost infinite amount of work that could be produced on the rhetoric of the John Henry legend. However, in investigating what these narratives signify in terms of national ethotic values and the incorporation of captivity narratives into widespread national myths, my hope is that I have at least begun to push towards the possibility of a folkloric techne that envisions, if not enacts, new social possibilities.
While her subject matter differs, Carolyn Miller also turns a critical eye towards ethotic values in “Expertise and Agency, Transformations of Ethos in Human-Computer Interaction” and references radical possibilities for invention through rhetoric, calling it “an art—that is, a considered, productive effort to make and remake our ourselves and our world” (Miller, 2004, 213). Miller goes a long way in directing our attention towards values that may be taken for granted but are, therefore, particularly in need of a deeper interrogation if only because of their blackboxed quality.
Similarly, the folklore surrounding the figure of John Henry offers fertile ground for critical explorations of national ethotic values and agendas that are disseminated through constructed narrative. It is in this turn to recuperate the rhetorical art of invention that the techne-cal capacity of folklore still offers us the potential for new social possibilities. However, this recuperation will require not just imaginative invention but a critical eye towards context and the complexly entrenched hierarchical systems that undergird our nation’s past and present. Ultimately, using invention in order to radically enact confrontation with our own participation in violent systems and their ensuing narrative erasure holds greater possibilities for learning than an invention that only ensures that we continually craft heroic reflections of ourselves.
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Bio:
Yasmine Anderson earned her PhD in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh in 2024 after defending her dissertation “Changing Blues: The Continued Life and Appropriation of Black Women’s Blues in Twenty-First Century Popular Culture.” She earned her MA from the University of Chicago’s Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities in 2016 and her BA in English, with a minor in film studies, at the University of Virginia in 2015. Her work has been published in Feminist Spaces, African American Review, Barzakh Magazine, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America.