I have a few pages of handwritten notes for this post and yet I struggle to make the transition from drafting in pen to typing on the computer. When my older daughter was attending school virtually, she made friends with people over google docs. It is her generation’s version of passing notes. She commented once, as she sat in our basement on her computer watching her classmate type a letter to her, live, “You can learn a lot about a person from how they type.” I remembered being in school myself and how familiar I was with my classmate’s handwriting and how much it could, in fact, reveal so much about a person. It’s a different era now. And perhaps this is in part why I struggle to convert from hand to computer.
I also remember a song that we learned in school. “John Henry was a steal driving man, oh lord, …” I don’t remember much else from the song except that the final line was something like, “… he laid down his hammer and he died, oh Lord, yes, he laid down his hammer and he died.” I could probably look up the rest of the lyrics and listen to the song and I’d be able to give you a fuller picture of John Henry and the song and my experience with it, but somehow, that feels like it would be a lie. I’m trying to give you the truth of what I can currently recall, which isn’t much, but it’s real.
I remember learning the song in elementary school. Maybe in the gym/lunch room. Maybe in the wood floored music room/ stage, the one with the cool storage loft with the spiral staircase we weren’t allowed to go up except for special times when we were helping retrieve props, instruments, costumes, or other flotsam and jetsam. Probably both the gym and the music room. Anyway. We were a small, mostly white school in a very white section of a very Black city. Were we taught that John Henry was a hero? I guess we were singing the song that heralded him as such. But I also remember feeling very sad that he’d died at the end. It seemed as though he had worked himself to death. And even though he was also very strong and courageous and determined, did he really defeat the machine if he ended up dead anyway? It was a lot for a kid to make sense of. Even as an adult, it’s still a lot to think about.
Apparently, the difference between the steam digging machine and John Henry was that the drill kept getting jammed up with all of the rock and stone. In other words, the machine needed to be cleared by hand. It wasn’t just that John Henry was strong, it was that he was able to think and problem solve as he went along. He used his brain, his strength, and what he had learned digging other tunnels.
I read once that it’s possible that John Henry was a real person. An historian found a person with the same name on a list of incarcerated men at a prison nearby where it’s believed that John Henry took on the machine. The song that I’m familiar with suggested that he worked so hard to beat the steam drill that his heart gave out. What more likely happened is that he died some time later from the cumulative effects and exposures related to digging tunnels through mountains and hillsides. Tow-may-tow. Tow-mah-tow. I guess.
I am not comparing myself to John Henry, but sometimes I feel like his ghost haunts my struggles as I try to move my thoughts from pen and paper to machine. I’m not trying to out-do my computer but I am aware of the existence of AI which has made me somehow even more desperate to assert my humanity from behind this screen.
I wrote last week about how I deleted my social media a few months ago and how it made me feel more grounded and more connected to people and in-person community. I never had comments turned on on this blog. And last week, I turned off email notifications for likes. I stopped checking stats, likes, and views. Prior to this, I had been checking often. And I felt myself starting to bend what I would think about and therefore what I would write towards getting more likes and views. In other words, I was thinking, “how can I get more – or any – likes and views on what I’m writing” rather than just writing. I was like the steam drill, getting jammed up in the very stones and rocks I was trying to remove.
The first few times I checked my email after turning off the notifications, I had forgotten that I was not longer receiving them. In my forgetting, I felt a little sad for a moment. But in the next moment, I remembered and a whole world of possibility opened up. What if I’d gotten 10,000 likes? It didn’t matter whether that was the reality or not. I could imagine it and so it was true where it mattered: in my mind.
When I imagine John Henry, I do not see him looking over at the machine. I see him focused on his task at hand. Part of me thinks that for him, it wasn’t really even a competition. It was that the steam drill inventors stuck their contraption next to him. It was doing its thing over there and John Henry was doing his over here. The company men were the ones who wanted to have a competition. For John Henry, it was just another day on the job. I wonder if he even thought it was something he was good at. Did he know he was going to become an American folk hero? Was he imagining songs being written about him? Probably not. I think he was just here to do the work. I hope to do the same.
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Rhena Writes 