The Day John Henry Died
I was chatting with my family one day and we touched on the subject of sci-fi author Robert Heinlein. I had just begun reading his quintessential work, Stranger in a Strange Land. My dad is a longstanding sci-fi buff and was a great fan of Heinlein in his younger days. While he enjoyed Stranger, he mentioned Heinlein’s earlier work Have Spacesuit, Will Travel as a personal favorite. He told us that if we wanted to understand his personal moral compass, we would find a foundational element in one of the climactic scenes within Spacesuit.
At one point, the protagonist, Kip, is stranded in an empty outpost on Pluto. His travel partner has escaped in an attempt to reach and light a beacon to alert the earth authorities of their whereabouts and imprisonment. Days pass and his partner does not return. He finally resolves to set out by himself across the unforgiving landscape of Pluto in an attempt to reach the beacon. During the journey, he can literally feel himself freezing to death; is painfully aware how close he is to losing consciousness, and his life. As he makes his way forward, he comes across the frozen body of his friend. Kip does not stop, but relentlessly presses on, never giving up, simply doing what must be done precisely because it must be done. My dad said he took this scene to heart, and still calls upon that feeling when he needs to press on, to do what must be done.
A day or two later, he forwarded me a quote from a commencement address Heinlein gave at the US Naval Academy in 1973. This particular address summarized the type of attitude he had absorbed as a young man, and which Heinlein hoped to inculcate into these future military men. The relevant portion is as follows:
“In my hometown sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.
One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her. But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman’s foot loose. No luck.
Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free… and the train hit them. The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed — and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself. The husband’s behavior was heroic… but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second, he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that’s all we’ll ever know about him. THIS is how a man dies. This is how a MAN . . . lives!”
My dad told me this is what encapsulated manhood for him. The willingness to die in order to do the right thing, because it must be done. To live for others, and in a selfless manner. Even today he said the memory of this story, and Kip’s intrepid Pluto trek across Pluto, brings a tear to his eye.
It occurred to me how often simple yet powerful stories such as these form the basis of one’s identity and moral compass. I am, by nature, a very analytical type and rarely factor much emotion into my decisions. In the most troubled times I have experienced, however, I find myself turning back to my childhood stories for guidance. When forced to retreat back to my “core self”, there is a collection of unshakeable values that were undoubtedly absorbed from the stories I heard as a child, and which ultimately inform my most momentous decisions. Phillip Pullman once advocated a literary theory of morality, namely that we subconsciously strive to live so that the characters in our childhood stories would approve of us. I tend to agree.
I wondered if I could identify a particular story that I considered formative for my own consciousness in the way the Heinlein stories did for my father. While I could point to many children’s stories that, as a whole, formed my values (Harry Potter, Narnia, etc..) these were far more complex narratives. I wanted to find a particular anecdote or fable that defined a self-value to which I would ultimately turn. The story I came up with, and I can’t recall precisely where I first came across it (probably on a PBS “Tall Tales” show as a young child), was the story of John Henry.
John Henry was a black folk hero, termed a “steel-driving man” in the original song commemorating his life. The steel-drivers would have been the men who carved out railway tunnels in the late 1800’s. John Henry was considered the greatest of these men.
As the industrialization of America continued, a steam-powered drilling machine was invented, in the hope of eliminating the need for large groups of laborers to drill the rock. John Henry was incensed that his work would be replaced by a machine and proposed a contest to see whether the mechanism was truly superior to his physical prowess. The bosses agreed and arranged a contest. As legend has it, John emerged victorious from the race, only to drop dead of exhaustion moments after his triumph. Lifeless but not defeated.
I realized that to me, this legend summarizes my own idea of manhood — the unwillingness to believe that human strength and ingenuity can be captured by a soulless mechanism. That identity with one’s true lifework should be worth risking life and limb. Even death would be preferable to conceding that one’s efforts were ultimately unnecessary and “overpriced”. John Henry was a unified man, unable to divide his work from his identity, and willing to prove that with his life.
By “work” I do not mean solely a literal job, in the sense of employment, but also one’s primary purpose in life. The labor of love that can only come from one’s individual soul and particular potential. The actuality of one’s true nature. To me, admitting that such a work could be replaced by an automaton is to give up on humanity.
As evidence of this feeling, look to the despair that has swept the rust belt after automation relegated the work of thousands of men to the dustbin of history. These men saw their jobs as more than simple employment — they saw them as expressions of their inner-being. To witness it wiped away by soulless appliances gutted their self-worth. Their inner-being was deemed irrelevant and overpriced. John Henry died unified, at peace. He knew that, whether or not the machine replaced him in the long run, his work was superior because of the bits of himself that were in it. His work was who he was. He was a steel-drivin’ man”, and no one would take that from him.
To me, this is how a man dies. This is how a man lives.
