Flesh, Agency, Possibility

“Put Off Death for a While and Dream”

Thomas’s Man Gone Down, like Whitehead’s John Henry Days, has at its center a deeply vulnerable man, a man trying and failing to shore up his own black privilege—though if, as we will see, Whitehead represents his protagonist’s vulnerability as structural, a function of his relationship to the shifting winds of capitalism and to his own inadvertent stumble down the historical path of racial martyrdom, Thomas writes his unnamed narrator as what seems like an isolated individual, fallen out of his history. An unemployed, unpublished writer, “broke” and in immediate need of some $12,000 to pay his sons’ private school tuition and rent the family a new Brooklyn apartment—money that would, in other words, allow his family to maintain their precarious middle-class status—his fiscal vulnerability is easily apparent.31 But this economic precarity is buttressed by other, more visceral sorts of vulnerabilities, tied to the protagonist’s race and gender and to the wounds and weaknesses of his abject black body.

Abjection is, for this character, much more than an abstraction—the first chapter of the novel reveals that the narrator was brutally raped as a seven-year-old boy in the bathroom of the Brighton Boys Club, an assault that leaves him convinced, or at least concerned, that he is “too damaged” (9). This phrase and phrasing—“I wonder if I’m too damaged”—recurs, mantra-like, throughout the novel, not only as the narrator tries and frequently fails to connect, sexually and romantically, with women—including the white, Boston Brahmin woman who becomes his wife—but also at each moment that the narrator weighs the value and meaning of his life as a twenty-first-century multiracial black man. And, indeed, the “damage” inflicted upon him by this past sexual violence is linked, in the text, directly to his racial subjectivity, imagined as “collateral damage of the diaspora” (9).

The protagonist’s various vulnerabilities—fiscal and material, corporeal and sexual, racial—work in concert in Thomas’s text to comment upon the positioning of the black and bourgeois subject in the (post-)post-soul moment, a transitional period between the post-soul and our more immediate present, what I am calling the Black Lives Matter (BLM) moment. This notion of the post-soul—which, as I noted in this book’s introduction, was coined by Nelson George and subsequently used by scholars like Bertram Ashe and Mark Anthony Neal to situate black cultural production in the decades following the end of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements—briefly gave way, after Barack Obama’s election in 2008, to the notion of the “post-racial,” which carried with it a sense that race no longer mattered, or no longer should matter, that the presence of a black man in the White House made racism an ugly anachronism. Yet by 2012 the subsequent racial backlash had led us to a new moment, the Black Lives Matter moment (and what some are calling the New Nadir). As I write, in 2018, it has become increasingly clear that the United States is in no way post-, or past, racial stratification or (especially) anti-black racism. The unwieldy language of the “post-post-soul” thus becomes particularly useful to situate Thomas’s and Whitehead’s novels, which in their fatalism anticipate our cultural transition not to the Obama era but to the BLM moment. “Post-post-soul” signals a temporal shift—the end of the post-soul moment—without insisting, as does the terminology of “post-racial,” that this ending necessarily indicates a kind of forward progress.

Both Thomas’s and Whitehead’s narratives are, at best, wary of the idea of such progress. Indeed, one of the things I posit in this chapter is that Thomas’s novel (despite the fact that it was published just prior to Obama’s historic election and the subsequent rise to prominence of the very term “post-racial”) expresses a stalwart skepticism toward the notion of racial transcendence, even as it looks somewhat askance at the ostensible terms of black racial belonging. The narrator’s multiple sites of susceptibility, the risks and weaknesses of his social position, define this ambivalent viewpoint toward race and racial belonging—vulnerability, in other words, is the fulcrum on which his sense of himself as a racialized subject precariously, but also productively, balances.

Let me return then, first, to the narrator’s fiscal vulnerability. Black Bourgeois is about the embodied conundrum of black and bourgeois subjectivity, the sense that black and middle-class subjects live within and thus must navigate the contradiction between material privilege’s concealment of the body and blackness’s reliance upon an exposed, hypervisible, racially marked body. Thomas’s text may seem a curious one to read through this larger lens because of the economic precarity of its protagonist, which would seem to obviate his status as “bourgeois”—but this vulnerability is precisely why Man Gone Down functions so appropriately as a post-post-soul narrative, one that despite its 2007 publication date speaks particularly well to the vicissitudes of the coming BLM era. In a sense, the struggles of Thomas’s narrator to stay afloat, financially, uncannily anticipate the struggles that many other putatively “bourgeois” black subjects would experience in the wake of 2008’s economic crisis and subsequent recession, fueled by a housing market collapse that disproportionately affected black homeowners, as well as a “jobless recovery” during which black rates of unemployment have remained twice as high as those of whites.32 These real-world circumstances highlight the always-already precariousness of middle-class status for black people, and so the struggles of Thomas’s narrator solidify rather than destabilize his (racialized) class positioning. This is particularly true if we consider what scholars such as Kevin Kelly Gaines and Michele Mitchell have pointed out—that middle- and upper-class status for African Americans has historically been at least partly aspirational, a matter of ideology and self-perception “in a society that relentlessly denied black Americans both the material and ideological markers of bourgeois status.”33

This is not to suggest that we can read class statically across time nor to argue that either Thomas’s narrator or real-world blacks in the first two decades of the twenty-first century face the same socioeconomic and political landscape that blacks did a century ago. It is, however, to acknowledge that the gross disparities in black and white wealth that emerge from this nation’s particular racial history persist in the present and often have material consequences even for those black Americans who have amassed significant educational and cultural capital.34 After all, Thomas’s struggling narrator is nonetheless a Harvard dropout, with a Hunter College BA and several years of doctoral study under his belt (his unfinished dissertation is titled “Eliot, Modernism, and Metaphysics”); one of the many “odd jobs” he has worked is as an adjunct lecturer of English literature.

Indeed, despite his current financial straits and undeniably working-class economic origins, it is difficult to read the narrator as anything but bourgeois, part and parcel of precisely the sort of gentrifying hordes that he claims to despise but to which he has been, until recently, in the position of reluctant insider:

“They” had always considered Claire as one of their own, and perhaps, after I became a father, they considered me that too. Somehow they let us in—they let me in. And although I don’t think that I changed a bit, we became part of the “us,” that seemingly abstract and arbitrary grouping that is able to specifically manifest itself: the right school, the right playground, the right stores and eateries, the right strollers, the right books and movies, the right politics, and the right jobs to bankroll all the rightness and distance them from asking whether it was perhaps all wrong. And yes, there were subdivisions of the us, but the only relevant divide was those who could afford to pay and those who could not—an us and a them. (122)

The narrator doesn’t think he’s “changed a bit,” yet he fits right in. While we might read this as delusion, it also suggests that those racialized markers of class aspiration in the narrator’s history (e.g., his pharmacist paternal grandfather’s origins among free, formerly landed blacks in North Carolina [56]) complicate even his sense of himself as a working-class boy, such that while his current troubles reposition him on the outside of the class-conscious “us” of his pricey Brooklyn neighborhood, the very terms of the narrator’s struggle mark him as a particular kind of bourgeois figure. In his search for a new apartment, for instance, Thomas’s protagonist (called “high-minded” and an “aesthete” by others, in not entirely complimentary ways) never entertains the idea of leaving his pricey Cobble Hill neighborhood and never seriously considers enrolling his children in public school. The story he tells—to the headmistress of his children’s school, as he pleads for leniency on the tuition bill—of his own mother lying about their address in order to get him into a better school, in “a nearby suburb that had an excellent reputation for education” (239), again speaks to a kind of class aspiration in his history. It echoes and informs his own black and bourgeois insistence on achievement for his children, particularly his “brown boy,” Cecil, who, the narrator insists, must “sit up straight, chew with his mouth closed, and display a certain amount of dignity” (153) because of the racialized judgment that awaits him.

Of course, Man Gone Down’s narrator constantly feels vulnerable to this judgment himself, a vulnerability that returns us to the question of his body. As his fiscal desperation increases, with the deadline for procuring or producing this $12,000 ever more quickly approaching, his body is increasingly at stake in his progress. His initial efforts to raise funds find him accepting a series of carpentry jobs as a day laborer, jobs that reduce him to his body, first as a “big man” (129) methodically pulverizing a concrete slab for hours at a stretch, even goaded, on a dare, into lifting a chest-sized rock over his head for the princely sum of $10 (141), and then on to another job where the finely detailed work he is assigned—sanding the grit from window trim—nonetheless culminates in a fistfight when the boss’s business partner calls him a “big nig” (280). Thus ends that precarious source of income, but the narrator’s corporeal performance is further tied to his economic fate when the lawyer acquaintance whose home he is staying in (while his wife and children spend the summer in Massachusetts with his wealthy mother-in-law) invites him to play in a high-stakes golf game with a couple of colleagues.

The narrator’s athletic performance on the golf course is fraught with risk—it has the potential to win him the money he needs but also to take everything he has. His first swing, which he believes, “if it is bad, will be [his] last” (366), hits true, and the ball “is like a supersonic missile, ripping the air,” again putting his body, his black body, on the line; as he notes: “My people were on that ball” (367).35 But the text doesn’t allow for either a simple or a simply triumphant physical victory, in part because he is more than his body’s brute power. Considering the irony of his competitor’s physical weakness compared to his strength, he thinks, “I outweigh him by fifty pounds—so whose failing is it that I’m tyrannized by his credit cards and his titles? . . . Somebody, some martyr wannabe, raised me right, or wrong, and I’m stuck with my gut and my own head rebelling, in chorus, the refrain: Broke-ass chump” (370). Thomas offers us pointed irony here, given the narrator’s own expressed disdain for “black entrepreneurship” (109)—his musing, early on in the text, that “If you and yours have been exploited for capital, then why, in turn, would you covet that capital. . . . As though freedom had a price that could be expressed monetarily” (109–10). Perhaps freedom does not, but in the “broke-ass chump” moment on the golf course, the narrator seems to acknowledge the ways that financial and social capital—in this case, the “credit cards and . . . titles” that “tyrannize” him—nonetheless operate as markers for status and respect. His belief, however reluctant, in the legitimacy of this link between capital and status is what obviates the possibility of his body outweighing, or literally outclassing, his competitor.

The text also undercuts a simple bodily triumph because the very body that might lead the protagonist to victory contains within it such abjection, that “damage” that he has ruminated on for much of the novel and that is finally narrated to us, in detail, on the golf course. I want to consider just a portion of that scene, which spans a couple of pages in the novel—specifically, the passage in which Thomas’s narrator links his sexual violation to racial abjection, not coincidentally in the moment when he believes he’s lost the game, lost the bet, the moment before his precarious redemption, a redemption that is itself based in deception and (therefore) risk:

Everything you ever were will gush from you through a breach, and everything you would have been will be gone. The tear in your anus a symbol denoting the eternal, fathomless gap. No one has ever reached that. I know no one ever will. The scarred brow, stigmata to remind you and them that you will never be whole. And I know it’s so feeble, but I wish it would all go away—but it is me: the line of Ham, the line of Brown, the crooked soul finger, the jagged keloid scar that everyone eventually points to. I wish I would go away, but I shoot through everything—the tree, the dappling on the log, the voices that seem to rise up out of the bay. Everything begs for meaning, for origin, for redemption, and I can’t do it. I know that I’m too damaged. I’ve seen signs and confirmations—evil, chaos. Never good. Never a sign of pure, lasting, invulnerable good. (375)

I want to read this moment, in this scene, against two other moments near the end of the novel. The first is the protagonist’s final conversation with his mentor, his insistence that despite “their” best efforts, no one could ever make him assimilate, “civilize” him (399). For him, “that is the heart of resistance—holding out for the good: That is what I always thought it was to be black, other, or any different title I can paste on myself” (399). There is a tension here, almost an opposition, between the racial abject who believes his “damaged” body and spirit exclude him from “pure, lasting, invulnerable good” and the racial subject who insists upon “holding out for the good,” who sees his ability to resist the imposition of a “civilizing” social hierarchy as the very site of his blackness, his Otherness—the site of his own power.

Yet there is also a sense in this passage that the goal of those “civilizing” forces may be precisely to reach into black abjection and subdue it, to smooth over and conceal, if certainly not to heal, the “eternal, fathomless gap.” The fact, then, that “no one has ever reached that” and that “no one ever will” speaks to an unassimilable power at the center of the protagonist’s (abject) black body, an unassimilable power at the figurative center of blackness, what Darieck Scott calls “blackness in what we could think of as a fundamental or ontological or existential mode.”36 Scott writes, further:

Though sexuality is used against us, and sexual(ized) domination is in part what makes us black, though sexuality is a mode of conquest and often cannot avoid being deployed in a field of representation . . . as an introjection of historical defeat, it is in and through that very domination and defeat also a mapping of political potential, an access to freedom.37

If, as Scott’s words here suggest, there is a black power in abjection, then that power lies not in a “pure” or “invulnerable” good but in the sort of good that comes from insistence upon and acceptance of the impure, the “crooked” and “jagged” markings on and maneuverings of the body, a body that is supremely vulnerable and “will never be whole” (Thomas 375).

The narrator of the novel seems not to believe in this power, however. Indeed, in concert with the refrain of “too damaged” throughout the novel, another recurrent motif is the notion of his thwarted call to lead “his people,” a call that is repeatedly framed as dependent upon not just his intellect but his bodily wholeness: “I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence and without physical deformity, and therefore I should lead my people. It didn’t work out that way” (199). This language sardonically points to how low the bar might actually be set for self-appointed black male leadership—“above-average” intelligence and simple lack of “deformity” read as perhaps the bare minimum of qualifications for such a role, in contradistinction to the far more elusive and esoteric quality of “charisma” (pace Erica Edwards) that we might expect. It is also worth noting that the poverty (“a poor black boy”) of the charismatic male leader is built into this description by the narrator, again gesturing toward the idea that a bourgeois black person is distanced from racial authenticity by class privilege. The narrator, then, fails in his attempts to meet these requirements on multiple levels—as I note, his relationship to poverty is contested throughout the novel (he describes his adolescent self as a “newly suburbanized black boy” [158]) and especially once he has married a white woman from a wealthy family and joined the Brooklyn elite. Perhaps most important, however, this failure—particularly in the narrator’s eyes—relates to the ways his own racialized abjection, which centers on his violated body, seems to undercut his call to leadership precisely because it replaces the absent physical deformity with a much more profound existential wound.

The second moment I want to consider in concert with the scene of the narrator’s violation returns us to the so-called post-racial. In the final pages of the novel, as he dozes on a dark Greyhound bus on the way to his family, Man Gone Down’s protagonist dreams of an exchange he had with his father as an adolescent—his father asks him whether he has a girlfriend, and expresses concern when he says, “the girls at school are rich and white, Dad . . . [and] I’m not” (421). His father “tried to show me something by slowly gesturing in front of his face with his hands: the size and shape of his idea. . . . ‘I believe . . . in a wider society . . . not whiter, a wider one’” (422). This is perhaps the novel’s conception of, or concession to, the notion of a post-racial world. Yet this “wider society,” in the narrative, is a social possibility that stands in deliberate opposition to a fantasy of race-neutral color blindness—“not whiter, [but] wider.” It points, instead, to a kind of social expansiveness, enabling the vulnerable blackness that “shoot[s] through everything” to coexist with, indeed to produce, something more, a “larger hope and love, waiting to be reborn,” an “imagined” illumination that is “real, consuming, sacred” and that, as Thomas’s protagonist notes, “leads me to other things I can really touch: my few friends, here and gone, my children, and my wife” (425). This emphasis on the materiality of human connection may resist “the burn of shame” (425), but it also reveals the impossibility of any “pure, lasting, invulnerable good,” because that good seems to depend upon the narrator’s physical presence, his ability to “really touch” these links to a wider world—and his presence is one that the text has already outlined as precarious and temporary.

Thus the narrator’s resistance is not, or not merely, to “civilizing” forces but to the death that he knows awaits him as a black subject. Yet if this novel rejects the teleology of racial progress by undercutting the notion of the narrator as leader “of [his] people,” it also undercuts the efficient cruelty of black death, and its inevitability, simply via the narrator’s refusal. The narrator well understands his socially ordained fate—“I’d already considered my experience and already understood on some basic level that things weren’t going to work out, that I was, in every sense of the phrase, born to lose, that the day when people like me, whatever and whomever they may be, win wouldn’t be a good day for others” (208–9)—and this passage, in particular, foreshadows his ill-gotten victory on the golf course, a victory he reaches only by cheating and deceiving his competitors. Yet the text has already made clear that the narrator is “born to lose” precisely because of the same social forces (namely, race and class) that enable certain others always to win at his expense; the narrative thus seems to suggest, through the narrator, a means of maneuvering past this fate, however temporarily.

Describing a conversation with his wife in which the two consider alternatives to their current dilemma (“private or public, New York or elsewhere, and can we afford to live in a town that has good public schools” [68]), the narrator notes:

And then I tell her something about my past, that there weren’t any ski trips or beaches or whatever people do to luxuriate and that the only thing I came out of those years with intact was the dim notion that I wasn’t quite ready to resign myself to any fate prescribed for me because of melanin or money—that I’d put off death for a while and dream. (68–9)

Lacking the privilege to “luxuriate,” the narrator’s only souvenir from his childhood is his “intact” spirit of refusal, his ability to “put off death” and imagine something other than his prescribed fate. The question of choice looms large here, both in relation to the narrator’s racialized destiny and his imagined potential as a racialized subject.

The narrator’s position within the arc of (black) progress, his sense of himself “as a future leader of [his] people” (201), brings with it a breathtaking burden of scrutiny and responsibility, not to mention competing alliances:

I was born a poor black boy of above-average intelligence, and therefore as a future leader of my people I was given the light for me to keep—not to let shine but to hold on to in the darkness like a star shrouded by night’s sky cloak until I was ready to reveal it. But it’s a strange thing to go through life as a social experiment: promethean metaphors; this school and that school; this test and that test; Moses and Jesus and Martin and Malcolm; Socrates to Baldwin; Shakespeare to Dylan; Jeremiah and the community; community centers; marches, church basements, and city hall stairs; and the good white schools with the good white people. (201)

The narrator, comparing himself as potential leader to everyone from Jesus to Malcolm X, and pointing out the complementary (or contradictory) social training of the cultural mulatto that would yield knowledge spanning from “Socrates to Baldwin,” emphasizes that his status as “social experiment” is at least as much about his begrudging acceptance in white spaces as it is about his link to the black community. Yet after a group of white boys taunt him because his mother is “funny looking” (199), the narrator’s “choice” to react violently, to channel his longtime “rage held in waiting . . . via [his] fist into that little pink face” (200), means that “all promises and contracts were cancelled” (201). His access to the “good white schools [and] good white people” is immediately revoked, revealing the precarity—indeed, the preordained defeat—built into the position he ultimately loses.

It is perhaps not surprising that the novel narrates this first explosion, and expulsion, in such close detail and then glosses over a similar but arguably much more serious incident, the confrontation that gets the narrator kicked out of Harvard (150). The narrator is assaulted by a police officer and dares to resist; while the dean who decides his fate focuses on the fact that he “hit a police officer” (149), the narrator’s revelation that his own arm is in a sling and that his “collarbone was broken” (149) suggests a much different explanation for the confrontation, one rooted in the police officer’s violence, a violence seemingly invisible to “Dean Ray, the white-haired jowl beast” who refuses to help the narrator. Instead, “the old world had regarded the promise of the new—he looked at me like he had won. One more dumb nigger down” (150). Here, with another reference to the narrator’s racialized “promise,” the narrator’s expulsion from Harvard returns us to that first expulsion, the one triggered when his angry childhood self punches a taunting white boy in the face.

What most interests me about both of these moments is the refusal contained in even the narrator’s seemingly involuntary reaction, a refusal, in this case, to do the socially acceptable thing and swallow his rage. This rage is depicted in the text as an internal “locomotive,” the violence of which must always be borne by its occupant, no matter how much it makes him suffer. The narrator tells us:

Most people don’t understand, or have never experienced rage. It isn’t singular, random, episodic. It’s cumulative, with a narrative thrust like a black-iron locomotive. It’s always there or on its way, started initially by some unseen engineer, some fireman wraith endlessly shoveling endless coal into the fire. Hot locomotive rage. Inexorable. And you can keep switching that train, switching it, keep it on the long runs of rail through your wastelands until one day when that rage is closing in, you don’t switch. You let it run. (200)

In its description of the narrator’s black interior as his “wastelands,” this passage tells us something about the embodied costs of blackness, the way a lifetime of exclusion and mistreatment take their toll. And the repeated internalization of the consequences of such experiences breaks the individual who bears it—the rage circulating “through your wastelands” suggesting a kind of internal destruction of the subject, the self sacrificed on the altar of keeping the peace, protecting those “good white people” from facing the consequences of their innocence.

We might also think of this description, however, of the “inexorable” locomotive, as an equally useful metaphor for black death and its inevitability. If death, too, is a train “always there or on its way,” then the best one can do, in the narrator’s estimation, seems to be to put off the inevitable, to seize, however briefly, what is always a contingent and provisional reprieve. Later in the novel the narrator recalls the words of his only black friend, Donavan, a playwright and former basketball star who had had a schizophrenic break and now “roam[ed] the streets of Lower Manhattan and south Brooklyn” (28), his body ravaged by psychotropic medication. In the voice of his unnamed narrator, Thomas writes: “Donovan once said that our action is our choice, our fate made by our own hands. I choose not to be me. I choose not to be afflicted, not to bear witness” (275–56). This is a choice that seems impossible, not only because the narrator seems irrevocably tied to himself, making “I choose not to be me” a declaration absurd on its face. The choice is also impossible because it rejects both the promise and the curse of black subjectivity—it rejects the narrator’s sense of himself as a future leader of his people as well as the failure and death that accompanies that racial positioning. In the face of such an articulation, which seems to grant the narrator as bourgeois individual the power to defy collective circumstance, it is perhaps not surprising other analyses of this text dismiss Thomas’s narrator as no different from his white class counterparts.38 Another way to understand this refusal, however, is to acknowledge it, like the narrator’s win on the golf course and the accompanying financial windfall, as precisely a temporary pause in a larger, inexorable path toward his fate.

Indeed, if we are tempted to read the conclusion of Thomas’s novel optimistically, a variation on the message that the “little, changing face of love” (428) conquers all, our knowledge, as readers, of the continuing precarity of the narrator’s circumstances makes such a reading difficult. The narrator is still unemployed, still broke; he has spent his last $50 on a bus ticket north, to reunite with his family. The apartment he has secured is theirs only for another month, until the next rent check comes due; his sons’ private school tuition paid only for the first semester. He has managed to “switc[h] that train” to another track for now, but what happens when it comes around again, and again? For another, albeit no more satisfactory answer to this question, we might now turn to Colson Whitehead’s early-twenty-first-century novel, John Henry Days, which also tackles these questions of choice and inevitability, and in ways that similarly suggest the impossibility of a reprieve from the “inexorable” fate of black death.

“As If Choices Are Possible”

The protagonist of John Henry Days, J. Sutter (his first name is never spelled out), is a freelance journalist—a press “junketeer,” in industry parlance—who racks up sponsor freebies and makes his living one travel reimbursement at a time. He is on “The List,” an ever-changing stable of freelancers who are invited, seemingly with no effort on their part, to various promotional events; the writers on the List don’t always file stories on the promoted object or place or person, but they do so often enough to maintain “the ultimate percentage . . . the unconquerable ratio of events covered to events not covered.”39 In the novel, the List is portrayed as not only an immutable force of nature—“The List had been pushed from the earth by tectonic forces” (55)—but also a preternaturally (self-)aware entity, with near-mystical knowledge of writers’ movements and their compliance, or noncompliance, with expectations:

The men and women on the List were astonished to find themselves contacted by email, having only just signed up for an email account a few days before and not having given their new email address to many people. They did not complain. It was convenient. If they wondered about the mechanism of the List, they kept their concern to themselves, or voiced it in low tones. They feared expulsion. (54)

Of course, what this description of the List highlights are the panoptical surveillance and extended disciplinary reach of the early-twenty-first-century labor market—even for freelance workers like J., who presumably do not owe allegiance to any particular employer. J. may be an “inveigler of invites and slayer of crudités, [a] drink ticket fondler and slim tipper, open bar opportunist, master of vouchers, queue-jumping wrangler of receipts” (56), but he is also a contract laborer, dependent upon the List, and the access it provides, for both the freebies he accrues (which are not so much swag as alternative forms of payment) and the legitimate work he produces for publication and a paycheck. The precariousness of his economic position as a freelancer is emphasized from the moment his character is introduced. Idling in an airport on his way to his next gig, J. anxiously ponders how to swipe a discarded receipt from the floor of the terminal. This boon for him (“pure luck, a pristine receipt newly plucked from the great oak of consumption”) is quite literally another traveler’s trash: “He chides himself for waiting so long to pick it up. Why would anyone want it besides him? It is litter” (10).

J. is also “going for the record,” or as he puts it, “on a jag,” meaning he is attending a press event every day and has been for several months. J.’s trip to the small town of Talcott, West Virginia, ostensibly to cover the festival taking place there on the occasion of the unveiling of a John Henry postage stamp, is a part of this thus-far-unbroken “junket jag” (15). The “record,” set by one Bobby Figgis, extends such behavior to a full year, with disastrous consequences (“He had been devoured by pop” [111]) that turn Figgis’s name into a two-word cautionary tale. Figgis arrives at his pursuit of the “record” via an ill-advised, drunken bet with a colleague. J., by contrast, seems simply to find himself there:

He tries to remember why he started. He sees himself kissing Monica the Publicist at the Barbie event. They were on the second floor of FAO Schwarz in a display of radio-controlled toys. His hand moved down the back of her black publicity dress and he heard a whirring sound. The toys were active, autonomous rambunction, tanks mostly, with a few hot rods from the future thrown in the mix. The robots collided with each other and spun off. They ran into the bottom of shelves and got caught there, unable to understand why they could not progress. They let out whines of frustration. She bit into his tongue and he tasted his blood. The next evening he went to a TNT event for their latest Civil War movie. . . . The day after that he went to the Palladium to see the hot new band from England and the next thing he knew he was going for the record. (41–42)

J. seems to stumble inadvertently down Figgis’s path, yet the text’s juxtaposition of J.’s body with the toy robots speaks obliquely to his possible motivation. J.s humanity, and particularly his body—mortal and vulnerable in a moment of semi-public intimacy with his occasional consort, Monica the Publicist, a vulnerability made especially clear to readers as she bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood40—is in ironic contrast with the radio-controlled toys, moving both autonomously and without conscious awareness, unable to navigate the obstacle of the shelves but still emitting lifelike “whines of frustration” when they cannot advance. The toys are only the first signal, in this novel, of the deadening, “robotic” nature of contemporary labor, a transformation that shapes J.’s working life as even enterprises like journalism, once viewed as straightforwardly middle class, have become the provenance of a proverbial army (“tanks, mostly”) of contract laborers.

For J., then, going for the record is an act of defiance, or perhaps a defense of his own humanity in the face of ultimately dehumanizing working conditions—conditions that seek to turn him into a kind of machine even as his livelihood is threatened by new forms of technology. The novel, published in 2001 and set in 1996, reveals J.’s naively cavalier perspective about the internet as merely a new kind of employer:

J. hasn’t worked for the web before but knew it was only a matter of time: new media is welfare for the middle class. A year ago the web didn’t exist, and now J. has several hitherto unemployable acquaintances who were now picking up steady paychecks because of it. Fewer people are home in the afternoons eager to discuss what transpires on talk shows and cartoons and this means people are working. It was only a matter of time before those errant corporate dollars blew his way. He attracts that kind of weather. (19)

As readers, however, particularly nearly two decades after the novel’s publication, we are aware of how the expansion of the web has shrunken and transformed print journalism, leading to the shuttering of multiple publications and the disappearance of many jobs, a process that had already begun in 2001 as Whitehead, himself a former journalist, completed the novel. The looming threat of obsolescence thus hangs over J.’s pursuit of the record, the “competition between him and himself. Or him and the List. Depended on how you looked at it” (233) that he initiates by pursuing Bobby Figgis’s feat—if not also his fate, a point to which I will return later.

In this J.’s efforts parallel the other central figure in the novel, John Henry himself, who in Whitehead’s hands steps out of the realm of myth and becomes just another man (indeed, “nothing but a man” [101]),41 born into slavery and working, post-Emancipation, for the railroad as a “driver”—meaning someone who hammers a drill bit into bare rock in order to create a hole large enough for dynamite, which then advances the train tunnel deeper into the mountain. John Henry in John Henry Days is an extraordinary laborer, one who earns the most pay because he works the hardest and fastest, even as his labor is understood to be part and parcel of an expendable post-Emancipation black workforce that exists to be exploited (“There was no shortage of niggers” [86]). J., too, is both exceptional in his ability to make a modest living from the “deep abstraction” of freelance journalism (135) and just another anonymous worker, fungible part of a larger system of exploitable labor—he and his publicist girlfriend “cog and flywheel” (221) in the machine of pop. And for both characters, J. and John Henry, the impending doom under which they work is more than figurative, as the question of their labor’s obsolescence is accompanied by the imminent threat of injury and death.

In John Henry’s case, the grueling nature of the work itself presents the threat; we are introduced to his character just as the thundering blow of his sledgehammer has shattered the hand of a young boy, an inexperienced kid who had been filling in for John Henry’s usual “shaker,” a kind of assistant to the driver who “had to twist the bit between blows to loosen the dust in the hole and keep the bit level for the next blow” (83). Yet the boy whose hand is destroyed (“not the first [John Henry] had maimed” [84]) is, more than mere casualty, a harbinger for the destructive fate that awaits John Henry himself, a death both signaled and momentarily forestalled by each death that precedes it:

Yesterday a blast in the Western cut shook out a large section of the arching in the east heading, and a stone from the cave-in crushed the skull of one of the drill runners. . . . They buried him with the rest down the hill. No one knew if he had any family. [John Henry] saw the light swimming in the gloom and as he stepped out of the tunnel he felt like Jonah stepping from Leviathan’s belly. He knew the mountain was going to get him but the Lord had decided it would not be this day. (85)

The mythology of John Henry suggests a man who is born knowing he would die as a result of his labor—labor that, despite his extraordinary strength, is infinitesimal in the face of the mountain’s colossal size, and is also expendable, even ultimately obsolete, within the sphere of industrial capitalism.

While it may seem an exaggeration to parallel the dangerous circumstances under which a nineteenth-century steel driver and ex-slave worked with the relative comfort and ease of a late-twentieth-century junketeer, wrapped from head to toe in free clothing and consuming, gratis, “five proud slabs of prime rib” from the buffet table, Whitehead does exactly this, highlighting the physical perils of J.’s version of contract labor by juxtaposing the lyrics of the “Ballad of John Henry,” sung by a local boy at the press dinner, with J.’s silent choking on an errant bite of beef, a “stern and vengeful plug of meat” (76). J.’s near-death experience at the banquet is presaged—albeit comically—by the experience of his junketeer colleague One Eye, who “had been blinded in a tragic ironic quotes accident a few years before”:

The bartender yelled out last call for the open bar, and One Eye jumped up on instinct, just as the freelancer [standing above him] punctuated his clever description by forming air quotations with the index and forefingers of his hands. . . . The force of the irony, coupled with One Eye’s eager and frantic upward movement, drove the freelancer’s pincer fingers deep into the junketeer’s eye socket. (52)

This scene, like many others in the novel, is openly humorous, yet One Eye’s injury and subsequent disability are real and motivate One Eye’s own symbolic attempt to “beat” the List, in his case by deleting his name (127).

J.’s choking incident is narrated with far more gravitas, however, as the italicized lyrics to the ballad detailing the John Henry myth frame and highlight J.’s imminent death:

Whitehead’s narrator suggests J.’s jaded indifference to both the poignancy of the song’s content and the boy’s gorgeous singing voice, which has given the rest of the banquet room pause. The other diners are “enraptured, all of them, openmouthed in beatitude and slack in delight at the nimble phrasings of the boy. Except for J. J. attacks the prime rib” (76). J.’s lusty consumption of the meat is fueled by his junketeer precarity—“he doesn’t know what time he’ll eat tomorrow and he needs the meat” (76)—and so this precarity leads directly to the far more urgent precarity of choking, as the “plug” of meat “catches in his throat. He can’t breathe” (76).

As J. makes this realization the narrative shifts back to the John Henry ballad, further highlighting the laborer’s futile competition with the steam drill and its foreordained mortal consequences: “He said, ‘I will beat that steam drill down / Or hammer my fool self to death’” (76). The implication of this line—that John Henry’s own choice to challenge the stream drill, no matter how constrained a “choice” it may have been, is the reason he will die—is paralleled directly with J.’s decision to pursue the record, a similarly constrained “choice” that has led him to what appears to be the moment of his own death: “What’s this guy singing? He’s choking on the stubborn plug of meat. John Henry, John Henry. He works on the C&O Railroad. He pushes puff, he is going for the record” (77). The slippage between the two “he”s in these lines suggests a continuity, if not contiguity, between John Henry’s and J.’s stories, their mutual proximity to death uniting the two men across time, and in space.

Indeed, J.’s rapid-fire thoughts as his brain is denied oxygen return again and again to his death’s inevitability, which he situates in his “Southern” location: “I’m a sophisticated black man from New York City and I’m going to die down here” (77), he notes, going on to rail, “This place will fucking kill him. He should have known better. A black man has no business here, there’s too much rough shit, too much history gone down here. The Northern flight, right: we wanted to get the fuck out. That’s what they want, they want us dead. It’s like the song says” (78–79). J.’s abrupt invocation of the John Henry song here is another moment of the text paralleling John Henry’s and J.’s narratives, as J. ascribes both his own and John Henry’s bodily vulnerability to an undefined but presumably white, Southern “they” who “want us dead.” In fact, the conclusion of this scene—just before J. is rescued by (white) stamp collector Alphonse Miggs, who has himself traveled to the John Henry Days festival, handgun in tow, to make a violent statement about his own social precarity—connects both J. and John Henry to a much larger history of black death at white hands:

He jumps out of his seat. My eyes must be popping out my head like some coon cartoon. His hands point to his throat. Can’t these people see what’s going on? The boy keeps singing. The pain is in his throat, around his throat and he would like them to make it stop. All these crackers looking up at me, looking up at the tree. Nobody doing nothing, just staring. They know how to watch a nigger die. (79)

Invoking the act of lynching with references both to his throat and to “the tree,” these lines simultaneously invoke the lynching photograph—which invariably documents white spectators in close proximity to a hanging black corpse, their faces calm, indifferent, or even gleeful at the intimate spectacle of black death.42 And Whitehead alternates between third- and first-person narration in this passage in such a way that the final two lines of the chapter, and of this first section of the book—“Nobody doing nothing, just staring. They know how to watch a nigger die”—could be ascribed either to J. or to the disembodied voice of the narrator, giving the words a gravitas that exceeds J.’s individual desperation and bitterness as his own death approaches, and instead lends them an air of historical inevitability.

Black death may link J. and John Henry in this scene, but such death—indeed, black death as mere spectacle, emptied, in Sexton’s words, of even its power as death—appears elsewhere in the novel as well, and in each instance the narrative similarly indicts white spectators for their callousness while emphasizing the wanton sacrifice of black flesh.43 J.’s fellow junketeer, for instance, Dave Brown, describes being at the Rolling Stones’s 1969 free concert at the Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco and witnessing the murder of a young black man who was in attendance. His narrative is clearly based on the real death of black concert attendee Meredith Hunter, who was beaten and stabbed to death by Hells Angel Alan Passaro, an incident inadvertently captured on film in footage for the documentary Gimme Shelter. Brown narrates this death as a “sacrifice”:

The Angels did what the people demanded, even if they didn’t know they demanded it. . . . [O]nstage the Stones played “Under My Thumb,” a song about getting over on your girlfriend, to hundreds of thousands while the Angels performed their sacrifice.

“Sacrifice to what?”

“To the culture. The kids had brought a new thing into the world, but they hadn’t paid for it yet. It had to be paid for.” . . .

“So this guy is like the Crispus Attucks of the seventies.” (99)

This theme of sacrifice threads throughout Whitehead’s novel—notes Talcott local Josie, “Pain is a down payment on happiness. You pay for happiness with grief in this world” (363)—and each time someone’s life must be sacrificed for a seismic cultural shift, the life lost is black. As Tavia Nyong’o notes of Crispus Attucks—a man of (at least partial) African descent who was the first person killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770 and who is widely understood to be the first American casualty of the Revolutionary War—“Attucks’s contested legacy to this day continues to touch upon issues that strike at the heart of American identity and its racial unconscious.”44 Through the reference to Attucks, Whitehead’s text reiterates that black flesh and black death have symbolic meaning in the United States, that black bodies are those repeatedly “sacrificed” to what might be called national progress.

It is with this context in mind—of black death and black bodily sacrifice in the name of “progress”—that we must consider the ambiguous death that hangs over the novel, which suggests, although it never directly states, that J. does indeed lose his life on this particular press junket. Early in the novel we learn that the second day of the “John Henry Days” celebration has been marred by violence, initially and erroneously described by a distraught college intern as the work of a postal worker, who “opened fire Sunday afternoon on a crowd of people gathered for the unveiling of a new postage stamp, critically wounding three people before being shot and killed” (26). Although the text reveals much later that the shooter was actually the disaffected stamp collector Alphonse Miggs, who, rather than opening fire on the crowd shoots up into the air, and that those wounded or killed were shot by a police officer as he tried to subdue Miggs (367), one detail from this earliest scene is accurate. The intern sees one of the casualties for herself: “For a second, the men standing over the journalist part and she can see his bloody chest and slack mouth” (25). Later in the novel, a casual conversation between post office higher-ups reiterates that those shot were “members of the media” (370) and reveals that not one but two of them have died:

The question of whether one of these dead journalists is J. thus colors the entire text, and Whitehead gives us clues throughout that point both toward and away from this possibility. Not only does Josie, for instance, co-owner with her husband of the Talcott Motor Lodge, believe that J.’s room is haunted by a ghost, “attached to the mountain by its mountain death” (105), but she frets, before the event and tragedy take place, “This annual fair, the John Henry museum when they complete it. . . . It is a new beginning but by her sights, it hasn’t been paid for yet. There’s some blood to be paid” (363). As readers, we are forced to wonder whether J.’s blood—his death—is the so-called payment for this particular instance of “progress.”

Indeed, J.’s near-demise at the banquet, death by prime rib, seems to foreshadow his ultimate fate: “He’s going to die on a junket? This is some far-out shit, this is a fucking ironic way to go” (76). One Eye, preoccupied by his own desire to remove his name from the List, insists about the choking incident, “It was a sign, J.” (124), and when One Eye goes on to attempt to recruit J. into a quasi-legal scheme to gain access to the List, J.’s skepticism takes the form of fatalistic, racialized pessimism:

“First, we break into Lawrence’s room.”

“What?”

“To see if he has the List. We’ll hit his copy, and then we’ll hit Lucien’s.”

“I’ll be in jail and you’ll get off scot-free,” J. says, backing away. “White people can get away with that, not black people. Not down here. We get caught, if they don’t string me up, I’ll get railroaded for sassing the judge or something. You’re laughing but I’m not joking. I’ll be laying asphalt with the work gang.”

“This isn’t Mississippi in the fifties, J.,” One Eye says, cocking his head.

“It’s always Mississippi in the fifties,” J. answers. (127)

Arguably, J.’s sense here that time—progress—moves differently for black people, that in some crucial way he and other blacks are always trapped in the most threatening and violent circuits of this nation’s history, is ironic given his bourgeois upbringing.45 He had been, the text tells us, “raised in a cocoon, programmed for achievement” (175), and “his parents were in on it, J. had come to realize, by their deep middle-class sin” (171). J. embodies the black and bourgeois dilemma that I have outlined, the tension between the hypervisible, hypervulnerable racialized body, for whom it is “always Mississippi in the fifties,” and the covering protection (the “cocoon”) of middle-class status.

This status, for J., spans at least two generations, as the text makes it clear that J.’s father, Andrew Sutter, grew up on Strivers Row in Harlem (270). The revelation of this fact—in a chapter that describes Andrew’s sister, Jennifer, discovering the sheet music for the John Henry ballad in a corner store in the early 1950s, only to have it thrown away as “gutter music” by their status-conscious mother—makes J.’s ancestral relationship to privilege abundantly clear. Yet the text marks even his grandmother’s bourgeois pretensions as the product of, and perhaps as an overzealous reaction to, histories of racial oppression:

“When we walk to church on Sunday morning down Broadway,” her mother said, cheeks red in her light brown skin, “you see the dirty men with their shirts all out their pants, drinking the devil’s liquor and stinking to high heaven when good people are going to church. Do you know what they’ve been doing all night?”

“No ma’am.” . . .

“Staying up all night drinking and listening to music like this!” her mother screeched. “Because they are good-for-nothing niggers who don’t care about making a better life for themselves. They want to stay up all night and carry on and pretend that just because they don’t have to pick cotton they have no more duties to attend to. We can’t do anything about good-for-nothing niggers who don’t want to take their place in America, but we can watch ourselves. This is Strivers Row. Do you know what striving means?”

“It means that we will do our best,” Jennifer recites.

“It means that we will survive.” (279–80)

The invocation of picking cotton so close on the heels of that American strivers’ maxim, of “making a better life for” oneself, suggests that the history of slavery in the United States gives particular shape to black bourgeois notions of self-improvement and collective “duties.” And Mrs. Sutter’s final commentary on the meaning of “striving,” asserting that to strive is not simply to “do our best” but in fact to “survive,” suggests, too, that bourgeois striving is a matter of life and death—the moral and sartorial rectitude of the Sepia Ladies Club providing the thinnest but most essential of barricades between the Sutter family and the (social) death embodied by the black underclass.46 That this boundary is imagined, and imaginary, the protections it offers illusory and insubstantial, should perhaps go without saying, but it certainly takes on the contours of a real thing within Mrs. Sutter’s anxious and status-conscious rant.

This is the “cocoon” of privilege into which J. is born—a cocoon that is also a prison, as his desire to flee from it makes clear. He hopes to make his escape from his parents’ world in order to “take his place” in the “unruly” machinery of the city (175). Yet his first foray into the working world exposes J. to the callousness of whites—even presumably progressive whites whom he admires—toward black bodies. A flashback to college-age J. depicts his awestruck, silent attendance at his first editorial meeting at the Downtown News (a thinly veiled Village Voice), where white journalists cavalierly wordplay with the name of Eleanor Bumpurs47 in order to come up with a catchy title for their front-page story on her death at police hands:

[J.] sat along the back wall, on the floor. . . . He did not intend to speak unless addressed. He listened to the old hands of the Downtown News to see how it worked.

“Bumpurs—I’m trying to riff on that.”

“Cops and Bumpurs. Do the Bump. Bump me in the morning and didn’t just walk away.”

“Bump, jump, lump, stump . . .”

“The cops knock on the door and—”

“Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

“Maybe we should focus on the cops.”

“Knock knock. Who’s there? Cop. Cop who? Cop come to kill ya.” (176)

This flippant extemporizing on the part of the “old hands” continues, in the novel, for three excruciating pages, as Whitehead allows us, as readers, to experience the meeting’s tone through J.’s silently observing eyes; throughout, the dialogue makes clear that Bumpurs herself barely registers as a human being to the writers and editors in the room, one of whom repeatedly asks his colleagues, mid-discussion, “Anyone see [popular 1980s sitcom] Cheers last night?” (177).

We come to understand that apart from J., everyone in the room is white, because when they begin casting about for “someone” to “write a sidebar over the weekend. To get the black angle” (178) their attention eventually turns to J. as the only apparently black face:

“I don’t know, what about our boy Malefi?”

“He hasn’t been returning my phone calls lately.”

“Why not?”

“Too busy?”

“What, busy changing his name again? What about the guy who wrote the graffiti piece two weeks ago. We put it on the cover. Is he . . .”

“You mean is he . . .”

“Yeah, is he black, Afro-American, what do you think I mean?”

“No. He’s a professor at NYU.”

Jimmy Banks looked over at J. J. had his arms drawn around his knees in a cannonball position. “You,” Banks pointed. “What’s your name?” (178)

The paper’s usual native informant, Malefi, is unavailable; by placing the phrase “our boy” in the editor’s mouth, Whitehead cleverly slips between the condescension implicit in white male appropriation of urban slang and a much older usage of “boy” that highlights whites’ infantilization of and sense of ownership over black men. And the News’s other nearby “expert” on African American cultural production, in this case hip-hop/graffiti, turns out to be a “professor at NYU,” a fact that is presented as prima facie evidence for why he, of course, is not black. This leaves J. as a possible alternative—but once he is revealed to be only an “intern,” not a staff writer, the editors’ interest in him and in “the black angle” vanishes, as it is suddenly “too late for a sidebar anyway” (179). J. may recede back into anonymity in this moment, but the lesson of the scene—whites’ callousness toward black life—continues to circulate in the novel.

In addition to the notion of black fleshly sacrifice, John Henry Days is preoccupied with the question of choice and agency and the way choices are circumscribed by life circumstances—a notion that is understood very differently by J. and his white colleagues. This is evident in the junketeers’ discussion of John Henry:

“I’m all into the prophecy thing, you understand,” Frenchie grunts, his arms splayed in a gesture of Gallic expansiveness. . . . [“]What I don’t get is, if you read the horoscope and the experts tell you to be careful about financial transactions or look out for Tauruses, what do you do? You keep the purse strings tight and look out for those horns. John Henry has a premonition that Big Bend is going to be the death of him. So you avoid Big Bend Tunnel. Meet a guy named Benjamin Tounelle, he’s a big guy, you avoid him too. He could have avoided the whole situation if he listened to his horoscope.”

“There goes Frenchie again, bringing the topic around to fate versus free will.”

“Everything’s a think piece to this guy.”

“Think he had a choice?”

“We all have choices. Look at that atrocious shirt you’re wearing, J.—that’s a choice.” (351)

The suggestion from Frenchie that John Henry could have done things differently prompts a telling question from J.—“Think he had a choice?”—that is met with teasing derision, but Frenchie’s response, “We all have choices,” also indicates a fundamentally different perspective on “choice” than that expressed by any of the black characters in the novel. For those characters, including J., agency is, at best, heavily circumscribed by one’s life chances, which are heavily circumscribed by race—and each “choice” available fits within a preordained journey that ends with, or perhaps is defined by, fleshly vulnerability and mortality.

In a chapter written from the perspective of a 1930s blues singer named Moses, for instance, recording a version of the John Henry ballad as a “race record,” the question of both John Henry’s and Moses’s choices is linked to the racialized, sure knowledge of impending death:

Goodman says, how about we start with that John Henry thing you did last night?

You like that.

It had a nice mood.

Moses wouldn’t call it nice. He’d call it something else. Most John Henry songs he’s heard from people, they tend to talk about the race and the man’s death. He sang a version like that a few times but it never sounded right to him. The words “nothing but a man” set him thinking on it: Moses felt the natural thing would be to sing about what the man felt waking up in his bed on the day of the race. Knowing what he had to do and knowing that it was his last sunrise. Last breakfast, last everything. Moses could relate to that, he figured most everyone could feel what that was like. Moses certainly understood: that little terror on waking, for half a second, am I going to die today. Am I already dead. (260)

Even though Moses goes on to ruminate that it was one thing to feel such fear momentarily and quite another “to know for sure, that today is your last day” (260), the power of his rendition of the John Henry ballad seems to lie in the way “most everyone” can access this feeling of being circumscribed, marked, and manipulated by a final inevitability: “What a dead man thinks” (260). This category, “most everyone,” however, clearly does not extend to the white man paying Moses to record the side, whose bland description of the song, “It had a nice mood,” signals his inability to share in the racialized identification with John Henry’s lack of choice, his fearful proximity to death.

J., however, is deeply aware of this proximity—even as he is also aware of the ways that privilege both protects and diminishes him. When he enters the abandoned tunnel where legend suggests John Henry worked (before Amtrak built a newer, larger tunnel next to it), he is acutely aware of the ways that his version of labor quite literally pales in comparison to John Henry’s. J. is in the tunnel with Pamela, a black woman from New York whose late father was a John Henry collector and zealot; she is in Talcott for the celebration both to decide whether to donate her father’s collection to the John Henry museum and to bury his remains near his idol’s. Pamela, who over the course of the weekend becomes a love interest for J., asks him, “What do you think it looked like to him . . . before he was an inch in, before he started. He had a big mountain in front of him” (320). This scene returns to and extends a moment nearly a hundred pages before, when J. wonders idly as he waits outside for his ride, “The mountain is in front of him. Maybe it is Big Bend. He thinks about what it must have been like before the road made it just another hill, to look at it and think, I’m going through this mountain. Then this line of thought evaporates and he half wishes he had a beer” (236–37). J.’s assessment of himself, in this scene, is as a sort of failure or disappointment: “Under the word heroic draw a line and list all the meanings. He doesn’t have a single one in him” (237). An antihero in the most literal sense, he cannot imagine John Henry’s perspective, cannot disentangle himself from the modern technology and distractions that make up his freelance life—represented in the chapter by a running, italicized litany of voice messages from the business offices of various publications, primarily quibbling over payment or small semantic choices in his copy (“We’re going with dimwit one word. One word dimwit. Call if there’s a problem” [237]).

In this later moment, however, perhaps because of Pamela’s presence—her proximate black womanhood serving as, in Bradley’s words, “the particularly vexed ‘subaltern’ figure through which we might think and conceptualize the epistemic injustice and violence that constitute and limit our thinking about both blackness and gender”—J. is able to delve more deeply into the question.48 His thoughts as he stands in the tunnel with her immediately veer toward the mortal, corporeal dangers John Henry would have faced:

He remembers the stories of accidents from the p.r. packet, where the miners were caught by cave-ins, crushed or trapped by rock and left to asphyxiate. He read about a train that got stuck in this tunnel during a cave-in or mechanical failure and people suffocated on the engine smoke. After last night he can imagine suffocating in here, choking on soot. This feeling seeps into him and resounds against his bones, where he can feel the angry tonnage of the mountain pressing down on his body, as if he has the mountain on his shoulders. Or he is in its fist, and it is squeezing. (320–21)

This passage is curious not only for the way J.’s awareness of the mountain as dangerous adversary is mediated through the canned narratives of the “p.r. packet” but also for how his perspective splits between that of the miner and that of the (bourgeois) passenger, both laborer and unlucky consumer “choking on soot” and left to die. The feeling of precarity that “resounds against” J.’s bones, then, that “press[es] down on his body,” is a sense of vulnerability that cuts across the contradictory positioning of the black and bourgeois subject; the mountain is a force that pierces the imagined cocoon of bourgeois safety and brings it in line with the mortal exigencies of black flesh.

For J., the clarity of this vulnerability is, ultimately, seductive. He thinks to himself, later in the same scene, “That’s how he feels now—small. Step in here and you leave it all behind, the bills, the hustle, the Record, all that is receipts bleaching back there under the sun” (321). Indeed, J.’s sense of the tunnel’s power is intimately tied to the ways that the mountain, because it promises death, dwarfs and trivializes his life’s petty concerns, simultaneously disabling the technologies that make his bourgeois comfort possible:

What if this were your work? To best the mountain. Come to work every day, two, three years of work, into this death and murk, each day your progress measured by the extent to which you extend the darkness. How deep you dig your grave. He wins the contest. He defeats the Record. This place confounds devices, the steam drill and all that follows. This place defeats the frequencies that are the currency of his life. Email and pagers, cell phones, step in here and fall away from the information age, into the mountain, breathe in soot. Unsettling but calming, too. The daily battles that have lost meaning are clearly drawn again, the opponents and objectives named and understood. The true differences between you and them. And it. (321–22)

The final lines of this passage leave these “daily battles” unmarked, but one way to read them is as racialized conflict, which loses meaning precisely because J.’s class privilege obscures the stakes of each encounter. In this reading, the “you” and the “them” could be defined as a racial self and Other, black and white, whose “true differences” are both amplified and trivialized by the mountain (“it”). Of course, because these characteristics remain unspecified in the passage, it may also be the case that the “true differences” aren’t about race at all but rather about one’s relationship to labor and to the ways that the mountain diminishes all such efforts. The clarity the mountain provides would thus ultimately be about life and death, about surviving the daily journey into the tunnel and back out again. For J., moreover, this moment of recognition while inside the mountain includes a moment of recognizing that the task he has set for himself, to beat the record, may be, ultimately, meaningless. Musing on the “decades of healing and forgetting” that have created the smooth stone walls that surround him, he wonders, “How long does it take to forget a hole in your self. He wins the contest but then what?” (322). Rather than provide an answer to this question, the text immediately presents J. with a request, from Pamela, to help her bury her father’s remains—a task to which J. agrees and which turns the book toward its ambiguously fatalistic conclusion.

The process of burying Pamela’s father—although he has been cremated and his ashes are stored in an urn, she wants to bury him, urn and all, rather than scattering his remains—proves life-altering for J. The two of them walk up the mountain together, taking turns holding the box in which the urn is stored, and trade stories about their lives. Pamela speaks of John Henry, of her father’s obsessive history with the John Henry mythology, his trips to Talcott and Hinton for nebulous research, in the process narrating his gradual estrangement from his wife and daughter: “She said her father had come down here three times. She and her mother were not invited along, nor did they wish to accompany him. . . . The third time he went she and her mother were gone” (370–71). In turn, J. tells Pamela about his efforts to go for the record, and about the List, as a prelude to describing his “strange” (371) dream of Bobby Figgis, who, in the dream, hails him on a cobblestone street, downtown, and directs him to “where he was supposed to go. His final destination of the night,” a bar inside a “beat-up metal door, above which a red light glowed” (373). Upon entering, and being greeted like a regular, “he suddenly remembered that he had been there many times before, all the time in fact, every night, and for every night after” (373).

J.’s dream suggests that his pursuit of the record can only lead him to his death—and more specifically to an eternally looping afterlife (or perhaps a hellscape, signaled by the glowing red light), in which J. walks through a superficial and empty scene, “somewhere downtown and hip” (372), guided to his final destination by an unexpectedly hale and hearty “apparition of Bobby Figgis” (372). The imagery of the dream only reinforces the sense, in the text, that the path J. is currently on mirrors Figgis’s, that J. is on track to be, like Figgis, “devoured by pop” (111). But his trip up the mountain with Pamela, where the two of them work together to dig a hole with their bare hands, suggests to him an alternative outcome, one in which his life might serve as reward instead of sacrifice, in which rather than repeat John Henry’s martyrdom, or Bobby Figgis’s, he might go on to live another day:

She asked him if he had to die to bring this weekend into being. All his life he wanted something like this weekend, a celebration of John Henry. His collection would have been a star attraction, he could have made speeches. . . . She asked him, would this have still happened, the fair, the museum, if he was still alive. Or did he have to give up himself for this to happen. The price of progress. The way John Henry had to give himself up to bring something new into the world. (378)

This passage repeats the theme of blood sacrifice that circulates throughout the novel, yet it implies that the sacrifice may have already been made, potentially liberating J. from a similar fate. While there is a slippage in the first line, with the unattributed “he” suggesting both Pamela’s father and J., as the passage continues and focuses more clearly on her father, there is a sense that his life, already over, was the payment for this weekend—and that J.’s does not have to be.

Thus J.’s odyssey up the mountain with Pamela has the potential to be lifesaving in a figurative and a literal sense. He comes to a new understanding of the possibilities of and for his life with a story that is unlike any other story he has written:

She asked him on the way down if he got his story. J. Sutter said yes. He had a story but it is not the one he planned. . . . He had put on paper some of the things she had said the day before but now he thought what happened today was the real story. It is not the kind of thing he usually writes. It is not puff. It is not for the website. He does not know who would take it. The dirt had not given him any receipts to be reimbursed. He does not even know if it is a story. He only knows it is worth telling. (387)

In addition to this revelation, which holds the promise to change the trajectory of his professional life, J. also might have been absolved of the need to die for the weekend’s festivities, to give his life to “pop”—but only if he is willing to walk away from his pursuit of the record, something that John Henry was unable to do. Thus we might ask not only whether J. is willing to resist John Henry’s (and Bobby Figgis’s) fate but also whether such resistance is possible. Pamela suggests that it is, that indeed resistance—refusal to die in a variation on the same struggles of one’s ancestors—is precisely the point of those earlier deaths: “You could look at it and think the fight continued, that you could resist and fight the forces and you could win and it would not cost you your life because he had given his life for you. His sacrifice enables you to endure without having to give your life to your struggle, whatever name you gave to it” (378). Here Pamela’s words echo a conventional progress narrative, in which subsequent generations are absolved from sacrifice by those sacrifices that came before.

The novel’s ending, however, seems to undercut the redemptive optimism represented by Pamela’s character. Indeed, not only does this novel express, via its lovingly detailed narratives of earlier players in the John Henry story, the sense that, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s words, our ancestors “were not bricks in [our] road, and their lives were not chapters in [our] redemptive history,” but the metaphor of the mountain, and specifically the journey up the mountain, actually points us to a more recent historical martyr.49 Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, on April 3, 1968, popularly known as his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, was given in Memphis one day before King was shot and killed. King’s penultimate lines use the analogy of the mountain (likely drawn from Moses’s journey up Mount Nebo in Deuteronomy) to speak to the precarity of his own life and the sense that he might not survive to see the “Promised Land” of black progress, language that has subsequently been understood as prophetic:

Like anybody, I would like to live—a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.50

As readers we are thus left to wonder whether J.’s journey up the mountain in John Henry Days is, like King’s, a way of presaging his death—allowing him a glimpse of a kind of progress, the possibility for another kind of life, while denying him the chance actually to live it. Musing, later, on “the darkness, the vastness outside the streetlight. The mountain and all that it meant,” J. cannot sleep, and when he sleeps his dreams disturb him, such that “he lay in his bed and shook” (388). The narrator acknowledges, “It was only when they were walking up the road to the graveyard that his discomfort eased. In the graveyard, with his hands in the dirt” (388). And while these lines might seem to suggest that the journey up the mountain has the capacity to save him from “the great rock within” (388), the moment they describe, “in the graveyard, with his hands in the dirt,” is also a moment of his body being in close proximity to—literally inside—a grave. Is it the dirt, then, the authenticity of physical labor, that “eases” him? Or is it literally the embodied confirmation, “his hands in the dirt,” of the affective sense that he is already dead, a dead man walking, such that his physical presence “in the graveyard” is a kind of homecoming?

Pamela presents J. with a choice: to pursue the record and beat the List, or to leave the John Henry Days festival early before the ceremony where two journalists will be shot and killed:

He had a decision to make in the parking lot. Pamela had stood before him and said to him, I’m leaving before the ceremony. When they reached the motel she said, I think I’ve done everything I needed to do. She looked into his face. The town can have it all and I’m going to take an earlier plane and go home, she said. You could leave, too, she said. (387)

What Pamela holds out to him here is more than the conventional romantic narrative resolution, a heterosexual coupling to foreclose death via the promise of reproductive futurity.51 Instead, her offer seems intimately tied to the implications of the sentences “I think I’ve done everything I needed to do” and “You could leave, too.” Pamela, carrying the financial and emotional burden of her father’s obsession with John Henry, his collection which, after his death, she put in storage along with the urn containing his ashes, has finally released the sundry items in her possession, in the process releasing the weight of her father’s life on her own. She holds out the choice she has made, to return to New York without this weight on her shoulders, to J. as an option that he, too, could exercise. And we wonder, along with J., whether he has also done everything he needed to do and whether his encounter with Pamela might lead him to another sort of to-do list other than “today’s event, tomorrow’s event and the ones after,” the press junkets that extend his labor in pursuit of the record and that “loom over him” like John Henry’s mountain (387). Could he perhaps—we wonder—turn away from this Sisyphean task, choose a trajectory for his life that doesn’t lead him to an inevitable and untimely death?

When I last taught this novel, many of my graduate students surprised me with their persistent optimism about J.’s fate, their conviction that it must have been one of the other journalists who had died in the narrative, not J., and their willingness to believe, though the text never depicts as much, that after the novel’s final page he would enter the taxi and leave with Pamela. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised—we all want to believe in the possibility of capital-p Progress, the possibility that contemporary black lives can and should be more than “people turned to fuel for the American machine.”52 It was with genuine contrition that I reminded them of the lines we all had read, lines that are not so much ambiguous as ambivalent about the fate they make perfectly clear: “There is still time. It will not take him long to get his little things together. They will wait if he asks. He stands there with the sun on his face deciding, as if choices are possible” (389). The thesis of the novel, and its tragedy, is contained in those last five words, which refuse us the possibility that J. can choose his way out of the mortality fated to him.

That the story does not end with these words, however, returns us to Williamson’s notion of black social life, “the way black people go about making themselves, both because of and regardless of the conditions of their making.”53 Referencing Sexton, Williamson positions her understanding of black social life not in opposition to Afro-pessimism but rather within its fissures, or what we might call its blind spot—its focus on blackness within “the modern world system” to the exclusion of considering “what [black] folks think about themselves.”54 Thus the final two lines of John Henry Days attend not to J.’s impending, seemingly inevitable death, even if that death has been signaled quite clearly a few lines before, but rather to the connection he has forged with Pamela on the mountain and a subsequent exchange between them:

She asked one last thing when they came down the mountain. When they came down the mountain she asked, what’s the J. stand for? He told her. (389)

These lines conceal as much as they reveal, emphasizing the depth of intimacy between J. and Pamela. We might guess, particularly given all of the parallels that the novel has set up between the two men, that the J. stands for “John,” but the text ultimately denies us this knowledge, leaving us as readers on the outside of the conversation.55 Indeed, the actual words of the exchange are not detailed here, only the fact that it occurred—she asked, and he told her. The near-chiasmic repetition of “she asked” and “when they came down the mountain” emphasizes not only the seriousness—rather than the idleness—of the question but also the importance of its timing, arriving as it does after the two have shared a moment of connection over Pamela’s father’s ashes, their “hands in the dirt” together.

Not only does their exchange undo J.’s typical position as journalist/laborer, in that J. is the subject of Pamela’s curious (social rather than investigative) questioning, but the fact that he responds to her question also suggests a higher level of connection. We might assume that a character like J. is asked not infrequently what the solitary initial of his name “stands for” and also that—given that no one in the text seems to know his given name—he typically rebuffs such questions. But when Pamela asks, after their time together, he tells her. In this, the novel suggests, finally, that optimism or pessimism may not be the point and that black life is, indeed, “lived in social death.”56 Whitehead, like Sexton, would seem throughout the novel to emphasize both the lived and the death—but in these final lines he returns emphasis to the living and reminds us, ultimately, that J.’s life matters while he lives it, no matter how (and in service to what larger struggle) it might end.