In a remote West Virginia town there’s an abandoned railroad tunnel. People say it was here that the legendary John Henry raced the stream drill, won, and then died. This part of the country is a topography of hollows and steep ridges that, in the words of Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, “unfold, one after the other, like petals in a rose.” Through the deep valleys the Greenbrier River winds to the south and west, the railroad track and state road running alongside: three parallel paths toward West Virginia’s coal country.
If you follow the river to where it runs headlong into the base of a mountain, you’d be at the Great Bend Tunnel, birthplace of the John Henry legend. On the hill above is a boarded-up caboose that once was a souvenir stand, and a bullet-dented bronze statue of John Henry, his back to the panoramic view of the river and railroad tracks below.
John Henry’s ballad has always moved me, so when I found out that the legend got its start in a real place only an hour’s drive from my father’s farm, I made plans to explore. On a gray day we followed the Greenbrier River to the rural outpost of Talcott, then made our way along the crossties toward the mountain. It’s isolated and wild down there, with towering green weeds, old whiskey and soft drink bottles, railroad spikes and sections of steel rail. From that jumble, a grizzled old man came toward us. “Y’all should stay away from there.” He nodded toward the mountain. “That place is dangerous. There’s some even claim it’s hainted.”
I could believe it. Beyond him the black mouth of the tunnel dripped with water and moss, and a heavy mist floated out. It was easy to imagine the place in 1870, alive with hammering and shouting and drilling and dynamiting. Tunnel building was dangerous work. One scholar says that hundreds of laborers may have died during its construction, and that it wasn’t uncommon to bury the nameless workers where they fell. Whether or not there are ghosts I don’t know, but there at the tunnel, history is palpable. The memory of the place never left me.
Fifteen years later, with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, I came back to Talcott to produce “a portrait of the John Henry legend and the remote community that lives in its shadow.” It was a great idea, I thought, to do an audio portrait of the social and economic conditions that gave rise to this classic story of human against forces more powerful.
It was a good idea on paper, anyway. I began to worry about the logistics: how can a stranger from California descend on this secluded community to gather intimate details of its residents’ lives? Is it even possible for an outsider to come away with an accurate portrayal?
I had another reservation. I’d come to the uneasy realization that one way to describe what I do as a radio producer is that I take things from people. I come into the lives of those I’ve never met, spend a few hours asking a bunch of questions, then walk away with their most personal stories. When I began work on “Steel Drivin’ Man,” I wanted to see if it was possible to give back to a community what I’d taken away, without making any compromises to journalistic or artistic integrity.
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In many ways Talcott is a typical southern farming town, with a history of economic difficulty and racial segregation. The railroad used to be the major employer here, but since labor has become increasingly automated over the past few decades, unemployment is high while morale and opportunities are low. There are two baptist churches, one white and one black. Most black residents now live up the hill in a section of town called “Pie Holler.” Racial conflict doesn’t tend to be overt but there’s little socializing between the races. This is the context from which John Henry emerged, a hero to black and white alike. This is the culture I hoped to describe in my radio documentary.
One July morning, I stopped to introduce myself at Dillon’s Superette, Talcott’s general store. Owner Donna Wykle has her finger on the town’s pulse. “Anyone wants to know anything… fire trucks go out, our phone starts ringing, ‘Where’s the fire truck going?’ If anybody has a wreck or if anybody is sick… you know, they’ll call here. They think we know everything.” For the next two weeks the Superette was my home base — it and the post office, Talcott’s other social center.
In my documentary work I usually set out fairly methodically to find the material I need. This time it was different. I took my time and let the day unfold at Talcott’s pace. At first, the community was politely wary of me. While I recorded a service at the white Baptist Church, the minister introduced me to the congregation. “We welcome her to our community. We don’t know just why she’s here or what she’s going to DO with this tape, but we certainly hope we’ll like it.”
I did want them to like what I’d done, but not at the expense of accuracy. Take the matter of racism. No one there openly acknowledges that it exists — in fact, they’d be likely to deny it, if you asked them. Yet there were clear divisions between the lives of black and white people there. How could I convey all of that?
I approached the subject not so much as a reporter but as an artist, weaving strands of many people’s stories into a single impressionistic landscape. An elderly man’s comment reveals more about his views than a direct factual statement could:
It’s quiet and it’s good people here. There’s a lot of colored but they’re good people. They come in here when the [tunnel-building] was going on years ago… The old generation was fine people — colored people, but they was good people.
Each person’s thoughts add dimension to the others. A great-grandmother:
Talcott has always… we had no trouble. We knew there were certain things that we were not supposed to do like go in the front door of white people’s houses. It was just accepted. But I can’t say that there was ever any real trouble.
Story upon story, a picture of the community emerges, as a schoolteacher describes the old swimming hole — once the only integrated spot in town — and an octogenarian whose family is racially mixed, concludes “I couldn’t raise up my kids to hate anybody, either side.”
Over the next two weeks I visited Talcott nearly every day. I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without help from Donna Wykle, who introduced me to dozens of people I’d never have found otherwise. I spent hours just leaning up against the Superette’s check-out counter. Sometimes I’d get an impromptu interview with a customer, or I’d meet someone who’d introduce me to her husband who would introduce me to his father who would take me on a walking tour of John Henry’s tunnel. Little by little people got used to me. Preacher Stalnaker invited me to the church picnic on the bank of the Greenbrier, where I ate pork chops and Jell-o. Like drops of rain on a window, one person led me to another, who led me to more. Without the cooperation, generosity and trust of the community, I couldn’t have proceeded.
A remarkable thing about interviewing “everyday” people is that few of them ever think they have anything worthwhile to say, yet if you happen to look in the right places, you’ll find amazing stories. 85-year-old Virginia Crockett welcomed me into her house with an apology: “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have anything useful to tell you.” I put my tape recorder away and we chatted for a while until she was ready for the interview. She was right; she had little to say about John Henry, so I asked instead about her childhood in Talcott, though I didn’t expect to use those stories in my program. “My grandparents used to live ‘way down there on the river. I remember when they put the state highway through, they blasted that place all up.”
The story had nothing to do with the John Henry legend, as far as I could tell. She continued, “It broke all our hearts to see that place go, but there was nothing we could do.” She hesitated, a memory triggered. “Come to think of it, I wrote a poem about that, a long time ago… I’d forgotten all about it.” She found the poem in a stack of yellowed papers. She read it. It was a vivid account of one family’s powerlessness in the face of technological progress: a living example of the John Henry legend. I never would have heard this poem if I’d been more exclusive in my approach to tape-gathering.
I completed the interviews and spent the next year in production. The whole time I kept in touch with my Talcott acquaintances, partly to reassure them that I wasn’t going to run off with their life stories and forget about them. That year the Greenbrier River flooded and destroyed Mrs. Crockett’s house, Donna Wykle became seriously ill, some local kids moved away for college and work, and the U.S. Postal Service released a new stamp: of John Henry, the steel drivin’ man. Pittsburgh, as a steel town, was slated to be the site of the stamp’s unveiling.
The people of Talcott were upset. Led by their postmaster Bill Dillon, they fought back, arguing that the John Henry stamp should be dedicated in Talcott and bear Talcott’s postmark. It was a lengthy battle, but in the end the U.S.P.S. agreed, and Talcott got busy: raising money to clean up the mouth of the tunnel where they’d hold the ceremony, designing the postmark, promoting the event, producing souvenir items. They called the event “John Henry Days,” a weekend of celebration of the town’s heritage. It was an extraordinary community effort — in the spirit of John Henry, an unlikely victory against an entity much bigger than they.
Finally, I finished producing “Steel Drivin’ Man.” It’s a respectful but uncompromising portrayal of life in Talcott. The program aired nationally and the people of Talcott listened. I doubted that each person I interviewed liked what I’d done with the stories.
A few months later, the week before “John Henry Days,” I paid a visit to Talcott, with no idea whether I’d be welcomed or shunned. I arrived to discover a mood of great anticipation, as residents did last-minute preparation for the John Henry festivities. Postmaster Bill Dillon was excited. “Have you been out to the tunnel yet? You won’t even recognize it. Go on down there, girl, and take a look!” I did. The tunnel looked just as it had in a hundred-year-old photo I’ve seen: no trash, weeds or railroad detritus, with the details of the brick arch and the chiseled inscription “Great Bend Tunnel” visible once again.
According to the “John Henry Days” flyer Dillon gave me, Virginia Crockett would read the poem she’d remembered during our interview. Marie Jackson would recite the traditional song she’d narrated to me:
From Allegheny’s lofty peaks to mountains towards the west,
There lies a state whose mooring speaks of beauty and the best.
West Virginia’s scenic grandeur is a boon to every eye
And a mountain’s tall commanding shoulders out the very sky.
As I got ready to leave town that day, Dillon said, “I wish you could stay for the celebration. You know, if it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think any of this would have happened. I want to thank you for all you’ve done.”
It’d be hubris on my part to think I really had that much impact, but probably my interest in their lives did give them an extra push toward organized action. With their cooperation and honesty, they gave radio listeners across the country a rare insight into their culture.
