The Annotated African American Folktales

by Henry Louis Gates

  The people all by his side,

  The very last words they heard him say,

  “Give me a cool drink of water ’fore I die,

  Cool drink of water ’fore I die.”

  John Henry had a little woman,

  The dress she wore was red,

  She went down the track, and she never looked back,

  Going where her man fell dead,

  Going where her man fell dead.

  John Henry had a little woman,

  The dress she wore was blue,

  De very last words she said to him,

  “John Henry, I’ll be true to you,

  John Henry, I’ll be true to you.”

  “Who’s gonna shoes yo’ little feet,

  Who’s gonna glove yo’ hand,

  Who’s gonna kiss yo’ pretty, pretty cheek,

  Now you done lost yo’ man?

  Now you done lost yo’ man?”

  “My mammy’s gonna shoes my little feet,

  Pappy gonna glove my hand,

  My sister’s gonna kiss my pretty, pretty cheek,

  Now I done lost my man,

  Now I done lost my man.”

  They carried him down by the river,

  And buried him in the sand.

  And everybody that passed that way,

  Said, “There lies that steel-driving man,

  There lies a steel-driving man.”

  They took John Henry to the river,

  And buried him in the sand,

  And every locomotive come a-roaring by,

  Says “There lies that steel-drivin’ man,

  Lawd, there lies a steel-drivin’ man.”

  Some say he came from Georgia,

  And some from Alabam,

  But it’s wrote on the rock at the Big Bend Tunnel,

  That he was an East Virginia man,

  Lord, Lord, an East Virginia man.

  SOURCE: Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, 31–34.

  John Henry, the “steel-driving man,” is celebrated in song and story as the victor in a race against a machine: the steam-powered hammer. According to legend, John Henry’s heart gave out after his triumph, and he died, hammer in hand. The mythical John Henry has driven railroad spikes but also hammered holes for dynamite charges. Various historical figures have been proposed as the source for the legend, among them an African American named John William Henry, from Talcott, West Virginia, who worked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Line. In the city of Leeds, Alabama, citizens claim that the contest took place at the Coosa Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western Railway in 1887. The John Henry in that contest was born a slave named Henry in 1850. Although there are many claims of eyewitness accounts to the contest as well as efforts to identify the man, no one has established with certainty that the story is factual rather than the stuff of legends, tall tales, and myths, all pieced together from various sources.

  “The Ballad of John Henry” begins with John’s early premonition of his death and moves swiftly to the contest with the steam-powered hammer, then on to his death and burial, and, finally, to the reaction of his wife. The so-called hammer songs that shadow the ballad—and most likely emerged before it—set the pace for work on the railroads. Those songs were rhythmic chants more than melodies, and they synchronized the efforts of the hammer man and the man who rotated the drill, while also ensuring that exertions did not exceed what was physically possible for the men in the group.

  John Henry became not only a folk hero but also a powerful symbol of muscle for labor movements as well as for the Civil Rights Movement. Embodying strength and endurance, he represented the dignity of the working man who labored on despite capitalist exploitation and the threat of being replaced by machines. Beyond that, he has been seen as a towering figure of heroic struggle in general. The celebrated author Julius Lester writes: “I’m not certain what the connection is between John Henry and [Martin Luther] King. However, I suspect it is the connection all of us feel to both figures—namely, to have the courage to hammer until our hearts break and to leave our mourners smiling in their tears” (1994).

  There are many John Henrys. For Southern millworkers, he was a model of strength and integrity. For coal miners, he became a symbol of endurance under the harshest of working conditions. For Communist organizers, he became “the hero of the greatest proletarian epic ever created” (Nelson 2006, 157). In one version of the song, John Henry becomes too ill to work, and his wife takes over:

  Artist James Daugherty provided illustrations for Irwin Shapiro’s John Henry and the Double-Jointed Steam-Drill, published in 1945. The frontispiece shows the hero, together with a soldier and a mother and child, as originators of a legacy inherited by celebrated African American athletes, activists, performers, and scientists.

  Well they called John Henry’s woman

  Yes they called for Julie-Anne

  Well she picked up the hammer where John Henry lay

  And she drove that steel like a man, Great God!

  And she drove that steel just like a man.

  In Shapiro’s version of the tale, John Henry competes with John Hardy in tests of strength and endurance. Here, John Henry bests John Hardy at driving steel railroad spikes.

  John Henry’s wife is able to drive steel “like a man” even as she nurses her husband back to health.

  The song exists in over two hundred recorded versions, as part of the blues but also as one of the first documented country songs. It has been performed by many artists, among them Leadbelly, Paul Robeson, Harry Belafonte, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Van Morrison, Johnny Cash, and Bruce Springsteen. The figure of John Henry has also inspired novels, films, and plays and has an enduring presence in popular culture in the root sense of the term—in being of the people, by the people, and for the people.

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  1 Big Bend Tunnel: The tunnel, which is also referenced in the last stanza, is located in West Virginia.

  2 shaker: the worker who holds the chisel or drill for the man who hammers holes into rock.

  3 intrels: entrails

  ANNIE CHRISTMAS

  Oldtimers say that the Negro longshoremen and all life on the riverfront are not what they used to be. It’s gone soft now, say they. In other days men were really men, yet the toughest of them all was a woman.

  Her name was Annie Christmas. She was six feet, eight inches tall and she weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. She wore a neat mustache and had a voice as loud and as deep as a foghorn on the river. The tough keelboatmen, terrors of the river in other days, stood in awe of her, and there wasn’t a hulking giant of a stevedore who didn’t jump when Annie snapped her black fingers. She could lick a dozen of them with one arm tied behind her back, and they knew it.

  Most of the time Annie dressed like a man and worked as a man. Often she worked as a longshoreman, pulled a sweep1 or hauled a cordelle.2 She would carry a barrel of flour under each arm and another balanced on her head. Once she towed a keelboat from New Orleans to Natchez on a dead run, and never got out of breath.

  Annie could outdrink any man in the South. She would put down a barrel of beer and chase it with ten quarts of whiskey, without stopping. Men used to buy her whiskey just to see her drink. Sometimes she got mad in a barroom, beat up every man in the place and wrecked the joint. Sometimes she did it for fun.

  Then, every once in a while, Annie would get into a feminine mood. When this happened she was really all of two hundred fifty pounds of coal-black female, really seductive and enticing in a super sort of way. At these times Annie would rent a barge, fill it with the best fancy women in New Orleans and operate a floating brothel up and down the Mississippi, catering to keelboatmen and stevedores, river pirates and longshoremen. She would always stage contests, and offer a hundred dollars cash to the women entertaining the most men satisfactorily in a given period of time. Of course, Annie was as magnificent amorously as she was as a fighter
and drinker and she always won her own first prize.

  She would really dress up for these occasions, wearing red satin gowns and scarlet plumes in her woolly hair. She always wore a commemorative necklace containing beads for all the eyes, ears and noses she had gouged from men, a bead for each one. The necklace was only thirty feet long, but then she only counted white men; there would not have been enough beads in New Orleans if she had counted Negroes.

  Annie had twelve coal-black sons, each seven feet tall, all born at the same time. She had plenty of other babies, too, but these were her favorites. Whenever she got ready to have a baby, she drank a quart of whiskey and lay down somewhere. Afterward she had another quart and went straight back to work.

  Finally, Annie met a man who could lick her and then she fell in love for the first time in her life. But the man didn’t want her, so Annie bedecked herself in all her finery and her famous necklace and committed suicide.

  Her funeral was appropriately elaborate. Her body was placed in a coal-black coffin and driven to the wharf in a coal-black hearse, drawn by six coal-black horses. Six on each side, marched her coal-black sons, dressed in coal-black suits. At the riverfront the coffin was placed on a coal-black barge, and that coal-black night, with no moon shining, her dozen coal-black sons floated on it with the coal-black coffin out to sea and vanished forever.

  SOURCE: Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, and Edward Dreyer, eds., Gumbo Ya-Ya, 376–77. For other versions of “Annie Christmas,” see Virginia Hamilton, Her Stories, 84–89, and “Annie Christmas,” in Richard and Judy Dockrey Young, African-American Folktales for Young Readers, 130–32.

  The female counterpart to such figures as Mike Fink, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry, Annie Christmas is legendary for her feats of physical strength. Although there are no print versions of ballads sung about her, she is included here as a female folk figure who is talked about in much the same way as the subjects of ballads.

  The first print version of an Annie Christmas story appeared in Gumbo Ya-Ya, an anthology of Louisiana folktales published in 1945 under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project, a branch of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration designed to combat the economic effects of the Depression. Lyle Saxon, who served as head of the Louisiana Writers’ Project and who co-edited Gumbo Ya-Ya, claimed that he and a friend made Annie up over drinks in New Orleans—she “floated up out of the whiskey-and-soda glasses” of the two men. Saxon suggested that they authenticate Annie’s folkloric origins as a river lady by “discovering” manuscripts. At first the two wanted to call her “Mary Christmas,” but Saxon decided, “Nobody would believe that. Call her Annie Christmas.”

  Still, Annie’s origins are contested. Is her story an example of pure fakelore, the confabulation of two intoxicated pals? Or is she firmly rooted in communal storytelling cultures? And does it matter? The road between literature and folklore has always been heavily traveled, and figures migrate back and forth with astonishing ease. Should we feel a need to begin patrolling the border between two different sources?

  When Richard and Judy Young put together an anthology of African American folktales for “young readers,” they saw Annie Christmas as a John Henry figure—“most probably a real person” and “so popular in folklore that many different kinds of people claim her as their heroine.” They point out that the story has “grown” over the years, as it is told and retold.

  Virginia Hamilton, renowned for her collections of African American folklore, sorts out the evidence and comes to the following conclusion: “ ‘Annie Christmas’ is one of the hometown stories of New Orleans. She is as common to southern Louisiana as is the Gumbo, the French patois spoken by some American blacks and Creoles.” She too sees in Annie Christmas a female John Henry, “larger than life” and “fashioned after someone who actually lived” and discredits the view that two New Orleans journalists “created” Annie Christmas. “It’s possible that they did make up a story about a white Annie Christmas. But tales about black Annie have been around for longer than anyone can remember. It’s more than likely that they will continue to be told and added to” (1994, 88–89).

  “Annie Christmas,” from Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, and Edward Dreyer, eds., Gumbo Ya-Ya: Folk Tales of Louisiana. Copyright © 1945, renewed 1973 by the Louisiana Library Commission. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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  1 pulled a sweep: conduct a search by towing a drag under water

  2 cordelle: a heavy rope once used for towing boats

  STAGOLEE

  Stackalee

  It was in the year of eighteen hundred and sixty-one

  In St. Louis on Market Street where Stackalee was born.

  Everybody’s talking about Stackalee.

  It was on one cold and frosty night

  When Stackalee and Billy Lyons had one awful fight,

  Stackalee got his gun. Boy, he got it fast!

  He shot poor Billy through and through;

  Bullet broke a lookin glass.

  Lord, O Lord, O Lord!

  Stackalee shot Billy once; his body fell to the floor.

  He cried out, Oh, please Stack, please don’t shoot me no more.

  The White Elephant Barrel House was wrecked that night;

  Gutters full of beer and whiskey; it was an awful sight.

  Jewelry and rings of the purest solid gold

  Scattered over the dance and gambling hall.

  The can-can dancers they rushed for the door

  When Billy cried, Oh, please, Stack, don’t shoot me no more.

  Have mercy, Billy groaned, Oh, please spare my life;

  Stack says, God bless your children, damn your wife!

  You stole my magic Stetson; I’m gonna steal your life.

  But, says Billy, I always treated you like a man.

  ’Tain’t nothing to that old Stetson but the greasy band.

  He shot poor Billy once, he shot him twice,

  And the third time Billy pleaded, please go tell my wife.

  Yes, Stackalee, the gambler, everybody knowed his name;

  Made his livin hollerin high, low, jack and the game.

  Meantime the sergeant strapped on his big forty-five,

  Says now we’ll bring in this bad man, dead or alive.

  And brass-buttoned policemen tall dressed in blue

  Came down the sidewalk marchin two by two.

  Sent for the wagon and it hurried and come

  Loaded with pistols and a big gatlin gun.1

  At midnight on that stormy night there came an awful wail

  Billy Lyons and a graveyard ghost outside the city jail.

  Jailer, jailer, says Stack, I can’t sleep,

  For around my bedside poor Billy Lyons still creeps.

  He comes in shape of a lion with a blue steel in his hand,

  For he knows I’ll stand and fight if he comes in the shape of a man.

  Stackalee went to sleep that night by the city clock bell,

  Dreaming the devil had come all the way up from hell.

  Red devil was sayin, you better hunt your hole;

  I’ve hurried here from hell just to get your soul.

  Stackalee told him yes, maybe you’re right,

  But I’ll give even you one hell of a fight.

  When they got into the scuffle, I heard the devil shout,

  The next time I seed the devil he was scramblin up the wall,

  Yellin, come and get this bad man fore he mops up with us all.

  II

  Then here come Stack’s woman runnin, says, daddy, I love you true;

  See what beer, whiskey, and smoking hop2 has brought you to.

  But before I’ll let you lay in there, I’ll put my life in pawn.

  She hurried and got Stackalee out on a five thousand dollar bond.

  When they take me away, babe, I leave you behind.

  But
the woman he really loved was a voodoo queen

  From Creole French market, way down in New Orleans.

  He laid down at home that night, took a good night’s rest,

  Arrived in court at nine o’clock to hear the coroner’s inquest.

  Crowds jammed the sidewalk, far as you could see,

  Tryin to get a good look at tough Stackalee.

  Over the cold, dead body Stackalee he did bend,

  Then he turned and faced those twelve jury men.

  The judge says, Stackalee, I would spare your life,

  But I know you’re a bad man; I can see it in your red eyes.

  The jury heard the witnesses, and they didn’t say no more;

  They crowded into the jury room, and the messenger closed the door.

  The jury came to agreement, the clerk he wrote it down,

  And everybody was whisperin, he’s penitentiary bound.

  When the jury walked out, Stackalee didn’t budge,

  They wrapped the verdict and passed it to the judge.

  Judge looked over his glasses, says, Mr. Bad Man Stackalee,

  The jury finds you guilty of murder in the first degree.

  Now the trial’s come to an end, how the folks gave cheers;

  Bad Stackalee was sent down to Jefferson pen for seventy-five years.

  Now late at night you can hear him in his cell,

  Arguin with the devil to keep from goin to hell.

  And the other convicts whisper, whatcha know about that?

  Gonna burn in hell forever over an old Stetson hat!

  Everybody’s talking bout Stackalee.

  That bad man, Stackalee!

  SOURCE: Onah L. Spencer, “Stackalee,” Direction 4 (1941), 14–17.

  Stackolee

  One dark and dusty day

  I was strolling down the street.

  I thought I heard some old dog bark,