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RATCATCHER – PAST SIMULATIONS
["'DAD'S GONNA KILL ME," SPRING 2015]
ESSENTIALS
WISE WORDS
"The student will rise to the level of the teacher's expectations."
--Jaime Escalante
READINGS
CURRENT WORK
PAST
SIMULATIONS
NOTHIN' BUT A MAN
Spring 2016
Nothin' But a Man focuses on a young laborer, Jonathon Tiberius Henry, in 1920s Harlem, at the height of what is now popularly known as the Harlem Renaissance. A descendant of the legendary black hero John Henry, the man who reputedly defeated a steam-powered drill in a contest to see who could drill through a mass of solid rock first. Henry won the contest but succumbed shortly thereafter to exhaustion and heart failure.
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Jonathon Tiberius Henry (J. T.) is a day laborer working on the buildings in downtown Harlem in the years just before the Great Depression. J.T., in addition to possessing preternatural physical strength, is a savant, with a rare form of autism that enables him to concentrate all his mental energy into single domains of effort where he performs at superhuman capacity. J.T.'s ability enables him to, quite literally, see weaknesses in building structures, which in turn allows him to apply with maximum efficiency the force of the two 16-pound sledgehammers he uses in his labors.
Unfortunately, J.T.'s peculiar ability has landed him in deep trouble with the wrong people. He has "seen" in the building structures incompetent construction and engineering that would eventually cause them to collapse. The engineering had been done by a firm owned by the Calhoun brothers, two unsavory cohorts of the corrupt politicians of Tammany Hall, who cut corners on construction materials to feather their already overstuffed bank accounts.
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Worse, J.T.'s autism has led him to somewhat incautious speech with people close to the Calhouns. Together, J.T.'s enemies hatch a plot to kill him while he is working on clearing a basement room, right in City Hall. They arrange for a timed explosion to bury him in rubble and with a limited oxygen supply, he will suffocate in less than thirty minutes.
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But the Calhouns didn't reckon on two things: he's the descendant of the greatest steel driver who ever lived...and they left him with his two 16-pound sledgehammers, "Dexter" and "Sinister," his two best friends, the ones who never let him down...
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Fun Facts and Trivia
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-- This simulation featured several historical figures from its specified time period, much more so than did previous simulations. It takes place in 1923, during what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance (spanning from about 1918 to the mid-1930s), a flowering of black culture that some say has never been equaled since. "Characters" from that period--such as W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, James Weldon Johnson, and Marcus Garvey, among others--appeared either as players in the final simulation performance; had their ideas voiced and debated over by the simulation characters; or both.
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-- J. T. was so fond of his hammers that he nicknamed them "Dexter" and "Sinister" ("right" and "left"). In an absolutely brilliant move, so characteristic of what happens when one lets the students loose of conventional restrictions, my class decided to make the two hammers characters, somewhat similar to the presence of the chorus in classical Greek theater, or even more appropriately, the "devil" on one shoulder and the "angel" on the other. "Dexter" advised J.T. as to the good he could do, while "Sinister" urged him to get revenge.
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