Notes

In “John Henryism,” I quote a line: “I got a girl in the white folks’ yard.” This line is the title and refrain of a work song sung by gandy dancers. Gandy dancers were the men who straightened the rails after a train came through so that the next train would not derail. The name gandy, some historians and gandy dancers surmise, comes from the metal pole they used to straighten the tracks. In the late twentieth century, gandy dancers were replaced by machines that could knock the rails back into place. However, in places such as South Carolina and Alabama, these men gather at folk festivals and line out the songs as a way of preserving this history. Also, the title of the poem comes from psychological studies that investigate the premature death of educated black men. This phenomenon is called John Henryism.

In the 1940s, Ernestine “Tiny” Davis played the trumpet and sang for the first integrated all-women’s jazz band, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. Her trumpet playing was so prized that Louis Armstrong offered to pay her ten times her Sweethearts salary to tour with him and his band. Tiny refused. When she retired from the Sweethearts, she opened a gay bar in Chicago with her lover, Ruby Lucas: Tiny and Ruby’s Gay Spot. She died in 1994 at the age of eighty-seven.