Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (37 page)

It would have been wonderful, too, if Evelyn had known that the young woman who shook her hand had been the eldest daughter of Jasper Peavey, pullman porter, who, like herself, had made it through.

“His only aim is to see people happy and to make their trip more pleasant. Please don’t overlook this outstanding railroad man when passing out the pats on the back to the Railroad Man of the Month.”

That’s how
Silver Crescent
passenger Cecil Laney described pullman porter Jasper Q. Peavey.

This genial porter has been receiving commendations since he started working for the railways at age 17, as a red-cap at the Terminal station in Birmingham, Alabama. Since then, he has been cook, freight trucker, station porter, dining car waiter, parlor car porter, and was promoted to pullman porter in 1935. He became president of the Birmingham branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1947.

Mr. Laney goes on to say, “Jasper’s little courtesies begin the minute a passenger boards the train. He makes a special effort to see that all the passengers
have their luggage properly boarded, and through the trip, he looks for those little unexpected things he can do to make the ride more comfortable, with his big, always-present smile and happy laugh.

“A few minutes before arrival at the station, he always announces, ‘In about five minutes we will be arriving at … If I can help you with your baggage, it will be a pleasure to do so.’

“To us, he is a trusted friend, an attentive host, a watchful guardian, a dispenser of comforts, and a doer of favors. He chaperones the children and helps mothers in distress; he is most courteous, helpful and efficient, for which the passengers are deeply grateful. It is unusual to find such a man in the times through we which we are now passing.”

Jasper is a lay pastor at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and is the father of four daughters: Two of them are teachers, one of them is studying to be a nurse, and the youngest is planning to go to New York and study music.

Congratulations to Jasper Q. Peavey, our Outstanding Railroad Employee of the Month.

Of course, we are all so sad to hear that the railroad yard is closing. Now that we have lost most of our trains, we seem to be losing a lot of our old friends, who are moving on to other places. We can only hope that the trains will start running again. It will not seem right with just a few trains passing through.

Grady Kilgore, retired official of L & N Railroad, says that the country cannot exist without its trains, and that it is just a matter of time before the government realizes it. I say the L & N Co. will come to its senses and put them back on the line soon.

Georgia Pacific Seaboard, and now L & N. Only Southern Railroad has held out … it seems they just don’t want passengers anymore.

Also, we hear that the cafe may be closing. Idgie says that her business is way down.

By the way—

My other half claims he has had the eight-day pneumonia for ten days … Men!

 … Dot Weems …

Jasper Peavey sat up all through the quiet night while the train glided through the snow-laden landscape and the moon sparkled on the passing fields of white.

It was freezing outside the ice-cold window, but warm and cozy inside the car. This was when he felt safest, and at ease. No more smiling for the day … just quiet.

The red and green railroad crossing lights slid by at each stop, and early in the dawn, the lights began to come on, one by one, in the small towns.

He was a month away from retiring, with a nice pension, from the Southern Railroad. Jasper had come to Birmingham a year later than his brother Artis, and although they were twins and both classified as Negro under the law, they had lived two entirely different lives.

Jasper had loved his brother, but hardly ever saw him.

Artis had quickly found a place among the fast, racy set down on 4th Avenue North, where the jazz was hot and dice rolled night and day. Jasper had taken up residence at a Christian boardinghouse four blocks away and had attended church at the 16th Street Baptist Church the first Sunday he was in
Birmingham. It was there that Miss Blanch Maybury had caught the eye of and took a shine to this creamy boy with his mother’s freckles. Blanch was the only daughter of Mr. Charles Maybury, a respected citizen, well-known educator, and principal of the Negro high school, so it was through her that Jasper was automatically admitted to the exclusive, upper-middle-class black society.

When they married, if Blanch’s father had been disappointed in Jasper’s lack of formal education and background, Jasper’s color and manners more than made up for it.

After he married, Jasper worked hard; and while Artis was spending his money on clothes and women, Jasper was staying in the cold, rat-infested dormitories that the company provided for porters when they were out of town. He saved until he and Blanch could go down to the piano company and buy one for cash. A
piano
in the home meant something. He gave ten percent to the church and started a savings account for the children’s college education at the all-black Penny Saving Bank. He’d never touched a drop of whiskey, never borrowed a dime, and never been in debt. He had been one of the first blacks in Birmingham to move into white Enon Ridge, later known as Dynamite Hill. After the Klan had blown up Jasper’s and several of his neighbors’ red brick homes, some had left, but he had stayed. He had endured years of “Hey, Sambo,” “Hey, boy,” “Hey, George,” emptied cuspidors, cleaned bathrooms, shined shoes, and lifted so much luggage that he couldn’t sleep from the pain in his back and shoulders. He had often cried in humiliation when something was stolen and the railroad officials searched the pullman porters’ lockers first.

He had “yes sirred” and “yes ma’amed” and smiled and brought loud-mouthed salesmen liquor in the middle of the night, had taken abuse from arrogant white women and been called nigger by children, had been treated like dirt by some of the white conductors, and had had his tips stolen by other porters. He had cleaned up after sick strangers and passed through Cullman County a hundred times, with the sign that warned,
NIGGER … DON’T LET THE SUN SET ON YOUR HEAD
.

He had endured all this. But …

The burial policy for his family was paid off, he had sent all four of his children through college, and not one of them would ever have to live off tips. That was the one thought that had kept him going all the long, hard, back-breaking years.

That, and trains. If his brother Artis had been in love with a town, Jasper was in love with trains.
Trains
, with dark, polished, mahogany wood-paneled club cars and plush, red velvet seats.
Trains
, with the poetry of their names … 
The Sunset Limited … The Royal Palm … The City of New Orleans … The Dixie Flyer … The Fire Fly … The Twilight Limited … The Palmetto … The Black Diamond … The Southern Belle … The Silver Star …

And tonight, he was riding on
The Great Silver Comet
, as slender and streamlined as a silver tube … from New Orleans to New York and back, one of the last of the great ones still running. He had mourned each of those great trains as, one by one, they were pulled off the lines and left to rust in some yard, like old aristocrats, fading away; antique relics of times gone by. And tonight he felt like one of the old trains … off the track … out of date … past the prime … useless.

Just yesterday, he overheard his grandson Mohammed Abdul Peavey telling his mother that he didn’t want to go anywhere with his grandaddy because he was embarrassed by the way he bowed and scraped to white people and the way he acted in church, still singing that old coon-shine, ragtime gospel music of his.

It was clear to Jasper that his time was over now, just like his old friends rusting out in the yards. He wished it could have been different; he had gotten through the only way he had known how. But he had gotten through.

Smokey was across the street from the boarded-up terminal L & N station downtown, in a hotel room that may have been up to the minute thirty-five years ago but now consisted only of a bed, a chair, and a forty-watt light bulb on a string. The room was pitch black, except for the pale yellow light that spilled through the glass transom at the top of the tall, thickly enameled, brown door.

Smokey Lonesome sat alone, smoking his cigarette and looking out the window onto the cold wet street below, thinking back to a time when there had been little stars in the ring around the moon and all the rivers and the whiskey had been sweet. When he had been able to take a breath of fresh air without coughing his guts up. When Idgie and Ruth and Stump still lived in the back of the cafe, and all the trains were still running. That time, special time, so long ago … just an instant away in his mind …

Those memories were still there, and tonight, he sat searching for them, just like always, grabbing at moonbeams. Every once in a while he would catch one and take a ride, and it was like magic. An old song played over and over in his head: