Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

OCTOBER 15, 1949

Naughty Bird Peavey was sixteen when she first laid eyes on Le Roy Grooms. She knew immediately that he was her man; and she told him so. He was employed as a cook on The Crescent, which passed through Whistle Stop on its way to New York, via Atlanta. One year later, a little girl was born, whom Le Roy named Almondine, after the trout dish featured on the pullman dining car menu.

Le Roy was a handsome, good-natured boy who traveled a lot and made many stops along the route; and when Naughty Bird found out that he had moved in with an almost white, but not quite, high yellow octoroon woman in New Orleans, it just about killed her.

She was desperate when she saw the ads in the Slagtown News:

Naughty Bird tried them all, and more, but after a month she was still the coal-black, nappy-headed shampoo girl from Whistle Stop, and Le Roy was still in New Orleans with his high yellow girl friend.

So she took her little girl over to Sipsey’s, went back home, got in the bed, and was dying of love.

There was nothing anybody could do. Opal came over to see her and begged her to come back to work at the beauty shop, but Naughty Bird lay there, day after day, drinking Turkey gin and playing the same song over and over. Sipsey said it would have been better for Naughty Bird if Le Roy had died instead of living with another woman, because after drinking Turkey gin for two months straight, Naughty Bird was not getting any relief.

Fortunately, Sipsey’s words turned out to be prophetic, because Mr. Le Roy Grooms left this world for another when he was hit hard in the temple with a toy iron dump truck, belonging to one of the high yellow’s little male children.

When Naughty Bird got the tragic news, she got up out of bed, went into the bathroom and washed her face, and fixed herself a breakfast of eggs, ham, grits and red-eye gravy, biscuits covered with butter and Eagle Brand table syrup, and had three cups of steaming coffee. She took a bath, got dressed, applied a little Dixie Peach hair oil, leaned into the mirror to apply a triple coat of tangerine-orange rouge and lipstick to match, and headed out the door and over to Birmingham, on the rove.

Within a week she was back with a surprised-looking young man in a plaid hat with a green feather, and a brown gabardine suit.