Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

DECEMBER 23, 1958

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.