Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

JANUARY 12, 1986

Evelyn opened her purse and gave Mrs. Threadgoode one of the pimiento-cheese sandwiches she had wrapped in wax paper, and brought from home.

Mrs. Threadgoode was delighted. “Oh, thank you! I love a good pimiento-cheese sandwich. In fact, I love anything to eat that’s a pretty color. Don’t you think pimiento cheese has a pretty color? It’s so cheery. I like a red pepper, too, and I used to love candied apples, but I cain’t eat them anymore, because of my teeth. Come to think of it, I like anything that’s red.” She thought for a minute.

“We had a red hen named Sister, once, and every time I’d go in the backyard, I’d say, ‘Sister, don’t you peck my toes, girl, or I’ll fry you up with dumplings,’ and she’d cock her head and walk sideways away from me. She’d peck everybody else except me and my little boy, Albert. We never could eat that hen, even during the Depression. She died of old age. When I get to heaven, with all my people, I hope Sister and Cookie the raccoon is gonna be there. I know old Sipsey’s gonna be there.

“I don’t have any idea where Sipsey came from … you never know where colored people come from. She was about ten or eleven when she started working for Momma Threadgoode. She’d walked over from Troutville, the colored quarters across the tracks, and said her name was Sipsey Peavey and she was lookin’ for a job, and Momma just kept her. She helped raise all the Threadgoode children.

“Sipsey was a skinny little thing, and funny. She had all those old-timy colored superstitions. Her mother’d been a slave, and she was scared to death of spells … told Momma that her neighbor in Troutville had put yellow conjure powder in this man’s shoes every night, and had caused him to lose his functions. But the thing she was the most deathly afraid of in the world was the heads of animals. If you brought her a chicken or a fish or if Big George killed a hog, she wouldn’t touch it or cook it until she’d buried the head out in the garden. She said that if you didn’t bury the head, the spirit of that animal would enter your body and cause you to go completely insane. One time, Poppa forgot and brought some hog’s-head cheese in the house, and Sipsey ran home, screaming like a banshee, and wouldn’t come back until the place had been conjured by a friend of hers. She must have buried hundreds of heads out in the garden. But you know, we got the biggest tomatoes and okra and squash in town because of it!” She laughed. “Buddy used to call it the fish-head garden.

“But, with all of her spooky ways, there wasn’t a better cook in the state of Alabama. Even at eleven, they say she could make the most delicious biscuits and gravy, cobbler, fried chicken, turnip greens, and black-eyed peas. And her dumplings were so light they would float in the air and you’d have to catch ’em to eat ’em. All the recipes that were used at the cafe were hers. She taught Idgie and Ruth everything they knew about cooking.

“I don’t know why Sipsey never had any children of her own. You never saw anybody love babies more than Sipsey did. All the colored women in Troutville would leave their babies with Sipsey overnight when they wanted to go out and have a good time. They knew she’d take good care of them. Sipsey said nothing made her happier than to have a little baby to rock. She’d rock those little babies and sing to them all night long, sometimes two at a time, and just pine away for one of her own.

“Then, one afternoon in November, right around Thanksgiving—Momma said it was freezing cold outside and all the trees were bare—Sipsey was upstairs making the beds, when a friend of hers from the colored church came in the backyard, hollering up to her. Her friend was all excited and told her that there was a girl from Birmingham down at the train station that was giving away a baby. And she said to hurry up ‘cause the train was fixin’ to leave.

“With that, Sipsey ran downstairs as fast as she could with nothing on but a thin dress and her apron. When she ran through the back door, Momma Threadgoode said she yelled at her to put her coat on, but she called back, ‘I don’ have time, Miz Threadgoode. I got to go get me that baby,’ and was gone in a flash. Momma stood on the back porch and waited, and pretty soon she saw the train pull away, and here came Sipsey, grinning from ear to ear, her legs all scratched and bleeding from running through the briars, carrying the fattest, blackest little baby boy, all wrapped up in a towel that said HOTEL DIXIE, MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE. Sipsey said that gal had been on her way back home and had told Sipsey she didn’t dare show up with a baby, ’cause her husband had been in jail for three years.

“So we never did know the baby’s real name. Sipsey said since he came off the train, she would just call him George Pullman Peavey, after the man that invented the pullman car. But whoever his real daddy was, he must have been a big man, because George grew up to be a six-foot-four, two-hundred-fifty-pounder.

“When he was a little boy, Poppa took him over to the store and taught him how to be a butcher. He was slaughtering hogs when he was only ten, and Sipsey was so proud of him … she couldn’t have loved him any more if he had been her very own. She used to hug him and she would say, ‘Honey, just ’cause we ain’t no kin don’ mean you don’ belong to me.’

“And later, when Big George was on trial, she dressed up and went to that courtroom, come rain or come shine … she must have been close to ninety years old. Course, you can never really tell how old colored people are.

“She was always singing her gospel songs … ‘In the Baggage Car Ahead,’ and ‘I’m Going Home on the Morning Train’ … always singing about trains. The night before she died, she told George that she had a dream where she saw Jesus all dressed in white. He was the conductor of a ghost train and he was coming to get her and take her to heaven.

“But I would venture to say she was still cooking over at the cafe well up into her eighties. That’s the reason most people came, because of her cooking. It sure wasn’t for the look of the place. When Idgie and Ruth bought it, it wasn’t nothing more but one big old room. It sat just across the street from the railroad tracks, down from the post office, where Dot Weems worked.

“I remember the day they moved in the cafe. We were all down there helping, and Sipsey was busy sweeping the floor when she noticed that Ruth was hanging her picture of the Last Supper. Sipsey stopped sweeping and studied that picture for a while, and then she asked, ‘Miz Ruth, who’s that sitting up there at the table with Mr. Jesus?’

“Ruth, who was trying to be sweet, said, ‘Why, Sipsey, that’s Mr. Jesus and the Brethren.’ Sipsey looked back at her and she said, ‘Oh. Uh-huh. I thought Miz Mary just had the one boy,’ and went on sweeping. We ‘bout died laughing. Sipsey knew exactly who that was in the picture. She just liked to play with people.

“Julian and Cleo had built four wooden booths and built the room in the back, so Idgie and Ruth would have a place to live. The cafe part had walls that were knotty Georgia pine, and the floor was just plain old wood.

“Ruth tried to fix the place up. She put a picture of a ship sailing in the moonlight, but Idgie came right along behind her and took it down and stuck up a picture she found of a bunch of dogs sitting around a card table, smoking cigars and playing polker. And she wrote underneath it, The Dill Pickle Club. That was the name of this crazy club that she and her friend Grady Kilgore had started. Other than the Christmas decorations they put up the first year that Idgie never did take down, and an old railroad calendar. That was it.

“There was only about four tables and a bunch of uncertain chairs.” She laughed. “You never knew for certain if they was gonna hold you up or not. And they never did have a cash register. They just kept the money in a Roy Tan Cigar box and made your change out of that. At the counter they had potato chips and pig skins on a rack, combs and chewin’ tobacco, fishing lures and little corncob pipes.

“Idgie opened the place at daybreak and didn’t close the place until, as she said, ‘the last dog was hung.’

“The big L & N switching yard was only two blocks down the street, and all the railroad people ate there, colored and white alike. She’d serve the colored out the back door. Of course, a lot of people didn’t like the idea of her selling food to the coloreds, and she got into some trouble doing it, but she said that nobody was gonna tell her what she could and could not do. Cleo said she stood right up to the Ku Klux Klan all by herself, and wouldn’t let them stop her. As good-natured as she was, Idgie turned out to be brave when push came to shove …”