Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

JANUARY 26, 1986

Evelyn stopped just long enough to say a polite hello to her mother-in-law and headed on back to the lounge, where her friend was waiting.

“Well, how are you today, honey?”

“Fine, Mrs. Threadgoode. How are you?”

“Well, I’m fine. Did you ever get yourself some of those Stresstabs like I told you?”

“I sure did.”

“Did they help?”

“You know, Mrs. Threadgoode, I think they have.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it.”

Evelyn started digging in her purse.

“Well, what you got in there today?”

“Three boxes of Raisinettes for us, if I can find them.”

“Raisinettes? Well, that ought to be good.”

She watched Evelyn as she searched. “Honey, aren’t you afraid you’ll get ants in your purse, carrying all those sugary, sweet things in there?”

“Well, I never really thought about it,” Evelyn said, and found what she was looking for, plus a box of Junior Mints.

“Thank you, honey, I just love candy. I used to love Tootsie Rolls, but, you know, those things can pull your teeth out if you’re not careful—a Bit-O-Honey will do the same thing!”

A black nurse named Geneene came in, looking for Mr. Dunaway to give him his tranquilizers, but there were only the two women sitting in the room, as usual.

After she left, Mrs. Threadgoode made the observation of how peculiar it seemed to her that colored people came in so many different shades.

“Now, you take Onzell, Big George’s wife … she was a pecan-colored woman, with red hair and freckles. She said it nearly broke her momma’s heart when she married George, because he was so black. But she couldn’t help it, said she loved a big black man and George was sure the biggest and blackest man you ever saw. Then Onzell had the twin boys and Jasper was light like her, and Artis was so black he had blue gums. Onzell said she couldn’t believe that something that black had come out of her.”

“Blue gums?”

“Oh yes, honey, and you cain’t get any blacker than that! And then next, here comes Willie Boy, as light as she was, with green eyes. Of course, his real name was Wonderful Counselor, named right out of the Bible, but we called him Willie Boy.”

“Wonderful Counselor? I don’t remember that. Are you sure that’s from the Bible?”

“Oh yes … it’s in there. Onzell showed us the very quote: ‘And he shall be called wonderful counselor.’ Onzell was a very religious person. She always said if anything was starting to get her down, all she had to do was to think of her sweet Jesus, and her spirit would rise, just like those buttermilk biscuits she baked. And then came Naughty Bird, as black as her daddy, with that funny nappy hair, but she didn’t have blue gums …”

“Don’t tell me that name came out of the Bible!”

Mrs. Threadgoode laughed. “Oh, Lord no, honey. Sipsey used to say that she looked like a skinny little bird, and when she was little she would always run in the kitchen and steal a couple of those buttermilk biscuits her mother was making and run under the cafe and eat them. So Sipsey started calling her Naughty Bird. Come to think of it, she did look like a little blackbird.… But, there they were, two black ones and two light ones, in the same family.

“It’s funny, now that I think about it, there aren’t any colored people here at Rose Terrace at all, except the ones that clean up and some of the nurses … and one of them is just as smart, she’s a full-blown registered nurse. Geneene’s her name, a cute and sassy little thing, and talks as smart and big as you please. She reminds me a bit of Sipsey, independent-like.

“Old Sipsey lived at home by herself until the day she died. That’s where I want to be when I go, in my own house. I don’t ever want to go back into the hospital. When you get to be my age, every time you go in, you wonder if you’re ever gonna get back out. I don’t think hospitals are safe, anyway.

“My neighbor Mrs. Hartman said she had a cousin in the hospital over in Atlanta that told her that a patient there went out of his room to get a breath of fresh air, and they didn’t find him until six months later, locked out on the sixth-floor roof. Said by the time they found him, there wasn’t anything left but a skeleton in a hospital gown. Mr. Dunaway told me that when he was in the hospital, they stole his false teeth right out of the glass when he was being operated on. Now, what kind of a person would steal an old man’s teeth?”

“I don’t know,” Evelyn said.

“Well, I don’t know either.”