Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

FEBRUARY 16, 1986

Evelyn had brought an assortment of cookies from the Nabisco company, hoping to cheer her mother-in-law up, but Big Mama had said no thank you, that she didn’t care for any, so Evelyn took them down the hall to Mrs. Threadgoode, who was delighted. “I could eat ginger snaps and vanilla wafers all day long, couldn’t you?”

Evelyn unfortunately had to nod yes. Chewing on her cookie, Mrs. Threadgoode looked down at the floor.

“You know, Evelyn, I hate a linoleum floor. This place is just full of ugly gray linoleum floors. You’d think with so many old people out here, running around in their felt slippers, that are prone to slippin’ and slidin’ and breaking their hips, they’d put down some rugs. I have a hooked rug in my living room. I made Norris take my black tie-up shoes down to the shoe shop and get me a rubber Cat’s Paw sole put on them, and I don’t take them off from the time I get up until the time I go to bed at night. I’m not gonna break my hip. Once you do that, it’s goodbye, Charlie.

“These old people out here are all in bed by seven-thirty or eight o’clock. I’m not used to that. I never went to bed before the ten-twenty to Atlanta passed by my house. Oh, I get into bed by eight and turn out the lights so I won’t disturb Mrs. Otis, but I can never get to sleep good until I hear the ten-twenty blow his whistle. You can hear it all the way across town. Or maybe I just think I hear it, but it doesn’t matter. I still don’t go off until I do.

“It’s a good thing I love trains, because Whistle Stop wasn’t never nothing more than a railroad town, and Troutville was just a bunch of shacks, with one church, the Mount Zion Primitive Baptist Church, where Sipsey and them went.

“The railroad tracks run right along the side of my house. If I had me a fishin’ pole, I could reach out and touch the trains with it, that’s how close I am. So, I’ve been sitting on my glider swing on the front porch for the past fifty years, watching those trains go by, and I never get tired of looking at them. Just like the raccoon washing the cracker. I like to look at them at night the best. My favorite thing was the dining car. Now, they just have a snack bar where people sit and drink their beer and smoke their cigarettes, but back before they took the good trains off, the seven-forty Silver Crescent from New York, on its way to New Orleans, would pass by right at suppertime, and, oh, you should have seen it, with the colored waiters dressed up in their starched white jackets and black leather bow ties, with the finest flatware and silver coffeepots, and a fresh rose with baby’s breath on each table. And each table had its own little lamp with a little shade on it.

“Of course, those were the days when the women would dress in their finest, with hats and furs, and the men looked so handsome in their blue suits. The Silver Crescent even had little tiny Venetian blinds for each window. There you could sit, just like you were in a restaurant, rolling through the night. I used to tell Cleo, eating and getting somewhere at the same time appealed to me.

“Idgie always said, ‘Ninny, I think you ride that train just to eat’… and she was right, too. I loved that porterhouse steak they used to serve, and you’ve never had a better plate of ham and eggs than what you could get on the train. Whenever the train stopped in those small towns along the way, people would sell the cooks fresh eggs and ham and fresh trout. Everything was fresh back then.

“I don’t cook that much anymore … oh, I’ll heat up a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, now and then. Not that I don’t enjoy a good meal. I do. But it’s hard to find one nowadays. One time, Mrs. Otis signed us up for this Meals on Wheels program they got down at the church, but they were so terrible that I just stopped them from coming. They may have been on wheels, but they weren’t anything like the meals you could get on the trains.

“Of course, living so close to the tracks had its bad side. My dishes got all cracked, even that green set I won when we all went to the picture show over in Birmingham during the Depression. I can tell you what was playin’: it was Hello Everybody, with Kate Smith.” She looked at Evelyn. “Now, you probably don’t remember her, but she was known as the Songbird of the South. A big fat girl with a good personality. Don’t you think fat people have a good disposition?”

Evelyn smiled weakly, hoping this was true, since she was already on her second bag of Lorna Doones.

“But I wouldn’t take anything for the trains. What would I have done all those years? They didn’t have television yet. I used to try and guess where people were comin’ from and goin’ to. Every once in a while, when Cleo could scrape together a few dollars, he’d take me and the baby on the train and we’d go as far as Memphis and back. Jasper, Big George and Onzell’s son, was a pullman porter at the time, and he’d treat us like we were the king and queen of Rumania. Jasper went on to become the president of the Brotherhood of the Sleeping-Car Porter’s Union. He and his brother Artis moved to Birmingham when they were very young … but Artis wound up in jail two or three times. It’s funny, you never know how a child will turn out.… Take Ruth and Idgie’s little boy, for instance. Having to go through life like that could have ruined some people, but not him. You never know what’s in a person’s heart until they’re tested, do you?”