Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

DECEMBER 3, 1938

West Madison Street, Chicago, was no different from Pratt Street in Baltimore, South Main Street in Los Angeles, or Third Street in San Francisco; a street of gospel missions, cheap rooming houses, and hotels, secondhand clothes stores, greasy-spoon soup lines, pawn shops, liquor stores, and whorehouses, teeming with what were kindly referred to as “disappointed men.”

The only thing that made that year in Chicago different from any other was that Smokey Lonesome, who usually traveled alone, had picked up a friend. Just a kid, really, but he was company. They’d met over a month ago, in Michigan.

He was a good-looking, fresh-faced kid, wearing a thin blue-gray slipover sweater over a brown frayed shirt and ragged brown pants, with skin like a baby’s ass. Still wet behind the ears, he’d had a lot of trouble over in Detroit with guys trying to bugger him, and he’d asked Smokey if he could travel with him for a while.

Smokey had told him the same thing that an old guy once said: “Go home now, kid, while you can. Get away from this life, ’cause once you piss out of a boxcar, you’re hooked.”

But it didn’t do any good, just like it hadn’t done any good with him, so Smokey decided to let him tag along.

He was a funny kid. He had about pulled his own britches off, digging so hard for a dime. He wanted to see Sally Rand do her fan dance to “White Birds in the Moonlight,” as it said on the poster. He never did find a dime, but the woman in the glass ticket booth felt so sorry for him that she let him in free.

Smokey had hustled up a quarter while he was waiting for him to come out of the show, and thought they’d go get them a ten-cent steak over at the Tile Grill. They had not had anything to eat that day except for a can of Vienna sausages and some stale crackers. He was smoking a Lucky Strike that he had found mashed in a cigarette package someone had thrown away when the kid came bursting out of the theater, flying high.

“Oh Smokey, you should have seen her! She’s the most beautiful and delicate thing I’ve ever seen. She was like an angel, a real live angel come down from heaven.”

All through dinner he couldn’t stop talking about her.

After they had their steaks, they were thirty cents short of a hotel room, so they headed on over to Grant’s Park, where they hoped to grab a sleep in one of the shacks, made out of tar paper and cardboard and a few scraps of lumber, that you could sometimes find if you were lucky; and they were lucky that night.

Before they went to sleep, the kid said, as he had every night, “Tell me about where all you’ve been and what all you’ve done, Smokey.”

“I told you that once.”

“I know, but tell me again.”

Smokey told him about the time he’d been in Baltimore and had a job at the White Tower hamburger place, and how it had been so shiny and clean you could eat right off the black and white tiles on the floor; and about the time he had been a coal miner, outside of Pittsburgh.

“You know, a lot of these fellows will eat a rat, but as for me, I couldn’t do it. I’ve seen ’em save too many lives. Saved mine, once. Rats are the first ones to smell gas in a mine …

“One time, me and this old boy was deep down in this mine, picking away, when all of a sudden here comes two hundred rats running past us, going more than sixty miles an hour. I didn’t know what to think, and this old colored boy throws his pick down and shouts, ‘Run!’

“I did, and it saved my life. If I see one, to this day, I just let him go on about his rat business. Yes sir, they’re tops in my book.”

The kid, who was almost asleep, mumbled, “What’s the worst job you ever had, Smokey?”

“Worst job? Well, let’s see … I’ve done a lot of things a decent man wouldn’t do, but I guess the worst was back in ’twenty-eight, when I took that job in the turpentine mill, down at Vinegar Bend, Alabama. I hadn’t had nothing to eat but pork and beans in two months, and I was so busted that a nickel looked as big as a pancake, or I’d of never took the job. The only white people they could get to work down there were the Cajuns, and they called them turpentine niggers. That job would kill a white man; I only lasted five days and was sick as a dog for three weeks from the smell; it gets in your hair, your skin … I had to burn my clothes …”

Suddenly, Smokey stopped talking and sat up. The minute he heard the sound of men running and shouting, he knew it was the Legion. In the past couple of months, the American Legion had been raiding the hobo camps, knocking down everything in their path, determined to clean up the riffraff that had descended on their city.

Smokey shouted to the kid, “Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!”

And they started running, just like the hundred and twenty-two other residents of that particular Hooverville that night. All you could hear was the sound of men crashing through the woods and the sound of the tar-paper shacks being ripped apart and struck down with crowbars and iron pipes.

Smokey ran to the left, and as soon as he hit thick underbrush, he lay down, because he knew, with his weak lungs, he could never outrun them. He went flat to the ground and stayed there until it was over. The kid could run and he’d catch up with him somewhere down the line.

Later, he went back over to the camp to see if there was anything left standing. What had once been a little town of shacks was now just loose piles of tar paper, cardboard, and wood, scattered and smashed flatter than pancakes. He turned and was leaving when he heard a voice.

“Smokey?”

The kid was lying about twenty feet from where their shack had been. Surprised, Smokey went over to him. “What happened?”

“I know you told me not to ever untie my shoes, but they was tight. I tripped.”

“You hurt?”

“I think I’m killed.”

Smokey squatted beside him and saw that the right side of his head had been beaten in. The kid looked up at him.

“You know, Smokey … I thought tramping would be fun … but it ain’t …”

Then he closed his eyes and died.

The next day, Smokey got a couple of guys he knew and they buried him out in the tramps’ graveyard they had outside of Chicago, and Elmo Williams read a selection he found on this page of the little red Salvation Army songbook he always carried with him.

Rejoice for a comrade deceased,

Our loss is his infinite gain,

A soul out of prison released,

And free from its bodily chain.

They never did know his name, so they just put up a wooden marker, made out of a crate. It said, THE KID.

When the other men left, Smokey stayed behind for a minute to say goodbye.

“Well, pal,” he said, “at least you got to see Sally Rand. That was something …”

Then he turned around and headed for the yard to hop a train south, to Alabama. He wanted to get out of Chicago; the wind that whipped around the buildings was so cold that it sometimes brought a tear to a man’s eye.