Mishaps Galore

Must be getting old or crazy... my other half, Wilbur, came home three days in a row, complaining of a headache... and is there anything worse than a man who has a little pain? Guess that's why we have the babies...

I, myself, was having a terrible time reading the paper, so yesterday morning, I went to Birmingham to get my eyes checked, and, lo and behold, I had on Wilbur's glasses and he had on mine. We are getting different colored ones next time.

I don't feel too bad. I heard there was a fire the other day over at Opal's beauty shop, and Biddie Louise Otis, who was hooked up to the permanent wave machine at the time, started screaming bloody murder because she thought it was her head that was on fire. But it was just some old hair in the wastepaper basket that was burning. Naughty Bird, Opal's shampoo girl, put out the fire and it was fine.

Don't forget to vote. Nobody is running against Grady Kilgore, but it makes him feel good, so do it anyway.

By the way, Jasper Peavey got another write-up in the Railroad News, and we know Big George and Onzell must be proud.

... Dot Weems...

P S. The Dill Pickle Club had its annual Icebox Follies again and it was hilarious as usual. My other half sang "Red Sails in the Sunset" again. Sorry, folks... I just cain't get him to learn a new one.

SEPTEMBER 14, 1986

Evelyn and Mrs. Threadgoode were taking a walk out behind the nursing home when a flock of Canada geese flew over, honking happily through the fall sky.

"Oh Evelyn, wouldn't you love to be going with them? Wonder where they're going?"

"Oh, Florida or Cuba, maybe."

"You think so?"

"Probably."

"Well, I wouldn't mind going to Florida, but I don't care a thing in the world about going to Cuba. Smokey used to say those geese were his pals, and when we'd ask him where it was that he'd go off to, he'd say, 'Oh, I just go where the wild geese goes...’"

They watched them fly out of sight, and continued on their walk.

"Don't you love ducks?"

"They're pretty, all right."

"I just love ducks. I guess you could say that I was always partial to fowl."

"What?"

"Fowl. You know—poultry, things with feathers, birds, chickens, roosters."

"Oh."

"Cleo and I would have our coffee out on the back porch every morning and watch the sun come up and listen to the birds... we'd always have about three or four good old hot cups of Red Diamond coffee and toast with peach or green pepper jelly, and we'd talk—well, I'd talk and he'd listen. We bad so many pretty birds come to the house: redbirds, robins, and the prettiest doves... you don't see birds like you used to, anymore.

"One day, Cleo was going out the door and he pointed up to where all the old blackbirds were sitting on a telephone wire in front of our house, and he'd say, 'Be careful what you say on the phone today, Ninny, you know they're up there listening to what you say. They can hear through their feet.'" She looked at Evelyn. "Do you believe that's true?"

"No. I'm sure he was just kidding you, Mrs. Threadgoode."

"Well, he probably was, but whenever I had a secret to tell, I’d look out the door and make sure they weren't sitting up there. He should have never told me that, knowing how much I love to jaw on the phone. I used to talk to everybody in town.

"I guess at one time we had upwards to two hundred fifty people living in Whistle Stop. But after they stopped most of the trains coming through, people just scattered all over like birds to the wind... went to Birmingham, or wherever, and never came back.

"Where the cafe was, they’ve put a Big Mac, and they've got some supermarket out on the highway that Mrs. Otis liked to go to because she clipped coupons. But I never could find anything I was looking for in there, and the lights hurt my eyes so bad, so I just walk over to Troutville to Ocie's grocery store to pick up whatever little bit I need."

Mrs. Threadgoode stopped. "Oh Evelyn, smell that... somebody's cooking barbecue!"

Evelyn said, "No honey, I think that's somebody just burning leaves."

"Well, it smells like barbecue to me. You like barbecue, don't you? I love it. I'd pay a million dollars for a barbecue like Big George used to make, and a piece of Sipsey's lemon icebox pie. He made the best barbecue.

"He cooked it in a big old iron drum, out in the back of the cafe, and you could smell it for miles around, especially on a fall day. I could smell it all the way over to my house. Smokey said he was coming in on the train one time and he smelled it ten miles up the tracks from Whistle Stop. People drove all the way from Birmingham to get it. Where do you and Ed get your barbecue?"

"We get it over at the Golden Rule or Ollie's, mostly."

"Well, they're all right, but I don't care what you say, colored people can make barbecue better than anybody in the whole world."

Evelyn said, "They can do most everything better. I wish I was black."

"You mean colored?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Threadgoode was completely baffled. "Lord, honey, why? Most of them want to be white; they're always trying to bleach their skin and straighten their hair."

"Not anymore."

"Well, maybe not now, but they used to. Just thank the good Lord He made you white. I just cain't imagine why anybody would want to be colored when they don't hafta be."

"Oh, I don't know, they just seem to fit in with each other... have more of a good time, or something. I've always felt... well... stiff, I guess, and they always look like they're having so much fun."

Mrs. Threadgoode thought about it for a minute. "Well now, that may be true, they do have a lot of fun, and they can let go when they want to, but they have their sorrows, just like the rest of us. Why, you've never heard anything sadder than a colored funeral. They scream and carry on just like somebody was tearing the very heart out of them. I think pain hurts them more than it does us. It took three men to hold Onzell when Willie Boy was buried. She went crazy and tried to jump in the grave with him. I don't ever want to go to another one of those for as long as I live."

"I know there's good and bad in everything," Evelyn said, "but I still can't help but envy them, somehow. I just wish I could be free and open like they are."

"Well, I don't know about that," Mrs. Threadgoode said. "I just wish I had me a barbecue and a piece of pie, and I'd be happy."

OCTOBER 15, 1949

Naughty Bird Peavey was sixteen when she first laid eyes on Le Roy Grooms. She knew immediately that he was her man; and she told him so. He was employed as a cook on The Crescent, which passed through Whistle Stop on its way to New York, via Atlanta. One year later, a little girl was born, whom Le Roy named Almondine, after the trout dish featured on the pullman dining car menu.

Le Roy was a handsome, good-natured boy who traveled a lot and made many stops along the route; and when Naughty Bird found out that he had moved in with an almost white, but not quite, high yellow octoroon woman in New Orleans, it just about killed her.

She was desperate when she saw the ads in the Slagtown News:

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Naughty Bird tried them all, and more, but after a month she was still the coal-black, nappy-headed shampoo girl from Whistle Stop, and Le Roy was still in New Orleans with his high yellow girl friend.

So she took her little girl over to Sipsey's, went back home, got in the bed, and was dying of love.

There was nothing anybody could do. Opal came over to see her and begged her to come back to work at the beauty shop, but Naughty Bird lay there, day after day, drinking Turkey gin and playing the same song over and over. Sipsey said it would have been better for Naughty Bird if Le Roy had died instead of living with another woman, because after drinking Turkey gin for two months straight, Naughty Bird was not getting any relief.

Fortunately, Sipsey's words turned out to be prophetic, because Mr. Le Roy Grooms left this world for another when he was hit hard in the temple with a toy iron dump truck, belonging to one of the high yellow's little male children.

When Naughty Bird got the tragic news, she got up out of bed, went into the bathroom and washed her face, and fixed herself a breakfast of eggs, ham, grits and red-eye gravy, biscuits covered with butter and Eagle Brand table syrup, and had three cups of steaming coffee. She took a bath, got dressed, applied a little Dixie Peach hair oil, leaned into the mirror to apply a triple coat of tangerine-orange rouge and lipstick to match, and headed out the door and over to Birmingham, on the rove.

Within a week she was back with a surprised-looking young man in a plaid hat with a green feather, and a brown gabardine suit.

IO49 4TH AVENUE NORTH BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA

SEPTEMBER 21, 1986

Evelyn had promised Mrs. Threadgoode that she would take her troubles to the Lord and ask the Lord to help her through these bad times. Unfortunately, she didn't know where the Lord was. She and Ed had not been to church since the children were grown, but today she felt desperate for help, for something to hold on to; so she got dressed and drove over to the Highland Avenue Presbyterian Church, where they used to be members.

But when she got there, for some reason she just drove on by and, all of a sudden, found herself across town, sitting in the parking lot of the Martin Luther King Memorial Baptist Church—the largest black church in Birmingham—wondering what in the hell she was doing there. Maybe it had been all these months of hearing about Sipsey and Onzell. She didn't know.

All her life she had considered herself to be a liberal. She had never used the word nigger. But her contact with blacks had been the same as for the majority of middle-class whites before the sixties—mostly just getting to know the maid or the maids of friends.

When she was little, she would sometimes go with her father when he would drive their maid to the south side, where she lived. It was just ten minutes away, but seemed to her like going to another country: the music, the clothes, the houses... everything was different.

On Easter they would drive over to the south side to see the brand-new Easter outfits: pinks and purples and yellows, with plumed hats to match.

Of course, it was the black women who worked inside the homes. Whenever a black man was anywhere nearby, her mother would get hysterical and scream at her to run put on a robe because, " there's a colored man in the neighborhood! ” To this day, Evelyn was not comfortable with black men around.

Other than that, her parents' attitude about blacks had been like most back then; they thought most were amusing and wonderful, childlike people, to be taken care of. Everyone had a funny story to tell about what this maid said or did, or would shake their heads with amusement about how many children they kept having. Most would give them all their old clothes and leftovers to take home, and help them if they got in trouble. But as Evelyn got a little older, she didn't go to the south side anymore and thought little about them; she had been too busy with her own life.

So, in the sixties, when the troubles began, she, along with the majority of whites in Birmingham, had been shocked. And everyone agreed that it was not "our colored people" causing ail the trouble, it was outside agitators who had been sent down from the North.

It was generally agreed too that "our colored people are happy the way they are." Years later, Evelyn wondered where her mind had been and why she hadn't realized what had been going on just across town.

After Birmingham suffered so badly in the press and on TV, people were confused and upset. Not one of the thousands of kindnesses that had taken place between the races was ever mentioned.

But twenty-five years later Birmingham had a black mayor, and in i975» Birmingham, once known as the City of Hate and Fear, had been named the All-American City by Look magazine. They said that a lot of bridges had been mended, and blacks, who had once gone north, were coming back home. They had all come a long way.

Evelyn knew this, but nevertheless, as she sat in the church parking lot, she was amazed at all the Cadillacs and Mercedeses driving up and parking all around her. She had heard that there were rich blacks in Birmingham, but she had never seen them before.

As she watched the congregation arrive, all of a sudden that old fear of black men came back.

She glanced around the car to make sure that all her doors were locked, and was getting ready to drive away when a father and mother with two children walked by her car, laughing; then she snapped back to reality and calmed down. After a few minutes, she mustered up all her courage and went inside the church.

But even after the usher with the carnation smiled at her and said, "Good morning," and led her down the aisle, she was still shaking. Her heart pounded all the way to her seat, and her knees were weak. She had hoped to sit in the back, but he had escorted her to the middle of the church.

In moments, sweat was pouring off Evelyn and she was short of breath. Few people seemed to look at her. A couple of children turned around in their seats and stared; she smiled, but they did not smile back. She had just decided to leave when a man and a woman came into the pew and sat down beside her. So there she was, stuck in the middle, just like always. This was the first time in her life she had ever been surrounded by only blacks.

All at once, she was the belly of a snake, the Pillsbury Doughboy, a page in a coloring book left uncolored, a pale flower in the garden indeed.

The young wife beside her was stunning, and dressed like someone Evelyn had seen only in magazines. She could have been a high-fashion model from New York, in her pearl-gray silk outfit, with snakeskin shoes and a purse to match. As she looked around the room, Evelyn realized that she had never seen so many beautifully dressed people in one place in her life She was still uneasy about the men—their pants fit too tight to suit her—so she concentrated on the women.

But then, she had always admired them, their strength and compassion. She had always wondered how they could love and care for white children and nurse old white men and women with such gentleness and care. She didn't think she could have.

She watched the way they greeted each other, their wonderful and complete easiness with themselves, the way they moved with that smooth and natural grace, even the heavyset ones. She didn't ever want one of them to get mad at her, but she'd love to see somebody call one of them a fat cow.

She realized that all of her life she had looked at blacks but she had never really seen them. These women were good-looking; thin brown girls with cheekbones like Egyptian queens, and those big, magnificent-looking, balloon-breasted women.

Imagine all those people in the past trying to look white; they must be laughing from their graves at all the middle-class white-boy singers trying so hard to sound black, and the white girls in their corn rows and Afros. The tables have turned...

Evelyn began to relax and feel a little more comfortable. Somehow, she had expected the inside of the church to look much different. As she looked around, Evelyn was convinced it could have been any one of the dozens of white churches all over Birmingham; then, all of a sudden, the organ struck a chord and the 250 members of the choir, in bright red and maroon robes, stood up and sang out with a power and a force that almost knocked her off her seat:

"Oh happy day...

Oh happy day...

When Jesus washed my sins away...

He taught me how to sing and pray...

And live rejoicing every day...

Oh happy day...

Oh happy day...

When Jesus washed my sins away

Oh happy, happy day...”

After they sat back down, the Reverend Portor, a huge man with a voice that filled the church, rose from his chair and began his sermon, entitled “The Joy of a Loving God." And he meant it. Evelyn felt it all through the church. As he preached he would throw his massive head back and shout and laugh with happiness. And the congregation and the organ that accompanied him would answer back with the same.

She had been wrong; this was not just like the white churches, certainly not the dried-up, bloodless sermons she was used to.

His enthusiasm for the Lord was contagious and spread like wildfire throughout the room. He assured them, with a great and mighty authority, that his God was not a vengeful God, but one of goodness... love... forgiveness... and joy. And he began to dance and strut and sing out his sermon to the rafters, sweat sparkling on his shining face, which he would mop off occasionally with the white handkerchief he kept in his right hand.

As he sang out, he was answered from all over the church-

"YOU CANNOT HAVE JOY UNLESS YOU LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR...”

"That's right, sir."

"LOVE YOUR ENEMIES...”

"Yes sir."

"LET GO OF THOSE OLD GRUDGES...”

"Yes sir, let go."

"SHAKE LOOSE OF THAT OLD DEVIL, ENVY... "

"Yes sir."

"GOD CAN FORGIVE...”

"Yes He can."

"WHY CANT YOU?...”

"You're right, sir."

“TO ERR IS HUMAN... TO FORGIVE, DIVINE...”

"Yes sir."

“THERE IS NO RESURRECTION FOR BODIES GNAWED BY THE MAGGOTS OF SIN... “

"No sir."

"BUT GOD CAN LIFT YOU UP...”

"Yes He can,”

"OH! GOD IS GOOD..."

"Yes sir."

"OH! HOW GOOD IS OUR GOD...”

"You’re right, sir."

"WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS...”

"Oh yes sir."

"YOU CAN BE BAPTIZED, CIRCUMCISED, GALVANIZED, AND SIMONIZED, BUT IT DONT MEAN A THING IF YOU AINT A CITIZEN OF GLORY...”

"No sir."

“THANK YOU, JESUS! THANK YOU, JESUS! GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY! WE PRAISE YOUR NAME THIS MORNING AND THANK YOU, JESUS! HALLELUIAH! HALLELUIAH JESUS!"

When he had finished, the whole church exploded in "Amens!" and "Halleluiahs!" and the choir started again, until the room began to throb with...

"ARE YOU WASHED IN THE BLOOD... THE SOUL- CLEANSING BLOOD OF THE LAMB... OH TELL ME, SWEET CHILDREN... ARE YOU WASHED IN THE BLOOD …”

Evelyn had never been a religious person, but this day she was lifted from her seat and rose high above the fear that had been holding her down.

She felt her heart open and fill with the pure wonder of being alive and making it through.

She floated up to the altar, where a white Jesus, wan and thin, wearing a crown of thorns, looked down from the crucifix at her and said, "Forgive them, my child, they know not what they do...”

Mrs. Threadgoode had been right. She had taken her troubles to the Lord, and she had been relieved of them.

Evelyn took a deep breath and the heavy burden of resentment and hate released itself into thin air, taking Towanda along with them. She was free! And in that moment she forgave the boy at the supermarket, her mother's doctor, and the girls in the parking lot... and she forgave herself. She was free. Free; just like these people here today, who had come through all that suffering and had not let hate and fear kill their spirit of love.

At which point Reverend Portor called for the congregation to shake hands with their neighbors. The beautiful young woman sitting next to her shook her hand and said, "God bless you." Evelyn squeezed the woman's hand and said, "Thank you. Thank you so much."

As she left the church, she turned at the door and looked back one last time. Maybe she had come today hoping she could find out what it was like to be black. Now she realized she could never know, any more than her friends here could know what it felt like to be white. She knew she would never come back. This was their place. But for the first time in her life, she had felt joy. Real joy. It had been joy that she had seen in Mrs. Threadgoode's eyes, but she hadn't recognized it at the time. She knew that she might never feel it again. But she had felt it once, and now she would never forget the sensation as long as she lived. It would have been wonderful if she could have told everyone in the church how much that day had meant to her.

It would have been wonderful, too, if Evelyn had known that the young woman who shook her hand had been the eldest daughter of Jasper Peavey, pullman porter, who, like herself, had made it through.

JUNE 1, 1950

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