Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (32 page)

"Ain't nobody gonna get dis baby, no suh, not while I's alive."

Frank Bennett had not figured that she would get back up off the floor. He also hadn't figured that the skinny little black woman had been handling five-pound skillets, two at a time, since she was eleven. He had figured dead wrong.

As Sipsey passed by Artis, frozen in his tracks, he could see that she was wild-eyed. She said, "Go get Big George. I done kilt me a white man, I done kilt him daid."

Artis slowly tiptoed over to where Frank was lying beside the truck, and as he leaned over to get a good look, he saw that glass eye shining in the moonlight.

He ran so fast over the railroad tracks he forgot to breathe and nearly passed out before he made it home. Big George was asleep, but he could see Onzell was still up, back in the kitchen.

He flew in the door, holding his side in pain and panting, "I gotta see Daddy!"

Onzell said, "You better not wake yo daddy up, boy, hell whup you within an inch of your life . . ." but Artis was already in the bedroom, shaking the big man.

"Daddy! Daddy! Get up! You' gots to come wit me!"

Big George woke with a start. "Whut? Whut's da matter witch you, boy?"

"I cain't tell you. Grandma wants you over to the café!"

"Grandma?"

"Yes! Right now! She say ax you to come right now!"

Big George was putting on his pants. "This better not be no joke, boy, or I'll have yo butt."

Onzell, who had been standing in the door, listening, went over to get her sweater to go with them, but Big George said for her to stay home.

"She ain't sick, is she?" Onzell said.

Big George said, "Naw, baby, naw, she ain't sick. You just stay here."

Jasper came into the living room, half asleep. "What . . . ?"

 Onzell said, "Nothin', honey, go on back to bed . . . and don't wake up Willie Boy."

When they got away from the house, Artis said, "Daddy, Grandma done kilt a white man."

The moon was gone behind the clouds and Big George couldn't see his son's face. He said, "You're the one gonna be daid, boy, when I find out what you is up to."

Sipsey was standing in the yard when they got there. Big George leaned down and felt Frank's cold arm, sticking out from the sheet Sipsey had covered him with, and he stood back up and put his hands on hips. He looked back down at the body and shook his head. "Mmmm, mmmm. You done did it this time, Momma."

But even as he was shaking his head, Big George was making a decision. There was no defense for a black who killed a white man in Alabama, so it never occurred to him to do anything but what he had to do.

He picked up Frank's body and threw it over his shoulder and said, "Come on, boy," and took it all the way in the back of the yard and put it in the wooden shed. He laid it down on the dirt floor, and said to Artis, "You stay here till I get back, boy, and don't you move. I's got to get rid of dat truck." About an hour later, when Idgie and Ruth got home, the baby was back in his bed and sound asleep. Idgie drove Sipsey home and told her how worried she was about Momma Threadgoode being so sick; Sipsey never told her how close they had come to losing the baby.

Artis stayed in the shed all night, nervous and excited, rocking back and forth on his haunches. Along around four o'clock, he couldn't resist; he opened his knife and, in the pitch dark, struck the body under the sheet—once, twice, three, four times—and on and on.

About sunup, the door creaked open and Artis peed on himself. It was his daddy. He had driven the truck into the river, out by the Wagon Wheel, and had walked all the way back; about ten miles.

When Big George pulled off the sheet and said, "We got to burn his clothes," they both stopped and stared.

The sun had just cracked through the wooden slats. Artis looked at Big George, his eyes as big as platters, with his mouth open, and said, "Daddy, dat white man don't have no head."

Big George shook his head again. "Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm . . ." His mother had chopped that man's head off and buried it somewhere.

Stopping only long enough to take in that horrendous fact, he said, "Boy, help me wid dese clothes."

Artis had never seen a white man naked before. He was all white and pink, just like those hogs after they'd been boiled and all their hair had come off.

Big George handed him the sheet and the bloody clothes and told him to go way out in the woods and bury them, deep, and then to go home and say nothing. To nobody. Anywhere. Ever.

While Artis was digging the hole, he couldn't help but smile. He had a secret. A powerful secret that he would have as long as he lived. Something that would give him power when he was feeling weak. Something that only he and the devil knew. The thought of it made him smile with pleasure. He would never have to feel the anger, the hurt, the humiliation of the others, ever again. He was different. He would always be set apart. He had stabbed himself a white man . . .

And whenever any white folks gave him any grief, he could smile inside.
I stabbed me one of you, already . . .

At seven-thirty, Big George had already started slaughtering the hogs and started the water boiling in the big black iron pot—a little early in the year, but not too soon.

Later that afternoon, when Grady and the two detectives from Georgia were questioning his daddy about the missing white man, Artis had nearly fainted when one of them came over and looked right in the pot. He was sure the man had seen Frank Bennett's arm bobbing up and down among the boiling hogs. But evidently, he hadn't, because two days later, the fat Georgia man told Big George that it was the best barbecue he had ever eaten, and asked him what his secret was.

Big George smiled and said, "Thank you, suh, I'd hafto say the secret's in the sauce."

NOVEMBER 10, 1967

Skull Found in Garden

Congratulations to our new lady governor, Mrs. Lurleen Wallace, who won in a landslide victory over the other fellow. She looked darling at inauguration, and promised to pay her husband, George, a dollar a year to be her number one adviser. . . . Good luck, Lurleen

Almost as exciting as our new governor is the discovery Thursday morning of a human skull over in the vacant lot by the old Threadgoode place.

It is not an Indian, said the coroner in Birmingham. It is not old enough, and it has a glass eye, and whoever it was had their head chopped off. Foul play is suspected, said the coroner. Anyone missing a person with a glass eye is asked to contact the
Birmingham News
. Or call me, I will do it for you. It is a blue eye.

My other half went and did a silly thing on me last Saturday, lie went and had a heart attack, and about scared his poor wife to death. The doctor said it wasn't all that serious but that he was going to have to give up smoking. So I've got me a big grumbly bear at home, but I'm babying him along and Mr. Wilbur Weems has gotten his breakfast in bed for the past week. Any of you old galoots out there who want to help me cheer him up, come on over . . . but don't bring any cigarettes, because he will try to get them off of you, I know, he stole a pack of mine. Guess I'm going to have to give them up, myself.

I'm taking him on a vacation when he gets better.

. . . Dot Weems . . .

JULY 2, 1979

A gentleman of color inquired about another gentleman of color, who was sitting in the lobby, laughing.

"Is that nigger crazy, or what? What's he laughing about? There ain't nobody talking to him."

The brown, pockmarked man behind the desk answered, "Oh, he don't have to have nobody to talk to. His mind done went addlebrained a long time ago."

"What he doin' here?"

"Some woman brought him over two years ago."

"Who's springing for the bill?"

"She is."

"Hummmmm . . .”

"She comes over and dresses him every morning and puts him to bed every night."

"Some easy life."

"I'd say."

Artis O. Peavey, the subject of this discussion, was sitting on a red Naugahyde sofa, with a good deal of cotton stuffing escaping through the various tears and cuts it had acquired over the years. His cloudy brown eyes seemed to be fixed on the wall clock with the pink neon ring around it. The only other object on the wall was a cigarette ad showing an attractive black couple enjoying a Salem cigarette, remarking that the smoke was as cool as a mountain spring. Artis threw back his head and laughed again, revealing a perfect set of blue gums where once had flashed a number of gold teeth.

To the world, Mr. Peavey was sitting in a run-down flophouse hotel lobby, on a towel supplied by the management, since he was often known to pee through the rubber pants the woman put on him every morning. However, for Mr. Artis O. Peavey himself, it was 1936 again . . . and at the moment, he was walking down 8th Avenue North, dressed in a purple sharkskin suit, wearing a fifty-dollar pair of lime-green brogans, his hair freshly straightened and pomaded down like black ice. And on his arm, this Saturday night, was Miss Betty Simmons, who was, according to the social columns of the
Slagtown News
, the toast of Birmingham's ebony glitter set.

They had just passed by the Masonic Hall and were, no doubt, headed on over to Ensley to the Tuxedo Junction Ballroom on the midnight streetcar, where Count Basie—or was it Cab Calloway?—would be playing.

No wonder he was laughing. And God bless God for not letting him remember the bad times, when it was no fun to be a "nigger" on a Saturday night. Those long, hard nights when he had been in Kilbey, beaten and kicked and stabbed by guards and prisoners alike, where a man had to sleep with one eye open and be ready to kill or be killed in an instant. Lately, Artis's mind had become just like the Frolic Theater; it chose only to run light comedies and romances, starring himself and a number of brown, tan, and cinnamon-colored beauties with swishing hips and flashing eyes . . .

He banged on the once shiny, now dull, chrome arm of the sofa, and laughed again. The movie in his mind, this time, was starring himself when his stay in Chicago had made him an important figure for telling and retelling about the famous performers he had seen—Ethel "Momma Stringbean" Waters, the Inkspots, Lena, Louis. . . . He had been able to forget the insults, and the way his manhood had been cut off in the minds of the whites. But somehow, it was that very dismissal that made it go at it with a vengeance, just to prove that he as a man did exist.

Want a white woman?

I never hankered after no white woman! High yellow was as high as I cared to go.

He liked them, in fact, big and black . . . the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. And more could call him Daddy than he cared to admit. He could smile and shuffle, but it never bothered him; because he had a secret. . .

Yes, life was sweet; women, important talk, Knights of Pythias, High Potentate, strutting rights, setting on porches rights, the finest men's colognes, women in peach satin gowns and multijeweled dresses to the floor, brown derbies and coats with collars puffed with purple, maroon, and green fur, mid-night-colored women to kiss you good night, cigars that traveled from Cuba, a gold timepiece that could be pulled out for the hour or for impressing. . . Shake That Thing . . . good times at the Black Shadow Lounge. Bleach that skin, make us a little closer skin. If you are white, all right! If you's brown, you be around. Yellow? You're a nice fellow. But if you black, jump back . . . jump back.

Now the movie flipped to the fifties. He was standing in front of the Masonic Temple Drugstore, jingling change in his pockets. The feel and sound of folding money never appealed to him; he was not cursed with a driving desire to break his back earning the green stuff. He was just as happy with a pocket full of shiny dimes and quarters, won in the elusive game, known in the back alleys as the Galloping Dots, Seven-Come-Eleven, Snake-Eyes. But more times than not, the change was a gift from some grateful partner in passion.

When he finally lost his activities at age eighty, due to the natural deterioration and the normal wear and tear, there was many a disappointed lady in Slagtown. He was that rare and precious commodity: a woman's man.

The movie speeds up, and sights and sounds start coming faster.
Three-hundred-pound women, shaking and screaming in church . . . and in bed . . . "OH JESUS, I'M COMING!" . . . Mr. Artis O. Peavey and a number of women exchange nuptial vows . . . sitting in the Agate Cafe, talking to his friend Baby Shephard . . . "That woman done busted my head" . . . "I heard tell it was the husband". . . "I would have fought for you, Odetta, but when a man's got the difference in his hand, loaded and cocked, there ain't no use in being a fool" . . . "Give me a pig's foot and a bottle of beer". . . "I've got the world in a jug and the stopper in my hand". . . "You're not the only oyster in the stew”. . . . Blue Shadows and White Gardenias . . . amber-colored plastic cigar-holders . . . Professor Fess Whatley's Jazz Demons. . . . Got the miseries? Feena-Mint. . . . Princess Pee Wee Sam and Scram . . . Fairyland Park Ballroom . . . Hartley Toots Killed in Bus. . . . I married her without my consent, so to speak . . . "That woman domineered over me". . . . Nobody knows you when you're down and out . . . Watch out . . . Don't be coming down here . . . Oh no, you gonna get them white folks all mad . . . all riled up . . . . No, no, I ain't one of 'em, boss, they's just troublemakers . . . Yes suh . . . "Get off that bus!"

Artis tapped his foot on the floor three times and, magically, the movie changed. He is a little boy now, and his momma is cooking in the back of the cafe. . .
Oh, don't get in Momma's way, she slap you out the door
. . . There's Naughty Bird and Willie Boy . . . and sweet Jasper . . . Grandma Sipsey's there, dipping her cornbread in honey . . . Miss Idgie and Miss Ruth . . . they treat you white . . . And Stump . . . and Smokey Lonesome . . .

Then, the old man, who had been agitated just a moment before, begins to smile and relax. He is out in the back of the cafe, helping his daddy barbecue . . . and he is happy . . . we know a secret.