Sipsey's Tomatoes: Reading Fannie Flagg in the Summer of Black Lives

 

There’s a critical scene in Fannie Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café around which hinges the plot of the novel, though since the novel is told in a series of flashbacks with a shifting sense of limited and omniscient narration, when we first encounter the scene, it’s significance is not readily apparent. Grady Kilgore is leading a bunch of Georgia detectives, including Curtis Smoote, through town on their search for the missing Frank Bennett. When they arrive at the café, Idgie feigns ignorance about this missing man, who is, in fact, the husband of her lover, Ruth, and greets the detectives with that show of false courtesy so often gratuitously on display in the hospitable South. She offers the men coffee. She offers them pie. She’ll eventual serve them a unique and tasty barbeque.

 For each of these, she figures herself as the server—these men are in her café, where she holds court and feeds the locals, paying and non-paying customers alike, white and black, despite angering the local Klan. But a slight-of-hand occurs in this scene that deserves attention. It’s embedded in the grammar of my sentence above. Idgie holds court, which is true enough, but she doesn’t feed anyone. She owns the food and the means of production, but when she offers coffee, she yells back to the kitchen for Sipsey to bring it out. When she offers pie, she yells again for Sipsey to bring the pie.

 Idgie and Ruth own the café. Sipsey is their employee. Later, when Ninny gifts Evelyn the old recipes from the café, we discover that all the recipes were actually Sipsey’s all along, who did all the cooking in the kitchen while her (adopted) son, Big George Pullman Peavey, killed and cooked hogs out back. Yet, there’s Idgie, offering these detectives coffee—just as soon as her black cook can bring it out front for them. Though seemingly subtle, this scene has heavy implications for the novel and the nostalgia for that dream-like town of Whistle Stop, when the trains still ran and the world was less complicated, when a good tall-tale could diffuse any situation, when a prank on the local preacher over his advocacy for temperance was all in good fun.  

 Fans of the film might remember that, when this scene is converted to that medium, the focus is the barbeque that the Georgia detective eats. He compliments Idgie on it, though while she serves it to him, she seems a bit sweaty and nervous. Later in the film, we find out why: Frank Bennett is in the barbeque! The film makes it known that Idgie is entirely aware of how his body has gone missing. In the film, she knows that she’s feeding the detective the missing man.  

 In the novel, Idgie really is over at the Threadgoode house with Ruth, sitting up with Momma, when Frank comes to town and has his skull cracked open. Though in the courtroom scene (many years and many pages later) she is unable to prove her alibi, it turns out to have been entirely true. Idgie didn’t kill Frank. No evidence in the novel suggests she knows what happened to him, which adds a layer of complication to the lies she needs to tell to pull the appearance of guilt away from Big George in the trial overseen by the former-detective, now-judge Curtis Smoote, who is pleased to have a reason to dismiss the case with little real evidence of innocence. No one really misses Frank anyway.

 The “true” story of what happened to Frank is not known to any white folks in the novel. As Ninny explains to Evelyn, it is the “sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” known only to long dead individuals; and “dead men tell no tales.” The answer to the question is not a man, though. Sipsey, a black woman, kills Frank. No one mourns his loss and he is presented in every way as a vile character undeserving of our sympathies, but he was still a white man in Alabama. Sipsey’s action would never be deemed justifiable by the legal definitions of homicide at the time where the truth to out.

 Both the film and the novel depict Sipsey as the responsible party for the death of Frank. However, in the film, the white characters are part of the cover-up. In the novel, when Smoote warns Idgie to make sure there is no trace of Frank anywhere in Whistle Stop—and he hates Frank as much as Idgie does, since Frank had gotten an illegitimate child on his own daughter, leading to her eventual early death on the outskirts of Valdosta—Idgie is not privy to the fact that Smoote is eating the very evidence he is warning Idgie to hide.

 In the novel, only three people know what happened to Frank: Sipsey, who cracked his skull with a frying pan; George, who butchered and cooked him, and George’s son Artis, who witnessed all of this, sat with the body, and helped his father cook. Artis suffers for the rest of his life because of what he’s witnessed; he dies crazy and alone, glad he got to stab a white man—the decapitated Frank—but his inability to settle and make a life for himself stems directly from this specific horror of his youth. He kept his father’s secret, who in turn was keeping his grandmother’s secret. As black folks in Georgia, they knew the price of knowledge. We do, too: long before we get the “true” story of what happened to Frank, we’ve already encountered Mr. Pinto in his coffin, electrocuted by “Big Yellow Mamma” for his crimes. Of course, any reader willing to accept the realities of American history knows it would have been unlikely for a black man to make it through a regular trial to a state-sanctioned execution (And even in that other Alabama novel, when Atticus Finch manages to keep Tom Robinson alive long enough to be sent to prison, Tom Robinson still dies there).

 The narrative changes from novel to film go well beyond the death of Frank Bennett. I wouldn’t quite say that the goal of those changes was to more thoroughly center the white characters in the story for a movie audience. Ninny’s stories (and Flagg’s authorship) more than centers whiteness in Whistle Stop, and the more significant change to black characterization is the complete erasure of most of the black characters from the film except Big George and Sipsey. At least Flagg’s novel has scenes set in hobo camps and black spaces like Troutville, Slagtown, and the Southside of Chicago, but then I return to that scene with the Georgia detectives and Idgie offering coffee to them. Who does the offering? Who does the work? And what does this say about the way Flagg understands and depicts whiteness in her down-home novel about those good ole days, before the world got all complicated with skinny girls stealing parking spots at the Piggly Wiggly and asshole teenagers calling a menopausal woman a nasty name?

 In some other universe, I’m a bonafide literary scholar, complete with a PhD and some decent research skills. I suppose I could now sign into my university library account and run a database search for journal articles on Fannie Flagg and depictions of race. That Sipsey uses her frying pan, George his barbeque pit to kill and literally cook Frank Bennett has surely attracted scholarly attention in a field of literary studies (Southern Literature) that dwells at great length on race and also at great length on foodways. But barring that rabbit hole of actual scholarly effort—this is just a blog, for Christ’s sake—I’d like to dwell on a few reasons these details, among others, stood out to me as I reread this book this summer in mid-August 2020.

 I’m currently scheduled to teach a course on Southern Lesbian fiction this Fall semester. Well, an independent study with an advanced English major as a capstone experience. Getting to reread some landmarks of Southern Lesbian fiction, and then getting a chance to construct and deconstruct the terms of that fiction with a badass student, appealed to me last Spring when I surveyed the coming Fall semester through the lens of the bleak late Winter outbreak of coronavirus. Reading a book like Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café sooths the soul in the hellscape of our current moment. As an ex-pat Southerner, I derived a great deal of joy from reading passages aloud in the thickest, twangiest accent I could muster by myself when no Sconnies were around to hear me. It’ll be a great book to discuss in a capstone class.

 But then two things happened after I set up plans for this course this semester. First, over Memorial Day weekend, the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests and relit the simmering fire of grief and anger over white supremacist practices in law enforcement (and at this point, I’d mention, Grady Kilgore is supposed to be a noble character in Flagg’s novel, a local law enforcement officer, and a member of the Klan). Bookstores have made a small fortune this summer by selling the latest guidebooks to anti-racism published by the biggest publishing houses in large east coast cities for the avid consumption of white people looking to be woke and looking for just the right purchase of a decidedly bourgeois object to display to friends on a living room bookshelf beside trinkets from Pier 1. But, hey, better than ignorance, I guess. This investment in literature to answer our questions about the nature of racism, however, has led to a natural supplementary conversation in the world of books, or, in this case, the second thing that happened while I was planning my course: folks returned to re-evaluations of the position of white authors in the canon, and they aimed for the big names in a way that brought these re-evaluations very close to home.

 The process of revisiting our old white (male) American authors with an eye towards their complicity (or worse) in the discourses of institutional racism and white supremacy is not new to students of literature. Ask a Twain scholar; ask a PTA meeting faced with an agenda item calling to ban Harper Lee. This summer, that conversation took a turn towards fruit much higher on the branches of the tree of great writers. This summer, voices have begun to ask, “Why are we still reading Faulkner these days?”

 I’ve previously blogged a bit about that conversation and will continue to prophesize on Billy’s utility to the canon. As a Faulkner scholar, I’d like to keep him around, but I’d also like more honesty, less apology (or apologia) for his blunt racism and troubling misogyny. White male scholars over the age of 60 insisting that he’s much more progressive than we realize—you know, they just don’t convince me anymore.

 And then I reread Fannie Flagg. For all the importance of her novel, for how it reconfigures lesbian representation and for how her success helps restructure the canon of Southern Lit to include women writers, it was difficult to read her depictions of black characters and not wonder, “What happens if we turn our critical racial eye here right now?”

 The problem is not just foodways; the problem is whiteness and the source of its sense of self and feelings of supremacy, or, in a word, its "power." Sadly, I don’t have my copy of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark available, but that extended essay on race in white literature crept its way back into my head, all these years after my comprehensive exams, while I reread a book about two white women whose place in their community is built on the labor of two black cooks.

 When Idgie offers Smoote coffee and pie at her café, purchased with $500 dollars gifted to her by her parents when she “married” Ruth, her sense of ownership and her confidence is belied by the fact that she doesn’t even try to fill an order for coffee and pie herself. She yells to a black woman to get it for her. For a white woman to offer up the things she owns and the goods she believes are the fruits of her labor and from which she derives her place in her community, she must rely on the work of someone else. Her “power” is an extension of her confidence that coffee will be served because she calls for it. Pie will be served because she wishes it so.

 Similarly, Evelyn relies on black identity to affirm herself through the anger of her feminist awakening. After envisioning herself as Tawanda, a name that could be construed as black, she gains peace when she makes herself go to a black church and sit through a sermon. She is in awe of the fact all these black people around her are human beings—she admits that she had never seen that in their lives before. She gains confidence from the experience, so much so that she knows she never even needs to come back to the church in future. Notably, her sojourn into the black church—during America’s most segregated hour—comes right after she wishes aloud to Ninny that she were black because black people just seem so self-possessed and happy.

 Her comments about black folks are obviously racist, and in her church experience, she actively works through her acknowledged fear of black men, which is to say that Flagg, as author, recognizes the racism of that fear. To craft a believable white woman in middle-class Birmingham in 1986, Flagg draws on the reality of racist assumptions. We can see Evelyn’s conversion as a kind of anti-racism for boomers in need of nudges towards being woke.

 Nonetheless, the greater reliance on black spaces and the seeming exoticism of black religion as the source of Evelyn’s new self-assurance presents to readers a deeper racial problematic, one which Flagg seems unaware of, but one which we, in 2020, can confront.

 Flagg is playing in the dark in her novel. Her depictions of black characters stray into stereotypes of devoted “mammy” figures and faithful family retainers. At times, her black characters speak in the nonsense language that white writers ascribe to black dialects (the only word marked for special spelling in all of Ninny’s ramblings is “cain’t” but we are supposed to hear her with a southern accent; meanwhile, when Big George talks, his dialogue is entirely full of misspellings meant to suggest he talks differently than the white folks around him). But the bigger problem is not the moments of what we can now, over thirty years later, identify as overt racism surfacing in the text. The problem is the covert, deeper structures of racism on which the white characterization in the novel is based.

 Sans white authority over black characters in roles of devoted servitude, the story falls apart. Sipsey tells Idgie to fry her own damn tomatoes; Big George tells Idgie he won’t go stand a prop against a truck, coring an apple, while she retrieves Ruth from Valdosta because he’ll be the one lynched for it, even though he’s just there so Idgie feels confident enough to confront Frank. Were these revisions made to the novel, Idgie would be powerless. She’d look foolish in front of the men who come into her café and with whom she makes brotherly gestures of shared masculinity—and yes, I’m aware that she is a woman. I’ll save comment on gender in the novel for a later post. She’d actually be powerless in the face of Frank when she goes to Valdosta by herself without a very large black man to scare white people just be default of standing beside a car. Her power derives from the fact that she can tell Sipsey to serve her customers everything from coffee to pie to barbeque to the titular green tomatoes. Her power also derives from her reliance on the intimidating size of a large, hog-slaughtering black man.

 So maybe the book does itself one big favor: Flagg does include several stand-alone chapters about George and his children. When Frank Bennett comes calling to steal Buddy, Jr., no white characters from Whistle Stop need be present for his defeat and erasure. Maybe there is evidence in the book for an alternative reading that de-centers the whiteness that seems—but only seems superficially—to lend the novel its strength.

 Maybe Fannie Flagg needs a Thadious Davis writing a Games of Property about the true protagonists of her novel about the Whistle Stop Café. The novel is not about the Threadgoodes, despite the insistence of the blurb on the back of the 2016 reissue paperback. The novel is the story of the Peaveys: Sipsey, Onzell, Big George, and their children and grandchildren.

 Okay, let’s burn down the house of some heterosexual, cisgender male Southern authors before we come loaded for bear against a Southern lesbian writer like Flagg. If the time has come for a critical reassessment of Faulkner, better we focus on him than take aim at writers from other historically marginalized groups, though at some point we have to be honest in our assessment of all the old (and new) devils of the Southern canon. Hopefully, we won’t have to chunk them to the curb, but we can consider more appropriate titles: Sipsey’s Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. Recognizing the real protagonists of the story is a good start.