"Oh yes, but she never let it bother her, and she always dressed up in the best-looking outfits and always had a little flower in her hair to match. Everybody used to say that Essie Rue looked like she had just stepped out of a bandbox, and she had the cutest little hands and feet. Everybody in Birmingham used to talk about what cute little feet she had when she got her job playing the mighty Wurlitzer ..."

"The what?"

"The mighty Wurlitzer organ. They had it down at the Alabama Theater for years. They said it was the largest organ in the south, and I believe they were right. We'd all get on the streetcar and go over and see the picture show. I'd always go when Ginger Rogers was playing. She was my favorite player. That girl is the most talented one they got out there in Hollywood. I don't even care to see a picture if she's not in it ... she can do it all: dance, sing, act ... what have you ...

"But anyhow, between shows, the lights would go down and you'd hear this man's voice saying, 'And now, the Alabama Theater is proud to present ...' he'd always say that, 'proud to present' Miss Essie Rue Limeway, performing on the mighty Wurlitzer. And from far away you'd hear this music ... and then, all of a sudden, here would come this huge organ, rising up from the floor, and there would be Essie Rue, playing her theme song, 'I'm in Love with the Man in the Moon.' And all the spotlights would hit her and the sound of that organ would fill the theater and shake the rafters. Then she'd turn around and smile and never miss a note; and move into another song. Before you knew it, she'd be playing 'Stars Fell on Alabama' or 'Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,' And her tiny little feet would just fly over those pedals like butterflies! She wore ankle straps that she ordered especially from Loveman's department store.

"You'd think she'd put weight on everywhere, but she never did, just her body.

"Everybody has their good points, and she knew hers and played them up. That's why I hate to see you so down on yourself. I was telling Mrs. Otis the other day, I said, 'Evelyn Couch has got the prettiest skin I ever saw,' I said. 'She looks like her mother has just kept her wrapped up in cotton all her life.' "

"Why, thank you, Mrs. Threadgoode."

"Well, it's true. You don't have a wrinkle on you. I also told Mrs. Otis that I thought you ought to think about selling some of that Mary Kay cosmetics. With your skin and personality, why I bet you could get yourself a pink Cadillac in no time. My neighbor Mrs. Hartman has a niece who sells it and she made a bundle, and Mary Kay gave her a pink Cadillac as a bonus. And she's not half as pretty as you are."

Evelyn said, "Oh Mrs. Threadgoode, thank you for saying that, but I'm too old to start anything like that. They want young women."

"Evelyn Couch, how can you say that, you are still a young woman. Forty-eight years old is just a baby! You've got half your life left to live yet! Mary Kay doesn't care how old you are. She's no spring chicken herself. Now, if it was me and I had that skin and was your age, I'd make a try at that Cadillac. Of course, I'd have to get me a driver's license, but I'd try for it anyway.

"Just think, Evelyn, if you live to be as old as I am, you've got thirty-seven more years to go ..."

Evelyn laughed. "What does it feel like to be eighty-six, Mrs. Threadgoode?"

"Well, I don't feel any different. Like I say, it just creeps up on you. One day you're young and the next day your bosoms and your chin drops and you're wearing a rubber girdle. But you don't know you're old. Course, I can tell when I look in the mirror ... sometimes it nearly scares me to death. My neck looks just like old crepe paper, and I've got so many wrinkles and there's nothing you can do about it. Oh, I used to have something from Avon for wrinkles, but it didn't last but about an hour and they all came back, so I finally stopped fooling with it. I don't even put on a face anymore, just a little lotion and eyebrow pencil, so you can tell I've got eyebrows ... they're white now, honey ... and I'm full of liver spots." She looked at her hands. "You wonder where all those little fellows come from." Then she laughed. "I'm even to old to make a good picture. Francis wanted to snap a picture of me and Mrs. Otis, but I hid my head. Said I might break the camera."

Evelyn asked if she ever got lonesome out there.

"Well, yes, sometimes I do. Of course, all my people are gone ... but once in a while, some of the ones from the church come to see me, but it's just hello and goodbye. That's just the way it is, hello and goodbye.

"Sometimes I look at my picture of Cleo and little Albert and wonder what they're up to ... and dream about the old days."

She smiled at Evelyn. "That's what I'm living on now, honey, dreams, dreams of what I used to do."

NOVEMBER 18, 1940.

Stump was in the back room shooting at cardboard blackbirds with a rubber-band gun and Ruth was correcting papers when Idgie came banging in the back door from the annual Dill Pickle Club fishing trip.

He ran and jumped up on her and nearly knocked her down.

Ruth was glad to see her because she always worried whenever Idgie went off for a week or more, especially when she knew she was down at the river with Eva Bates. Stump ran out to look on the back steps.

"Where's the fish?"

"Well, Stump," Idgie said, "the truth is, we caught a fish, it was so big we couldn't get it out of the water. We took a picture of it, though, and the picture alone weighs twenty pounds ..."

"Oh Aunt Idgie, you didn't catch any fish!"

About that time, they heard, "Whooo-ooo, it's me ... me and Albert, come to visit ..." and in came a tall, sweet-looking woman, with her hair twisted back in a knot, and a little retarded boy, about Stump's age, coming to visit just like they had every day for the past ten years; and they were always glad to see her.

Idgie said, "Well hey there, gal, how you doing today?"

"Just fine," she said, and sat down. "How are you girls doing?"

Ruth said, "Well, Ninny, we almost had some catfish for supper, but they must not have been biting." She laughed. "We're having photographs instead."

Ninny was disappointed. "Oooh, Idgie, I wish you had brought me a good ol' catfish tonight ... I love a good catfish. What a shame, I can just taste him."

"Ninny," Idgie said, "catfish don't bite in the dead of winter."

"They don't? Well, you'd think they would be just as hungry in the winter as they are in the summer, wouldn't you?"

Ruth agreed. "That's true, Idgie. Why don't they bite this time of year?"

"Oh, it's not that they're not hungry, it has to do with the temperature of the worm. A catfish won't eat a cold worm, no matter how hungry it gets."

Ruth looked at Idgie and shook her head, always amazed at the tales she could come up with.

Ninny said, "Well, that makes sense. I hate my food to get cold, myself, and I guess even if you were to heat up the worms, they would be cold by the time they got to the bottom of the river, wouldn't they? And speaking of cold, hasn't it been a cold old winter? It's as cold as blitzen out there."

Albert was across the room playing with Stump and shooting at the cardboard blackbirds. While Ninny was having her coffee, she had a thought. "Stump, do you reckon you could come over to my house and shoot your gun at these old blackbirds that are sitting on my telephone wires? I don't want you to hurt them, I just want you to scare them off ... I think they're up there listening to my telephone calls, through their feet."

Ruth, who adored Ninny, said, "Oh Ninny, you don't think that's true, do you?"

"Well, honey, that's what Cleo told me."

NOVEMBER 19, 1940.

Faith Act Used to Fleece Woman Out of $50 in Cash

Mrs. Sallie Jinx, of 68-C Howell Street, S.E., was the victim of flimflam, she reported to police yesterday. Mrs. Jinx said a woman, known to her as Sister Bell, came to her home and, through a faith act, pretended to tie $50 of her money in a napkin and put it in a trunk with instructions not to open the napkin until four hours later. When the napkin was opened, the money was gone, the victim stated.

Toncille Robinson and E. C. Robinson are telling their friends they don't care what the other does.

Missing from Our Alley 8th Avenue just doesn't seem the same. Artis O. Peavey, that well-known fellow around town, has seen fit to exit to the Windy City. He is sorely missed by the female population, of that fact you can be sure.

We hear that Miss Helen Reid had to call the law over a late-night prowler trying to enter her home on Avenue F, and do her bodily harm ... and when the officers of the law arrived, they apprehended a gentleman hiding under the house with an ice pick in his hand, who claimed that he was the iceman.

Could that gentleman have been Mr. Baby Shephard, who heretofore had been sweet on Miss Reid?

... The Esquire Club is preparing for its annual Limb Loosener ...

Platter News Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy" is a new Decca release of considerable interest and novelty. The pianist in "Creole" gets on a boogie-woogie kick that's odd but effective.

NOVEMBER 20, 1940.

It was raining in Chicago, and Artis O. Peavey was running down the street. He ducked into a doorway, under a sign that read SEA FOOD LUNCH, FRIED FISH 35. Across the street, at the RKO Alhambra, Dealers in Crime and Hoodlum Empire were showing. He felt like a fugitive, himself, up here, away from home, hiding out from a dusky damsel named Electra Greene.

He stood there, smoking a Chesterfield cigarette and contemplating life and its turmoils. His mother had said, whenever she was down, that just the thought of her sweet Jesus could always make her spirits rise.

But it hadn't been such thoughts that made Artis rise. It was the sight of a certain high-hipped, thick-lipped black beauty; and it hadn't been just his spirits that would rise and stay risen, much to the delight of said beauty. His main problem in life, at the moment, was that he loved too well and not too wisely.

He had always played a dangerous game where the lovely ladies' husbands were concerned, for Artis knew no boundaries. Every living female was his particular domain, and because of that lack of respect for territorial rights, he had often been forced to search his own body for stab wounds and broken bones, and on too many occasions had found them. After being caught with the wrong woman at the wrong time, one bronze amazon stuck him with a corkscrew. He was much more careful after that unhappy affair, the result of which was an interesting scar, to say the least, and a natural hesitation to fool with any more women who were bigger than he was. Still, he was a heartbreaker. He had told one too many to look for him the next night, and that's just what they wound up doing-looking ...

This skinny little man, so black he was a deep royal blue, had caused a lot of trouble for the opposite sex. One gal drank a can of floor wax and topped it off with a cup of Clorox, trying to separate herself from the same world he was in. When she survived, claiming that the liquids had ruined her complexion for life, he became continually uneasy after dark, because she had snuck up behind him more than once and cracked him in the head with a purseful of rocks.

But this situation with Electra Greene was more serious than a purseful of rocks. Electra was packing a .38 revolver that she knew how to use and had made uncouth threats pertaining to his manhood, and the extermination of such, after finding out he had not been true. Not once, but eight times, to be exact, with a Miss Delilah Woods, her sworn enemy, who had also left town in a hurry.

As Artis stood there today in the doorway, he was hurting so bad, he thought he would die. He missed Birmingham and he wanted to go back.

Every afternoon, before his hasty exit from Birmingham, he had driven his blue two-toned Chevrolet with the whitewall tires up Red Mountain and had parked to watch the sunset. From up there he could look down and see the iron and steel mills, with their towering smokestacks billowing orange smoke all the way up to Tennessee. There had been nothing more beautiful to him than the city at that hour, when the sky was washed with a red-and-purple glow from the mills and neon lights would start coming on all over town, twinkling and dancing throughout the downtown streets and over to Slagtown.

Birmingham, the town that during the Depression had been named by FDR "the hardest hit city in the U.S." ... where people had been so poor that Artis had known a man that would let you shoot at him for money and a girl that had soaked her feet in brine and vinegar for three days, trying to win a dance marathon ... the place that had the lowest income per capita of any American city and yet was known as the best circus town in the South ...

Birmingham, which at one time had the highest illiteracy rate, more venereal disease than any other city in America, and at the same time proudly held the record for having the highest number of Sunday School students of any city in the U.S.... where Imperial Laundry trucks had once driven around town with WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY written on the side, and where darker citizens still sat behind wooden boards on streetcars that said COLORED and rode freight elevators in department stores.

Birmingham, Murder Capital of the South, where 131 people had been killed in 1931 alone ...

All this, and yet Artis loved his Birmingham with an insatiable passion, from the south side to the north side, in the freezing-cold rainy winter, when the red clay would slide down the sides of hills and run into the streets, and in the lush green summers, when the green kudzu vine covered the sides of the mountains and grew up trees and telephone poles and the air was moist and heavy with the smell of gardenias and barbecue. He had traveled all over the country, from Chicago to Detroit, from Savannah to Charleston and on up to New York, but there was never a time when he wasn't happy to get back to Birmingham. If there is such a thing as complete happiness, it is knowing that you are in the right place, and Artis had been completely happy from the moment he hit Birmingham.

So today he made up his mind to head on home, because he knew he would rather be dead than be away any longer. He missed Birmingham like most men miss their wives.

And that's just what Miss Electra Greene intended to become ... if she let him live, that is.

As he walked by the Fife and Drum Bar, somebody played a song on the jukebox: Way down South, in Birmingham, I mean South, in Alabam',

An old place where people go to dance the night away,

They all drive or walk for miles to jive

That Southern style, slow jive, that makes you want

To dance 'til break of day.

At each junction where the town folks meet

At each function, in their tux they greet you.

Come on down, forget your care. Come on down

You'll find me there. So long town!

I'm headin' for Tuxedo Junction now.

NOVEMBER 25, 1950.

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