58 pages • 1 hour read
Fannie FlaggFried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Section 2 (Pages 99-202)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: Pages 99-132
Each Sunday, Evelyn brings new snacks for Mrs. Threadgoode, who loves good food. Mrs. Threadgoode tells her, “Idgie always said, ‘Ninny, I think you ride that train just to eat’…and she was right, too. I loved that porterhouse steak they used to serve” (102). Other fixtures of life in Whistle Stop include the Dill Pickle Club and Railroad Bill. The Dill Pickle Club consists of members like Idgie, Grady, and Smokey Lonesome: “About all they did was drink whiskey and make up lies […] That was their fun, making up tales” (124). Railroad Bill is a mysterious figure who raids government supply trains to provide food to Troutville.
One Sunday, Mrs. Threadgoode talks about how Ruth’s son, “Stump,” lost his arm as a young boy playing on the railroad tracks. This incident features in a 1936 excerpt from the Weems Weekly, while two flashbacks depict the aftermath of the accident. In the first flashback, Big George carries Stump to the segregated hospital and must wait outside because he’s black. The next flashback shows the “only time” Stump complained about his disability. During a mock shoot-out with his friends, Stump is “killed” multiple times, embarrassing him in front of a girl his age named Peggy Hadley. Idgie finds him throwing a tantrum in his room, and he tells her that he lost because his friends can use two guns. Idgie then takes him to Eva Bates’s bar, where she tosses a ball for a three-legged dog while Stump watches. She tells him that he shouldn’t talk about what he “can’t do,” since she’d “hate like the devil to think that [he] didn’t have any more sense than that poor, little dumb dog” (115).
In December 1938, Idgie and Stump come across a can left alongside the train tracks, and Stump marvels at Railroad Bill’s courage. Idgie points out the other “brave” people she knows: Big George, who saved Idgie when she fell into a hog pen as a toddler, and Ruth who found the courage to leave her abusive husband while heavily pregnant.
In another December flashback taking place in1934, Big George’s son Artis visits black Birmingham, or “Slagtown,” for the first time. There, he falls in love with the music, fashion, and gambling. A 1937 excerpt from the Slagtown News describes Artis’s admission to the hospital: “suffering from multiple self-inflected accidental injuries he received while attempting to open a particularly expensive bottle of wine.” The Weems Weekly makes note of events like Thanksgiving, 1935, when Railroad Bill steals 17 hams (121).
Summary: Pages 133-173
By March, Evelyn increasingly finds herself taking comfort in thoughts of Whistle Stop: “She would walk down the street and go in Opal’s beauty shop […] After a comb-out she would stop by to visit with Dot Weems at the post office and then on to the cafe where she could see everyone so clearly, Stump and Ruth and Idgie” (133). Meanwhile, Mrs. Threadgoode talks about her love of Easter, as it was the day that God finally answered her prayers after more than a decade of infertility. Her son, Albert, was intellectually disabled, but Mrs. Threadgoode was grateful for his existence and refused to institutionalize him.
In a flashback to 1938, Smokey Lonesome and a young boy arrive at a Chicago Hooverville. When the American Legion raids the camp, the two lose each other, and Smokey later finds the boy fatally injured. Before returning to Alabama, Smokey buries the boy with the help of some friends: “They never did know his name, so they just put up a wooden marker, made out of a crate. It said, THE KID” (139). Another flashback concerns Mr. Pinto—a man Mrs. Threadgoode describes as a “famous murderer” (165). In 1940, Pinto was executed, and his remains placed on a train traveling through Whistle Stop. Stump convinced Peggy to come with him to the station, and the two managed to open Pinto’s coffin and take a picture before someone caught them.
The Weems Weekly covers topics like “religious sewing machines that were supposed to heal you as you sewed,” and “Miss Fancy,” an elephant in Birmingham (149). In one1938 flashback, Big George’s daughter Naughty Bird is sick with pneumonia and refuses to eat until she’s seen Miss Fancy. Because the KKK’s presence makes it too dangerous for George to take her to Birmingham, Idgie arranges for Miss Fancy’s trainer to bring her to Whistle Stop.
A series of flashbacks and articles surround Ruth’s 1924 marriage to Frank Bennett. A few months before the wedding, Idgie travels to Valdosta and, posing as Ruth’s cousin, asks a shopkeeper about Frank. The man responds that Frank is “well liked” and that everyone in town is “pleased” about the wedding. On the day of the wedding, Idgie returns to Valdosta and parks across the street from the church, drinking and blowing the car’s horn during the service.
Summary: Pages 174-202
Through flashbacks and Mrs. Threadgoode’s stories, Flagg explains how Ruth ended up returning to Whistle Stop. After Ruth’s marriage, Idgie begins driving to Valdosta each month to check up on Ruth. After more than two years of this, Idgie finally speaks to Ruth directly, saying she still loves and misses her. She visits Valdosta infrequently after that, until in 1928 she learns from a shopkeeper that Frank has been abusing Ruth: “He’s blackened her eye and knocked her down the stairs, and once, he broke her arm” (188). Frank has been abusing Ruth since their wedding night. Idgie storms over to the barbershop where Frank is getting a shave and threatens to kill him if he hurts Ruth again.
Later that same year, Ruth sends Idgie a passage from the Bible implying she wants to leave Frank to be with Idgie: “‘And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’” (191). A few days later, Idgie, Big George, and several friends and relatives fetch Ruth from her home while Frank yells in protest. Back in Whistle Stop, Ruth assures Idgie’s parents that she’ll remain loyal to Idgie for the rest of her life.
In the novel’s present, Evelyn and Mrs. Threadgoode continue their weekly chats. Mrs. Threadgoode talks about her soft spot for insects, which she used to spend “hours and hours” watching with her son. She adds that another nursing home resident (and former resident of Whistle Stop) named Vesta Adcock has been throwing people’s possessions out windows. A 1940 flashback reveals that Vesta’s husband, Earl, left her after their child was grown, as he was unable to endure her temper and controlling nature any longer. Excerpts from the 1940s editions of the Weems Weekly divulge that a man nearly died when Vesta drove over him while he was napping: “Grady Kilgore came over and said thank God it had been raining a lot lately, because if it had not been for the mud, Jesse might have been killed” (201). There’s also a mention of Stump winning a science fair.
Section 2 Analysis
In this section, several symbols and motifs in the novel become increasingly important. For instance, trains and railways are ever present in much of the Whistle Stop narrative. The cafe is near a railroad yard, and the tracks run so close to some residents’ houses that, as Mrs. Threadgoode puts it,
“If I had me a fishin’ pole, I could reach out and touch the trains with it, that’s how close I am” (102). Given this proximity, the town relies on train traffic for business and, to some extent, its population. Several fixtures of the town, such as Smokey Lonesome and George Pullman, initially arrived by train. At the same time, the presence of the railroads isn’t an unqualified good, as accidents like the ones that kill Buddy and disable Stump demonstrate. Perhaps the best way of thinking about trains, then, is as a reflection of life itself, and the changes—good and bad—that it brings. Rail travel evokes the common image of life as a journey from one point to another, while the complex and interconnected network of tracks suggests the ways in which different people’s lives intersect.
The motif of food serves primarily to establish and reinforce social bonds. The fact that Evelyn shares snacks with Mrs. Threadgoode signifies the women’s developing friendship, and the attention Evelyn is beginning to pay to Ninny’s thoughts and feelings. After learning how much Mrs. Threadgoode likes Easter, for instance, Evelyn brings her an assortment of “dyed eggs, candy corn, and Easter chocolates” (164). In the Whistle Stop storyline, Ruth and Idgie’s picnic offers another example of food mediating relationships between women: Ruth realizes she’s in love with Idgie when Idgie collects the jar of honey for her.
Though Mrs. Threadgoode is open about her love of good food, Evelyn initially indulges her sweet tooth privately, “escap[ing]” the stress of visiting her mother-in-law by eating a candy bar in the “peace and quiet” of the visitor’s lounge (5). Evelyn’s guilt-ridden eating contrasts with Flagg’s depiction of food as a source of pleasure and companionship and reveals Evelyn’s isolation and depression at the beginning of the novel. Mrs. Threadgoode’s attitudes slowly begin to transform Evelyn’s relationship with food, and Evelyn eventually loses weight through exercise rather than extreme dieting.
Flagg continues to develop issues related to gender and sexism throughout this section. Frank’s abuse of Ruth is the most overt example of misogyny in the novel and stems from the abuse Frank suffered as a child for being too close to his mother—presumably, a sign of effeminacy in his father’s eyes. This mistreatment caused him to idolize his mother even more, leaving him unprepared to cope with the revelation that she was having an affair. As villainous a figure as Frank is, his villainy is not inherent, but is the product of a broader sexist system. His treatment of women also depicts the widespread racism of the time, as Mrs. Threadgoode says, he “started forcing himself on the poor colored girls he had working for him. Ruth said one little girl was only twelve years old” (192). Frank’s victimization of black women and girls is partly opportunistic, as it’s unlikely that a crime against black women won’t investigated, but the act also reflects society’s longstanding tendency to depict black women in hypersexualized ways.
