When Larry Tye began collecting stories of the once ubiquitous Pullman porter for his latest book, "Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class," he knew he had to work fast. The last generation of porters was slipping away, taking with them the memories and wisdom of an era that gave black Americans their first taste of freedom.
Rescuing a relic from the edge of oblivion is no easy task; making room for him in the collective memory is harder still. But revealing his living influence on our social and cultural institutions today requires insight and imagination. Tye has both. He succeeds in explaining how, in the late 19th through the early 20th century, the young African American laborer who, while working as a porter, (but also as a dining car waiter, fireman, brakeman, maid or cook) for the Pullman Rail Car Company, was the true harbinger of the Civil Rights movement and the precursor to today's black middle class. "Behind almost every successful African American, there is a Pullman porter," Tye writes.
The first wave of porters was hired by the maniacal industrialist George Mortimer Pullman -- whose luxurious "Palace" cars revolutionized train travel and whose recruitment strategy focused exclusively on newly emancipated slaves in the South because, he thought, they would make the best servants. Pullman had a rigid criterion for his black railway workers -- and his porters in particular: They had to be young, trim, tall, literate, and their skin had to be jet black (presumably to underscore the "otherness" of their station). Each was given an employee manual to read and memorize -- which, in addition to 217 rules, included "entire catechisms on how to clip a passenger's hair and pour an Old Fashioned Kentucky Colonel Mint Julep (and) what to do if a rider required surgery or the heating system did."
Some declared the job barely a step up from chattel slave; to others it was a giant leap. Indeed, from today's perspective it's hard to imagine how porter work, with its meager pay, inhumane hours and daily indignities, was legal, let alone coveted. Yet Tye shows with the help of anecdotes and fresh testimonies that the often complex and contradictory sides of the porter's life and lifestyle were, in fact, precisely the basis for later advances.
What drew many in at first was the idea of being a porter: "an image outlined by midnight-blue tailored jackets and crisp visored caps, filled in with tales of exotic destinations and celebrity passengers, and completed by the sound of coins jingling in the pockets of these veteran porters." But what prompted them to stay, and even to pass their jobs on to their children, was the reality of the economic advantage porters gained over any other profession available to blacks at the time. It was not only an opportunity to support themselves and their families, but it produced a peculiar set of circumstances that yielded unexpected opportunities -- which went beyond their selves, their communities and even their time.
Porters were in constant motion, discovering new cities and encountering new tastes and new ideas. They were "keen observers," Tye notes, studying the manners and the interests of their passengers, picking up and reading the newspapers and magazines those passengers left behind. "When you travel and come in contact with people, you just broaden yourself," an ex-porter tells Tye. "My son could identify things because, as a Pullman porter, I came into the passenger's refuse." More important was the impact the porter had on the places he went. " The porter did more than pass through those worlds. He helped disseminate the culture he saw and tasted to black Americans and whites. " He brought the urban sound of jazz to the rural South and the local flavors of blues and bluegrass to the cities. If black newspapers and revolutionary ideas reached the most isolated and segregated parts of the country, it was often owing to a Pullman porter. [...]
| Continue "A long ride to a better station," Maria Fish's San Francisco Chronicle review of Larry Tye's "Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class"
posted in reviews on July 3, 2004 10:13 PM | t (0)
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