A Journey North

Abstract

A Journey North M. L. Goldsmith (bio) My father pressed a folded five-dollar bill into the hand of the smiling Pullman porter, who deftly slipped it into the side pocket of his starched gleaming white jacket. “Don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” he said. “I’ll take good care of your young gentleman and make sure he meets his aunties at Union Station in the morning.” He laid a heavy black hand on my shoulder. “I’ll come get you for supper; then we’ll make up your bed. You need something, you just mash that little button on the wall there, and Ol’ Charles will be right here.” He gave a smiling salute and backed out of the tiny compartment. “Thank you, Charles,” my father called after him. “I’ll see you when y’all return.” With a backward wave Charles acknowledged the implied promise of another tip. My father lit a Chesterfield with his Ronson. “Well, Old Man, you’re all set. Charles will take care of you, and Helen and Elinor will meet you in Washington. You have your wallet?” I patted my hip pocket in affirmation. “Remember to take both suitcases when you get off, and don’t get into any trouble,” he said with mock seriousness, lowering his head and looking at me solemnly over his glasses. “Come on, Daddy, I’m not a baby any more. I’m ten years old now.” He laughed and gave me a quick rough hug and then another. “Give those to my little sisters for me, and have a wonderful time.” Soon he and my mother were waving from the platform where she had been waiting since her inspection of my accommodations and her own good-byes, reminding her only child three times to call home the moment he arrived. The whistle echoed from the grimed brick wall of Birmingham Terminal Station and the conductor called his “All aboard!” I sat back with my new copy of Boy’s Life, and the Southerner headed north. [End Page 214] Twice I had made the overnight trip to Washington with my parents—before the Southerner had added Pullman sleeping cars. I remembered lying on the prickly reclined seat, watching the dark landscape and occasional town lights passing by, too excited and too uncomfortable to do more than doze. Even before the addition of sleeping cars in 1950, the Southerner had been one of the flag-ships of the Southern Railway System since it had begun service between New York City and New Orleans on March 31, 1941. It and its “streamliner” sister trains, bearing such names as the Tennessean, the Crescent, the Peach Queen, the Birmingham Special, and the Royal Palm, were unmistakable: their aerodynamic diesel locomotives painted the distinctive white, green, and gold of the SRS logo, their strings of mirror-bright stainless-steel coaches flashing behind. They set the standard for luxurious travel, for comfort and speed, until the 1960s, when affordable air travel and President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system combined to send them into the anonymous mediocrity of Amtrak. Reconfigured and renamed the Southern Crescent, the Southerner maintained its reputation of superior passenger service until its eventual hand-over to Amtrak in February of 1979. That was in the unimagined and unimaginable future for me, twenty-six long years down the tracks. My wife and three sons would be with me in seminary as I, a veteran on the G.I. Bill, prepared for the Episcopal priesthood. My parents and Aunt Helen would be dead, and Charles, the Pullman porter, would no doubt be long retired. But on this glorious evening Charles came for me as he had promised and delivered me to the glamour of the dining car. “May this young gentleman join you for supper?” Charles asked the woman seated alone at the small linen-covered table. Smoke from a slim cigarette in a long amber holder wreathed her blond head with a hazy halo, her violet eyes hooded against the smoke. To me she seemed elegant, sophisticated, beautiful. She turned her attention slowly from the window. “Ov carse,” she responded after a long gaze at the two of us, her accent...