Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LARRY TYE has been an award-winning journalist at The Boston Globe and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He now runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Satchel, as well as Bobby Kennedy, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, Rising from the Rails, and co-author, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. He lives in Massachusetts.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Rising from the Rails

Owl Books (NY)

Chapter One

All Aboard

* * *

HE WAS A black man in a white jacket and sable hat. Havingstepped out of the cotton fields barely two years before, he now wasstepping onto one of the locomotives that had long symbolized freedomto slavehands across America. He lit candles that illuminatedthe passenger carriage, stoked the pot-bellied Baker Heater, andturned down hinged berths that magically transformed the day coachinto an overnight compartment. He was part chambermaid, partvalet, shining shoes, nursing hangovers, tempering tempers, and performingother tasks that won tips and made him indispensable to thewealthy white travelers who snapped their fingers in the air whenthey needed him. It was the only real traveling he would ever do.

That much is known about the first porter to work on GeorgeMortimer Pullman's railroad sleeping cars. What is not known is hisname, age, birthplace, date of employment, or just about anythingelse about him. Historians will say the reason is that a fire in Chicagodestroyed the early archives of the Pullman Company. But, curiously,it didn't destroy the names of those first two primitive Pullman carsback in 1859, remodeled day coaches 9 and 19 of the Chicago, Alton& St. Louis Railroad, or the provenance of the first three paying passengers,all from Bloomington, Illinois. Or even the name of the originalconductor, Jonathan L. Barnes, who like all conductors was whiteand whose narrative is preserved in telling detail.

The pioneering porter, in fact, was not expected to have humanproportions at all, certainly none worthy of documenting. He was aphantom assistant who did not merit the dignity of a name or identityof any sort. That is precisely why George Pullman hired him. Hewas an ex-slave who embodied servility more than humanity, anever-obliging manservant with an ever-present smile who was therewhen a jacket needed dusting or a child tending or a beverage refreshing.Few inquired where he came from or wanted to hear about hisstruggle. In his very anonymity lay his value.

And so it was that the polished passengers who rode the plushvelvet-appointed night coaches over the first half century of PullmanPalace Car service summoned him with a simple "porter." The lesspolite hailed him with "boy" or, more often, "George." The latterappellation was born in the practice of slaves being named afterslavemasters, in this case porters being seen as servants of GeorgePullman. It stuck because it was repeated instinctively by successivegenerations of passengers, especially those below the Mason-DixonLine, and by caricaturists, comedians, and newspaper columnists. Ifthe more socially conscious among riders perceived the grim ironyof the moniker, they did not say so publicly. They certainly did notobject. The only ones who protested, at first, were white men namedGeorge. They were sufficiently annoyed by the slight, or more probablyamused, that they founded the Society for the Prevention ofCalling Sleeping Car Porters George, SPCSCPG for short, whicheventually claimed thirty-one thousand members, including England'sKing George V, George Herman "Babe" Ruth, George M. Cohan,and Georges Clemenceau of France.

Whether George Pullman knew his passengers were calling hisporters "George" is unclear. That he would not have cared is certain.It was not that he was mean, or more coldhearted to blackemployees than to white. He believed he owed workers nothingmore than a job, and when business slackened, even that was notironclad. He hired more Negroes than any businessman in America,giving them a monopoly on the profession of Pullman porter anda chance to enter the cherished middle class. He did it not out of sentimentality,of which he had none, but because it made businesssense. They came cheap, and men used to slave labor could becompelled to do whatever work they were asked, for as many hoursas told.

There was another reason George hired only Negroes, one thathad to do with the social separation he thought was vital for portersto safely interact with white passengers in such close quarters.Women, after all, were disrobing on the other side of a thin curtain.Riders were stumbling into bed drunk, slinking into compartmentsof someone other than their spouse, tumbling out of upper berths.Such compromised postures called for a porter whom passengerscould regard as part of the furnishings rather than a mortal withlikes, dislikes, and a memory. It had to be someone they knew theywould never encounter outside the closed capsule of the sleepingcar, someone who inhabited a different reality. It must be a Negro.

Recruiters started signing them up shortly after George launchedhis fleet of sleeping cars. The Pullman Company built the sleepersand rented them to the railroads, complete with everything fromfine linen and sweet-smelling soap to a service staff whose centerpiecewas the porter. George's first choice for that job was Negroesfrom the old slave states. The blacker the better, passengers toldhim. If some riders were rude in return, so be it. That was outsidehis control and concern.

All of which was okay with most porters, at least at the beginning.They were, as George suspected, grateful for a steady salary,for being out of shackles and able to hurtle across the landscape inhis luxurious sleeping carriages. They cherished the job and stayed alifetime, with many passing it down to sons and grandsons. Workon the train was rigid and hierarchical, but they were accustomed tostructure. No hierarchy could be more confining or cruel than thatof slave and slavemaster. Little by little, however, some portersasked for more. They wanted the human dimension that slavery hadtaken away and without which they could not feel fully free. Theyneeded a heritage and ancestors worth knowing. If the PullmanCompany could not or would not tell them who their patriarch was,that first porter, they would frame their own gilded image.

They called him Daddy Joe. He was a Bunyanesque figure tallenough to pull down upper berths on either side of the aisle at thesame time, agile enough to prepare uppers and lowers simultaneously,and so appreciated by riders that his pockets were weigheddown with silver and gold. Once, when marauding redskins besiegedhis Central Pacific train at a water stop, Joe climbed atop the sleeperand spoke to the Indians in their own idiom, charming the chiefsinto accepting a pile of Pullman blankets in place of passengerscalps. Another time he convinced passengers panicked by a risingriver to stay seated 'til floodwaters subsided. Daddy Joe may or maynot have been real, but the way porters told and retold his stories itwas clear he reflected their aspirations as well as their need to knowwhence they came.

GEORGE PULLMAN KNEW his own roots enough to know theydid not matter. Like most true believing entrepreneurs in the making,he saw history as mere curiosity, preordaining nothing. He wasdetermined to become a player in the new financial and politicalorders, an age defined by the iron horse, shrinking frontiers, and thewar brewing between the states. Industry was eclipsing the old land-basedeconomy. Men who grasped those trends, men like GeorgePullman, were free to shape their future and, when needed, reshapetheir past. They were self-made.

The third of ten children, George set out in 1859 from the villageof Albion in upstate New York to seek his...