1,001 Novels: A Library of America
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (1987)
by Fannie Flagg
Whistle Stop, Alabama (Mobile area)
Alabama: 12/18
The last geographic cluster of Alabama books in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America map is around Mobile- on the Gulf coast in the south of the state. It's another area I have never visited. Nor, for that matter, do I have any idea that I ever might be there. The same can't be said for northern Alabama, easily reachable from Nashville (a place I've been and could go again). Mobile doesn't have the historic heft of the Birmingham and its important role in the Civil Rights movement. I didn't get much of a feel for real world Birmingham, since Fried Green Tomatoes is close to being a fantasy novel about some semi-idealized version of the south where decent people actually exist.
Fried Green Tomatoes mostly reminded me of The Oldest Living Confederate War Widow Tells All, which uses a similar narrative convention (death bed flashbacks from one of the protagonists with an interlocutor trying to figure out confused events of the past. Widow was published in 1984, which makes me think author Fannie Flagg must have read it. Unlike Widow, Tomatoes is not 800 pages long. The central themes, which treat both racial and LGBTQ issues in a sympathetic light, made me laugh, because the attitudes in this book are unlike any in the other 50 plus titles in this chapter. Here, we've got a small-town Alabama sheriff who is protective of his African American community, and an LGBTQ business owner who isn't afraid to stand up to racists and suffer no consequences from her actions. That is not the Deep South I've read about up to this point- where the characters in this book would have all been murdered for their behavior. Maybe it has something to do with Mobile.
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