Your Porter
By Edward Hungerford
He stands there at the door of his car, dusky, grinning, immaculate—awaiting your pleasure. He steps forward as you near him and, with a quick, intuitive movement born of long experience and careful training, inquires:
“What space you got, guv’nor?”
“Lower five,” you reply. “Are you full-up, George?”
“Jus’ toler’bul, guv’nor.”
He has your grips, is already slipping down the aisle toward section five. And, after he has stowed the big one under the facing bench and placed the smaller one by your side, he asks again:
“Shake out a pillow for you, guv’nor?”
That “guv’nor,” though not a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial—his subtlety, if you please. Another passenger might be the “kunnel”; still another, the “jedge.” But there can be no other guv’nor save you on this car and trip. And George, of the Pullmans, is going to watch over you this night as a mother hen might watch over her solitary chick. The car is well filled and he is going to have a hard night of it; but he is going to take good care of you. He tells you so; and, before you are off the car, you are going to have good reason to believe it.
Before we consider the sable-skinned George of to-day, give a passing thought to the Pullman itself. The first George of the Pullmans—George M. Pullman—was a shrewd-headed carpenter who migrated from a western New York village out into Illinois more than half a century ago and gave birth to the idea of railroad luxury at half a cent a mile. There had been sleeping cars before Pullman built the Pioneer, as he called his maiden effort. There was a night car, equipped with rough bunks for the comfort of passengers, on the Cumberland Valley Railroad along about 1840.
Other early railroads had made similar experiments, but they were all makeshifts and crude. Pullman set out to build a sleeping car that would combine a degree of comfort with a degree of luxury. The Pioneer, viewed in the eyes of 1864, was really a luxurious car. It was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so wide was it that there were no railroads on which it might run, and when Pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to permit the Pioneer to run over their lines, they laughed at him.
“It is ridiculous, Mr. Pullman,” they told him smilingly in refusal. “People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours.”
Then suddenly they ceased smiling. All America ceased smiling. Morse’s telegraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great magistrate lay dead within the White House, at Washington. And men were demanding a funeral car, dignified and handsome enough to carry the body of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield. Suddenly somebody thought of the Pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far from Chicago.
The Pioneer was quickly released. There was no hesitation now about making clearances for her. Almost in the passing of a night, station platforms and other obstructions were being cut away, and the first of all the Pullman cars made a triumphant though melancholy journey to New York, to Washington, and back again to Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, in the hour of death—fifty years ago this blossoming spring of 1915—had given birth to the Pullman idea. The other day, while one of the brisk Federal commissions down at Washington was extending consideration to the Pullman porter and his wage, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the Pullman Company. And the man who answered the call was Robert T. Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.
When Pullman built the Pioneer he designated it A, little dreaming that eventually he might build enough cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet. To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in constant use. It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into Mexico. On an average night sixty thousand persons—a community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana—sleep within its cars.
And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service. A railroad in the South, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investment in sleeping and parlor cars to meet its high-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dull months. The Pullman Company, by moving its extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regiments and in battalions, keeps them all earning money. It meets unusual traffic demands with all the resources of its great fleet of traveling hotels.
Last summer, when the Knights Templars held their convention in Denver, it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of Colorado. And this year it is bending its resources toward finding sufficient cars to meet the demands for the long overland trek to the expositions on the Pacific Coast.
The transition from the Pioneer to the steel sleeping car of today was not accomplished in a single step. A man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pullman was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that title. It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. Disfigured by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush curtains—head-bumping, dust-catching, useless—it was a decorative orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor.
Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all. More than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. It separated the two. It began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car.
Recently it has done much more. It has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. It has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. Our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions.
This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car. It is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it. It is the story of George the porter—the six thousand Georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars. And George is worthy of a passing thought. He was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of America—when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along Fifth Avenue or round Rittenhouse Square. Transplanted, he quickly became an American institution. And there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant.
Fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside. It is only in the Pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige. That company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore. Yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service. Experiments have been made in using others. One or two of the Canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the Southwest the inevitable Mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform. None of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car.
The Pullman Company passes by the West Indians—the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper New York. It prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the Old South—Georgia and the Carolinas. It almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states. It shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made Pullman car porters. The company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate—and it does discriminate.
That is its first step toward service—the careful selection of the human factor. The next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the Pullmans he goes to school—in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system. Sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose.
Its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable. One moment it considers the best methods to “swat the fly”—to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome passenger; the next moment the class is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding. The porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again. Though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service.
All these things are taught the sophomore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a passenger, for instance. Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. The porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without.
When the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line. Under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons—comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities. Also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word—service. After all, here is the full measure of the job. He is a servant. He must realize that. And as a servant he must perfect himself. He must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run. He must do better—he must anticipate them.
Take such a man as Eugene Roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between New York and Boston for two decades—save for that brief transcendent hour when Charles S. Mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of New England and appropriated Roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car. Roundtree is a negro of the very finest type. He is a man who commands respect and dignity—and receives it. And Roundtree, as porter of the Pullman smoker on the Merchants’ Limited, has learned to anticipate.
He knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both New York and Boston—though he knows the Boston crowd best. He knows the men who belong to the Somerset and the Algonquin Clubs—the men who are Boston enough to pronounce Peabody “Pebbuddy.” And they know him. Some of them have a habit of dropping in at the New Haven ticket offices and demanding: “Is Eugene running up on the Merchants’ to-night?”
“It isn’t just knowing them and being able to call them by their names,” he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments. “I’ve got to remember what they smoke and what they drink. When Mr. Blank tells me he wants a cigar it’s my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him. I don’t ask him what he wants. I anticipate.”
And by anticipating Roundtree approaches a sort of nth degree of service and receives one of the “fattest” of all the Pullman runs.
George Sylvester is another man of the Roundtree type—only his run trends to the west from New York instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal.
Sylvester is a porter on the Twentieth Century Limited; and, like Roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character. He had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man—a man who was making life hideous for other passengers on Sylvester’s car—was taken from the train. The fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter’s job the more difficult.
The Pullman Company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember Sylvester’s force and courage—and consummate tact—just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property.
Sylvester prefers to forget that episode. He likes to think of the nice part of the Century’s runs—the passengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering. They are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve. They are the people who make an excess-fare train a “fat run.” There are other fat runs, of course: the Overland, the Olympian, the Congressional—and of General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional, more in a moment—fat trains that follow the route of the Century.
It was on one of these, coming east from Cleveland on a snowy night in February last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp Sixth City on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who—to put the matter lightly—is a particular traveler. More than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car.
And the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the Pullman trails. An unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities. It was well that every brother in service in the Cleveland district should know the code. When Mr. X entered his drawing-room—he never rides elsewhere in the car—shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill. X would never ask for these things; but God help the poor porter who forgot them!
So you yourself can imagine the emotions of Whittlesey Warren, porter of the car Thanatopsis, bound east on Number Six on the snowy February night when X came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the Union Depot at Cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake. Warren recognized his man. The code took good care as to that. He followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill.
The banker merely grunted approval, lighted a big black cigar and went into the smoker, while Warren gave some passing attention to the other patrons of his car. It was passing attention at the best; for after a time the little bell annunciator began to sing merrily and persistently at him—and invariably its commanding needle pointed to D.R. And on the drawing-room Whittlesey Warren danced a constant attention.
“Here, you nigger!” X shouted at the first response. “How many times have I got to tell all of you to put the head of my bed toward the engine?”
Whittlesey Warren looked at the bed. He knew the make-up of the train. The code had been met. The banker’s pillows were toward the locomotive. But his job was not to argue and dispute. He merely said:
“Yas-suh. Scuse me!” And he remade the bed while X lit a stogy and went back to the smoker.
That was at Erie—Erie, and the snow was falling more briskly than at Cleveland. Slowing into Dunkirk, the banker returned and glanced through the car window. He could see by the snow against the street lamps that the train was apparently running in the opposite direction. His chubby finger went against the push button. Whittlesey Warren appeared at the door. The language that followed cannot be reproduced in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. Suffice it to say that the porter remembered who he was and what he was, and merely remade the bed.
The banker bit off the end of another cigar and retired once again to the club car. When he returned, the train was backing into the Buffalo station. At that unfortunate moment he raised his car shade—and Porter Whittlesey Warren again reversed the bed, to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse that had ever been heaped on his defenseless head.
Yet not once did he complain—he remembered that a servant a servant always is. And in the morning X must have remembered; for a folded bill went into Warren’s palm—a bill of a denomination large enough to buy that fancy vest which hung in a haberdasher’s shop over on San Juan Hill.
If you have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland—thank heaven for that!—though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of indulging those peculiarities.
Despite the rigid discipline of the Pullman Company the porter’s leeway is a very considerable one. His instructions are never to say “Against the rules!” but rather “I do not know what can be done about it”—and then to make a quick reference to the Pullman conductor, who is his arbiter and his court of last resort. His own initiative, however, is not small.
Two newspaper men in New York know that. They had gone over to Boston for a week-end, had separated momentarily at its end, to meet at the last of the afternoon trains for Gotham. A had the joint finances and tickets for the trip; but B, hurrying through the traffic tangle of South Station, just ninety seconds before the moment of departure, knew that he would find him already in the big Pullman observation car. He was not asked to show his ticket at the train gate. Boston, with the fine spirit of the Tea Party still flowing in its blue veins, has always resented that as a sort of railroad impertinence.
B did not find A. He did not really search for him until Back Bay was passed and the train was on the first leg of its journey, with the next stop at Providence. Then it was that A was not to be found. Then B realized that his side partner had missed the train. He dropped into a corner and searched his own pockets. A battered quarter and three pennies came to view—and the fare from Boston to Providence is ninety cents!
Then it was that the initiative of a well-trained Pullman porter came into play. He had stood over the distressed B while he was making an inventory of his resources.
“Done los’ something, boss?” said the autocrat of the car.
B told the black man his story in a quick, straightforward manner; and the black man looked into his eyes. B returned the glance. Perhaps he saw in that honest ebony face something of the expression of the faithful servants of wartime who refused to leave their masters even after utter ruin had come upon them. The porter drew forth a fat roll of bills.
“Ah guess dat, ef you-all’ll give meh yo’ business cyard, Ah’ll be able to fee-nance yo’ trip dis time.”
To initiative the black man was adding intuition. He had studied his man. He was forever using his countless opportunities to study men. It was not so much of a gamble as one might suppose.
A pretty well-known editor was saved from a mighty embarrassing time; and some other people have been saved from similarly embarrassing situations through the intuition and the resources of the Pullman porter. The conductor—both of the train and of the sleeping-car service—is not permitted to exercise such initiative or intuition; but the porter can do and frequently does things of this very sort. His recompense for them, however, is hardly to be classed as a tip.
The tip is the nub of the whole situation. Almost since the very day when the Pioneer began to blaze the trail of luxury over the railroads of the land, and the autocrat of the Pullman car created his servile but entirely honorable calling, it has been a mooted point. Recently a great Federal commission has blazed the strong light of publicity on it. Robert T. Lincoln, son of the Emancipator, and, as we have already said, the head and front of the Pullman Company, sat in a witness chair at Washington and answered some pretty pointed questions as to the division of the porter’s income between the company and the passenger who employed him. Wages, it appeared, are twenty-seven dollars and a half a month for the first fifteen years of the porter’s service, increasing thereafter to thirty dollars a month, slightly augmented by bonuses for good records.
The porter also receives his uniforms free after ten years of service, and in some cases of long service his pay may reach forty-two dollars a month. The rest of his income is in the form of tips. And Mr. Lincoln testified that during the past year the total of these tips, to the best knowledge and belief of his company, had exceeded two million three hundred thousand dollars.
The Pullman Company is not an eleemosynary institution. Though it has made distinct advances in the establishment of pension funds and death benefits, it is hardly to be classed as a philanthropy. It is a large organization; and it generally is what it chooses to consider itself. Sometimes it avers that it is a transportation company, at other times it prefers to regard itself as a hotel organization; but at all times it is a business proposition. It is not in business for its health. Its dividend record is proof of that. All of which is a preface to the statement that the Pullman Company, like any other large user of labor, regulates its wage scale by supply and demand. If it can find enough of the colored brethren competent and willing and anxious to man its cars at twenty-seven dollars and a half a month—with the fair gamble of two or three or four times that amount to come in the form of tips—it is hardly apt to pay more.
No wonder, then, the tip forms the nub of the situation. To-day all America tips. You tip the chauffeur in the taxi, the redcap in the station, the barber, the bootblack, the manicure, the boy or girl who holds your coat for you in the barber’s shop or hotel. In the modern hotel tipping becomes a vast and complex thing—waiters, doormen, hat boys, chambermaids, bell boys, porters—the list seems almost unending.
The system may be abominable, but it has certainly fastened itself on us—sternly and securely. And it may be said for the Pullman car that there, at least, the tip comes to a single servitor—the black autocrat who smiles genially no matter how suspiciously he may, at heart, view the quarter you have placed within his palm.
A quarter seems to be the standard Pullman tip—for one person, each night he may be on the car. Some men give more; some men—alas for poor George!—less. A quarter is not only average but fairly standard. It is given a certain official status by the auditing officers of many large railroads and industrial corporations, who recognize it as a chargeable item in the expense accounts of their men on the road.
A man with a fat run—lower berths all occupied, with at least a smattering of riders in the uppers, night after night—ought to be able easily to put aside a hundred and fifty dollars a month as his income from this item. There are hundreds of porters who are doing this very thing; and there are at least dozens of porters who own real estate, automobiles, and other such material evidences of prosperity.
A tip is not necessarily a humiliation, either to the giver or to the taker. On the contrary, it is a token of meritorious service. And the smart porter is going to take good care that he gives such service. But how about the porter who is not so smart—the man who has the lean run? As every butcher and every transportation man knows, there is lean with the fat. And it does the lean man little good to know that his fat brother is preparing to buy a secondhand automobile. On the contrary, it creates an anarchist—or at least a socialist—down under that black skin.
Here is Lemuel—cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. Lemuel runs on a “differential” between New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials—as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge a slightly lower through fare between those cities, are called—have had a hard time of it in recent years. It is the excess-fare trains, the highest-priced carriers—which charge you a premium of a dollar for every hour they save in placing you in the terminal—that are the crowded trains. And the differentials have had increasing difficulty getting through passengers.
It seems that in this day and land a man who goes from New York to Chicago or St. Louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey. It is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-passenger travel. But the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service—even at a loss. There is little or no loss to the Pullman Company—you may be sure of that! The railroad pays it a mileage fee for hauling a half or three-quarter empty car over its own line—in addition to permitting the Pullman system to take all the revenue from the car; but Lemuel sees his end of the business as a dead loss.
He leaves New York at two-thirty o’clock on Monday afternoon, having reported at his car nearly three hours before so as to make sure that it is properly stocked and cleaned for its long trip. He is due at St. Louis at ten-fifteen on Tuesday evening—though it will be nearly two hours later before he has checked the contents of the car and slipped off to the bunking quarters maintained there by his company.
On Wednesday evening at seven o’clock he starts east and is due in New York about dawn on Friday morning. He cleans up his car and himself, and gets to his little home on the West Side of Manhattan Island sometime before noon; but by noon on Saturday he must be back at his car, making sure that it is fit and ready by two-thirty o’clock—the moment the conductor’s arm falls—and they are headed west again.
This time the destination is Chicago, which is not reached until about six o’clock Sunday night. He bunks that night in the Windy City and then spends thirty-two hours going back again to New York. He sees his home one more night; then he is off to St. Louis again—started on a fresh round of his eternal schedule.
Talk of tips to Lemuel! His face lengthens. You may not believe it, white man, but Lemuel made fifty-three cents in tips on the last trip from New York to Chicago. You can understand the man who gave him the Columbian antique; but Lemuel believes there can be no future too warm for that skinny man who gave him the three pennies! He thinks the gentleman might at least have come across with a Subway ticket. It is all legal tender to him.
All that saves this porter’s bacon is the fact that he is in charge of the car—for some three hundred miles of its eastbound run he is acting as sleeping-car conductor, for which consolidated job he draws down a proportionate share of forty-two dollars a month. This is a small sop, however, to Lemuel. He turns and tells you how, on the last trip, he came all the way from St. Louis to New York—two nights on the road—without ever a “make-down,” as he calls preparing a berth. No wonder then that he has difficulty in making fifty dollars a month, with his miserable tips on the lean run.
Nor is that all. Though Lemuel is permitted three hours’ sleep—on the bunk in the washroom on the long runs—from midnight to three o’clock in the morning, there may come other times when his head begins to nod. And those are sure to be the times when some lynx-eyed inspector comes slipping aboard. Biff! Bang! Pullman discipline is strict. Something has happened to Lemuel’s pay envelope, and his coffee-colored wife in West Twenty-ninth Street will not be able to get those gray spats until they are clean gone out of style.
What can be done for Lemuel? He must bide his time and constantly make himself a better servant—a better porter, if you please. It will not go unnoticed. The Pullman system has a method for noticing those very things—inconsequential in themselves but all going to raise the standard of its service.
Then some fine day something will happen. A big sleeping-car autocrat, in the smugness and false security of a fat run, is going to err. He is going to step on the feet of some important citizen—perhaps a railroad director—and the important citizen is going to make a fuss. After which Lemuel, hard-schooled in adversity, in faithfulness and in courtesy, will be asked in the passing of a night to change places with the old autocrat.
And the old autocrat, riding in the poverty of a lean run, will have plenty of opportunity to count the telegraph poles and reflect on the mutability of men and things. The Pullman Company denies that this is part of its system; but it does happen—time and time and time again.
George, or Lemuel, or Alexander—whatever the name may be—has no easy job. If you do not believe that, go upstairs some hot summer night to the rear bedroom—that little room under the blazing tin roof which you reserve for your relatives—and make up the bed fifteen or twenty times, carefully unmaking it between times and placing the clothes away in a regular position. Let your family nag at you and criticize you during each moment of the job—while somebody plays an obbligato on the electric bell and places shoes and leather grips underneath your feet. Imagine the house is bumping and rocking—and keep a smiling face and a courteous tongue throughout all of it!
Or do this on a bitter night in midwinter; and between every two or three makings of the bed in the overheated room slip out of a linen coat and into a fairly thin serge one and go and stand outside the door from three to ten minutes in the snow and cold. In some ways this is one of the hardest parts of George’s job. Racially the negro is peculiarly sensitive to pneumonia and other pulmonary diseases; yet the rules of a porter’s job require that at stopping stations he must be outside of the car—no matter what the hour or condition of the climate—smiling and ready to say:
“What space you got, guv’nor?”
However, the porter’s job, like nearly every other job, has its glories as well as its hardships—triumphs that can be told and retold for many a day to fascinated colored audiences; because there are special trains—filled with pursy and prosperous bankers from Hartford and Rochester and Terre Haute—making the trip from coast to coast and back again, and never forgetting the porter at the last hour of the last day.
There are many men in the Pullman service like Roger Pryor, who has ridden with every recent President of the land and enjoyed his confidence and respect. And then there is General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional Limited, for twenty-four years in charge of one of its broiler cars, who stops not at Presidents but enjoys the acquaintance of senators and ambassadors almost without number.
The General comes to know these dignitaries by their feet. When he is standing at the door of his train under the Pennsylvania Terminal, in New York, he recognizes the feet as they come poking down the long stairs from the concourse. And he can make his smile senatorial or ambassadorial—a long time in advance.
Once Forrest journeyed in a private car to San Francisco, caring for a Certain Big Man. He took good care of the Certain Big Man—that was part of his job. He took extra good care of the Certain Big Man—that was his opportunity. And when the Certain Big Man reached the Golden Gate he told Henry Forrest that he had understood and appreciated the countless attentions. The black face of the porter wrinkled into smiles. He dared to venture an observation.
“Ah thank you, Jedge!” said he. “An’ ef it wouldn’t be trespassin’ Ah’d lak to say dat when yo’ comes home you’s gwine to be President of dese United States.”
The Certain Big Man shook his head negatively; but he was flattered nevertheless. He leaned over and spoke to Henry Forrest.
“If ever I am President,” said he, “I will make you a general.”
And so it came to pass that on the blizzardy Dakota-made day when William Howard Taft was inaugurated President of these United States there was a parade—a parade in which many men rode in panoply and pride; but none was prouder there than he who, mounted on a magnificent bay horse, headed the Philippine Band.
A promise was being kept. The bay horse started three times to bolt from the line of march, and this was probably because its rider was better used to the Pompeian-red broiler car than to a Pompeian-red bay mare. But these were mere trifles. Despite them—partly because of them perhaps—the younger brethren at the terminals were no longer to address the veteran from the Congressional merely as Mr. Forrest. He was General Forrest now—a title he bears proudly and which he will carry with him all the long years of his life.
What becomes of the older porters?
Sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even sturdy Afric frames, they go to the “super” and beg for the “sick man’s run”—a leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars: the Alicia, or the Lucille, or the Celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles, and abundant in carvings. For a sentimental frippery may be given a feminine name and may bear her years gracefully—even though she does creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven.
As to the sick man’s tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six. And though there is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all habit—some of it is still anticipation. But quarters and half dollars do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat runs. To the old men come dimes instead—some of them miserable affairs bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the north side of Lake Erie and hardly redeemable in Baltimore or Cincinnati. Yet even these are hardly to be scorned—when one is sixty.
After the sick man’s job? Perhaps a sandy farm on a Carolina hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream of the days when steel cars were new—perhaps of the days when the platform-vestibule first went bounding over the rails—may dream and nod; and then, in his waking moments, stir the pickaninnies to the glories of a career on a fast train and a fat run. For if it is true that any white boy has the potential opportunity of becoming President of the United States, it is equally true that any black boy may become the Autocrat of the Pullman Car.
(The Independent)