Leon Forrest is a professor in the African-American studies program at Northwestern University and a novelist whose work includes Divine Days; his maternal grandfather worked on the railroads, and his father was a bartender on the Santa Fe for twenty years, usually working on the Super Chief that ran between Chicago and Los Angeles.
Forrest still recalls the day more than forty years ago when his father came home with a screenplay given to him by a Hollywood screenwriter. "My father had mentioned that I was interested in writing," Forrest says. "A few weeks later, the writer--who was a regular on the train--handed him the screenplay and said, `Show this to your son.'
"I can't begin to tell you what a difference that made in my life...the idea that I could be a writer."
His father had wanted to be a doctor, but lack of money and education made that impossible. The railroads offered a chance to expand his horizons.
"The country was still young," says Forrest. "It was an adventure. The West was still a frontier. It gave my father the sense of limitless possibilities, and he brought that home to me."
Forrest's father had noted how black jazz musicians had managed to transcend some racial barriers, and he believed he could overcome abuse and insults by rising above them. "Talking face to face goes a long way toward breaking down issues of class and race," Forrest says. "Guys like my father carried themselves with a great deal of dignity. He spoke well and had an extensive vocabulary, which made him seem more educated than he really was."
But familiarity did not always breed civility. "I do remember one time," Forrest adds, "when a customer called my father, who was light-skinned, a `white nigger.' My father came out from around the bar and decked him. He was suspended for thirty days but told my mother, `What's a few paychecks compared to self-respect?'"
And the railroad men were among the most respected members of their communities. In fact, they helped create those communities, in areas where few blacks had lived before.
In Denver, the Five Points neighborhood owes much of its existence as the heart of the city's black population to its proximity to Union Station. Until the railroad jobs opened up at the turn of the century, most blacks worked as domestic servants, scattered throughout the city with no real sense of community.
And without a geographic community, there was almost no way to support black-owned businesses. When railroad men spent their money in their neighborhoods--buying houses, buying cars--everyone benefited.
"They were a sort of working-class aristocracy," Forrest says. They were unlikely to be troublemakers or boozers; for one thing, if word of such carrying on got back to the railroad companies, they would be out of a job. For the most part, they were stable family men who made consistent, if not outstanding, salaries.
The customers these men waited on were typically people with money who dressed in the latest fashions--especially those on the trains to Los Angeles, Chicago, New York or the beach resorts in Florida. The railroad workers took note of what the musicians, athletes and movie stars were wearing and brought that heightened sense of fashion back home with them.
"Historically in the black community, a man showed his position by how he dressed," says Forrest. "And the railroad guys were always great dressers. Their influence is evident even today when sometimes it seems what a black man wears is more important to him than what he eats.
"That may not always be a good thing. But when you don't have much, you take pride in what you can."
Railroading ran in the families--at times, several generations might be working on trains simultaneously. And the influence of these railroad families ran fast and deep along the streets they lived on. It wasn't just clothing; often the impacts were more subtle.
By their nature, railroaders were men who wanted to see what lay beyond the next hill. It was a big, big country they viewed from the windows during their short breaks and layovers, and it fostered even bigger dreams for themselves and their children.
It took courage for a young black man to leave home and step aboard a train bound for the wide world. Kids and adults alike looked up to them and hung on the stories they brought back.
Whenever he could, Forrest's father would get off the train and mingle with people along the line. Aboard the train, he spent his precious free moments reading or writing lyrics for songs. And when he came home, neighbors would gather at the family home on Chicago's southside to hear about Hopi Indians, the great jazzmen, fighters like Joe Louis, or the time he poured drinks for Bing Crosby.
"My father had an enriched feeling for what life could be," Forrest says. "He believed that we could transcend whatever limitations had been placed on us."
But the railroad men had to work to remove those limitations.
In the late 1800s, white railroad workers organized into unions to agitate for better pay and working conditions. Many times, their efforts were met with brutality by the government, which was not about to allow strikers to bring the main supply line of American industry to a standstill. Gradually, however, the unions succeeded in their demands.
