Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe/Chapter 6

This chapter takes place in a hobo camp in Davenport Iowa on October 15, 1929, the same date as the newspaper article in the previous chapter. Five men are sitting by a campfire. One of these men is Jim Smokey Phillips. These men are five of about 200,000 men roaming the country in search of work that year. The impending winter makes Smokey decide to start heading south.

Smokey's background is revealed in this chapter. His mother was a devout Baptist prone to speaking in tongues, while his father was an alcoholic who made his own moonshine. His mother told church members his father was possessed by the devil and they came and led him away at gunpoint. Smokey never saw his father again. His mother became more involved with her extremely fundamentalist religion, which included snake handling. This ended in her death by rattlesnake bite