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Nia opens with a girl she has to imagine: ten years old, in the colored coach behind the engine, with cinders blowing through the window and a shoebox on her lap. People had a name for those trains, half a joke and half a wound. They called them the Chicken Bone Express.

Jeliba and Nia follow the eastern stream of the Great Migration up the Atlantic coast: the separate waiting rooms, the Jim Crow car, and the closed dining car. They take on the fried-chicken stereotype directly, then answer it with the story it buried.

That story is in Gordonsville, Virginia. After the Civil War, Black women known as waiter carriers met the trains with platters balanced on their heads, passing food up through the open windows. One of them, Bella Winston, said her mother paid for their home with chicken legs. Jeliba and Nia work out how much chicken might have crossed that platform in a day, ask how the women found an open door in post-war Virginia, and explain why the trade finally ended.

Then the story comes home. Kevin Bearden's family came north on these lines and went to work on them. His ancestor William Irving Bearden was a porter on the Reading Railroad, and his great-grandmother Mary Abrams Bearden kept her chickens to the end.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: the girl by the window 1:09 Intro 1:45 The eastern stream 3:07 The colored coach and the shoebox kitchen 5:10 The waiter carriers of Gordonsville 10:38 The Washington threshold, and the family on the rails 12:12 The keeper's segment 13:57 Closing: the names

Names spoken in this episode Bella Winston · the waiter carriers of Gordonsville · William Irving Bearden, the elder · Mary Abrams Bearden · Luther White · the Bearden, Burton, and Shells families

Sources and further reading

• Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• Mia Bay, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021)
• Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020)
• The Bearden Family (Rose Creek Press), Part II
• Town of Gordonsville Visitor Center and the annual Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival