Replay: No One Was Playing Music in First Class

Dear Everyone,

I’m on vacation, so am republishing a piece I published earlier this year. If you are interested in this project, I will be setting up a separate substack for Dad’s photos soon.

No One was Playing Music in First Class

One of my current creative projects is helping my dad finish his book about traveling through Mexico in the 1960s photographing steam engines.

My father has been photographing trains since he was 7. His official career was at Cornell University—he wrote grant proposals—but anyone who knows him knows that his true love was trains. Almost all of our family vacations were planned around chasing and photographing steam engines. Our living room in the house I grew up in was decorated with Dad’s striking black and white photos, many of which had appeared in magazines like Trains and Classic Trains.

We didn’t know that some of them had made the cover, and many were included in books and anthologies. We didn’t know he had a following, or that there was a rumor that his photos that hung in a bank in Chama, New Mexico had been used by Disney to help them create the background for one of the Raiders of the Last Ark movies.

We did know he’d been doing this forever, and we should never, ever open the door to the darkroom he set up in our laundry room when the red light was on, no matter what item of clothing we needed. It was part of the background of our lives, the way Dad liked to listen to albums of recordings of steam engines and sometimes when I came inside from roaming the creek the house would be filled with the thundering sound of a steam engine while Dad sat peacefully at his desk. (Once our friend Paul stopped by with a box of tomatoes from his garden. When he opened to door to see if anyone was home, he heard the blast of a train whistle, turned around, left the tomatoes by the door, and went home.)

The book we’re working on is about the years in his early twenties when Dad was in Mexico drilling wells as part of his service as a conscientious objector. On his time off he would travel to different railroad lines, camping out at night in the desert or the mountains, and in the daytime he’d ride and photograph steam trains and the people who worked on them. For Dad, this was heaven. He loved Mexico. He loved the people, the landscape, the way of life and the railroaders who welcomed him. I think this is part of why the photos from this time period have an especially intimate, soulful feel.

Yesterday he read me a section he wrote about the time my grandmother came to visit him and they rode the train to Yucatan. It is one of my favorite parts of the book and it goes like this:

The Best Seats on the Train

          We set out from Veracruz on train 102, by then the longest steam powered run in North America.  We bought tickets to Jesus Carranza; we would ride the Tehuantepec train to Coatzacoalcos the following day. 

            Leaving Veracruz and then Tierra Blanca, we rolled past sugar cane, banana fronds, citrus groves, pineapple plantations and mango trees.  The scenery did not compare with the rugged mountains of the previous day, but that didn’t bother my mother, who was much more interested in people. She sat happily in the passenger car, her wavy black hair tied back in a silk scarf, smiling and communicating as best she could in limited Spanish with the whoever sat next to her. She loved looking at people’s faces and contemplating the character they revealed. She especially enjoyed the stops at larger stations where women and some men approached the train with large baskets and shouts of “Papayas, mangos, platanos (bananas), tacos---!” These vendors performed a vital service as there was no diner on the train; the absence of air conditioning greatly facilitated commerce by allowing the windows to remain open, and delectables were quickly passed up to outstretched arms in exchange for a few coins.  (I’m not sure how the unfortunates in the sleeper managed without a diner; their car was air conditioned so their windows could not be opened).

            We rode second class—much cheaper than sleeper or first class, and more interesting, but admittedly less comfortable. The seats faced each other, which was ideal for families or small groups.  Although some newer second-class coaches had plush seats, the standard variety were built with stiff wooden seats facing each other and low vertical wooden backs. We took two of these seats in the forward end of our car. My mother, who had a slight limp from the bout with polio she’d had as a child, did not complain.

            At one of the stops a band of musicians got on with instruments carefully wrapped in flour sacks for protection.  They and their instruments took the four seats across the aisle from us, and the two seats facing us on our side.  This band was quite unusual as all its members were women.  In fact, this was the only all-female band I ever saw in Mexico and they attracted curious glances from other passengers at first.  But eventually people dozed off as the day got warmer.

            After a while, perhaps feeling somewhat bored, one of the band members took out her guitar and started picking a few notes and then tuning her strings.  After some minutes of this the violin player took out her instrument and started a similar ritual.  Finally, the member with the large base guitarron unwrapped it and plunked its low notes, then also did some tuning.  I began to wonder whether they might actually play something.

            They did!  

The music started abruptly with no notice or announcement—in fact without the musicians even looking up.  It was as if they were playing just for themselves—the audience didn’t matter.  The deep chords of the guitarron played bass counterpoint to the high piercing tones of the violin with a beat so fast and exhilarating that I found it impossible to keep still.  Straw sombreros that had been drooping forward resumed their alert horizontal position as their owners awoke.  Women with babies wrapped in their rebozos sat up straight to listen.  This was the Huapango music for which Veracruz is famous.

            For us, sitting surrounded by string instruments in full play felt like being onstage in the middle of an orchestral performance in Carnegie Hall--we had the best seats on the train!  The music outdid the noise from the wheels and our engine ahead.  My mother was in heaven—she loved music and she loved the chance to gaze at the faces of the other passengers as we all absorbed the high-pitched energetic rhythm of the fast-paced Huapango tunes.  I don’t remember any of the singing that usually accompanies Huapango performances but the compelling beat and intricate harmony nevertheless seemed to elevate players and listeners alike to a higher level of being.  

            We slowed for the station at one of our larger stops, I don’t remember which.  The crowd that quickly gathered outside our car included many more than the regular vendors, with all faces turned upward as they too soaked in the excitement of the music bursting from our open windows.  We hardly heard the two hoots from engine 1243 as its engineer announced our departure.  As we picked up speed some of the younger boys ran alongside our car, competing to see who could hear the music the longest.

            The concert continued as we rolled again through open country.  Finally, in an act as spontaneous as the performance itself, an elderly campesino with intricately patterned lines in his face, stood up and took off his straw hat, revealing matted locks of hair seldom seen in public.  He flipped his sombrero upside down and walked up and down the aisle, holding it out to passengers on either side.  Men dug into their pockets and women into hidden folds of their clothing and the sombrero accumulated a pile of copper and silver coins as well as small paper bills.  Finally, after passing the hat by every passenger in our car, he brought it up to the musicians, who were still playing, and without a word, respectfully emptied its contents on a folded flour sack on the seat next to the violinist.

            Years later I learned that some of our organization’s staff were appalled when I took my mother to Yucatan by train.  In their minds, trains in Mexico were slow, dirty and late—they were for rural campesinos and the poor--not for educated people or members of the emerging middle class.  But our staff members did not know my mother; they didn’t know that she came from a family of adventurers or that she related to people soul to soul without social class filters.  If we had flown to Yucatan what would she have had to remember?  We had the best seats on the train!

            Today, more than fifty years later, I still get teary eyed when I hear Huapango music.”

“You still get teary eyed whenever you read this chapter,” I said after Dad finished reading.

“That was the epitome of Mexico,” he said. “People gave of themselves generously and did wonderful things. I still remember all those people who said, “You took her in second class?!” as though it was a bad thing. But that’s where all the action was! No one was playing music in first class.”

Later that night I was looking for something to take upstairs to read myself to sleep when I was drawn to a slim black book with no title on its spine on the bookshelf. I hadn’t noticed it before but all of a sudden it was all I could look at, almost like it glowed. It nearly flew off the shelf into my hands. I opened it.

It was my grandmother’s diary from that same trip. My heart leapt. I flipped rapidly through the pages to see if she had written about that moment. She had! There it was, on p. 24.

I felt like I was holding something sacred, like my grandmother was in the room with us, which I’m sure she was. “Did you know this book was here?” I said. Dad had no idea.

I read the passage out loud, struck by the way she described not only the women playing, but also the faces around her, illustrating what my father had written about her. I could not get over these two renditions of this lost happening, calling to each other 60 years later. I thought, how amazing that a moment of boredom more than half a century ago could transform into an explosion of music that lit up a train car, and that car lit up the stations it passed, and now, here it was again, lighting up this room in this old house.

On the dresser by the woodstove my grandmother, wearing a silk scarf, smiled from a picture of her and my grandfather in their 80s, sitting like lovebirds on the white couch that is now in my living room.

“She was a beautiful writer,” Dad said.

Meanwhile, to this day everyone in my family loves listening to huapango music.

Here is an example from an artist whose album Veracruz Hermoso (1961) is one of my favorite records. I listened to it all the time when I was a girl—to me it was pure joy, singing to itself like water.

(The link is to Amazon Music, but you can probably also find it on spotify. The song is El Colas, the album is Veracruz: Conjunto Jarocho Medellin de Lino Chavez.)