The couch was in the smoking room.
Ben might lie down there after midnight, behind a curtain that did little to separate him from the rest of the room. The wash basins and toilet were nearby. Passengers dropped by to smoke, use the facilities, talk, or sit over a card game that always seemed to last longer than it needed to.
He got up the moment somebody needed something. Anything. That was the arrangement.
He made the beds in the car and carried bags. He shined shoes, answered bells, and did the work that allowed passengers to feel as if the trip was smooth and effortless. By the time they settled in for the night, he had already been moving through the car for hours.
For much of the Pullman era, a sofa behind a thin curtain in the smoking room was where men in Ben’s position slept or tried to. The room remained readily available to passengers.
He was a Pullman porter. It was 1925.
Pullman had become one of the country’s largest employers of Black men. The work had status because it offered a more dependable paycheck than many jobs available to Black families at the time. A porter wore a uniform. He traveled. The money he brought home could help pay rent, put food on the table, or send his child to school.
The job asked plenty in return.
Porters had to do it all. They made up berths, carried luggage, woke passengers at their stops, shined shoes, cleaned toilets, and handled complaints and requests throughout the trip. They paid for their own uniforms, meals, and shoe polish, and could be required to travel to the next run without passengers and without pay. Railroad workers called that deadheading. Pullman kept the better-paid conductor jobs closed to Black workers.
Passengers often called the porter George. It was George Pullman’s name, used to signify that George’s boy was serving them, carried over from an older custom of calling an enslaved person by the name of the person who owned him.
The porters had a phrase for the work: miles of smiles.
A smile mattered when tips mattered. A man who had been up most of the night still needed to be warm with a passenger in the morning, even one who had not bothered to call him by his name. He could be exhausted, frustrated, or angry. But could never let it show.
Some porters worked as much as 400 hours a month, or traveled 11,000 miles, to receive full pay. Four hundred hours over 30 days comes to more than thirteen hours a day, before accounting for the travel itself and the parts of the job that did not show up on any clock.
In 1925, The Messenger, a magazine A. Philip Randolph edited, printed demands from porters seeking an independent union. The men wanted a living wage, pay for preparation time and delays, a 240-hour basic month, and relief from the tipping system. Historical accounts of the campaign also describe a request for four to six hours of sleep at night.
The job was difficult to leave because it was still one of the best jobs many Black men could get. It was equally difficult to organize against a company that had become so central to Black employment.
The railroad did more than carry passengers. Pullman porters helped distribute the Chicago Defender across the South, moving bundles of the paper into communities where the local press did not report Black life with the same range or honesty. People could read about jobs, housing, schools, and the possibility of a life somewhere else.
On August 25, 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized in Harlem. Randolph was not a porter. Pullman could fire a worker who became too visible in union activity. It could not fire him.
The company resisted the Brotherhood for years. Pullman’s Employee Representation Plan gave the appearance of worker representation without the independence the porters sought. Workers who openly supported the union could lose their jobs. The Brotherhood struggled through the Depression and faced reluctance from the American Federation of Labor before finally winning recognition in 1935. Its first contract with Pullman followed in 1937.
Accounts of the agreement describe higher wages, a work month reduced to roughly 240 hours, protection against arbitrary dismissal, and limits on some of the abuses carried out by service inspectors.
Twelve years had gone by.
Years ago, I worked with someone in music who spent long stretches traveling between cities. He had trouble falling asleep after arriving somewhere new. He had tried melatonin, several things from the pharmacy, and advice from friends who all seemed to have their own idea about how sleep worked.
By the time we met, he was tired enough that other people noticed the irritability before he did.
He had paid attention to much of what we discussed: wake time, meals, light, and the challenge of trying to get his body onto local time when every flight kept moving the clock around. The naps were the part he did not think much about. He would sit down in a hotel room or the back of a car and wake up an hour later. Sometimes longer. He called them cat naps.
We used a timer.
It did not stop the travel or make unfamiliar rooms feel familiar. It helped him notice the nap before it took over the afternoon. His sleep began to improve. The anxiety eased some, and he was less likely to arrive angry at everyone around him.
I also worked with a man whose father lived in another state with home caregivers. His father had difficult nights. Sometimes the caregivers called because he had become upset or confused. Other times, they asked the son to speak with him directly.
He kept the phone beside the bed.
We put it on vibrate. The ringing stopped, but he still slept as if he were waiting for it. When we tried putting the phone in another room, he lay awake worrying about the call he might miss and what could happen if he did.
For a while, he was averaging around three hours of sleep.
We worked on the things that were available to him: a regular morning wake time, early light, leaving the bed when he had been awake too long, and breathing exercises after a call or on the nights when there was no call but he had been lying there expecting one.
The caregivers needed a plan too.
What could they try before calling him? What required another level of support? What required him? He loved his father and had been carrying responsibility for a long time. It took time for him to believe that being his father’s son did not mean being the first person awake whenever something changed.
His sleep gradually moved closer to five hours. Sometimes six. His father’s condition had not changed. The distance between them remained. At night, he still found himself waiting for the vibration even when it did not come.
A Pullman porter had no caregiver plan. The passenger could ring. The door to the smoking room could open. His time to sleep was whatever remained after everyone else had been served.
Labor Day comes around with its familiar last day of summer cookouts, sales, and celebrations.
But the Pullman porters were up against things that looked a lot different inside a train car.
A passenger calling a grown man George and a sofa behind a curtain in the smoking room.
The door opened.
He got up.
Source Note: Ben is a composite, drawn from the oral histories of many porters rather than from any one man. The clinical examples are also composites; identifying details have been changed. Historical information about the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, including its founding in 1925, A. Philip Randolph’s leadership, Pullman’s opposition, union recognition in 1935, and the first agreement in 1937, draws on the Library of Congress’s history of the union. The smoking-room arrangement, the sofa behind a thin curtain, passenger access to the room, and related accounts of porters’ working lives draw on Larry Tye’s oral-history-based reporting and his book Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class. Historical accounts describe work schedules reaching roughly 400 hours or 11,000 miles monthly, the Brotherhood’s 240-hour demand, and a 1937 agreement that reduced working hours and raised wages; accounts vary on the precise post-contract monthly-hour calculation. Accounts also report four to six hours of sleep or rest among the union’s 1925 campaign demands, though the sources used here do not establish that the 1937 agreement included a separate sleep guarantee; historical accounts of the Chicago Defender distribution network and the practice of calling porters “George” inform those passages.
Derek H. Suite, MD, MS, is a board-certified psychiatrist, a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and the founder of Full Circle Health, PLLC.
Dr. Suite hosts the SuiteSpot podcast and contributes monthly to Black Westchester Magazine. He writes here in his personal capacity.
