the whole audience. With a lot of help from a lot of people (some of it not quite legitimate), she unexpectedly wins the pageant, to Mrs. McClay's disgust and outrage (because of this, she quits running the Miss Mississippi pageant for good because she felt betrayed by her so-called "friends") and is off to Atlantic City. It was revealed that Mr. Cecil and the Cecilettes were going to accompany her, although it was never revealed who in the Miss Mississippi organization, if anyone, did accompany her, since Mrs. McClay had stated that she would not accompany Daisy Fay to Atlantic City. After she won, she also discovers, to her shock and joy, that her maternal grandfather, who everyone had thought had died, was in fact alive and well and working as a cab driver in Tupelo. In fact, it was he who had driven his granddaughter to the pageant events. He had kept in touch with her Daddy over the years, despite their not speaking. Before she leaves for the Miss America pageant, however, she gets word that Jimmy Snow, who had been kind of a surrogate uncle to her, had been in a plane crash, and had died of a broken neck. She mourned him, as did her father, and her loyal friend, Mr. Cecil. Her father revealed to her that she was the only person that Jimmy really loved, which surprised Daisy. After that, she achieves her ends and gets out of Mississippi. At the book's end, she states that "I promise that I won't come back until I'm somebody. And I won't." Trivia Daisy Fay's Aunt Bess is a minor character, but has a cafe Daisy Fay loves to visit. Her aunt plays tricks on everyone, such as putting mustard in a baby doll's diaper and driving Daisy Fay's mother to distraction with her lack of social propriety. This character is based on Fannie Flagg's real life Aunt Bess, who ran the Irondale Cafe in Irondale, Alabama. She is the basis for the character of Idgie in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of an 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling,