Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  Avoidance of a confrontation with this common alliance in the hobo’s womanless, tentative life has usually been accomplished by either totally ignoring its existence, or by glancing references in remote Athenian terms, or by presenting it as a rather touching example of the gruffly kind wayfarer taking the greenhorn under his scrawny wing.

  London, while describing the savagery of the jackal-packs of road kids, who roll drunks, goldbrick, steal and He, never includes in his recollections male prostitution or pairing off with adult homosexuals. Perhaps London never brushed with it but it is likelier that he thought it inadmissible when writing in 1907.

  Nor does Tully give more than an ambiguous hint of this side of jungle recreation. At the start, when the one-eyed boy is coming on with the lowdown on the craft, he says: ‘If you ever go on the road, Kid, don’t you never let no old tramp play you for a sucker. You know, them old birds’re too lazy to scratch themselves when they’re crummy. So they gits young kids and teaches ‘em to beg. They know people’ll feed kids quicker’n they will them. There’s a lot of punkgrafters on the road.’ And the matter is left with the vague pendant: ‘Lota things I could tell you.’

  Tully says elsewhere that ‘a vast army of men in hoboland and jails are recruited from orphanages and reform schools’. An equally large number, it can be inferred, were drawn from the yards and sidings which have been the playgrounds of poor white, Negro and Indian children since the railroads snaked out to the rural townships of America, and the water tank where the train riders stopped off for rest and refreshment was the enlistment office for infatuated punks.

  The seasoned jocker or wolf, as the homosexual hobo with a lad in tow was, and still is, called, developed a Pied Piper art. It may be disconcerting to those accustomed to hear that apparent nonsense song The Big Rock Candy Mountains played on Children’s Favourites radio programmes, to learn that this is a homosexual tramp serenade or at least a parody of what are known as the ‘ghost stories’ the accomplished seducer spins to entice a child away with him on the next train out. For general consumption the verse has been changed:

  One sunny day in the month of May

  A jocker he come hiking

  He come to a tree and ‘Ah!’ says he,

  ‘This is just to my liking.’

  In the very same month on the very same day

  A hoosier’s son came hiking.

  Said the bum to the son, ‘O, will you come

  To the Big Rock Candy Mountains?’

  Then follows the lip-wetting catalogue of what the hoosier kid will be introduced to under the jocker’s protection and guidance: hand-outs which grow on bushes, empty boxcars, cigarette trees, whisky springs, lakes of stew, a land of eternal sunshine where the cops have wooden legs, the bulldogs rubber teeth, the hens lay soft-boiled eggs, and where ‘they boiled in oil the inventor of toil’.

  The jungle version continues, less equivocally:

  The punk rolled up his big blue eyes

  And said to the jocker, ‘Sandy,

  I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered, too,

  But I ain’t seen any candy.

  I've hiked and hiked till my feet are sore

  I’ll be God-damned if I hike any more..’

  Or, he adds, be carnally used in the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

  The hyperbole itself is not all that immoderate when set against the prose in which the West promoted itself to prospective settlers, and indeed The Big Rock Candy Mountains may have started out as a parody within a parody. ‘Sunshine and green salads all the year will promote cheerfulness. Where there are not bitter winds, no sleet or hail’; ‘It is so healthy we had to shoot a man in order to start a graveyard’; ‘Where there are no aristocrats and people do not have to work hard to have plenty and go in the best society, where ten acres, judiciously planted in fruits, will soon make one independent, all varieties being wonderfully successful and profitable’ - those are actual Big Rock Candy Mountain phrases with which the states advertised themselves.

  There are a good many variations of the tramp’s Cockaigne, perhaps the next best known being The Sweet Potato Mountains, about a floater who settles down among the cigarette vines and ham ‘n’ egg trees, where whiteline springs squirt booze to your knees. Less well known outside the jungle circuit but which speaks more candidly of the turn up for many young boys is The Road Kid’s Song:

  Oh, when I was a little boy I started for the West -

  I hadn’t got no farther than Cheyenne,

  When I met a husky burly taking of his rest

  And he flagged me with a big lump and a can

  When I saw that can of coffee how it made me think of home

  ‘Won’t you let me have some,’ said I, ‘Good Mr Bum?

  Remember you was once a kid yourself.’

  He asked me how old I was, I told him just fourteen,

  That Muncie was where I come from.

  In his eyes appeared a stare.

  ‘I think you I will snare,

  For you ought to have the makings of a bum.’

  Harry ‘Mac’ McClintock, one of the early song buskers for the IWW and who played the clarinet in the first Wobbly street band and edited the first edition of The Little Red Songbook, claimed to be the author of not only Hallelujah, Vm a Bum but also the original The Big Rock Candy Mountains. McClintock had been a road kid himself. He ran away from his Knoxville, Tennessee, home at fourteen to join a circus. When the Gentry Brothers’ Dog and Pony Show played its last date of the 1896 season at Annis-ton, Alabama, about half the fifty canvasmen and razorbacks collected their pay and grabbed the first rattler out of town.

  ‘I traveled along,’ he says, ‘I was only a kid and looked even younger than I was. So the brakemen and the coppers in the towns ignored me and let me go my way unmolested.’ He found that instead of being ‘a moocher of pokeouts at back doors’ he could collect pocketfuls of coins in Bourbon Street in New Orleans by singing in the grog shops and can joints where a table of sailors was provided with glasses and a gallon tin of beer for two bits.

  But he also found that his success as a troubador made him a prize catch for the type of hobo who would indubitably have been a pop group’s agent in other times and circumstances.

  ‘Most of the vagrants were mechanics or laborers, uprooted and set adrift by hard times and they were decent men. But there were others, “blowed-in-the-glass-stiffs”, who boasted that they had never worked and never would, who soaked themselves in booze when they could get it and who were always out to snare a kid to do their begging and pander to their perversions.

  ‘The luckless punk who fell into the clutches of one of these gents was treated with unbelievable brutality, and I wanted no ‘ part of such a life. As a “producer” I was a shining mark; a kid who could not only beg handouts but who could bring in money for alcohol was a valuable piece of property for any jocker who could snare him.

  ‘The decent hoboes were protective as long as they were around, but there were times when I fought like a wildcat or ran like a deer to preserve my independence and my virginity. I whittled my way out of two or three jams with a big barlow knife, and on one occasion I jumped into the darkness from a boxcar door - from a train that must have been doing better than thirty miles an hour’

  Hallelulia, On The Bum (as it originally was) became widely popular, the anthem of the Wobblies and a set-piece anywhere for migrant workers, but The Big Rock Candy Mountains on the other hand remained for a long time significant to only a limited and specialized audience. McClintock obviously wrote this out of keen inside knowledge of the jocker’s methods and spiel.

  Lomax shrewdly draws connecting threads between The Big Rock Candy Mountains and Oleana, a satirical ballad still sung in the Norwegian communities of the Northern states. Oleana was based on the German legends of Schlaraffenland, where roast pigs trotted about with knives and forks stuck at the ready in their back inviting you to help yourself to some ham, where cakes rained from the skies and the rivers
ran with beer. Originally ridiculing the fantasies of Norwegian emigres about the life of effortless luxury awaiting across the Atlantic, it is conceivable that it may have germinated Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and Gyntiana. What is quite probable is that it was a Norwegian bindle stiff singing Oleana around a jungle fire who gave the start to The Big Rock Candy Mountains, the ancient Utopian fancy converted to the day dreams of the rod-rider.

  The cynical spoof of the original The Big Rock Candy Mountains speaks more truly of a routine road relationship than the interpretations of later writers. Milburn saw in this partnership a rosy similarity to ‘that which once existed between the knight and his squire’. Indeed, Milburn hails in the jungles and the hobo assemblies in jails and flophouses a revival of ‘games that once flourished around the wassail bowl’, including ‘extemporaneous rhyming’ which was a favourite form of parlour entertainment in Georgian England.

  The song of these landloping Homers which make the closest approach to epic proportions is the one the jocker sings to justify himself before his fellow and the other tramp kids for his exploitation of his own ‘preshun’: the song sometimes tells of the hardships the jocker has to undergo in protecting and training his kid. At other times a mythical jocker, whose kid has been taken from him by the dicks, is the hero of the song. It tells of the Odyssean exploits of the jocker in following the detectives back across the continent and his ultimate reunion with his faithful kid.

  It was this manner of romanticization which deodorized the man-boy relationship and made it edible to the public at large, so that it eventually, at many removes from the reality of the jocker and his punk, took on the entirely innocent sentimentality of Charles Chaplin’s 1921 The Kid.

  In The Kid Chaplin the tramp picks up an abandoned waif, played by Jackie Coogan, and the story is of his ingenuity at eluding the police and officials who are trying to snatch the boy away for proper institutionalization.

  In his autobiography Chaplin describes his negotiations to sign up Jackie Coogan. ‘Can you imagine the tramp a window-mender, and the little kid going around the streets breaking windows, and the tramp coming by and mending them?’ he enthused to the cast while it was still uncertain if Coogan could be lured from a Fatty Arbuckle contract. ‘The charm of the kid and the tramp living together, having all sorts of adventures!’

  When Chaplin got to Coogan Senior, he said: This story will give your son the opportunity of his life if you will let me have him for this one picture.’ Replied Coogan Senior: ‘Why, of course you can have the little punk.’

  Clearly, punk had by then passed into the general cheery vernacular, just as the British working man will refer fondly to his child as ‘the little bugger’. It is also quite obvious from Chaplin’s guileless excitement about ‘the charm of the kid and the tramp living together, having all sorts of adventures’ that he was utterly unaware of the griminess of the relationship he was idealizing, for it had passed through a filtering process before it reached him as an idea invested with comedy and pathos. The Kid reflected the unconscious sanctions the American public had to exercise upon the underground partnership of a man and a boy, and its actuality of squalor, buggery and semi-slavery.

  Female prostitution of course was an acceptable condition of life. Minehan found it prevalent and orthodox among the freight train travellers: ‘… regarded as a normal occupation … They say she is a whore just as others might say she is a school teacher. The term is descriptive. That is all. Some girls pride themselves on the fact that they “either got cash or liked him”.’ His estimate was that at this period one child tramp in twenty was a girl. ‘Never does a freight pull out of a large city without carrying some girls, disguised usually in overalls or Army breeches, but just as certainly and appallingly homeless as the boys … Girls go from jungle to jungle and from box car to box car without discrimination. Any place where there are men or boys, they know they will be welcome. They enter a box car or a jungle - and without more ado the line forms to the right.’

  His report on homosexuality is more perfunctory. It does occur, he admits, and in fact: ‘Wherever you see a trainload of transients, there is always a wolf on the tender and a fruiter on the green light. Like the vultures following a caravan, the perverts trail boys, waiting with bribes and force to ensnare them. One of the first lessons that a boy learns on the road is to beware of certain older men. These men become friendly with a lonely boy and attempt to seduce him. It is to protect himself from the approaches of such men, as well as for other reasons, that boys travel in pairs or in gangs.’

  But to a degree he supports the theory of Platonic tenderness: ‘I have seen wolves and their little “lambs” or “fairies”, and their relationship seemed to be one of mutual satisfaction. The man and boy were pals.

  ‘Far from being miserable, the boy did not want to be separated from his friend. He resented and refused all efforts at his “rescue”. In a mission older men give boys some bananas, candy or tobacco, and take them into the toilet or a dark corner and love them up.’ Still, Minehan believes, ‘The boys have a healthy aversion to it.’

  Doubtless many keep their aversion whole, as did Tully, who recounts being cased by an old hobo. ‘Ever have a jocker?’ he asks. ‘You’re a purty smart-lookin’ boy.’ Tully continues: ‘I had heard of boys who were called “punks”, who were loaned, traded, and even sold to other tramps. The boys who became slaves to “jockers” are of the weaker and more degenerate type.

  ‘Bill told me a case where the boy was whipped by his “jocker” for the most trivial offence, and every day of the year he was forced to bring a dollar to him - which he begged. The tramp always ruled the “punk” by fear, the same crude and brutal psychology that the pimp practiced over the weak woman of the underworld. And always, the boy obeyed with dog-like affection.

  ‘Perhaps it was because he had nothing else in life, as, false sentimental reports to the contrary, hobo boys always come from the swollen ranks of poverty and degradation.’

  After these reflections Tully replies to his suitor: ‘ “Nope, I’d bust a jocker on the nose that ‘ud try to make me out a sucker’… The hobo looked sideways at me … “Course it’s all right. Some kids like a jocker,” he stammered after a moment. “What becomes o’ the punks when they big?” I asked. “Oh, they turn out to be perfessional ‘jockers’ themselves, an’ then they gits kids to be their “punks”.’

  Nevertheless Minehan’s reading of a general aversion seems a little sanguine. The real surprise would be if homosexuality was not commonplace, just as it is in prisons, boarding schools and ships, in the barren and segregated loneliness of the hobo life.

  A Federal Transient Program survey in the mid-Thirties showed that of 26,306 migrants interviewed, only six per cent were married; the others were single, widowed, divorced or separated; and of course even that six per cent were ‘temporarily’ apart from their wives. An earlier investigation by Solenberger of one thousand men in Chicago in the Twenties showed seventy-four per cent as single.

  In 1914 in California, ‘widespread practice of homosexuality among the migratory laborers’ was noted, and it was stated that in the up-state lumber camps ‘sex perversion within the entire group is developed and recognized as the well-known similar practice in prisons and reformatories’. In fact the lumber camps provided stimulation even stronger than prison for it was pointed out, ‘often the men sent out from the employment agencies are without blankets, even sufficient clothing and they are forced to sleep packed together for the sake of warmth’.

  Anderson’s study of the hobo of the Twenties differed strikingly from Minehan’s about the number of women on the road and therefore about the amount of heterosexual prostitution. ‘Women do wander from city to city,’ he says, ‘but convention forbids them to ride the rods and move about as men do.’ He quotes a tramp who had covered eight thousand miles in six months: ‘I even saw two women on the road, and last summer I saw a woman beating her way in a box car.’ This is not confirmed by the fir
st-hand evidence of Box-Car Bertha – Bertha Thompson - who described herself in her autobiography (‘as told to’ Ben L. Reitman) as ‘a sister of the road, one of the strange and motley sorority which has increased its membership so greatly during the depression’.

  The illegitimate child of a section gang cook on the North-Western railroad, her first play house was a boxcar and she learned to spell by reading out the names on the freight trains. There were always wandering men’, she recalls, ‘and even then’ -this is around 1915 - ‘a few women travelling on the railroad and the highway’. Box-Car Bertha hoboed around for fifteen years like a man and met plenty of other women riding the trains, socialist organizers, prostitutes, college girls and drifters.

  Anderson states flatly but inaccurately: ‘Tramping is a man’s game.’ It was much more so up to 1929 but the Depression which followed was more total than any previous one and the newly emancipated woman was in the boxcars as well as in the speakeasies.

  The plaint which vibrated throughout America, Where is my Wand’ring Boy Tonight? was supplemented by a notice which has always been conspicuous in missions: ‘When Did You Write to Mother Last?’

  Although it has frequently been rebellion against the stability of home and community which has set the hobo’s feet on the road, mothers are regarded with reverent if unapplied love.

  The older mother-figure used to be a familiar mission character: ‘Mother’ Greenstein who kept a cheap restaurant on South State Street, Chicago, and who would never turn away a penniless hungry man, and ‘Aunt’ Nina who ran a rooming house in the same area and who would always find space for a working stiff stranded in winter.

  But where the hobo worked - and, in the period Anderson was dealing with, even within the closed frontier - were galactically remote areas, seldom containing women of any kind, either mother-figures or those of sexual potential. He might spend six months in a lumber camp and not see a woman during all that time. His visits to town were, like those of the soldier or sailor, for quick connections with no strings.