Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  By 1910 one and three-quarter million Negroes had left their native states, severed from the plantation and its enforced stability. They, the dislodged, scavenged for work anywhere, in the turpentine camps, in mines and sawmills, on railroad and levee construction and in city factories, but there was seldom continuity or security. The Negro had begun his traipsing from job to job (or from no job to no job), from town to town, from woman to woman.

  The railroad’s right of way was the life-line, the thin carpet of urbanism through huge expanses of wild and foreign parts, because the peasant - black and white - of early twentieth century America was as ignorant of what kind of conditions and expectations there might be across the Mason-Dixon line as was Columbus sailing beyond the rim of Europe.

  Bewilderment and misery went into the transients’ blues:

  I was standing at my window, saw a poor boy walking in the rain I heard him saying, ‘It’s a lowdown dirty shame.’

  They had the Memphis Blues, the Fort Worth Blues and Dallas Blues, the East St Louis Blues, the Chicago Blues, the Southern Blues, the Going North Blues - the blues which gathered in the great termini and junctions of water and overland travel, where the paddleboats could be worked and the long-stretch trains jumped, and where a man could feel irremediably lost.

  Even when the Negro did not have to evacuate because of times impossibly out of joint, however, it was inevitable that he was infected by the urge to follow that red lantern on the caboose of the eight-wheel drivers and midnight mails which had already carried away so many of his family and friends. The chance was taken - a million and three-quarter times in those few years - yet it never took the Negro long to feel the draught of cold hostility. In his home country he had at least sensitively understood the local guises and forms of prejudice and the terms of toleration, and there he was known as someone’s workman, so-and-so’s son. Gone from there he was just another black face without a frame, open to arrest and easy to mistreat.

  I’m a poor boy, a long way from home …

  The freezing ground was my foldin’ bed last night

  If you ever been down, know just how I feel.

  Feel like an engine ain’t got no drivin’ wheel.

  A savour of the neurotic movement in this period, and of the irresistible necessity to change ground despite its wearying point-lessness, can be conveyed in fragments from country supper guitarists and blues entertainers who floated about the land in minstrel and medicine shows, and played in wharf billets and barber shops, whom Oliver taped.

  Percy Thomas: ‘We played at the juke at Rome down there on the 49 Highway; played at the juke at Louise - all over. Played for those Sat’d’y night fish-fries. We played blues, breakdowns, such as that.’ Whistling Alex Moore: ‘Oh, they were tough joints … I’d play them all, from North Dallas to the East side … Froggy Bottom … Central Tracks.’ Blind Arvella Gray: ‘I did levee camp work; I worked in factories and things … Just jumped from job to job. I did railroad; I was workin’ for the B and O road.

  Well I got a letter from Hagerstown

  Saying East St Louis is burnin’ down

  Workin’ on the railroad, hammerin’ steel

  Hotter the sunshine, Lord, the better I feel.’

  Edwin Buster Pickens: ‘You know I heard the Santa Fe blow one mornin’ … It cried like a child - that engine was shootin’ up steam … and I talked with the conductor, the brakeman, in the caboose - and he said, “Where ya goin’ boy?” I said, “I’m goin’ to Cowswitch.” He said, “I don’t ’llow nobody to ride this train.” I said, “Boss, I’m hungry.” “What can you do?” I said, “I can fiddle a li’l bit,” He said, “All right, go on … I’ll let you ride” … I rode freight trains practically all over the country … I might go to Tomball an’ I might stay there until things dull down. I leave there and probably go on Racoon Bend - oil field. Then I leave there and probably go to Longview … Kilgore … Silsbee … Just wherever it was booming … Freight train, truck sometimes, even walk a while, ride a while.’

  Lightnin’ Hopkins: ‘Well sometimes we jump on top of freight trains, run over there from Buffalo to Palestine. Get off there, play there, ketch the freight back to Buffalo … Otherwise I used to ride buses - yeah, free. They’d see me goin’ down the street with my git-tar. They’d say, “Hurry on boy! Jump on there! Let’s go!” I’d jump up there, riding down on that ole git-tar there, make me a little piece of change between Dowling Street and West Dallas.’

  Speckled Red: ‘I hoboed on trains - I’d catch a train right now, if I feel like it, go anywhere I want to go … Well, I got put off so many times - run like a rabbit! I remember one time I was going down from Memphis, Tennessee. Caught a train, caught the Illinois Central going down to Cairo … The brakeman sees a gang of ‘bout twelve of us there. They got light, searchlights by the fireman’s bell or something. And you could hear them bullets going ping-ping-ping-ping.’

  These were the entertainment men, the street singer, the dispossessed tenant farmer turned minstrel guitarist, the travelling blind beggar guided by a young boy who shook the tambourine and passed around the tin cup, the freight train picking up band of guitar, washboard, broom-handle bass, jug and mouth organ -relatively they had it good for their music was always worth some coins. But they too went through the experiences, the story of so very many more, which they condensed in their verse:

  I’m a stranger here, just blowed in your town

  Just because I’m a stranger everybody wants to dog me ’round.

  For the minstrels too it has always been a gaunt and unpredictable life, with hope barely maintained. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s end was commonplace enough: found frozen to death on a Chicago sidewalk in a 1930 blizzard. Pneumonia, tuberculosis and sickness from exposure all get dealt with in the blues of the men on the road, not with especial drama but as condition of life. Victoria Spivey sang in 1929:

  Yes, I run around for months and months

  From gin-mill to gin-mill to honky-tonk

  Now I’ve got the dirty T.B.

  In 1936 Bumble Bee Slim recorded:

  Doctor, please give me something just to ease these awful pains

  I’m having bronchitis

  Give me Oil of Ninety-Nine, Three-Six - anything!

  … Well, I been wading in deep water an’ I been sleepin’ on the ground

  Oliver makes the point that in the late 1920s, at the height of the pellagra outbreaks, seven times more Negroes died from pneumonia: ‘Migrant Negroes, homeless men, those that are obliged to sleep over the gratings of basement kitchens, on the marble shelves above the station radiators, or on the park benches, cannot withstand the rigours of a Mid-West winter. Shuffling through the streets with feet wrapped in sacking and with tattered clothes offering little protection against the rain and snow …’

  Big Boy Crudup sang:

  Went down Death Valley, nothin’ but the tombstones and dry bones

  That’s where a poor man be, Lord, when he’s dead and gone

  … They goin’ on 61 Highway, that’s where the poor boy fell dead.

  And another drifter, Robert Johnson, wanted to ensure that his departing soul got a last hitch.

  Bury my body down by the highway side

  So my ole evil spirit can get a Greyhound bus and ride.

  Johnson, who was poisoned in 1938 also sang:

  I gotta keep movin’

  Blues fallin’ down like hail

  Can’t keep no money, hellhound on my trail,

  and elsewhere:

  Got up this morning’, all I had was gone

  Well, leavin’ this mornin’ if I have to, gonna ride the blinds.

  There is the blues of the man who takes off for the lumber site: Workin’ on the saw mill, sleepin’ in a shack six feet wide, and there is the blues of the man who tries the long ride to the Northern steel works:

  Today, mama, today, tomorrow, I might be ’way

  Goin’ back to Gary, that’s where I intend to stay,


  and

  Used to have a woman that lived up on a hill

  She was crazy ’bout me ’cause I worked at the Chicago Mill

  –where the money was if you could get it. Again:

  Goin’ to Detroit, get myself a real good job

  Tired stayin’ ’round here with the starvation mob.

  Thereafter, when they had dropped off the rattler in the strange and clanging cities of the North, the adventure in tow of that smokestack which shone like gold ended most usually in not only loneliness with no recourse to kinship but in worse hunger and poverty. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Tin Cup Blues totted up the score:

  I stood on the corner and almost bust my head

  I couldn’t earn enough to buy me a loaf of bread

  … The tough luck has struck me and the rats is sleepin’ in my hat.

  That was Chicago for some Negroes. In the bitter Northern winters a new nostalgia developed - for the abandoned oppressive South:

  Chicago and Detroit folks, have you heard the news?

  Old Dixieland is jumping - I’ve got the Southern blues,

  and:

  I’m going back to the lowlands and roll up my jumper sleeves

  Then I’ll be sitting pretty, baby - long as I kill grass and weeds.

  Yet for everyone who came back a hundred more went North. For the black American it continued to be mainly a traffic out. In 1890 eight of every ten Negroes were residentially rural; by 1950 fewer than one-fifth lived in the pastoral South.

  The man who could make his getaway received perhaps an intenser hero worship among American Negroes than did the romanticized bindle stiff of the North-West among the white homeguard. In Negro folk lore the mysteriously flitting free man appears in many guises. He is ‘Joe Turner’, a sort of anti-white Robin Hood, who ‘done been here and gone’. He is Blue Jim (with blue gums, ruby eyes and diamond-set teeth) who strolls in his stripes out of the chain gang, laughing as the guards’ bullets fly at him and calling: ‘White folks, so long, I’m going up town.’ He is Railroad Bill, an Alabama turpentine worker, real name Morris Slater, who shot a sheriff, took to the tall timber and lived by robbing freight trains and selling the swag cheap to the poor Negroes of the piney woods. From Tennessee through to Texas he is Long John, bad man and sport the whites can never capture, and in the Mississippi Delta he is the Travellin’ Man, who is shot through the head by a police Winchester but when

  They sent down South where his mother had gone …

  They opened up the coffin for to see her son.

  And the fool had disappeared!

  He was a travellin’ man, he certainly was a travellin’ man.

  That was the ideal, the prance onward with a jeer. The dusty truth was stated in Peetie Wheatstraw’s Road Tramp Blues, The Grapes of Wrath at an economic level even more sunken than the Okies’ flight by flivver, the statement of the family and village bands of destitute Negroes who trudged the dirt roads:

  I have walked a lonesome road till my feet is too sore to walk

  I beg scraps from the people, oh, well, till my tongue is too stiff to talk

  Anybody can tell you people that I ain’t no lazy man

  But I guess I’ll have to go to the poorhouse and do the best I can.

  Broken Down Man, sung by Buster Bennett, told a similar bedrock story:

  Now I’m roamin’ the highways and pickin’ up cigarette butts and

  everything I can find

  … sure got evil on my mind

  Now I’m eatin’ wild berries and I’m sleepin’ on the ground

  I’m broken down and disgusted, and I’m tired of trampin’ around.

  The buses and through motor traffic were watched hungrily by the Negro in motion but neither ticket money nor free hitch was often available. So the railroad continued to be the mainstream of his conscious discontent and dreams of departure. It was, and still is in both white and Negro country church music, a religious emblem and there is at least one legitimate ride for a man, into the Promised Land on the Gospel Train.

  The fare is cheap an’ all can go,

  The rich and poor are there,

  No second class aboard this train

  No difference in the fare.

  For the rustic Negro Christian the track in the sky ran both ways. It carried not only the White Flyer to Heaven, a special for the righteous with no seats for sinners, gamblers, jazz dancers and whisky drinkers, but also the black train, a fast run to perdition and no return ticket, so often seized by Negro ministers such as the Reverend A. W. Nix on the Library of Congress recording:

  This train is known as the Black Diamond Express train to hell,’ chants the Reverend Nix, with beautiful interwoven chant and responses from his congregation. ‘Sin is the engineer, pleasure is the headlight, and the devil is the conductor. I see the Black Diamond as she starts off for hell. Her bell is ringing “Hell-bound, hell-bound”. First station is Drunkardville. Stop there and let all the drunkards get aboard. I have a big crowd down there drinking Jump Steady, some drinking Sheneg, some drinking moonshine, some drinking White Mule and Red Horse…Next station is Liars’ Avenue … big crowd of liars down there, have some smooth liars, some unreasonable liars, some professional liars, some barefaced liars, some ungodly liars, some big liars, some little liars…

  ‘Ooooooooh, gambler! Git off the Black Diamond train. Ooooooooh, midnight rambler! Git off the Black Diamond train. Ooooooooh, backsliders! Git off the Black Diamond train. Chillun, aren’t you glad you got off the Black Diamond train a long time ago?’

  The train presented itself as dramatically good object for analogue, and so was widely and frequently seized upon, and it is not without interest that lines which could easily be from a Negro spiritual are to be found on a tombstone in Ely Cathedral, commemorating the victims of a Norfolk railway smash in 1845:

  The Line to heaven by Christ was made

  With heavenly truth the Rails are laid …

  God’s Love the Fire, his Truth the Steam,

  Which drives the Engine and the Train …

  In First and Second, and Third Class,

  Repentance, Faith and Holiness …

  If you’ll repent and turn from sin

  The Train will stop and take you in.

  In his sacred music and his secular, in his sexual imagery and his escape fantasies, for the Negro more than for all other landlocked Americans the train, rolling like gun caissons, had a mellifluous magic.

  During slavery the stepping-stone network of secret hiding places in barns and cellars and woodland huts, organized by abolitionist whites and along which the runaway dodged his way Northward, was known as the Underground Railroad, so the significance was strong from the start. When the real overland railroad could be reached it was a hard and dangerous ride, but it got you out.

  Dreamed last night that the whole round world was mine.

  sang David Alexander.

  Woke up this morning, didn’t have one lousy dime

  So I’m leaving here tonight if I have to ride the blinds

  Catch a freight train, special - engineer, lose no time.

  The importuning lover’s Let me be your side-track till your mainline comes is a familiar blues allegory, with the bonus boast: I can do more switching than your mainline ever done. Brother John Seller’s Railroad Man Blues contains copulatory imagery of steamroller subtlety:

  That’s why I’m a railroad man and I got so much energy

  That woman I got can’t understand where it comes from

  Railroad work is hard, any man will tell you

  But when I’m drivin’ steel it gives me such a thrill.

  Another point:

  If you don’t like me, Thelma, you don’t have to stall

  I can get me more babes than a passenger train can haul.

  These are the blues of the rambling man. Sometimes, occasionally, it is the woman who rides away:

  Baby caught the Katy, she left me a mule to ride

  When that tra
in pulled out, ole mule laid down and died

  Looked down the track just as far as I could see

  And a little bitty hand kept a-waving back at me.

  Johnny Temple recounted that experience:

  Well, the Bob Lee Junior passed me with my baby all on the inside And the conductor said, ‘Sorry, buddy, but your baby she got to ride.’

  and there was Leroy Carr’s rebuke for the Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St Louis and Chicago railroad for taking his girl away from him:

  Big Four, Big Four, why are you so mean

  Why, you the meanest old train that I ever seen.

  The Kansas City Southern-Louisiana and Arkansas, known as the Flying Crow, is accused by Washboard Sam of snatching away the last woman he had, but all the same there’s this to be said for the Flying Crow:

  Flying Crow leaves Port Arthur, calls at Shreveport to change her crew

  She’ll take water at Texakarna, yes, boys and keep on through.

  In other blues the Sunshine Special, the Panama Limited, the Shorty George and dozens of other personified route trains are blamed for carrying women away, but as many more are extolled for offering transportation out:

  Green Diamond’s blowin’ her whistle, train’s coming round the trail Can’t ride the Pullman, guess I’ll ride the rail,

  and:

  I’m a railroad man and I love that M and O

  And when I leave this town I ain’t coming back no mo’.

  Perhaps the most famous transient’s track is the Yellow Dog, the Mississippi line whose nickname was adopted from the Yazoo Delta logging railroad which had primrose cars. W. C. Handy’s Yellow Dog Blues just about sums up the unpredictability of the here today gone tomorrow Negro experience in the supposed message sent by one train rider (who knows ‘every cross-tie, bayou, burg and bog’ on that route) up from Tennessee to a girl whose lover has lit out:

  Your easy rider struck this burg today

  On a South-bound rattler, side-door Pullman car

  Seen him here and he was on the hog

  … He’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.

  24 If they had met God they would have asked Him for a bone