It should be possible for so rich and powerful an industry to spare a better share for its necessary task-force, these two million people, ‘comparable’, the Negro leader Herbert Hill has said, ‘in their destitution to feudal serfs, save that they are bound to no land’.
A religious committee reviewing the problem declared: The conditions of these American migratory farm workers and their families are an affront to the conscience of the nation.’ But they do not seem to be.
There is nothing new or revolutionary in the above facts. They have been publicized many times, angrily, passionately. Quite regularly they cause an uneasy flutter, which then subsides. In 1960 Ed Murrow’s CBS television film Harvest of Shame showed the dismal convoys of black labour on their way up the East coast from Belle Glade, Florida, and eventually returned to Belle Glade. Summed up one: ‘We broke even. We were broke when we left. We were broke when we came back.’
In 1965 there appeared Truman Moore’s The Slaves We Rent and Dale Wright’s They Harvest Despair, two honest, muckraking books which again aroused much controversy and public oath-taking that something should be done. But during the long history of this sewer-bed migration - against which the roughest going of the career freight-rider and the sweaty trudges of the old-timer bindle stiff have the airy dash of a peregrine falcon - there have been many printed denunciations, many senate investigations and hearings, many, many individual campaigns.
Meanwhile for millions life carries on much the same in the stoop crop fields, and there seems little sign of change in the vagabond farm hand’s lot. In his testimony to the National Advisory Committee on Farm Labor in 1959 Dr. Hector Garcia said: ‘As a migrant, his world will be from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande. It will be his world, however, only in that the only piece of property he will own will be his grave.’
That is descriptively true but perhaps what is more factually affecting is the statement of another physician to yet another inquiring body, the President’s Commission on Migratory Labor, when he pointed to: ‘… evidence of ordinary starvation among many of these people.’ His survey in Texas labour camps showed that ‘ninety-six per cent of the children in that camp had not consumed any milk whatsoever in the last six months. It also showed that eight out of ten adults had not eaten any meat in the last six months … they could not afford it with the money they were making.’
It is strange that, while ‘this national scandal’ should have been so nailed for all to see across such expanses of print and film, that a migratory worker could still be right when he said, ‘It seems like of all the forgotten men, we’re the most forgottenest’. The forgetting comes of long practice.
The colour bar has, overtly at least, been erased in America. The migrant bar has not. In towns with migrant camps shoved away on the fringes, behind the tar-paper curtain, there can be seen on cinemas, on restaurants, on shops these notices; Migrants Not Admitted and No Migrants.
A Department of Labor booklet, The Community Meets the Migrant Worker, designed to foster educational and welfare programmes that will take the curse off the migrant in the eyes of residents, says: ‘Local people avoided the migrants when possible; they feared they were dirty, might spread disease, or steal… Gradually, however, people in a good many communities have come to realize that this is not a true picture of the migrants; that they have an obligation to these workers who are necessary to their economy…’
It would be nice to believe so. In Arkansas the Reverend Sam Allen, area head of the National Council of Churches and active in the migrant ministry which for forty-six years had toured the camps with literacy classes, entertainment, distribution of clothes, food and, of course, religion, says: There is an enormous gulf between residents of anywhere and the migrants from somewhere else, which we try to bridge a little, but there are seventeen thousand migrants a year come into this state, all strangers.
‘Or look at Memphis, from where they ship out three to five thousand labourers a day, gone at dawn, back at sunset. How can they identify with the town? My fear is that in five years’ time, when mechanization has done away with the migrant in Arkansas, he won’t be integrated anywhere. He’ll just go to swell another pocket of poverty, all of his own kind.’
Up at Grove Park, Mrs Marion Lunden looks after 36,000 chickens in her husband’s batteries, and when through with the hens goes down to the migrants’ camp to teach the women crafts. ‘I don’t know whether it’s hopeless or whether they don’t want to better themselves,’ she says. ‘But then the cabins down at the Labor Camp are terrible. I don’t know how they stand it. Then, almost every woman is pregnant every year. There are children of thirteen and fifteen with three babies. They’re very polite and pleasant but they are totally inbred and don’t want anything outside the camp.
They’re proud, not a bit grabby, and they don’t beg even when they’re hungry. But, you see, the town attitude to them isn’t very good. We’ve just had some middle-class teenagers who said they weren’t going in the swimming pool with those dirty things. Yet we have less trouble with the migrant teenagers than with our own.
‘I think most of the American people have a wrong attitude about the migrants. They think they’re scum. They’re not scum. They are under-privileged.’
Harry Wilson is a high school teacher who helps in the evenings with classes for the migrant children at the Springdale Labor Camp, a voluntary chore which seems to leave him palely despondent : ‘If you ask the children what they want to be when they grow up they say they want to be bean pickers. Why? They just don’t know. That’s all they know, picking beans and chopping cotton.
They’re not dumb. They’re just behind, because their parents aren’t interested in them having an education. They need to take them travelling, to earn money in the fields. If you take the kids to see the rodeo they crawl around on the floor looking for money people have dropped.
‘They’re loud and noisy, but they don’t know how to play organized games. Most of them never did finish high school and never knew anything about sport. The teenagers go out in the fields and just hang around. There’s a baseball field just a block away where the local kids play every night, but these kids won’t go out and mix with the town children. Probably it’s because they feel odd men out.’
Part Seven
Picture-book heroes
I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished
from humane society.
Daniel Defoe
35 You’ve been to that town a thousand times
The perpetually shifting frontier that lies between
ordinary life and the terror that would seem to be more
real… How long the road is from my inner anguish.
Franz Kafka: DIARIES
Some say I’m a hobo.
Some say I’m a bum.
No one knows what I’ve done.
Bessie Smith: Young Woman’s Blues
Jack Malone’s story has the cadence of the closing 1890s when America was still a wild bronco of a country and those who were breaking it in were necessarily themselves wild and lived with gusto, with a contemptuous disregard for humdrum law and order. Since then America, with bewildering speed and magnitude, has been subdued and civilized. The ideal of the Garden of the World was never consummated but the roughness was smoothed over with subtopia. The pioneer hardship, danger and nihilism have been eradicated, but Jack Malone and his kind have managed to preserve themselves in a reliquary of the pristine American life, for Malone keeps on hoboing.
He is now forty-five. His father was Polish-American, his mother Irish, and he was born in the East End of London where his sailor father hung around for a time. When he was fourteen they left for the United States, for Seattle which his father remembered as ‘a friendly port’. Malone, who took his mother’s maiden name, did not go to school a great deal once there; he began doing odd turns at labouring, loading trucks, working on the coastal shipping, and in 1939 returned to Britain to joi
n the Army. In the Welsh Regiment he fought in France and Belgium, and his foot and hand were injured in a booby trap. In 1946 he bought a passage to New York with his discharge pay and moved in with an aunt.
‘Then after two months’ Malone says, ‘she told me, “Jack, maybe you’d better move on.” It was a small apartment and I understood her difficulties. So I grabbed a Greyhound and landed in Cleveland, one of the few times I ever paid a fare after that. Since then, for twenty years, I’ve been on the road.
‘I knew nothing about hoboing when I hit Cleveland but I found myself down in the slave market off Euclid Avenue and saw this gang of men waiting around. They were shipping out on the railroad and told me you didn’t have to have cash or gear or nothing. So I went in to see the clerk in this employment office and he said he was sending me up to Western Ohio for the New York Central line.
‘I was given a work-slip with my name and social security number on it and we all travelled out on a mail train with one passenger coach. At the other end the bull-cock met us and took us out to the rolling camp, old 1870 coaches on a side track fitted out as dining-car, sleeping-car and shower-car, and we were issued with blankets and sheets from the store-car. Next morning we were pulled up to Toledo where they were re-laying track and resurfacing the road bed with fresh ballast.
‘I was a shovel and pick man. This is the kind of work you take up as a last, I mean last, resort. At first it hits you so hard that you’re too bushed to eat. It takes you ten days to break in. I was there two weeks. I started at seventy-eight cents an hour, working from six in the morning until five at night, and quite often overtime after that.
‘I did seven years’ broken service with the railroad. My next job was with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy up at Wisconsin, then on the western railroads at Minneapolis and in North Dakota with the Big G, the Great Northern. The camps were totally different out in the West: very good. Laundered sheets, good bunk houses, not lousy like in the East, and all the food you could swallow - I seen one man eat eighteen fried eggs for breakfast.
‘Pretty soon I became a gandy dancer. You use a spike-maul, that’s a ten-pound haammer with a foot-long narrow head, and you really have to roll that spike maul - you hit the spike, which is inch-and-half diameter, with a twirling action. Two of you work on each spike, hitting it in turn, whirling that hammer to keep it whipping. In just one second - zap! - that spike’s right in. You’re not allowed too many misses. They don’t like you hitting the rail. If you show yourself not to be too much of a marksman you don’t last. Finally I became a gauge spiker, leading a section.
‘You have to line up the new rail with the old rail, put an iron gauge on the old and the new, and keep them in position while you drive in the gauge spike as a guide for the gandy dancers behind you. This has to be done with speed and precision. You’re setting the pace. With a gang of sixty men you’d lay or re-lay three miles of track, one length of single line, in a day. With overtime you can pull down eighty dollars a week, less deductions for board, but that’s cheap at a dollar fifty a day.
‘When you finish a job you’re a one-day millionaire. You grab a freight and run down into town and live it up for a while. One reason I rode freights was that there wasn’t too much motor traffic on the roads out in those Western parts even just a few years ago. Quite early I found a lot of guys use these shipments out to get to a jumping-off point for wherever they’re heading. I met a couple of new arrivals up on a job at Dickinson, North Dakota, who said they were picking up supper and breakfast before pushing off for Seattle so I went with them.
‘I had a few days’ money coming and arranged to pick it up at the Butte, Montana, division point. We hitch-hiked it, really struggled away in that hot sunshine, but we were given a ride in a station wagon and got to Butte easy and we celebrated there a little bit. After that I fixed up to join another gang at Missoula and when that was finished I collected sixty dollars. I grabbed a freight for Spokane with a couple of old timers, and when I got to skid row I fitted myself up with a new shirt and pants, and booked in at a hotel. The clerk said “With or without?” I thought he meant with or without a bath, but he meant with or without a girl, so I said with.
‘After two days the money had gone and as it was getting ‘round time of year for the pea harvest I joined some of the crews engaged by farmers who came into Spokane with trucks to ride you out to the fields. Then I went logging in Colorado, at Kremmling. That was at an elevation of seven thousand feet, piece-work, and using a cross-cut at that height was impossible for more than fifteen minutes at a time. I’d been in Denver before that and down on Market Street skid row a contractor came in with a lorry finding men to fall spruce on government land. First he took us to a hardware store to buy axes and saws. He told us he had a camp up there, but we found we had to live in a hotel and eat in a restaurant. That was a poor job. There wasn’t much big timber and at the end of two weeks he deducted the cost of the tools and accommodation and we had just ten dollars apiece coming.
‘So I hopped over to Salt Lake City on the Denver, Rio Grande and Western Railroad, gandy dancing again. After that I decided to make Klamath Falls for the potato harvest - that’s a really rugged way of earning your dough. Then I took a trip up to Portland and shipped out for the Southern Pacific to a place called Eugene where I worked for about a month re-laying track. Checked out of there and up to Seattle, and I decided to lay off gandy dancing for a while and proceeded to hustle the city, just doing odd jobs and using the missions. There’s one there, Jack and Jenny’s, run by two hot gospellers where to earn yourself a supper and a bed you have to take an ear-beating for three hours, and if you happen to fall asleep you’re tossed out of the door. There’s another, Sister Dorothy, who really enjoys throwing the winos out. There must be at least thirty missions in Seattle, because of all the loggers and sea-going men, so you can get by there for quite a while.
‘I’ve averaged forty thousand miles a year, and must have done near a million miles, mostly on freights. I’ve worked through nearly all the states, except some of those quiet New England states, forty or fifty times apiece. That includes the South, although it’s bad for a hobo down there. If they see you’ve got heavy gear on they know you’re from the North - a snow-bird, they call you - and the cops are on to you damned quick.
‘I hold two records for hoboing. Once I rode the fastest freight there is, the Berry Special, which carries fruit on a complete run from Seattle to Chicago, but you can’t hold it down all that distance because of the speed it does. It’s a diesel service now but they were still using steam then. I grabbed it at Fargo, North Dakota, in the Dilworth Yards and I rode it through to Minneapolis. I covered 265 miles in three hours forty minutes, that’s an average of eighty miles an hour. There are only four or five guys who’ve done this and lived to tell the tale. It was carrying cherries and strawberries and all the cars were closed up with a government seal, so I had to ride the roof. You have to contend with the swaying of the coaches because it really whips round those curves.
‘When I got off the train in Minneapolis yards it took me an hour to wash all the coal dust off. I told this story at the Britt hobo convention and they all said “Here’s a guy who rode the Berry Special, give him a hand,” and they applauded me. Most hobos seeing the Berry Special coming say “I ain’t gonna ride that baby”, because they know the kind of speed it does.
‘My other record was hitching from Portland, Oregon, to New York, 3,300 miles in ninety-six hours, in mid-December which is the roughest time for hitch-hiking. I was in Portland with five cents in my pocket and I had this urge to get to New York. I was on Highway 30 and after two hours got a lift 100 miles in a Cadillac. By five that afternoon I’d done 300 miles and by six next morning I’d been taken by a guy in a Buick to Salt Lake City. So I thought “Things are going good, why stop now?” So I hitched up to Ogden, Utah, stayed overnight and got a lift to Evanston, Wyoming, and the next guy drove me right through to Omaha. On the third day I was half
way across the States. I panhandled a breakfast and the next car was a Mercury to Philadelphia, where I had some sandwiches. On the fourth day I made New York.
‘I’ve taken the occasional job inside, like working for the post office as a sorter, but I always feel hemmed in, claustrophobia, or sump’n. On one inside job the boss liked me and he began calling me by my first name, and when a boss starts calling you by your first name a hobo resents it. He thinks “I got to move on.” You think you’ve been there too long. A hobo doesn’t like to establish too much of a routine. It’s like the philosophy of the American Indian. He doesn’t like to make too much of a close friend because if he loses that friend he’ll never get over it. Just the same if you save an Indian’s life. He’ll never forgive you - because he can’t repay you.
‘People see a hobo as a no-good hopeless sort of guy. But in fact he can never let up if he’s going to remain self-sufficient. He always has to know where to find water, how to trap a rabbit like the old time trappers, how to forage to keep himself alive. He likes to feel he’s capable of making out for himself. After he’s been a hobo for a while he doesn’t feel he comes within the scope of ordinary settled people any more.
‘Even if occasionally he decides to clean himself up and try for a steady job it doesn’t work out. The outlook of the people you come into contact with makes it impossible. In the States they don’t ask for references and that sort of stuff - they’ll always try you out on a job, which is not the case in England. But, even so, in a small town you just aren’t accepted. They say “Who is this guy?” If you’re just drifting through, okay, but if you try to settle there’s a lot of suspicion and distrust.
‘In a big city there’s the pace of the competition and inevitably you’re living in some cheap flophouse and you can’t break through from there. Often you feel you’re excluded from society. In your twenties and thirties you don’t mind this, and anyway there’s always this dream that the young hobo has of being taken into some family. I’ve known this happen. A family says “Hey, this guy looks like our boy who left home years ago”, and they take him in and treat him like a son.1
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