Transient Modes - Or, Some Thoughts on Vagrancy, Freedom, and National Character in Ben Reitman's Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha
Response Paper Written for the Course “Travel Narratives” taught at the Nonstop Liberal Arts Institute Spring 2009. (Slightly revised summer 2010)
“You and your kind are the only ones left with a real sense of freedom in America.”--from The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha
Sister of the Road (1937), Ben Reitman's generically playful, faux first-person account of female hobo Boxcar Bertha demonstrates a perhaps distinctively American romantic love of the open road and of open-ended travel. This American (as in U.S.) obsession reappears throughout many forms of our culture—from myths of the freedom of the Western frontier through the Beats in the fifties, the hippies in the sixties, truckers in the seventies, and ever-popular road movies across the latter half of the twentieth-century. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rash of hobo narratives in the nineteen-twenties and thirties equate hobo travel with pure freedom, a perspective which contrasts sharply with more critical European accounts of itinerant travel of the same period.
Writing at about the same time as Reitman, George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), explains that vagrancy in England is not a moral failing but the result of legal and economic realities—bad English laws create tramps and transients. The unreasoning 'logic' of capitalism combined with unreasonable legislation imposes rootlessness and squanders and misdirects the labor of the poor. The lives he describes are never freely chosen, these travels are never romantic: “a tramp lives a fantastically disagreeable life, and lives it to no purpose whatsoever.” Orwell believes that vagabondage goes against the national grain and work ethic of the English, although, intriguingly, not of Americans:
The idea that tramps are impudent social parasites is not absolutely unfounded, but it is only true in a few per cent of the cases. Deliberate, cynical parasitism, such as one reads of in Jack London's books on American tramping, is not in the English character. The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if one remembers that a tramp is only Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes (p. 202).
The central character of Reitman's Boxcar Bertha is one of these “deliberate, cynical parasites” with little sense of vagrancy's supposed moral stigma. Far from disagreeable, her life on the road is generally filled with fun and fellowship as she flits across the country from one supportive hobo collective to another. One is struck by Bertha's near-absence of bourgeois attitudes around the sanctity of private property and sexual propriety, and her casual acceptance of petty theft, crime, trespassing, and prostitution. Interestingly, her account rarely dwells on the dangers and discomforts of the road (can sleeping in boxcars have been warm and cozy?); what comes through instead is her plucky American resourcefulness and ability to meet any challenges that come her way. Indeed, her sunniness is such that she does not characterize even the apparently miserable lives of the female prostitutes forced to turn over all of their money to their pimps as servitude. She herself appears to enter into (and exit from) a wide variety of jobs, including prostitution, relatively freely. These relaxed attitudes seem to be, in part, the result of the character Bertha's youth and optimism; they are also portrayed as the result of her mother's teachings that “there are no tragedies in our family,” an attitude which enables Bertha to cope with syphilis, prostitution, unwed motherhood, and a cascade of personal dramas which includes the hanging of one lover and the horrific accidental death of another.
As we talked about in class, some of narrative's celebration of wandering and wanderlust are rooted in the particulars of “American” history—ideologies of the American revolution, for example (“Give me liberty or give me death!”), and the pervasive myth of the frontier (Jack London's books often exemplify this, and of course Huck Finn famously 'lights out for the territory' to get away the corruptions and restrictions of town life). Emma Goldman's anarcho-utopianism, influential in the first few decades of the century, and certainly a major influence on her lover, co-conspirator, and fellow anarchist Ben Reitman, was based on the conviction that the freedom of the individual from any form of coercion should be absolute. As Goldman wrote: “All I want is freedom, perfect, unrestricted liberty for myself and others.” According to a recent article on Goldman in the London Review of Books, she dedicated herself to “the complete material and psychological regeneration of human individuality,” arguing that “economic conditions, no matter how oppressive, were not the root cause of evil, but that the world's woes originated in 'a lack of responsibility to the individual man.'” For Emma Goldman and Huck Finn, the problem is deeper than private property or the laws which operate to protect it, but lies in coercion or authoritarianism of any sort, including coercive relations within families, schools, and towns, as well as within larger economic modes of organization. Therefore a clear way to assert one's freedom is always to keep moving, to refuse to participate in traditional social structures.
Yet Bertha's femaleness clearly poses a problem for her chances of obtaining Goldman's ideal of 'unrestricted liberty,' and this is where the text runs into trouble. Real Women can't just keep moving but eventually have to be domesticated and so Bertha grows up at the end of the narrative and matures out of the irresponsibility of hobo-dom. In male travel narratives, coupledom, fatherhood and family generally represent restrictions on autonomy, and authentic maleness is usually re-established through refusal—through a return to irresponsibility—through 'Movin' On' and 'Hittin' the Highway.' But this conventional narrative resolution apparently does not work here. One way of reading Bertha's personal conflict (a reading Reitman appears to foreground) is to see her youthful desire to work for all mankind as naïve and as a sublimation of her truest desires, her own maternal needs. Her maturation then comes with her realization that her own desires for a child need to be put first, before her social conscience or the needs of the hobo collective. She finally comes to see herself as an 'individual' with her own individual yearnings (albeit, as a woman, she is necessarily an individual mother--something of a paradox!). Ultimately female 'nature' intrudes upon this freewheeling hobo narrative; the female hobo journeys from the construction of identity via an expansive proletarian consciousness into a gender-appropriate maternal role which entails some degree of settling down. It should go without saying that there is no equivalent for male radicals, whose political and social commitments are of course taken quite seriously in their own right, not regarded as immature sublimations of an inevitable desire for paternity. The brotherhood of man remains a noble philosophical ideal, but sisterhood is, after all, just a pale substitute for deeper biological needs.
Reitman's story of Boxcar Bertha seems confused, though, because the freedom of the road and the company of hobos has been made quite appealing, and it becomes difficult for present-day readers to see Bertha's ultimate renunciation of these as representing her truest desire. In the very last sentence of the text Bertha refers nostalgically to her beloved fellow hobo travelers as a "flock of angels." The contrast between Reitman's angels and Orwell's downtrodden tramps could not be more striking; for Reitman, unfettered angels flit through this modern American world, and the wandering life offers the closest thing to utopia that can be found in this fallen capitalist society. Boxcar Bertha links up with a number of US cultural traditions which mobilize criticisms of social inequality and of bourgeois life and values—but from a place rooted in anarcho-libertarian discourses which idealize a mythic and vague individual (and paradigmatically male) freedom from constraint, rather than structural critiques of industrial wage slavery or capitalist immiseration.