Maiden Voyages (26 page)

from
SISTER OF THE ROAD

So I knew that he was tired of me, or had another woman, or both, and when I told him that I was going away we were both relieved.

A week later Ena, her poet lover and I got a ride with a sister of one of the men in Mr. Schroeders office as far as Alton, Illinois, and from Alton got an empty box car with two men hoboes on a midnight freight.

It was a bumpy ride, full of scrapings and stoppings at every little jerk-water town in Illinois. Toward morning a brakie found us, but we gave him fifty cents apiece to shut him up. We ran into only one woman on this trip, but her story was worth all the discomfort we had. She and two tall, lanky southern male hoboes, all of them drawling in their talk, got on towards morning when we stopped and switched about in a little spot. The brakie had tipped us off that we had about an hour’s
wait, and we had gotten out to stretch ourselves. As it was getting light we walked around the quiet streets and up past the little red brick store buildings and the court house square that then had hitching posts around it. When we got back in our box car we found the girl and the two men there before us.

Her name was Virginia Hargreaves. She was thin, raw-boned, rather attractive in her overalls and heavy boy’s sweater. Her husband had left her and she had attached herself to the two older men hoboes and was trying to make Chicago where a girl friend of hers had a job in a “house.” She said the two men had helped her all the way from Alabama. Part of the time they had come in box cars, part of the time on the road hitch-hiking. They had hustled food for her and in return she had given them what sex expression they wanted. She was pretty cynical about men generally. After the train got rolling she told me how she lost her husband on her first hobo trip, on her wedding night.

Virginia was seventeen and had lived all her life in a small Georgia town. Hargreaves was the son of a farmer who had been dispossessed. They scraped together five dollars, bought a marriage license, gave the preacher fifty cents to marry them, and immediately after the ceremony hopped on a freight train intending to spend their honeymoon with relatives in Alabama.

When they got on the freight it was already moving, so they climbed up the ladder and got on top of an empty. It started to rain and soon poured down. They decided to swing down from the top and jump inside, a feat quite common among hoboes and sisters of the road.

Hargreaves held on to his wife’s hands while she swung over the roof of the car and let her body down. She was in overalls. As her legs began to descend a pair of arms took hold of them and helped her into the car. Her husband attempted to follow her, but the train had gained speed and was jerking so badly that he was afraid he couldn’t make it. He put one leg down slowly, then yelled after her, “I can’t do it. I’ll fall off!” He swung back and flattened himself on the top of the car, holding the sides for support. Hanging over the edge, he looked inside the car. What he saw made him wild.

The arms that had helped his wife down belonged to a male hobo,
and were now around Virginia, struggling with her. But Hargreaves wasn’t man enough to make another attempt to do anything about it. He simply lay there and watched while the hobo raped his wife.

The train thundered on a hundred miles through the mountains. Finally, when they came near a small town and the train slowed down to about twenty miles an hour, the hobo jumped off. When the train stopped, Hargreaves climbed down to his wife. He was beside himself with rage.

“You had no business leaving me on top of the car,” he shouted. “It was your fault. You sure as hell can beat it. I’m going back.”

And he did.

Virginia and her men were willing to risk the railroad dicks in Chicago, but Ena’s poet had been picked up twice in the yards there, so we got off the train when it slowed up in Berwyn and rode into the city on a street car. We had sent our baggage on by American Express and walked through the Loop to get it on Randolph Street. Ena’s poet suggested we go over to the Near North Side close to the Dill Pickle Club and Bughouse Square. Here we found a little three-room housekeeping apartment with two beds, and proceeded to settle down and look around.

Girls and women of every variety seemed to keep Chicago as their hobo center. They came in bronzed from hitch-hiking, in khaki. They came in ragged in men’s overalls, having ridden freights, decking mail trains, riding the reefers, or riding the blinds on passenger trains. They came in driving their own dilapidated Fords or in the rattling side-cars of men hoboes’ motorcycles. A few of them even had bicycles. They were from the west, south, east and north, even from Canada. They all centered about the Near North Side, in Bughouse Square, in the cheap rooming houses and light housekeeping establishments, or begged or accepted sleeping space from men or other women there before them. Some of them had paid their own way on buses or passenger trains but arrived broke to panhandle their food or berths with men temporarily able to keep them. A few had been stowaways on Lake boats, and I remember one who said she stowed away on an airplane from Philadelphia. Not
a few of them had their ways paid by charity organizations believing their stories that they had relatives here who would keep them.

On arrival most of them were bedraggled, dirty, and hungry. Half of them were ill. There were pitiful older ones who had been riding freights all over the country with raging toothaches. In Chicago they got themselves to clinics, and although they couldn’t get any dental work done free they could usually get the old snags of teeth taken out. Some were obviously diseased, and most of them were careless about their ailments unless they had overwhelming pain.

The bulk of these women, and most all women on the road, I should say, traveled in pairs, either with a man to whom by feeling or by chance they had attached themselves, or with another woman. A few had husbands and children with them. There were a number traveling with brothers. Now and then there was a group of college girls. A few women traveled about with a mob or gang of men. These were of the hard-boiled, bossy type, usually, who had careless sex relations with anyone in their own group, and who, therefore, never had to bother to hunt for food or shelter. I do not remember, during the first years, seeing many pairs of lesbians come in off the road together, but of course they are common now, women who are emotionally attached to each other, even though, on the road, or while they stop, they give their sex to men or to other women in exchange for food, transportation, and lodging.

These women were out of every conceivable type of home. But even that first summer I could see what I know now after many years, that the women who take to the road are mainly those who come from broken homes, homes where the father and mother are divorced, where there are step-mothers or step-fathers, where both parents are dead, where they have had to live with aunts and uncles and grandparents. At least half the women on the road are out of such homes.

Many others, I have found, are graduates of orphan asylums. Shut up and held away from all activity, such girls have dreamed all their childhoods about traveling and seeing the world. As soon as they are released they take the quickest way to realizing their dreams, and become hoboes. Not a few are out of jails and institutions, choosing the road
for freedom, the same way, regardless of hardship. Among these are actually many paroled from institutions for the feeble-minded and insane.

During my years in and out of Chicago I talked to hundreds of these women. How they managed without money on the road always fascinated me. Many worked from time to time. Some were typists, some file clerks, and carried with them recommendations from companies they had worked for. I knew one that first summer who was a graduate nurse. The only thing she carried with her on the road was a conservative looking dress which she could put on when she wanted to register for a job. She’d stay on a case, or a couple of cases, until she got a little money again, and then she’d pack the good dress away and go out on the road in trousers, hitch-hiking.

The bulk of the women on the road made no pretense of working, however, even when they stayed for weeks or even months, as they do in Chicago or any other big center. I have already explained how they get by, by begging, stealing or hustling, or with help from the welfare agencies.

Today, of course, all over the country there are state relief stations, federal transient bureaus, travelers’ aid offices, but in the earlier days the missions and the private charities would help transients, especially women. Some of the girls made a specialty of all the words and attitudes that went with “being saved,” and used them all successfully to get the watery soup and the coffee and bread that were put out by rescue missions in the name of the Lord. Some of them made up circumstantial stories of their Jewish ancestry (being Irish) and got emergency help from Jewish agencies. Or they manufactured Roman Catholic backgrounds (being Jewish) and got help from Catholic missions. Others had acquired the language of various lodges and fraternal organizations and in the name of fathers and brothers and uncles who were Masons, Moose, Woodmen, Kiwanians, they were given food or clothes or money for transportation.

But the great group of hobo women practiced none of these tricks. Most of them weren’t clever enough. Instead they begged from stores and restaurants; from people on the road or on the city sidewalks. A lot
of them didn’t bother to beg rooms. If the weather was good they slept in the parks with the men, or alongside them, cleaning up in the morning in the toilets of the libraries or other public buildings. And on the Near North Side there were dozens of people in studios and rooming houses who would let any of them in for a bath or clean-up.

One of the roughest, toughest and smuttiest flats we used to gather in was Tobey’s. Tobey ran a bootleg joint on Hill Street, near the elevated, and this side of hell there was no worse conglomeration of human beings. Tobey was a rebel and a freethinker. He was tough and vulgar, a vicious, crooked, frightful sort of man. The vile, filthy language that he spouted, and the degrading way in which he handled his women were almost unspeakable, but I doubt if any aristocratic apartment of a wealthy bachelor in town attracted such a varied assortment of brains and talent as did Tobey’s lousy flat.

Many of the best known labor leaders, the ones who not only believed in, but practiced, violence, came to his place for a loud drink, and quite a number of distinguished professors and literary men could be found there often. The poets, the real ones whose books did something for the community, came often.

I shall never forget the first night that Lucille Donoghue, the wife of the star reporter, Terry Donoghue, brought me to Tobey’s. The place was stuffy and crowded with half-drunken men and soused women. Two of the “heavy men” (burglars) I met that night were killed by policemen soon after.

I despised Tobey, with his heavy jaw and penetrating eyes, the moment I laid eyes on him. He leered at me, and attempted to put his dirty hand under my dress before he had talked with me five minutes. About twelve o’clock two cabs stopped in front of the place, and a group of actors and newspaper men came in. Among them was Earl Ford, who was playing in
The Front Page
, and some of the stars from
My Maryland
.

There was no piano, but there was music. There was no modesty or decency, but there was genuine intellectual activity. I was amazed at how clearly the drunken, brutal Tobey could think. After Earl Ford downed a pint of “moon,” he recited part of
The Ballad of Reading
Gaol
. I left the party with a bunch of actors. Ena refused to leave, and when her poet attempted to drag her out, Tobey broke a china cuspidor over his head.

In practically every large city that I have visited, except those in the South, I found hobo colleges, unemployed councils, and radical forums that were run especially for the hoboes and the unemployed. They were nothing new to me. But the most interesting of them all was the one in Chicago, located in an old bank building at Washington and Desplaines Streets. The director was a physician, and the superintendent was John Burns, the Bughouse Square speaker I have already mentioned. For months I attended the meetings regularly. There were three each day, one at ten in the morning, the others at three and eight in the evening.

The staff at Hobo College was drawn from many walks of life some of which had nothing to do with hoboing. It was here that I not only heard but met Richard Bennett, the actor. He made a delightful and humorous speech and invited the whole audience to come to his play. We all loved him in
They Knew What They Wanted
, and after the play we all ganged into his dressing room and had a grand time. Mary McCormic sang for us at the College, and afterwards gave the superintendent fifty dollars and sent him out to buy food for the crowd. Gilda Gray, the dancer, and her husband and publicity man came over and danced and sang for us. Her husband got a taxi and brought us some wonderful cakes from the swellest baker in town and a whole milk can full of steaming coffee.