Hard Travellin Read online

  The rails go westward in the dark.

  Brother, have you seen the starlight on the rails ?

  Have you heard the thunder of the fast express?

  And in the Negro blues:

  I’m just from the country, never been in your town before,

  Lord, I’m broke and hungry, ain’t got no place to go.

  I was raised in the country, I been there all my life,

  Lord, I had to run off and leave my children and wife.

  But how true was any of this still? How representative were these Greyhound riders? Then there were about four million unemployed (that summer it fell a fraction) and it was estimated, with less statistical certainty, that there were thirty-five million people living below poverty line. On the other hand there were seventy-five million in the total work force and that thirty-five million had to be viewed in relation to a population of 198 million enjoying, overall, a state of prosperity and ease hitherto unknown to mankind. Had the American economy stabilized, the old sliding about calmed, the melting pot simmered down? Economists have defined four post-war ‘spending tiers’, the fourth and present being ‘the life-enriching stratum’. America urbanized, standardized, a consumers’ cornucopia garlanded with telephone wire and television beam, was hardly the picture of a hobo jungle. Was it that the vigour and impatience, the bustle and striking out, as well as the directionless scrambling for a position on that fourth stratum, all the dynamic of the American dream, had - as has been said - clotted into the American trance ?

  I was unsure what I would find although it seemed likely that it would not be the hobo, neither the old freight train rider, banking on luck and muscle to get through the most arduous circumstances, nor even many of the Greyhound transients I had briefly encountered. All the official agencies assured me that this phase of American life was over and done with. The endlessly helpful Washington departments which guided me to big construction projects and on to the seasonal routes of the semi-organized armies of harvest migrants explained that, while mobility was a vital nerve in the nation’s functioning, it no longer took the old vagabond form: the hobo was extinct, the Java Man of industrial history.

  That I retained some scepticism about those statements was due, flimsily enough, to a record which popped into the hit parade as I was making plans for my trip. My hunch was that despite the improbable gaiety of Roger Miller’s King of the Road, it must have some significance to the average American if it had been elected a best-seller. It began, with a lazy lilt:

  Trailers for sale or rent,

  Rooms to let, fifty cents,

  No ‘phone, no pool, no pets,

  Ain’t got no cigarettes.

  It continued to explain with sunny resignation that two hours of ‘pushin’ broom’ brought in enough to take a four-bit room and, the inference was, an enviable contentment known only to the happy-go-lucky bum. If it had struck the chord it had in fourth-stratum America it seemed to me that it might have more relevance than mere romantic nostalgia for the idea of a departed wayfaring freedom. Perhaps I might find that there were still many, from choice or necessity, itinerant under the floorboards of the Great Society.

  In fact, I did not have to search far, only in the right places, and usually just a few blocks away from any town’s Department of Labor and Department of Agriculture buildings - beside the railroad tracks where the freight trains delivered their human cargo to the skid row district of bars, rooming houses and missions, the makeshift palaces of the real kings of the road.

  My starting point was not the belief that mobility is unique to America, only that America has a unique kind of mobility. I need not have moved out of my own patch of England to find a fluid hotchpotch of race. The tuft of chimneys I can see as I write, across the county border in Bedfordshire, is a brickfield staffed mostly by young immigrant Italians. Farming nearby is a Pole who stayed on after flying with Bomber Command. Several streets in the small market town three miles away have been colonized by West Indians and Pakistanis. The motorway extension just beyond is being built by Irish construction gangs. A Scottish boy in the village recently married a Spanish girl from the Canaries, and the shop is run by a Yorkshire couple.

  Man has ever, and everywhere, been on the move. The ticker-tape of the human race’s occupation of our planet is an endless message of invasion and retreat, ebb and flow, flux and reflux. Always concomitant within the nature of man has been on the one hand the need to push down roots and to have the security of a centre, a homestead, and on the other the restless chafing against these very ties. The warring of these two compulsions had produced the fluctuations of migration, settlement, secondary surge.

  There are medical terms designed to cover wanderlust in its pathological forms. Dromomania is the desire to travel pushed to the point of abnormality, an obsession for roaming, and drapeto-mania is an insane or uncontrollable impulsion to wander away from home. But although these conditions may disguise themselves under good reasons, my impression is that they are rare beside the causes for most men being on the road. Behind each drive and drift there has usually been the primary need for food. Violent climatic changes, such as the opening of a glacial period and the southerly curve of rain belts dispersed game and crops, so man adjusted - with the flexibility which has made him a successful survivor - and followed. Races and tribes were nudged out by an advancing ice-cap or roasted out of drying deserts by cycles of fiercer heat. Other more sophisticated or emotional reasons have propelled populations into new ground: greed for plunder and the greener fields of others, the stubborn adherence to outlawed religious or totemic principles, revolt against political oppression, the draw of adventure and action. All have inextricably mingled.

  Distance lengthened between image and reality, between experience and desire. It was amid the smoke and degradation of nineteenth-century factory enslavement that the poignancy of the lost arbour, of the idea of a natural life in the glades and the wheatfields - for the reinlessness of the happy rover, the tramp, the road mender, the shepherd, the gipsy - became most confused and most acute.

  Both the ideal and the actuality of mobility, of free-ranging in unfenced countryside and across distances of pulse-quickening scale, have survived in America long beyond the time when they had become a literary convention, a cliché of the imagination, in Europe. Perhaps the nearest similarity to the American pattern was the briefer, and pedestrian or horse-borne, span of the Australian sundowner, who humped his bluey in the outback and like the American hobo glorified himself in song and legend: the ‘jolly swagman’, the squatter and free selector, the gold digger and the shearer and the other itinerant bush-workers, as in The Ramble-eer of the 1890s.

  For I am a ramble-eer, a rollicking ramble-eer

  I’m a roving rake of poverty, and son-of-a-gun for beer.

  (One of the earliest American hobo songs was The Son of a Gambolier which began:

  I’m a rambling rake of poverty

  From Tippery Town I came.)

  Tremendous though the upheavals and shifts of people in Europe during and after the 1939-45 war were, they were an aberration. Despite the heterogeneity in my own ordinary country area there is a family in the village which has been here since the thirteenth century (when the records start, so it may well be even longer), and to look down the parish registers is to see, from the seventeenth century onward, familiar name after familiar name, whose descendants are present neighbours. In America it is the exception to talk to a person who was born in the place where you meet him. Furthermore it is statistically likely that he will have flitted off if you call in at that town a few years later.

  To risk a large generalization, which I shall be attempting to justify, no matter how he may rhapsodize about the rover and picture himself within the golden pastoral mode - or its rolled-gold substitute - to the European entrenchment is good. To the European impermanence and change are bad, restlessness reveals the flaw of instability; whereas to an American restlessness is pandemic; entrenchment me
ans fossilization, a poor spirit. Of course both outlooks are held there, as historical parallels in the edificial scheme of the traditional regionalists of the Old South, and in the chafing and fidgetiness of those who thrust deeper into inner America; both are mixed unsettlingly in the individual. Lerner makes the point that to understand America these are the two elements - ‘double beat of migration and the sense of place’ -which must be seen as facets of each other. ‘In a big country you run the risk of feeling lost, of being anonymous, and a sense of place is a way of riveting yourself down.’ But the lostness and the longing for trustworthy attachments - Thomas Wolfe’s ‘a stone, a leaf, an unfound door’ - have usually in America succumbed to the greater fear of being caught.

  So the search is continued, the Faustian spirit of the endless quest, the temptation to top the next hill, which became the tropistic quality of the American migrations - indeed, of American institutions themselves, whose very nature has evolved in terms of flexibility and acceptance of the new to the point of dread of anything - car, building or mind - which is not of the latest styling.

  The present Europeans are those who stayed, who were, whichever way it may be seen, content or steady or faint-hearted. The present Americans are the Europeans, or their descendants, who got out, the mavericks and the refractory and the bold (or the duds and fugitives: again, however it may be seen). They keep that bloody-mindedness green and they preserve within their adopted borders the right to move on to new ground if the old is intolerable, infertile, or just too stalely familiar.

  Fluidity in America is prized and praised, both kinds of fluidity: that which is physical and horizontal about the land, and the other which is vertically social, up, and down, the economic greasy-pole. They cannot be discussed unrelatedly because each is implicit in the metabolism of the other.

  The highly-paid white-collar executive who moves from a ranch-style house in St Paul, Minnesota, will, with luck, be moving to a bigger ranch-style house in Westchester County. So, although he is a dot on the geographical mobility chart, he is simultaneously acting out the social mobility myth and proving it true in his case. The ‘gipsy’ truck driver who pulls on hire one of those monster aluminium cargo vans 3,000 miles across country, howling down the highways with twin exhausts jutting like snorkels above the cabin, hopes soon to be sitting in an office sending out others on the long hauls.

  There are seventy-five million motor vehicles in America, sixty-eight million of those being private cars, and there are more than ninety million licensed drivers. Every year 400 billion miles of motor travelling is done on American roads.

  The Americans also take to the road with trailers and caravans swaying behind. There are 350,000 now on wheels, as distinct from those positioned like semi-permanent bungalows. More and more Americans go off in camping vans and in metal housing units mounted on three-quarter-ton trucks, bedrooms projecting like nose gun-turrets over the driving compartment. In Colorado I saw one family camper-truck, placarded across the radiator THE NOMADS, towing a Volkswagen - the dinghy for use when anchored in the programmed forest bower. Overnight campers in the national parks and forests have risen from fifteen million in 1960 to twenty-three million a year. Additionally, the inter-city buses now match the railroads in total passenger miles. The Greyhound Scenicruisers and the Continental Trailways Silver Eagles, the two biggest lines, together log eleven billion miles a year. Nearly as much mileage again is mopped up by the shorter-hop bus services.

  The drive-in banks, the supermarket plazas, the open-air restaurant stalls where your order, dictated over a window-side telephone or microphone, is brought by a waitress to the car door (an odd sensation of having public breakfast in bed), the throw-in machines which catch your coins in a metal wicket-keeper’s mitts at the toll road gateway - all these are the superficial but intelligent adjustments to a social order built, like an auto’s bodyshell itself, around the internal combustion engine, accessories which have evolved out of a mobile behaviour and which in turn aid and extend that mobile behaviour.

  Much of this ferment in America is frivolous and frothy (‘freedom plus groceries’), a splurging away of gasoline and tyre rubber at a rate which never fails to make a frugal European’s heart quail. At base, though, there is the condition which the American accepted when he rejected Europe and came to the new shore, indeed the very condition which drew him there: space and its kinetic scope.

  Forty million Americans, almost a fifth of the population, change places of residence every year. A move may mean just across town (if those status ascent cogs are engaging as they should) but it is likelier to be farther, even across the continent. The average American family moves house every five years, eighteen in every thousand long-distance. (The Nashville Tennessean- a local daily newspaper - publishes a New Neighbours list. On the day I glanced down it among the thirty-six families who had moved into town the previous day, eleven were from other, different states.) The trend for twenty-five years has been sharply away from the country. In 1940 farm population was nearly one-quarter of the total; today it is less than one-eighth. Thirty-five years ago one farm worker produced food for ten people; today he produces enough for twenty-three. The cities have not absorbed this surplus as an additional work force: this is the social dropout factor. These are the men shoved over to and beyond the perimeter, the drifters without gyroscopes.

  Yet by and large Americans continue to value mobility as a high performance fifth gear over most standard economies’ four-speed boxes. In the Chicago Employment Office last year, Rodger Wilson explained to me that because ‘ever-increasing complexity of economic living hampers the movement of unemployed workers’, his department was beginning a Congress-authorized experimental project ‘to increase mobility’. Increase it The British attitude, reflected in Margot Jeffery’s 1954 survey, is perhaps predictably more conservative. ‘It is impossible to regard the willingness of the labor force to make changes as an unmixed asset; since such willingness may reflect not merely a satisfactory measure of personal adaptability to changing circumstances, but the restlessness which comes from a failure to find satisfying work.’

  Actually there are American economists and sociologists who concur. As long ago as 1938 Anderson wrote: ‘The casual-labor market is an economic luxury because of the trial-and-error principle upon which it operates. Workers go here and there in a chance search for jobs. Such a hit-and-miss search occupies the attention of many more workers than are needed. Many are busy in the search, but few are busy at work.’

  It had by then become clear to all who would look it in the eye -and ignoring the wanderlust which may incubate it and the romance which is its by-product - that migrant casual labour is horribly wasteful of human energy and resources. The general turmoil of the past is known about: indeed, the dust has still not settled. The question here is not only ‘Is it necessary?’ but ‘Is it good?’ When the frontier closed, the West strung itself with barbed wire and the railroads from East to West embraced -goodbye adventure! But in the nineteenth century came the call for a style of movement different to that of the frontier scout and the inaugural ploughman. What was now needed was an industrial labour force without impediment, to be transferred and distributed like troops on a fluid battleground. So the business world created ‘an ideology of stir and movement, jostling the pick-up-and-sadly-go spirit of the immigrant, using whatever allies it could find in the ever-upward doctrine of religion, science and progress, linking democracy to them and to unending change’.

  Yet there is nothing in the American Republic as a political institution to say that change in itself is good. The Founders permitted change but made it pretty hard to accomplish. Existing religions have rarely looked kindly on unsettledness: it is the typical terrain of messiahs. ‘Thus government, science, and religion are not by themselves supporters of the doctrine of mobility and change,’ writes de Grazia. ‘Like the Indian following the buffalo, the American follows his job.’

  The Indians and the buffaloes are tam
ed and penned; the American is not yet, entirely.

  Part Two

  Stones in my Passway

  I got stones in my passway, and my road is dark at night.

  I got to keep moving, blues falling down like hail

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

  From two blues recorded by Robert

  Johnson in 1939, the year before he

  was murdered.

  3 Extinct (Official)

  Now alien, I move forlorn, an uprooted tree.

  And at dawn, irresolutely,

  into the void…

  From Worker Uprooted by Joseph Kalar,

  a lumbermill poet of the Thirties

  ‘Uncle’ Purl Stockton spent forty-five years singing the gospel around the United States, praising the Almighty in blazing baritone in hundreds of revivalist tents and store-front churches. When in 1958 he was asked if he would start a rescue mission for derelicts, drifters, lolligaggers, alki stiffs, scrubs and winos in Little Rock, he replied that any man who hadn’t more sense than to get drunk should look after himself.

  The Lord changed my mind right quick.’

  He has been running the Union Rescue Mission at Little Rock since then. He is now seventy-seven, a massive, powerful unstoppable redeemer with flossy white hair and chromium-rimmed spectacles. He is crouched restlessly at the desk under a framed SERVICE TO MANKIND AWARD in his office beside the Rock Island tracks. He houses nearly 200 homeless men at a time. He gets income by putting those unable to find jobs around town (yard work, picking cucumbers, loading sugar trucks, chopping cotton) on to cutting up newspapers which sell for wrapping at a dollar a hundred sheets. He has an ex-bootlegger just out of the penitentiary running an electrical shop where broken television sets, radios and refrigerators, donated to the mission, are doctored up and resold.

  ‘This isn’t a hóbo jungle or a drunks’ paradise or a loafers’ retreat,’ Uncle Purl lets it be known in his melodious bellow. ‘This is a rescue mission. I tell any man who comes in here “We’re trying to keep you from going to hell. HELL ! You can stay here as long as you want to if you’re trying to find yourself and find Christ and find a job.