Freighthopping

"Railroading in those years was very dangerous for train and engine crews, but incomparably more so for hoboes. Besides hunger and cold, the hobo was confronted with a maze of perils. Death laid in wait for him at every turn. The hobo might dash his brains out or be cut to pieces while jumping on or off a rapidly moving train; he might fall from the top of a swaying box-car or be swept off by a low bridge of whose presence he was unaware; he might have his head torn off by a car or railroad structure that was not "in the clear"; he might be crushed between telescoping cars or mangled in wrecks. Broken bodies of hoboes were constantly picked up along the railroad right-of-way, and hurried off to nameless graves in local Potters' Fields."

"I could see men of all colors bouncing along in the boxcar. We stood up. We laid down. We piled around on each other. We used each other for pillows. I could smell the sour and bitter sweat soaking through my own khaki shirt and britches, and the work clothes, overhauls and saggy, dirty suits of the other guys. My mouth was full of some kind of gray mineral dust that was about an inch deep all over the floor. We looked like a gang of lost corpses heading back to the boneyard. Hot in the September heat, tired, mean and mad, cussing and sweating, raving and preaching. Part of us waved our hands in the cloud of dust and hollered out to the whole crowd. Others was too weak, too sick, too hungry or too drunk even to stand up. The train was a highball and had the right of way. Our car was a rough rider, called by hoboes a "flat wheeler." I was riding in the tail end where I got more dust, but less heat. The wheels were clipping it off at sixty miles an hour. About all I could hear above the raving and cussing and the roar of the car was the jingle and clink on the under side every time the wheels went over a rail joint."

"Throughout the entire trip we were compelled by poverty to steal rides on freight cars. Nothing we could do about that. Between jobs we would sleep in haystacks or near-by boxcars. That was illegal also."

"A mile outside Waycross, I and a handful of others heading west waited. A freight train rumbled slowly toward us, its stack belching black smoke as the fireman worked up a full head of steam. We scrambled aboard any open car we could catch. The train started picking up speed. Then two long toots of the engine whistle let us know the train was going to "highball" run wide open. There's a lot to be said about traveling in a boxcar, especially an empty one. You can get up and walk around or even trot. You can sing, holler and shout. You disturb no one, if you're alone. Through the wide open door you can watch the countryside go by; you can smell the country air mingled with the odor of sulfur, as the fireman piles more soft coal onto the fire. When it rains, there's a roof over your head. When the wind howls, you can always close the door a wee bit more to keep out the gusts and the cold."

"On my first trip, my friend and I traveled the first leg on top of a boxcar. That is not a particularly relaxing way to travel either, and was made less so in those days by hot cinders from the engine, particularly if the train went through any tunnels. Luckily, ours didn't. But the greatest danger was that a railroad dick, as the company police are derisively called, would spot us and use his club to force us to jump while the train was going at a relatively high speed. I heard many stories of incidents of this kind, mostly from men who were explaining why they walked with a limp, were nursing broken ribs or carrying a broken arm in a crude sling. We rode that way this time because the boxcars were all locked and the run from the railroad yards on the West Side of mid-Manhattan to the yards in Croton-on-Hudson is slow and relatively safe."

"We ran across the tracks and slid down the embankment across from the station and down the gully, out of sight of the town."