Algren by Mary Wisniewski Read Free Book Online

was taken without payment. In Nelson’s
Somebody in Boots
, a hobo brags about having the unexpected good luck of finding a drunken woman in an empty cattle car. There were also good manners in odd places—Nelson remembered how a policeman once came onto a train, cursing the hoboes, and was surprised to find a woman. He apologized with southern gallantry for his rough words. “We never use language like that in front of women down here,” he told her.
    With all their genteel pretenses, the southern states were the hardest on wanderers. Southern towns were prominent in hobo warnings about which places to avoid. “Beware Beaumont, Greensboro … look out for one-armed Mike Bingo’s Hole … steer shy of old Seth Healey, dressed like a Bo but carrying a gun and hoselength in Greenville; but the worst place of all is anywhere in Georgia.”
    Blacks huddled in the same cars as whites, who harassed them. Irony was thick in the boxcars. Black and white refugees from a common enemy fought each other for a space in the straw. In
Somebody in Boots
, the vagrant Cass keeps reminding his police captors that “Ah’m not no nigger,” as if that made the quality of his wretchedness more refined.
    Nelson found that boxcars were the easiest to ride—the hard part was getting on, because you had to board while the train was moving, and then grab on to a metal side rail, feeling the motion pull savagely at your arms and knowing how badly it could end. Sometimes they’d go too fast; sometimes a traveler’s grip failed him. The carnage was astounding. On just the Missouri Pacific railroad in 1931, 114 riders were killed and 221 injured on trains traveling between Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana. The other hard part was getting off—to get water, or food, or work—out of the reach of the railroad bulls. Far worse than riding inside boxcars was clinging to the rods underneath cars, where one slip could leave a rider crushed under the wheels. Also terrible were the open gondolas carryingcoal, and the refrigerator cars, or “reefers,” carrying meat or produce. In one of Nelson’s grim early stories, “Lest the Trap Door Click,” a cocky youth is warned by an old hobo to beware of riding the reefer, since he might get locked inside and freeze or suffocate. The kid, who like Nelson has a bachelor of science degree from a state university, scoffs, figuring the reefer is no worse than other cars and certainly no colder than the Texas desert at night. So he takes a reefer, the door clicks shut softly above him, and he spends hours in torment, clinging to a frozen steel grating while holding a delusional dialogue with the oranges rolling out of his reach. “It is so cold in the reefer, so dark and cold.”
    Climbing off the train outside of town, Nelson walked into the French Quarter of New Orleans in the early morning, with the sunrise lighting the pastel pinks, blues, and yellows of the houses, with their lacy wrought-iron balconies. The benches in Lafayette Park were filled with homeless men—he would need to get there earlier if he wanted a place to lie down. It took hard work and planning to be poor. Exhausted and grubby, he bought a po’boy sandwich for a nickel in the market, and watched a muscular black man cutting the heads off turtles and stacking them in a pile, an image he used in
A Walk on the Wild Side
. A store advertised Coke for a nickel, so Nelson went in. A pretty girl emerged, topless, and said Coke was ten cents. Nelson did not question the markup and drank his pop, standing rigidly, eyes fixed straight ahead.
    This look of wide-eyed innocence wouldn’t go unnoticed in New Orleans, and up came a Dixie Fagin. A long, lopsided man from Florida, wearing a straw hat of dingy yellow, he was eager to know this college boy, still in his frayed and grubby graduation suit. Wouldn’t Nelson like to make some money? Of course he