Home is Surrounded by Places to Go: Sister of the Road (Boxcar Bertha) by Ben Reitman – Colm McKenna
February 24, 2025
Boxcar Bertha reflects a lost mode of living. It pays tribute to “the world of careless living detached from the rest of the world.”
Bertha had no formal education. Her mother was a hobo, drifting through camps and men, and Bertha gladly accepted these changes. Without academic training, she found practical alternatives in the natural world:
“I learned my first spelling from the names on the boxcars. What early geography I knew I learned by asking the men about the towns and cities… I learned numbers by counting the cars on long freights. I don’t ever remember anyone telling me a real fairy story in my whole childhood, but the tales of… drunken brawls in New Orleans’ dives were thrillers I remember to this day.”
For Bertha, the necessities of life could be learned outside the classroom, and the rest seemed superfluous when the world was within reach.
Despite spending time in big cities, Bertha’s world remained separate from civilization at large. The easygoing nature of a hobo’s life is rooted, she believes, in an inability to feel disgrace. It’s thanks to this that the likes of Bertha stand apart:
“Our family never had any hard luck, nor was it ever disgraced, for there was nothing which it would acknowledge as disgrace.”
During the Depression era, anarchists and hobos often brushed shoulders, forming a community of radicalized transients (hobohemians). Lacking formal education, they still quoted the likes of Proudhon and William Morris with ease. As one of the most anti-capitalist existences imaginable, the life of a hobo was fertile ground, porous to anarchist sentiments. Some eighty years on, so many of Bertha’s views still seem progressive. She advocates for love without “romantic pretensions” and criticizes marriage: “Those who marry to escape drabness and the monotony of existence only find themselves in a worse jam.” She even questions her devotion to her child: “I knew that I was playing a part, knew that, somehow or other, I had never really achieved motherhood in the full sense of the word.” Such feelings seem more common by the day.
While Bertha’s life feels contemporary in many ways, it unfolded in a world that to some extent accepted transients. While anti-vice activism was far from friendly to anarchism, the hobo lifestyle itself was facilitated by hobo colleges and federal transient bureaus. To an extent, it was even romanticized; Bertha notes that many transients were driven by roaming spirits: “The trains going in and out to places as they grew up gave them wanderlust.” Despite the obvious hardships, some people chose to become hobos, and they lived in a world that acknowledged their existence. Today, free land is a relic of the past, and many would-be transients have no means to sustain themselves. Homelessness has become largely sedentary, with individuals confined to specific areas, often resorting to begging. Anti-homeless laws and hostile architecture make their lives paradoxical: movement is discouraged, yet so is lingering. Unlike the hobos in Boxcar Bertha, modern homeless individuals are stripped of any claims to intellectualism. Bertha brings home the point that hobos “are not a bunch of dumb ignoramuses” and that they have the stomachs for “intellectual food.” This is in stark contrast to the dehumanizing sentiments used against the homeless today.
Eleven chapters in, I tried to find a photo of Bertha. Besides stills of Barbara Hershey from Martin Scorsese’s loose adaptation, I found nothing; I’d been reading Ben Reitman’s Boxcar Bertha, not an actual autobiography. Despite the Amok Press edition’s cover reading Boxcar Bertha: An Autobiography, as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman, this is a work of fiction. Bertha is a composite of various transients known to Reitman – anarchist, physician, “Hobo King” – though primarily his former lover Retta Toble.
I didn’t like the book less, but I liked it differently. Certain anecdotes lost their charm when I started to see them as fictitious. Fiction broadens expectations, but it can also cheapen them. I couldn’t shake the strangeness of something I’d accepted to be real sliding into the realm of fiction; I thought I had my hands on something tangible. Something of flesh and blood unveiling itself as fiction seems a lot stranger than something fantastical dropping into the world.
After having the rug pulled out from under me, I became cautious. Reitman, it seems, expected this of his readers. Fact and fiction are so thoroughly blended that it’s hard to see the wood for the trees. Real-life hobohemians appear throughout the book, either in person or through anecdotal homages. Bertha writing letters for illiterate women in a venereal hospital recalls certain episodes from Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, while limbs lost during boxcar journeys mirror Welsh tramp W.H. Davies’ The Autobiography of a Supertramp. Other figures just don’t exist at all. I’m left with an image of Depression Era Chicago – a hub for women hobos – made up of real-life hobohemians and ghosts living side by side, all of whom Reitman captures indiscriminately.
Despite Reitman’s literary games, Boxcar Bertha remains truthful to the experiences of women hobos during the Depression Era. It’s an extensive overview of hobohemian life, which was still reeling from the Haymarket Affair and battling against anti-vice laws. From the orators of Chicago’s Bughouse Square and the Dill Pickle Club speakeasy to debates on birth control and the conflict between personal and humanitarian existence that dominated anarchist discourse, Reitman’s veiled fiction often feels like it’s on the verge of being a completely accurate history of the times. Instead, Bertha is added to the world, a body through which this anarchist Frankenstein creates a hobo queen.