One More Train to Ride: The Underground World of Modern American Hoboes (review)

Clifford Williams teaches philosophy at Trinity College, an independent Christian liberal arts college in Illinois, and has published books on free will, the Christian heart, spiritual adventure, and the life of the mind. In 1990, he happened to hear about the National Hobo Convention, held annually in Britt, Iowa, and attended as a "hobo at heart" (xv). Williams has been attending the conference ever since and, in the process, has not only acquired the moniker "Oats"—based on his habitual breakfast of rolled oats with milk and honey—but has also befriended and interviewed dozens of self-styled hoboes, collecting their stories, poems, songs, and life experiences.

One More Train to Ride is divided into forty-five sections: fourteen of them are devoted to first-person narratives of life on the rails, as told to Williams by contemporary hoboes, some with highly evocative names—New York Slim, the Texas Madman, Dante Fucwha, Frog, Shayla, Stretch, Shortstop, B, Preacher Steve, New York Grizzly, Iwegan, Road Hog, Raquel, and Adman. Another fourteen sections contain poems written by hoboes (many of them in stanzas of four lines, with rhymes of a-b-c-b). The remaining sections contain miscellaneous bits of wisdom and lore (e.g., where to wait for trains, how to board a moving boxcar, and what to do when arrested).

The general consensus on the hobo community is that hoboes are free spirits who do not want to be tied down by rules or responsibilities, but instead have chosen a life of wandering by rail and working only when they feel like doing so. Among the hoboes interviewed by Williams, there is a strong sense of community; many of them know each other, or at least have heard legends of the more seasoned, and abide by an ethical code that they feel places them above other categories of the homeless. "Hoboes are the elite of society's basement," maintains Adman, who (when he's not riding the rails for one week each year) serves as the chief executive of an advertising agency in Minneapolis (14). Others are more direct; according to nineteen-year-old Shayla (one of two women interviewed by Williams), "If you're a hobo, you're pretty much worthless as far as society goes" (52).

This book is not intended as an ethnographic analysis or scholarly interpretation of the hobo phenomenon. Williams provides no annotations for the material he has collected; even though several of his interviewees refer to the FTRA, the reader has to go elsewhere to learn that these initials stand for the Freight Train Riders of America, a loosely knit gang of rail-riders thought to be responsible for murdering hundreds of transients over the past fifteen years. There is no index for the book.

Nevertheless, folklorists may find much of value within the first-person narratives collected, some of which resemble the best picaresque tales. Take, for example, New York Slim's story: a six-foot six-inch African American who grew up in suburban New York; raised primarily by an uncle who belonged to the Hole in the Wall Gang (presumably not the same one started by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid); traveled to the 1969 Woodstock Festival; received a basketball scholarship to Marquette University, flunked out, and was drafted into the military (though it is unclear which branch of service he entered or if he went to Vietnam); married three times; deeply religious (a church deacon and junior elder); owner of land in Montana and Washington; and has ridden the rails off and on since 1976. As the title of this book suggests, there is always one more train to ride for this diverse group of...