Sister of the Road, as told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman

Started: May 25, 2012
Finished: May 30, 2012
Pages:314
Copyright: 1937

Now this is an interesting book.  I picked it up last year on a whim at a second-hand bookstore out in Chilliwack.  It's an autobiography of a female hobo, "Box Car" Bertha Thompson, written during the dirty 30s.

Why did I read it?  I've also read:

• an autobiography of a suffragette.  Laugh a Defiance by Mary Richardson is a matter-of-fact description of, well, frankly, her terrorist actions while following Emmeline Pankhurst in the struggle to win the vote for British women.  
• the memoir of Caroline Herschel, an 18th century astronomer who discovered 7 comets at a time when there were only about 20 in total known, and who also helped her brother William do the first systematic astronomical survey of the skies.  
• Sister Marie Celeste's letters in Letters to Father: Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo.  (translated and published by Dana Sobel after she wrote Galileo's Daughter)
• the autobiography of Diane Di Prima, a 50s Beatnik poet who was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac.

These women have nothing in common except that they tell their own stories in their own words. History in the raw. The books are an adventure for someone who isn't used to reading primary sources that drop you--- slam!--into the past.  They are also a very immediate way of connecting to the lost history of women's lives.

That's the context I brought to Sister of the Road.  And in some ways this book didn't disappoint. I wondered how shocked contemporary readers would have been at Bertha's unconventional lifestyle. I was interested in the range of women and men that Bertha met on the road, and was surprised at how commonplace radical political movements appeared to be in the  hobo camps.  More lost history:  when we talk about "the homeless problem" today we aren't generally talking about the problem of  I.W.W. or anarchist agitators.  Except sometimes in the Occupy camps, which ended up hosting all three types of travellers that Bertha knew: hobos (jobless wanderers), tramps (those looking for adventure), and bums (drunks or addicts).

The book follows Bertha from age 15 or so until just past her 30th birthday.  But at about age 22 I started to have doubts.  Granted Bertha was a tramp who was interested in people and any and all experiences of life.  But .....her experiences started to seem a tich too comprehensive for plausibility.  Why did she take up working for a pimp in a brothel again?  Really?  Just as she leaves that life, pregnant and afflicted with venereal disease,  her grifter ex-boyfriend dramatically finds her again from death row.  Ah ..okay.  Which made me start thinking: Bertha is literate, well-educated, and articulate.  Why is this book is "as told to"  rather than written by Bertha herself?   Hm....and here's an appendix of statistics about homeless men and women.  New hypothesis: Bertha is a fabrication by a sociologist who chose to illustrate ALL of those statistics in a single woman's life?. 

I have an original 1937 edition of the book, but I thought "what the hell" and googled it anyway.  Thanks to the gods of the internet I did come up with something.  But it was a weirder something than I expected.  Sister of the Road was reprinted in the 2000s with an appendix that explained that it was a fabrication based on the stories of 3 or more hobo women interviewed by Ben Reitman.

It also explained that Ben Reitman was an anarchist, abortionist, birth control activist, and Emma Goldman's lover.  Which of course changed my perceptions of the book all over again. Of course he chose to make Bertha a political activist moving in a network of political activists.  Even if that hadn't been his life, it would have been his propaganda.  But why did he make Bertha so promiscuous and so unconventional?  Originally I'd thought the book was sensationalistic simply to draw in readers. Was he instead trying to advocate for free love by treating Bertha's sexual adventures matter-of-factly?  Why did he write the book in the first place?  He romanticizes Bertha's life and makes her likeable, but she and the others she meets on the road are often far from admirable.  Did he feel it was important to circulate and humanize those statistics ?  I don't see another clear political purpose to the book and I think there must be one.  Finding out the book was fictional raised more questions than it answered.

In the end the best part of reading this Sister of the Road was having my perceptions altered first by Bertha's story, and then by my understanding that Bertha's story was fiction.  Which makes it a very modern book after all, a la "A Million Little Pieces" and "Three Cups of Tea".