Box Car Bertha: the anti-biography

When I came to the note at the end of Box Car Bertha, I couldn’t help but be upset by it. While everything in the book seemed too good to be true, and while I had gone into it knowing that it was a work of fiction, I had still been taken in to an extent by Bertha’s attitude, her acceptance, and her overpowering wanderlust. But as soon as the suspension of disbelief was broken by the afterward, “In this, the fourth time that Boxcar Bertha has been reissued, we feel obliged for the first time to make it plain that this is in fact a work of fiction,” I still felt betrayed. This feeling was only emphasized by the fact that I realized that the work had been presented, in its first three incarnations, as an autobiography, connected to a real person. It is even titled “Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box Car Bertha” and cited “As told to Dr. Ben L. Reitman.” In this sense, the work is completely manipulative and demeaning to the people who were actually struggling through this period.
Bertha manages to relay her story without a moment of whining or complaining or pity-seeking, maintaining a proud front and strong character, but none of this seems so admirable in an imagined character. She looks back at her hobo childhood as a fun adventure, noting that “there weren’t many dolls or toys in my life but plenty of excitement.” She portrays her lack of early schooling as trivial, as she says “I learned my first spelling from the names on the boxcars…I learned numbers by counting the cars on long freights.” She then talks about her mother opening a boarding house, as if it was the simplest thing in the world for a homeless mother of four to pick up and do. In her adult life she attains job after job, never souring on good deeds and working as a woman, helping other women, as a “sister of the road.”
All of the events she takes us through in her life trivialize the plight of the real homeless in the depression, those struggling helpless and desperate. The only indication we have are statistics thrown in, facts that seem shocking to Bertha, like the idea that “Three-fourths of the transients, men and women, started migrating to seek work…four percent only gave desire for adventure as their reasons. Only four percent appeared, also, to be habitual hoboes. A new order, certainly, from that of the old hardboiled sister of the road who chose the road for adventure and freedom in living and loving!” Even these comments about the sad state of things are tempered with the ideas that in some way these people are just not of the same caliber as the fun-loving adventuresome hoboes, and perhaps they could take more of this sort of attitude and be happier. Another such comment comes when Bertha says “certainly our hoboes and our sisters of the road need a place in the sun…why should they not hunt out the most pleasant spot for sojourn if employment is not available?” Again, this seems to me to be saying, ‘well, as long as they’re not working, they may as well be enjoying themselves, so all these migrants should just stop complaining.’ This sort of fictional portrayal is far more damaging than the others we have encountered. Though the others may have been manipulated in other ways, at least the aim was to draw attention to the trouble, whereas this image gives people an out, a way to ease their guilt and turn away by imagining it’s really not so bad after all.