Status Updates From Sister of the Road: The Aut...

reading before I watch Scorsese movie of the same title

As well as encouraging him to live for the moment, his experiences allowed him to flatten his ego. He was a man who was acutely aware of his weakness but he showed no desire to mimic the respectable society that disdained people among whom he chose to live his life. He met those people as equals personally and professionally. Their failings he recognised in himself. He recognised their strengths also.

Your money won’t do them any good but it will be a good example.[..]when a man leaves money to the church it proves that Christianity was more important to him. And if u leave money to radical movement it will prove that the radical movement was important to at least one man with money.
(Story ends. The pllotwist of it being a written story)

in spite of your agnostic parents, u inherited a deep religious nature. You’re a religious mystic, a Christian anarchist riding in a boxcar to find God.

The more I learn about unemployment, the more unemployed. The more I contribute to anti war causes, the more wars. The collage graduates and professors, the more uncertainty. The more we know abt the inconsistencies and injustices of capitalism, the more powerful it becomes.[..]

(She goes into travel again but also for research, meets State Street Blondie)
Survey society has a right to defend itself. Society has the right to send me to jail if they get the goods on me. But I’ve got to eat n sleep n my child has to have his board money. I don’t justify myself. I know I’m wrong.

To hell with such a society (Mr Nelson) we must somehow destroy it if we have to be thieves crooks weaklings and slaves just to exist! Who can remain quiet and peace loving and be content to just vote. Even now in these deadly days of depression all we have out of the chaos is the rich growing richer and more powerful and more arrogant and the bulk of the poor growing more submissive and adapting themselves by force

(Jordan dies. Awful. Such a way of describing deaths that freezes one’s blood. 12months to recover, Chicago hunger march)
With hundreds of others I found myself walking along parallel to them on the sidewalk, falling into their rhythm, unconsciously adding my burden to theirs.

(Goes home to her mother with Baby Dear. Stays home for some time, Leon, wanderlust takes over again. Goes with Jordan and 1st serious thoughts abt women hobo collage. Joins mercy shelter
“I’m so very happy,”I told Jordan one night.
“Look out,”he warned me. “God takes care that the trees don’t grow into the sky.”

(Quits hustling, gets medical attention, discovers that she will have a baby. Big Otto writes, he will be hanged)
Bite me. Hurt me. Make me feel you after you’re gone.
(Big ottos hanging left a hollow in my heart and bones. Had to put down the book. It was actually terrifying with the clarity and honesty Bertha usually writes.)
(Bertha goes to her mother. Some time later works in a polyclinic. Baby is born.)

(Bertha starts work as sex worker.)
I let him rest a few minutes in my arms when he was through, and when he went out he gave a look like you’ve seen on a face of a hungry dog after you’ve fed it.
I didn’t feel that anything had changed in me bc I had become a prostitute. I just felt completely worn out, as though I’d finished an unusually hard days work.
(40 men in 1 day and at the end she only had 2$)

(Gets blackout drunk and robbed by the beggars. A man leads her to a safe anarchist place, Ediths)
They all left Edith’s flat believing in themselves.
-Boxie meets her sister, Jordan and Manittelli again. Goes to Chuckago. Stays at a hotel where sex workers work. Gets intrigued by Bill, their pimp. All the girls believe that they’re the ones for Bill. Interesting analysis on infatuation and women masochism)

Boxie leaves her father and meets with real drunk beggars, New York
I heard no dramatic, tragic stories. They accepted without resentment the fact that they were product of “the system”, a society that hires and fires, of a society in which landlords must have their rent.
“[..]the more I earn the more I drink.”
I had gone a bit too far this time trying to learn abt different types of people!

This last war and the statistics from the criminal, insane, and charity organisations demonstrate that no one should be very proud of what any of us have accomplished.
In the past I had joy in struggling and agitating and going to jail. Now I can get more out of life living simply with my friends
Overall 2 pages (92-93p) are interesting, her father’s monologue.

The real professional crook doesn’t even know who’s mayor and cares less. [..] and he knows, too, that bankrolls operate as well with Republicans as they do with the Democrats, and that they have done even some good in Socialist Milwaukee and in Farmer-Labourite Minneapolis.
Boxie leaves the crooks. Goes to New York and meets her father

Boxie gets in prison and meets Lucille, after getting out starts travelling with crooks. Otto.
They prided themselves on their nerve and on their hardness. They were afraid to speak of things that were close to them for fear they would go soft.

“I never take gas from anybody unless his car costs over two thousand,” he told us. “These folks with Fords and Chevies are as poor as I am.” (Don, stealing gas”
I knew that I loved him and I felt I was his so strongly that he must be mine. It was one of the commonest errors human beings make. (Abt Milletti. Millettid answer on p64 was interesting)

He had made the unemployed conscious of their need for knowledge. He had made them realise that the only power for liberation lay in being informed. (Dr How)
It was not in her to be artificial or conventional. (Lizzie Davis)

if I am to tell an honest story of my life and the influences that moulded it, I must begin it, as I have, by telling abt my mother.
We were taught also in the colony the dignity of labour [..]
All war is stupid. It is crude and expensive and outrageous. That which we gain by violence, somebody with more violence will take away from us.

(Abt her mom)And many people, including the police, said she was a bad woman. But she never agreed with them, and she had a way of lifting up her head when she talked back to them that made me know she was right.
The rich can become globe-trotters, but those who have no money become hoboes.