Elija’s Reviews > Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha > Status Update

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.

(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$)