Howells elaborates on the picture of New York city's competing rail-based Systems, and has a street car strike as a central event. Cather depicts midwesterners' excitement upon arriving in New York by train, and shows a woman's freedom to travel alone. Bellamy analyzes the growth of monopolies with railroads as his example and as the source of metaphors. Freeman's rural New England is shown to be still dependent on carriages. Zitkala-Sa tells of a Native American girl's ride between the Yankton Sioux reservation and a boarding school in Indiana. Garland gives a series of pictures of the railroad in western Wisconsin, while Faulkner charts the effects of the railroad and, decades later, the automobile on rural Mississippi. Hurston and Reed tell of railroad construction through the myths of John Henry and Railroad Bill, "the conjure man."
Author: William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Title: A Hazard of New Fortunes
Date: 1890
Systems: Elevated train, horse-drawn street car
Context: 1880s, New York City
The novel gives complex pictures of the complementary and competing Systems in New York City in the 1880s. For example, the main event of the book is a strike against the street-car company which is broken by police and scabs, and by the fact that the elevated trains keep running (Ch. 5: 4). The city is a "turmoil of cars, trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going and coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad tracks overhead," (Ch. 2: 11). This "turmoil," visible down the side streets, ends with a view of "the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final gleams of dancing water" (Ch. 4: 2).
The central characters, the Marches, leave from the Albany Station, Boston, for New York - the trip takes 7 hours and covers 200 miles. The parlor-like station has mahogany rocking chairs, cozy walls, although the fireplaces are not used. The dining car is later attached to the train. Basil March comments on the passing scene, noting that it's impossible to keep the visual middle ground in view while watching the foreground next to the train and the rushing background (Ch. 1: 6). Later an older widow goes to Florida by a "Pullman vestibulated train," the "usual conveyance." (Ch. 2: 1). We are later reminded that having Pullmans doesn't let us pretend that there aren't first-class cars (Ch. 3: 9).
In New York, the Marches recall Broadway of five, ten, and twenty years ago, "a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic" now replaced by horse cars with grinding wheels and harsh bells. Now it's safe to cross the street by Grace Church because police direct traffic; the "processional, barbaric gayety of the place is now gone" (Ch. 1: 8). The modern omnibus allows passengers to travel on the roof, an exciting difference from what is possible in Boston (Ch. 4: 2). As a minor comment, one of the characters has his coupé (taxi) move to asphalt-covered Madison Avenue because it's impossible to talk when they are riding over cobble stones.
The "L" is described in considerable detail, starting in Ch. 1: 8, where Basil proposes to take the train to the end of the line, into the country side, for relaxation after a hard day of apartment hunting. A long paragraph gives the Marches' view of New Yorkers' lives from the second and third floor level of the train - it is a theatre, a drama. Looking down the track gives a long view of the city lights. The waiting night trains evoke "What forces, what fates, slept in these bulks" (Ch. 1: 10). Basil and Isabel March agree that "the flame-shot" of the approaching train is "the most beautiful thing in New York" (Ch. 2: 9). Later in the book, the view from the "L" gives an odd but interesting glimpse at the city's ornamental architecture, e.g., the Corinthian front of an old theatre (Ch. 2: 11).
Another long passage describes Basil's preference for the East Side to the West Side "L." The East Side draws from the city's many "nationalities, conditions, and characters." Howells, through Basil, comments on the immigrants' escape from Europe, their national customs, their facial characteristics, and thinks about "the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth" (Ch. 2: 11). When Isabel and Basil do ride to the end of the West Side line, they see "the city pushing its way by regular advances into the country," thus defining the social and psychological limits of urbanization by the reaches of its fixed-rail transportation system (Ch. 4:3).
The new Systems contribute importantly to the country's economy. Metaphorically, Basil's boss describes great wealth as "dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double track, from this office to the moon" (Ch. 3: 2). Back home in the Dryfooses' Indiana, the legislature is wasting public money by selling a local canal to the railroad, thereby killing "that fine old State work" (Ch 3: 8). As noted, the central dramatic events in the novel surround the strike by street car workers, events based on Howells' reaction to the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago (Ch. 5: 2-5). Basil argues for a public interest in ending the strike, separate from the rights of the "roads" and the workers. The strike leads to silence "where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs had been" but the noise of the "L" would drown out that of the surface cars anyhow (Ch. 5: 3). The novel's capitalist, Dryfoos, "heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange" (Ch. 5: 4), but even March has some trouble finding the strike's activities, so it is generally far from most peoples' daily lives. When the strike does show up on stage, it is almost accidental - rioters try to stop a street car but the driver lashes the horses to escape: a cop and the conductor lead the way through the mob (Ch. 5: 5).
Howells' 1909 retrospective "Preface" notes (poetically) that "mildly tinkling horsecars" are now replaced by "clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city's haste."
Edition used: New York: Bantam Classic, 1960.
Critical comment: Amy Kaplan, "'The Knowledge of the Line': Realism and the City in Howells' A Hazard of New Fortunes," PMLA 101 (1986): 72-3, 77.
Author: Willa Cather (1876-1947)
Title: My Mortal Enemy
Date: 1926 Written: 1925
Systems: Train, carriage, cab
Context: 1880 in New York city and 20 years later in San Francisco
The eloping of Myra and Oswald Henshawe had become a romantic legend in the small midwestern town where the narrator lived. They left by sleigh and the 2 AM express to Chicago in the face of her father's threat to give her inheritance to the Church (Ch. 1: 2). The fifteen-year-old narrator, Nellie Birdseye, visits them once in New York when they are fairly rich and then a decade later, by chance, when they are poor and she is a beginning teacher.
The New York trip involves being met by Myra at the Jersey City station, walking to the ferry which goes to the 23rd Street Station, then riding the crosstown car to the Henshawes' hotel. During the visit Nellie and Myra ride home from Central Park in a hansom, and Myra expresses what Nellie calls "insane ambition.… here Mrs. Myra was wishing for a carriage - with stables and a house and servants, and all that went with a carriage!" (Ch. 1: 5). On the Pullman ride back west Nellie (and her aunt) are joined by Myra, who had left her husband and was going as far as Pittsburgh on the same train (Ch. 1: 6). Part of Myra's mystique is her freedom to travel independently.
In San Francisco, the Henshawes are reunited, but in financially reduced circumstances and Myra has become quite ill. On an April afternoon Nellie hires "a low carriage with a kindly Negro driver" for a drive along the shore. Nellie and "this nice darky man" help her get out, cover her in a blanket, so she can spend a pleasant hour looking at the sea with a few steamers below (Ch. 2: 2). After her illness worsens and she is given the Last Rites, she manages to signal the cab, which drove her to the same site, where she gets out and sends the cab away. "She must have died peacefully and painlessly. There was every reason to believe she had lived to see the dawn" (Ch. 2: 6).
Oswald has various jobs during the novel. At the start he has "a position" in the New York offices of an Eastern railroad; he and his wife may have traveled from Chicago to Parthia, Ill. on different trains (Ch. 1: 1). The railroad had gone into receivership and Oswald was let go after a brief time - this causes their financial problems, so he works for the city's "traction company" (Ch. 2: 2). At the end, he is going to work for an Alaskan steamship company (Ch. 2: 7).
Edition used: New York: Vintage, 1954.
Author: Edward Bellamy (1850-1898)
Title: Looking Backward: 2000-1887
Date: 1887
Systems: Coach
Context: 1887 and a mythical East coast in the year 2000
This utopian novel puts a fantasy about the future next to a critique of Bellamy's own world. The basic idea is that state (federal) ownership of "mills, machinery, railroads, farms, mines, and capital in general" (Ch. 6) will overcome the bad effects of growing monopolies in the late nineteenth century. Dr. Leete, the main spokesman for the new (2000 AD) age, uses the "history" of railroads as his example; they "had gone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail in the land" (Ch. 5). Partly because the dream/time-machine format restricts the future traveler to interior locales, the most detailed and rather fascinating technological advance in the late twentieth century is a nifty hi-fi system.
The first chapter has a detailed analogy between the sorry economy and "a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow.… the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents." The seats inside, for the movers and shakers, are insecure, so people keep falling out of them and others take their place. This system breeds very little compassion for the people on top and a lot of competition among those inside.
Edition used: New York: Regent Press, 1887.
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930)
Title: "On the Walpole Road" In A Humble Romance
Date: 1884
Systems: Carriage
Context: Contemporary, New England
The first part of the story tells of two women who drive on a New England country road. They start from Walpole, "a lively little rural emporium of trade; thither the villagers from the small country hamlets thereabouts went to make the bulk of their modest purchases. One summer afternoon two women were driving slowly along a road therefrom, in a dusty old-fashioned chaise, whose bottom was heaped up with brown-paper parcels." The couple has to attend both to the road conditions and the character of the horse, "a heavy, hard-worked farm animal" who isn't afraid of lightning. "This road was not much traveled, and grass was growing between the wheel-ruts; but the soil flew up like smoke from the horse's hoofs and the wheels." A thunderstorm comes up, and the horse's reluctance to move faster than his easy pace reminds Mis' Green of a funeral she attended twenty years ago. For our purposes, the relevant details concern a similar carriage ride in the middle of a thunderstorm in an effort to get to her aunt's funeral service on time. During the storm Green and her companion, Israel, get under the shay top, pull the blanket up, but still get dripping wet. These details emphasize the stability of this part of New England.
Edition used: Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, eds. American Women Regionalists: 1850-1910. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
Author: Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin) (1876-1938)
Title: The School Days of an Indian Girl
Date: 1900
Systems: Train
Context: 1884, South Dakota and Indiana
At the age of eight, Zitkala-Sa is sent by train from her home on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota to a Quaker school in Indiana. The first chapter describes the expectations and fears of the eight young people on the "iron horse." The "staring palefaces disturbed and troubled us"; women notice the absent mothers, men rivet their "glassy blue eyes" on them, and little kids point at their moccasins. Zitkala-Sa is "breathless" at seeing the telegraph pole, "which strode by at short paces. Very near my mother's dwelling, along the edge of a road thickly bordered with wild sunflowers, some poles like these had been planted by white men…. Now I sat watching for each pole that glided by to be the last one." This unhappy ride is compared with buckboard rides back in Yankton during the summer. "Seizing the reins and bracing my feet against the dashboard, I wheeled around in an instant. The pony was ever ready to try his speed.… There was nothing moving within that great circular horizon of the Dakota prairies save the tall grasses, over which the wind blew and rolled off in long, shadowy waves. Within this vast wigwam of blue and green I rode reckless and insignificant. It satisfied my small consciousness to see the white foam fly from the pony's mouth" (Ch. 6).
Edition used: Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, eds. American Women Regionalists: 1850-1910. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
Author: Hamlin Garland (1860-1940)
Title: Main-Travelled Roads
Date: 1930 Written: 1888-1930
Systems: Carriage, railroad
Context: Chiefly 1880s, western Wisconsin
The preface: "The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it.… Mainly it is long and wearyful, and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of people, but the poor and the weary predominate."
The stories represent two, parallel transportation Systems - horse-drawn and trains. Wagons change from being used on occasion to being part of scheduled work. The trains are for special trips, starting with demobilization after the Civil War through a series of disappointing train rides home to a town in the midst of a long slide toward depression.
"The Return of a Private" (set in 1865 or 1866) tells of a group of Civil War veterans returning to La Crosse from New Orleans in the caboose of a freight. "The station was deserted, chill, and dark, as they came into it at exactly a quarter to two in the morning. Lit by the oil lamps that flared a dull red light over the dingy benches, the waiting room was not an inviting place." The shell-shocked Smith "was attended to tenderly by the other men, who spread their blankets on the bench for him, and, by robbing themselves, made quite a comfortable bed, though the narrowness of the bench made his sleeping precarious." This group of veterans has missed the first wave who had been greeted at the stations with "banks of gayly dressed ladies waving handkerchiefs and shouting 'Bravo!'" He now begins and resumes "his daily running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellowmen."
"The Creamery Man" tells of the time when the tin-peddlers' red wagons had gone out west, and were replaced by the battered, muddy wagon of Claude Williams, the creamery man. His courtship of Lucinda and later of Nina features "his newly painted buggy flashing in the sun, and the extra dozen ivory rings he had purchased for his harnesses clashing together, [as] he drove up the road as a man of leisure and a resolved lover." The story points out a shift to scheduled, daily use of horse-drawn commercial vehicles.
Uncle Ethan Ripley in the story bearing his name "had a theory that a man's character could be told by the way he sat in a wagon seat. 'A mean man sets right plumb in the middle o' the seat, as much as to say, "Walk, gol darn yeh, who cares!" But a man that sets in the corner o' the seat, much as to say, "Jump in - cheaper t' ride 'n to walk," you can jest tie to.'"
"A Branch Road" (1891) focuses on an accident involving a "top-buggy, in which to take his sweetheart to the neighboring town" for the county fair. Even though the demand for such buggies at the livery stable is high, Will can borrow his brother's rig which he washes and dusts with care. On the way to his date, the right fore-wheel falls off, and the two-hour delay to get a replacement part, the axle-burr, means that he misses his date and decides to leave town to avoid the shame and an explanation. Seven years later in 1887, Will returns to Rock River and finds Agnes has married, but quite unhappily. He tries to lure her away with the promise of a standing offer to be a conductor on the Santa Fe Railroad, or a trip to Europe, to "sit with me on the deck of the steamer." She accepts and with her daughter, "the world lay before them."
"Up the Coulé: A Story of Wisconsin" (1891) begins with the "fine ride" from Milwaukee to the Mississippi in the reclining chair (living-room comfort) as the summer fields and La Crosse valley pass by the train. Howard, the main character, returning to his childhood home, gets off at the "grimy little station" with its "boiling hot splintery planks." The few idlers at the station are compared to people "standing before the Brooklyn Bridge." In the town, "The one main street ended at the hillside at his left, and stretched away to the north, between two rows of usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty"; the street is unpaved. His uncle, who happens to be in town, offers him a lift in his covered buggy whose top is lowered, as he goes to visit his mother and brother after being away for ten years. As part of his settling in for the visit a neighbor brings his trunk up from the freight station. He is accepted by his mother and, by the end of the story, reconciled with his brother. The elegant, modern train ride is the path back to his youth and to a collapsing rural society - where the four to one ratio of young women to young men highlights the lack of opportunity.
The same theme is articulated in "God's Ravens," a later story. Garland describes the escape from Chicago, "the great grimy terrible city…. With clanging bell the train moved away piercing the ragged gray formless mob of houses and streets (through which railways always run in a city)." The couple reaches the Wisconsin prairie within an hour, but the small town is getting old, "Here they sit while sidewalks rot and teams mire in the streets."
After 23 years of marriage, Mrs. Ripley, age 60, takes the train to New York, since she never had a day alone. The round trip ticket is $55, but she must ride in an old-fashioned car, not a sleeper "where there ain't no half-dressed men runnin' around." On the way to the station, "There is no ride quite so desolate and uncomfortable as a ride in a lumber-wagon on a cold day in autumn, when the ground is frozen, and the wind is strong and raw with threatening snow. The wagon-wheels grind along in the snow, the cold gets under the seat at the calves of one's legs, and the ceaseless bumping of the bottom of the box on the feet is almost intolerable." To Mr. Ripley's relief, his wife returns to pick up the chores he had let lapse ("Mrs. Ripley's Trip" [1888 in Harpers, 1891]). The train ride out of town (§ 3) and then the return from New York (§ 6) frames the story of Jim Sanford's adventure as a bank investor who gets into carelessness or embezzlement in "A 'Good Fellow's' Wife."
"Among the Corn-Rows" (1891) begins with an account of "railroad schemes," which control the prairies. Rob is to go east from the Dakota prairie to Wisconsin on the night train to find a wife. The 11:00 PM rendezvous, with Rob standing by his team, is successful, and he and Julia Peterson leave amid the sounds of the "dull tread of swift horses" and "the rising of a silent train of dust" - another couple getting away from the countryside.
Edition used: New York: Harper & Bros., 1956.
Author: William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Title: Go Down, Moses
Dates: 1940, 1941, 1942
Systems: Wagon, train, automobile
Context: 1880s and 1940, Mississippi and Memphis
Faulkner uses the rituals and realities of hunting to dramatize the impact of the automobile on the rural South. Further, he extends the early hunts into a timeless, mythical past through the figure of Sam Fathers, a Native American.
The central story is "The Bear," set in the 1878 and years following with young Ike McCaslin as its central character learning the rituals of tracking deer and, the ultimate, a particular bear, Old Ben, with "the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape." Each year Ike watches the procession of wagons with the gear, dogs, and ordinary hunters, and the ex-generals and ex-majors on horseback leaving Jefferson for the wilderness: "no fixed path the wagons followed but a channel non-existent ten yards ahead of it and ceasing to exist ten yards after it had passed" (§ 1). The bear's path "rushed through rather than across the tangle of trunks and branches as a locomotive would" (§ 2). The train image portends the next phase of the hunt where it is broken up by side trips to Memphis. Now they are at the "log-line," the border of the logging operations which will destroy the wilderness, and they ride a warm caboose on the logging train. Old Ben becomes just a legend, like the boxer Sullivan and, later, Dempsey. They go to Memphis with its "high buildings and the hard pavements, the fine carriages and the horse cars." Now they are on schedules, missing the 1:00 and getting the 3:00 - and they take in the zoo where the bears eat ice cream and lady fingers (§3).
Major de Spain has sold the hunting camp to the loggers, and the logs look like miles of stacked rails. Faulkner sets up a personified train: "the little locomotive shrieked and began to move; a rapid churning of exhaust, a lethargic deliberate clashing of slack couplings traveling backward along the train, the exhaust changing to the deep slow clapping bites of power as the caboose too began to move." This train, "dragging its length of train behind it … resembled a small dingy harmless snake vanishing into weeds," a Satan in what's left of Eden. The hunters shoot deer from the moving caboose; the whistle chases the bear up small trees. Previously the train had been "harmless," just a sound in the distance, but "it was different now," the wilderness is "doomed" by the train. Old Ben's foot is kept in an axle-grease tin, and the final scene is of Boon, one of the old hunters, hammering the barrel of his broken rifle against a railroad iron to drive away a swarm of squirrels (§5).
"Delta Autumn," set in 1940, captures the next stage of change, the automobile. "Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther and farther to drive, the territory in which the game still existed drawing yearly inward. The sons and grandsons of men who rode 24 hours "behind the steaming mules" take Ike, nearly eighty years old, 200 miles for what's left. Ike "would look ahead past the jerking arc of the windshield wiper and see the land flatten suddenly and swoop, dissolving away beneath the rain as the sea itself would dissolve." The brake brings the car "to a skidding halt on the greasy pavement without warning," and tosses two passengers forward against the dash.
Faulkner carries the issue back to the prehistoric past: "The paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them and along the rivers…" This new land is one "in which neon flashed past them from the little countless towns and countless shining this-year's automobiles sped past them on the broad plumb-ruled highways, yet in which the only permanent mark of man's occupation seemed to be the tremendous [cotton] gins…." Further, "the land across which there came no scream of panther but instead the long hooting of locomotives: trains of incredible length and drawn by a single engine, since there was no gradient anywhere and no elevation save those raised by forgotten aboriginal hands." And the automobile takes them to "the last little Indian-named town at the end of pavement they waited until the other car and the two trucks" carrying the hunting gear. They leave the gravel road and then grind on "with skid-chains on the wheels now, lurching and splashing and sliding among the ruts, until presently it seemed to him that the retrograde of his remembering had gained an inverse velocity from their own slow progress, that the land had retreated not in minutes from the last spread of gravel but in years, decades, back toward what it had been when he first knew it." Clearly, Faulkner turns motor vehicles into symbols of psychological, ecological, and cultural change over the centuries. "This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires' mansions on Lakeshore Drive…"
But, in the final story, "Go Down, Moses," it is a black man, executed for shooting a policeman in the back, whose body is brought home to Jefferson at his mother's request and with the white lawyer's funds and efforts. The casket is transferred from the train to a hearse with an audience of half a hundred Negroes, and we hear it go up the hill from the station, "going fast in a whining lower gear until it reached the crest, going pretty fast still but with an unctuous, an almost bishoplike purr until it slowed into the square." It reaches the city limit, "and the pavement vanished, slanting away into another long hill, becoming gravel." The parallels with the hunt and the symbolic retreat backward into the past bring the novel to a symmetrical close.
Somewhat incidentally, Carothers McCaslin farmed in the old style, "refusing to let a tractor so much as cross the land which his McCaslin forbears had given him without recourse for life, refusing even to allow the pilot who dusted the rest of the cotton with weevil poison, even fly his laden aeroplane through the air above it" ("The Fire and the Hearth").
Edition used: New York: Modern Library, 1942.
Author: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Title: Mules and Men
Date: 1935
Systems: Railroad construction, train
Context: 1920s, rural Florida, African-American perspective
Hurston's collection of folklore includes words and music to "John Henry," an old railroad ballad, and her glossary contains a description of the John Henry legend. Hurston tells us the song is "suited to the spiking rhythm, though it is, like all the other work songs, sung in the jooks and other social places." The ballad celebrates the strength and bravery of John Henry, a renowned steel-driver who pits his ability with a nine-pound hammer against the company's new steam drill. John Henry beats the drill at driving spikes for "nearly an hour, then his heart fails him and he drops dead from exhaustion."
While the legend captures the contest between man and machine, the song lyrics suggest that John Henry's struggle is broadly representative of African American survival under white dominance: "[John Henry] Says, 'fore I'll let your steam drill beat me down / I'll hammer my fool self to death," Other lines - "Man ain't nothing but a man ... I'll die with this hammer in my hand" - suggest the will to die fighting in the face of impossible odds. John Henry's perseverance is larger than life and for that reason constitutes an inspirational moral victory.
"The Goat that Flagged a Train," is of interest for the common knowledge it assumes. As the story goes, a goat spies his owner's best red silk shirt drying on the laundry line and, of course, eats it. The furious owner ties the goat to the railroad track, but the train-wise goat - when he sees the engine bearing down on him - coughs up the red shirt and waves the train down. The humor derives from two clichéd images about railroads that have achieved broad circulation: one - the use of a red flag to signal a train to halt; two - the betrayed young hero/heroine tied fast to the rails and only narrowly escaping death beneath the oncoming train. Here the goat proves himself "a smart varmint" by being villain, victim and his own rescuer.
Edition used: Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1978.
Author: Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
Title: "Railroad Bill, The Conjure Man" In Chattanooga
Date: 1972
Systems: Railroad
Context: Southern
Railroad Bill, the conjure man, is what a good academic multiculturalist would call "the trickster figure." The poem, subtitled "A HooDoo Suite," has little to say about railroads per se. But it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Railroad Bill is so-named to evoke the railroad man's knack for getaway - that is, his legendary will to escape.
Railroad Bill can conjure himself into any shape - animal, vegetable or mineral - tree, film star, deceptive slave. Bill embodies a spirit of self-definition: "Let me be whatever I please." The poem shows that determined self-definition is the equivalent of anti-authoritarianism. He kills a policeman who attempts to disarm him. As a consequence, Bill takes various shapes in order "to outwit the chase and throw / Off the scent he didn't care what / They sent." The ending lines: "Railroad Bill was a conjure man ... Railroad Bill was free," underscore this poem's debt to the blues tradition in which the railroad and railroad men were the very spirit of resistance, transformation, freedom.
Edition used: New York: Random House, 1973.
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