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Book Review: Beggars of Life
Sep. 24th, 2020 08:03 amJim Tully’s Beggars of Life: A Hobo Autobiography details Tully’s years as a “road-kid” during the early twentieth century: a teenage drifter, riding the rails across the United States, falling in with traveling companions and drifting away from them just as easily, gazing on glorious sunsets and stealing books from libraries (Tully was an indefatigable reader) and avoiding the railroad bulls (also called dicks) who patrolled the railway yards to throw tramps off of trains.
There’s a powerful nostalgic element to this book: Tully is writing about his youth, after all. But his nostalgic is unsentimental: although he remembers this time in his life fondly, he knows very well it was a rough world that he moved in, with danger not only from the law but from the other tramps, as well, many of whom were accomplished brawlers and habitual criminals (or “yeggs,” as Tully calls them: a yegg is “a robber, a blower of safes, the aristocrat of the road, and the most dangerous man who travels it”).
But it’s neither the police nor the other tramps who kill the most men, but the railroad itself. One man misses his jump on the train and gets dragged alongside and bumped to death; another falls asleep while riding on the railroad coupling and falls to his death. A third is riding on the train top - right up until the train reaches a low tunnel… Tully even hears a tale of a fellow who got struck with lightning while walking along the railway track. The trains are both freedom and death.
This is a much rougher view of the early twentieth century than you’re likely to get from, say, the writing of L. M. Montgomery - this is perhaps a particularly apt comparison, because Tully really was an orphan boy taken in by a farmer who wanted help with the farm work. He was so brutally overworked that he took to the road. (Anne was a lucky lass!)
But there are certain commonalities too, particularly in Tully’s love of the natural world: like Montgomery, he is liable to pause for a paragraph or two to admire a beautiful sunset, or a fleet of fireflies lighting up the hayloft where he sleeps one night. It adds light to heighten the shadows of his story, and it all adds up to a beguiling glimpse of a very different world.
There’s a powerful nostalgic element to this book: Tully is writing about his youth, after all. But his nostalgic is unsentimental: although he remembers this time in his life fondly, he knows very well it was a rough world that he moved in, with danger not only from the law but from the other tramps, as well, many of whom were accomplished brawlers and habitual criminals (or “yeggs,” as Tully calls them: a yegg is “a robber, a blower of safes, the aristocrat of the road, and the most dangerous man who travels it”).
But it’s neither the police nor the other tramps who kill the most men, but the railroad itself. One man misses his jump on the train and gets dragged alongside and bumped to death; another falls asleep while riding on the railroad coupling and falls to his death. A third is riding on the train top - right up until the train reaches a low tunnel… Tully even hears a tale of a fellow who got struck with lightning while walking along the railway track. The trains are both freedom and death.
This is a much rougher view of the early twentieth century than you’re likely to get from, say, the writing of L. M. Montgomery - this is perhaps a particularly apt comparison, because Tully really was an orphan boy taken in by a farmer who wanted help with the farm work. He was so brutally overworked that he took to the road. (Anne was a lucky lass!)
But there are certain commonalities too, particularly in Tully’s love of the natural world: like Montgomery, he is liable to pause for a paragraph or two to admire a beautiful sunset, or a fleet of fireflies lighting up the hayloft where he sleeps one night. It adds light to heighten the shadows of his story, and it all adds up to a beguiling glimpse of a very different world.
