I totally forgot about the whole emotion tugging aspects of the movie… I just remember the girl and her adventure

Not really, but my reading wasn’t exactly, er, comprehensive. In Joan Crouse’s book she recommends Nan Cinnater’s book Women Hoboes of the Great Depressionwhich apparently includes “some of the only material available on black women transients” but I couldn’t find a copy online.

I just had a quick google and this book this book looks pretty interesting and the comment in this article is quite telling I think: “While tales of friendships among hobos that transcended race abound, many African American hobos recounted being made to feel like outcasts among outcasts.”

But no, I think The Hobo as he exists in Americana is generally white. Like women I suspect the stories of black homeless travellers have not been admitted to the folklore because their experiences undermined the romanticized ideals of the wandering lifestyle.

Given segregation and oppressive poverty, and the issue of what “freedom to wander” would be afforded a person of colour, I think it is also difficult to romanticise wanderers of colour without hitting some very problematic issues. Then there’s the predominantly white “okies and arkies” dustbowl imagery evoked by (say) The Grapes of Wrath etc (which contains almost no POC if memory serves, unlike Of Mice and Men or Steinbeck’s urban writing, and which contains a line delivered by Ma Joad where she talks of the family as descended from the pioneers of the Revolution). Steinbeck isn’t hobo literature per se, but I thought of Grapes somehow.

… I’m rambling.

Anyway, here is a woman of colour we wrote about last year who did do quite a lot of wandering: Stagecoach Mary Fields.