Bread of Life

by M. D. Roblyer

Driven by the dearth of jobs and failing businesses in the early 1930’s, the increasing ranks of homeless men and women became an army of the desolate, traveling from place to place in search of jobs. My father left our home in Cresaptown, Maryland, and joined them when he had just turned 20 years old.

Dad’s stories that my brother Bud relayed to me of those fearful days and nights seemed like dark fairy tales from a foreign land, but it was our country between 1929 and 1939 during the Great Depression. Men, women, and children left places they had lived all their lives and went on the road, looking for either handouts or work.

To move from town to town, many hobos, as they were called, adopted a dangerous, sometimes fatal mode of transportation. Dad would later describe to Bud his days of “riding the rails,” or jumping into boxcars as they rumbled slowly through towns or stopped to load and unload freight.

Railways hired guards called “bulls” to use whatever means they saw fit to dissuade hobos from boxcar-hopping and, when hobos did manage to reach a new town, local police often employed their own measures to keep them from staying long. Towns already had their own ranks of homeless, jobless families, many of whom had built make-shift encampments dubbed Hoovervilles after the President they blamed for the Depression. These slums sprang up around the country. Transient hobos represented a further drain on an already-failed local economy.

Dad hopped one of the Western Maryland cars that stopped in Cumberland and joined other lines headed south. Dad’s voice was clear in my head as Bud continued his story:

A couple dozen of us were traveling in one boxcar, including a few kids traveling alone and one guy with his wife and three kids. When we reached a Florida town one night and opened the car door, we found ourselves looking down the barrels of a dozen rifles as the local sheriff and his deputies and bulls surrounded us. Some of the kids started crying; I hadn’t heard them cry before that.

‘Y’all have just one chance to go back where you come from,’ he barked, waggin’ his rifle at us, ‘or I’ll set the dogs on you. If you live through that, I vow I’ll throw you into my jail, and God help you then.’

“Bud, I don’t think you could understand how that made me feel. I wanted to help those kids, those women, but I couldn’t even help myself.”

I was stunned by what Bud told me. My mind quickly went to what I would expect any Bible-toting Southerner knew about the last judgment. “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was hungry, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in” (Matthew 25: 41-43, NKJV). That sheriff must have known those words, but I guess he couldn’t see how they applied to any of those people. Maybe he just didn’t care.

Bud continued Dad’s story: “They made us walk way out to the edge of town and turned us loose. Another young feller and I decided to take the sheriff’s advice and head back North. By that time, I’d been traveling over a year and never found one job. Ever’place was just as hard up as Cumberland, and the folks were all just as broke as I was. Whatever food we managed to get was from families that grew their own, and even they were near as bad off as us. I was also sick, so I was getting’ pretty weak.”

Sick, heartsick, and hungry, my father must have been as low as he had ever been. He never said how long they were walking, probably weeks or months. He must have known the despair in the cry of the old Negro spiritual: Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.

Dad’s story continued:

The other feller and I hitched rides whenever we could but, mostly, we walked. I can’t blame folks for not picking us up. We must have looked pretty rough by then after sleeping in woods along the way and no place to clean up. One morning we woke up under a tree. Frost was everywhere; we knew winter was comin’. Cold, hungry, and bug-bitten and nothin’ to eat for days, we were so weak I said to the other feller, ‘If we don’t find something to eat today, we’re gonna die tonight.’

We saw a path to a river and mostly slid down it, hopin’ to find somebody who would give us a fish or a piece of bread. We saw an old black man fishin’ by the stream. The man turned around, looked us over, and said, ‘Y’all are ’bout the hongriest boys I ever done seen.’ He didn’t have any food for us, and fish weren’t bitin’, but we talked a while ’bout how bad things were for the country and how hard it was on poor folks. I told him I was from a village called Cresaptown near Cumberland in western Maryland, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see home again.

After we talked with this man and had a drink of water from the river, we felt a bit rested, so I said goodbye and shook his hand, and when I drew it back, the man had left a dime in my palm. He said it was a gift, and we should buy a loaf of bread. That would fill us up. We were okay after that. The other feller went his own way soon after we shared the bread, and I continued up towards Maryland.”

I never heard my father speak of spirituality or any such abstractions. However, he was a lifelong member of the Cresaptown Methodist Church, so he must have heard what Jesus told his disciples by the sea: I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst (John 6:35, NKJV). Dad never claimed that this old black fisherman was an angel of God. Instead, he told his son Bud how the gift of a dime was all that stood between him and starvation, and how a stranger gave two hobos the bread of life and the strength and will to go on.