At the height of the Depression, Jim Hoffman, a teenager in an Appalachian town, has a fateful meeting with Jacks, a wealthy dropout from the nearby boarding school who has suffered a family tragedy. The two decide to join forces and see America by boxcar. They join the legion of men who are traveling America during the 1930’s.
PASSAGE ON A BRIDGE reminds readers that history is comprised of the stories of people–stories of those who are confronted with difficult circumstances and hardships which they must deal with or crumble under. Jim Hoffman, a teenager in an Appalachian town and Jacks, a wealthy dropout from the nearby boarding school who has suffered a family tragedy, come from very different backgrounds, and Jim sees this opportunity as a last chance: “In those days I seemed to be watching a fork in the road always moving away.” Early on they join up with Murph, an Irish-American, who educates them in boxcar travel and socialist politics. The three men witness street brawls, riots, and worse. Along the way, the many people they encounter influence their odyssey. They learn that ‘riding the rails’ is a singular culture all its own, with a vocabulary and a rhythm and rules, the knowledge of which saves their lives many times. “I still wonder sometimes how I could have sat there on the floor of a boxcar awaiting my fate. Sometimes my dreams say I was on the edge of faltering when the voice of Booker Jones comes through the darkness: ‘Riding the blinds is between the cars. Best stay outta there. Jus common sense, if a thing look dangerous, it mostly is.’”
William Cheevers’ writing has a deceptive simplicity. At times, however, there is too much incidental detail or an overload of ruminating. But each vignette leads naturally to the next and characters are woven from all walks of life and ethnicities. Jim is mixed race white and Susquehanna. Their temporary companions and employers are from many backgrounds: Cajuns, Indigenous peoples, Euro-Americans, Mexican Americans, Black Americans. Trains rush through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and all points west. The author makes readers feel the grittiness, smell the smoke, hear the rumble – we’re there with these men in the box cars drinking water from mason jars and talking about families and God and Hitler and women and what knives are best for harvesting fields of broccoli. And these conversations are weighted with meaning because their lives are tenuous in this world. In many ways, PASSAGE ON A BRIDGE is an existential journey through one man’s experiences during a time of crisis in our nation.
PASSAGE ON A BRIDGE is a fictionalized memoir of the Depression years, a history of the men who traveled America by freight train, and a story that shines as an authentic telling of what that desperate journey was like for so many.
~Kathleen Kenney Peterson for IndieReader