Chapter Seven focuses on African-American representations of transiency. Black transients suffered from the same problems of poverty and hunger as whites but they had to contend with the added problems of racial discrimination and state-sanctioned violence. They were also, to varying degrees, barred from hobohemian subculture. Black transients were entirely excluded, for example, from the publishing market for book-length hobo memoirs. This chapter seeks out representations of transiency in black vernacular music, particularly, though not exclusively, the blues. I argue that examining the lyrical content of black vernacular music changes the cultural representation of the hobo because blues is more sexually explicit, contains more examples of female empowerment, and places a stronger emphasis on the road as a place of violence than do white written accounts. The romanticisation of the road that is common in white hobo memoirs is largely absent from black vernacular music, in which concerns about needing to leave town, often to escape an awkward romantic situation but sometimes to escape from the violence of the railroad police, loom large.

The category of Civil War literature is not bounded by historical designation or lived experience; instead, this genre encompasses a broad range of reflections and reconstructions concerning the legacy imparted by the war. Beginning with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, contemporary evaluations of the civil rights movement mobilize competing logics of Civil War memory. These versions of Civil War memory take shape in both personal and political registers, the subjective nature of which simultaneously confounds and perpetually renews understandings of the past. Three developments occurred in the 1950s and 1960s that brought such contradictory remembrance to light: the desegregation of public schools via Brown v. Board of Education, the commemoration of the Civil War’s centennial anniversary, and the deaths of the last remaining Civil War veterans. This final event characterizes the relevant work produced in both the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment, as writers continuously work to preserve, alter, or resist their ancestors’ history in ways informed by the interests and conflicts of the present.