The Grapes of Wrath
As the debate about which immigrants are welcome and which are not into the wealthy parts of the world gets hotter, I turn to John Steinbeck
Photo - ‘Immigrant Woman’ by Dorothea Lange - 1936, California
The numbers of people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea are growing. I remembered this classic, published in 1939, and the events of ‘the dust bowl migration’ that inspired John Steinbeck to write it.
The land is spent and dust has settled on the fields of Oklahoma. The air is thick. Farmers search the sky for rain; the women watch their men to catch the slightest signs of despair, and the children quietly observe the same scene outdoors – day after day. But the clouds pass by and instead, great big tractors arrive to mow down the fields and the houses with them; those very houses built by grandparents and great grandparents with their own hands, as anxious people watch helplessly. The Joad family and thousands of others have been informed that the banks have taken over their unproductive land and they have to go. Where? That is not the problem of banks and those who represent them. The farmer, on questioning who is responsible for this decision comes up against a wall. At the very outset, Steinbeck introduces the reader to the effects of those nameless, faceless entities in people’s lives, and in this case in particular, to the conundrum of who a farmer would confront to protect himself and his family since ‘the bank’ is not a person, but a concept he can barely grasp.
And thus begins the Joad family’s journey on Route 66 in a jalopy they have managed to buy after selling almost all of their movable possessions and animals for a song. For, a farmer whose life consists of steeping himself in the ways of the land, has little understanding of the ways of money, while on the other hand, entrepreneurship is a highly valued quality in those who know its workings. Like the Joads, an estimated two hundred thousand people, from Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas and New Mexico, travelled westwards, away from the ‘dust bowl’ after they received pamphlets advertising work in the promised land of California, where peaches and grapes hung from the trees, waiting to be plucked.
Tom Joad, just out of prison for manslaughter jumps parole to join his close-knit family on the road to California. According to Ma, his mother, he is the one with sense; the one who has to ensure the success of the enterprise westwards and the beginning of a new life. As he, and his younger brother Al take turns on the steering wheel, and their truck, along with thousands of others makes its way along the highway, the reader is introduced to the immigrant dreams of different members of the family. For Ma, everything is possible because the family is together. The Joads have adopted Casy, once a preacher, and now a dreamer of ‘one who will live among the people’, sharing their joys and sorrows, their songs and work and leisure. Rose of Sharon, the older of the Joad daughters is married to Connie, and pregnant. The two lovers whisper together at the back the truck about the little house and all the lovely baby things they are going to have. Connie will study nights and become a radio mechanic. Granpa was going to pluck the grapes from the trees and gorge on them. But the shock of leaving his native soil results in a stroke very early in the journey, and he dies on foreign soil, followed by granma for whom the loss of her partner of decades leads to derangement. Noah, the ‘slow-brained’ older brother of Tom, decides along the way to opt out of life in the promised land, and to spend his days by a river living on what he can hunt and gather. The loss of each of these foreshadows the break-up of the family, and the shattering of immigrant dreams. The Joads make their way forward – hot and dusty – on very little food and less money, and enormous reserves of will-power and the ability to dream about California. The truck breaks down, and Al and Tom innovate and fix it. Connie deserts Rose of Sharon as life on the migratory route gets harder. The immigrants share stories, tips, and what little they have as they camp along Route 66.
The first signs of what awaits them in California comes through a man and his young son travelling the other way. They are returning to die on their ow soil, after months of getting no work and losing faith in the future. The pamphlets, they reveal to the men of the Joad family, invited the dispossessed in great numbers, and this ensured that the owners of Californian farms and orchards could beat the price of labour down to the bare minimum. If one refuses to work for the wages offered, there are thousands waiting in line. But for the Joads, there is only one way, and it is westwards. Standing on a hill, they gaze speechlessly at what is below them in utter reverence. This green valley is California. They have arrived.
The Joads take shelter in a campsite called Hooverville, because it doesn’t cost to stay there. They soon learn that Hoovervilles are present on the outskirts of towns and cities. The awesome land, bearing treasures untold, is in the hands of a few mighty landowners, who along with the local authorities practice every form of brutality, including the use of weapons to keep labour costs down and the hungry immigrants from growing food on it. The ‘Okie’ men return dejected and beaten every evening without the prospect of work. Every measure is taken to make it impossible for the workforce to organize themselves. One could be accused of being a ‘Red’ arrested, and even shot down. And so, the vicious cycle begins. The more the immigrants are denied the possibility of the most basic of human needs, the more ‘inhuman’ they appear to the ones who have houses, work, money and cars, and the more the hungry and dispossessed resort to any means to survive, including theft. No wonder then, that Steinbeck describes in detail what different members of the Joad family go through when they are introduced to a faucet with running water, a toilet that flushes and the possibility of a shower in a government run camp, to which they have fled after a particularly violent confrontation with the authorities in one of the dreaded Hoovervilles. Their self-respect returns after standing under a warm shower, combing their hair, and wearing clean clothes.
But one cannot live on human dignity and the lack of work forces the hungry Joads out of the comfort of the friendly commune into the next exploitative situation. As dreams are dashed one by one, the ex-preacher Casy, now leader of a strike is brutally killed. Tom who is present, commits his second murder in retaliation and is almost killed himself. Ma, who, at the outset of the journey believed in the invincibility of the Joad family, as long as they are together convinces her favourite son on whom she relies, now an outlaw, to travel as far away from the family as he possibly can. Tom decides to step into Casy’s shoes and organize the workforce without whom the Californians would not be able to reap their fruits. The book ends with what remains of the Joad family – Ma, Pa, Al, Rose of Sharon, and her siblings – the children Ruthie and Winfield – and Uncle John scrambling up to higher ground to find shelter in a barn after heavy rains threaten to flood the boxcar in which they have found a temporary home as cotton pickers.
The writing has a poetic quality, as the author resorts to alliteration, short and long sentences and visual and auditory imagery. As unlikely as it may seem, there is a place for humour, as in the characterization of grampa and granma, and the three women of the ladies club in the commune in the government camp. The narrative of the Joad family’s immigrant experience is interspersed with accounts of what is taking place around them in those times. To use the language of cinema, Steinbeck ‘cuts away’ from the story. This could be to describe a clever entrepreneur’s tactics in divesting a hapless farmer of his worldly possessions; to give a bird’s eye view of Route 66 with its endless line of cars and vehicles moving westwards; to bring the countryside to life; comment on the workings of capitalism; or show how the immigrant communities share stories, songs and more. These are separate short chapters in which none of the characters from the narrative make an appearance, yet personalities are forged and vivid scenes created which awake the senses and add another dimension to the emotion one is already feeling. They also serve to provide a greater context for the setting and the times, and thus feed into narrative. Most importantly, they undoubtedly show Steinbeck’s own position with regard to ‘the dust bowl migration’ as it came to be called.
Some characters in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath seem unreal. Ma, not only does not have a single selfish bone in her body, she is also invincible. Not for a single moment does she despair, or pity herself. Rose of Sharon, on the other hand, who is depicted as moaning, and steeped in self-pity throughout, suddenly emerges in the aftermath of delivering a still born child to offer her milk-filled breasts to a strange man dying of hunger. The book ends with her gently moving her fingers through the man’s hair. ‘She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously’. This sentimental ending echoes other similar moments. Furthermore, Steinbeck’s world appears to be inhabited by good guys with feelings and bad guys without, and little in between. It is a black and white world. In it, everything to do with the capitalists is wrong and evil, and everything to do with the ‘Reds’, as in the commune in the government camp is good and noble. Apparently, socialism is the answer to the capitalist’s avarice.
So, what kept me turning the pages? The prose. The pleasure of reading the author’s chosen words. How they came together to form sentences, paragraphs, the chapter, the story. And this drew me into the Joad family’s dreams and I wanted them to come true. When it was clear it was not going to happen, I wanted to know if and how they would prevail. It wasn’t long before I began to want desperately for them to come out of the book alive, given the mounting brutality and the rising numbers of dead and dying around them. When there were just a few pages left, I began to wonder how the Joad family would end. Then Ma spoke to Pa whose spirit is near broken, and who, like me wondered about what next. “Everything we do—seems to me is aimed right at goin’ on. Seems that way to me. Even getting’ hungry—even bein’ sick; some die, but the rest is just tougher. Jus’ try to live that day, jus’ that day”. These words resonate strongly with one of the ‘cut away’ chapters in which Steinbeck professes his view of the soft people – the rich and spoilt ones – who are actually the weak ones because of they are terrifyied of losing what they have. The migrants – they live from day to day, and have nothing left to lose. In another moment of clear insight, earlier in the narrative, Ma says that what she has learnt is that it is the poor who help the poor. In this light, the silent understanding that passes between Ma and her oldest daughter, Rose of Sharon gives way to action – and she shares the only possession she has at the moment, the milk her body produces, with a starving man.
Despite what I cited as the weaknesses of the book, I, like the many, many people who have read it, could not but be greatly moved by what the characters go through. This may also be because I could feel Steinbeck’s anger at the injustice meted out to the ‘Okies’ – a derogatory term for all non-Californians who entered the state in those times. It is as if the author was the one who had tasted the grapes of wrath. Steinbeck, himself a Californian, enraged many in his home state because of his depiction of the hell the immigrants experienced in California. The book was banned in Kern County and some other places in America. Despite its reputation, it sold by the millions and to this day is considered one of the greatest works of American literature, and taught at high schools and universities. It got the author the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. When he later won the Nobel Prize, this book was cited as an important work.
I picked up The Grapes of Wrath because the ‘migration issue’ is an integral part of our lives. Governments fall and rise in Europe, where I live, because of it. Reading it did to me what it did to many of us the world over, when we saw the photo of a two-year-old boy, washed ashore after the boat he was in, capsized. He got a name. And we came to know that Alan Kurdi’s father was the only survivor in his family, of that tragic migration out of Syria to the promised land of Europe.