Second Book: John Steinbeck´s ¨The Grapes of Wrath¨

And the people listened, and their faces were quiet with listening. The story-tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words, because their tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.

Well, I figure that maybe 100 million people or so have read John Steinbeck´s ¨The Grapes of Wrath,¨ so I´m not sure I´m about to say anything new here. But since I like talking about books almost as much as I like reading them, I´ve decided to sit down and write a little bit about this story.

This is the story of a family of Okies, the Joads, who leave their land during the Dust Bowl and travel west to California, encountering various hardships along the way. It´s a surprising portrait of America: turbulent, angry, fearful, and on the move. It is indeed an indignant book, and in the story of the trials of this one family there is the story of a nation in upheaval.

The story begins when the Joads are forced off their land:

Sure, cried the tenant man, but it´s our land. We measured it and broke it up.
We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it´s no good,
it´s still ours. That´s what makes it ours--being born on it, working it, dying
on it. That maes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

But leaving their land is a difficult thing:

How can we live without our lives? How will we know it´s us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

But when they arrive in California, they find little work or welcome. This story takes place during the midst of the Depression, when the economy has a perverse and destructive absurdity. (I know that this passage is long, but it is so good, so important, so much the heart of this book.)

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Car-loads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the organges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit--and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescene drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our successes. There fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates - died of malnutrition - because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, and the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for vintage.

What I loved about this book was how deeply Steinbeck commits to the story and to the people that this story concerns. He embraces their language and customs. He portrays their experiences with startling realism, and there are moments that are just heart-breaking. Yet the most lasting impression is the ultimate resilency of the family and the dignity they maintain in a struggle against some vast and unknownable force.

When it comes down to it, this is really the story of cultural change caused by social and environmental factors, which is really what I want to study for the rest of my life. It´s interesting to examine what happens to the family unit, and in the societies of Hovervilles that spring up along the side of the road, and especially in what happens to the characters: to Tom and Ma and Rose of Sharon as individuals.

At the start of the novel, Steinbeck presents Tom as a man who will have to do whatever it is to defend himself: He killed a man in a fight at a dance after being stabbed with a knife. But as the story progresses, he sees the great injustices committed against his people and he yearns to defend not only himself, but the rights of all as well:

¨Then it don´matter. Then I´ll be all aroun´in the dark. I´ll be ever´where--wherever you look. Wherever they´s a fight so hungry people can eat, I´ll be there. Wherever they´s a cop beatin´up a guy, I´ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I´ll be in the way guys yell when they´re mad an´--I´ll be in the way kids laugh when they´re hungry an´ they know supper´s ready. An´ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an´ live in the houses they build--why, I´ll be there....¨

But ¨The Grapes of Wrath¨ is not only the story of characters or of a family: it´s also an intensely politcal work. It´s about, essentially, the right to work and bread and maybe a bit of land. It´s about the pursuit of happiness and how society can so effortlessly conspires against it. It´s amazing how the characters in this book worked so hard for so little. It´s a little hard to believe that this is the story of Americans barely 80 years ago--an America with that amount of suffering and dislocation.

But though the portrait Steinbeck draws seems foreign to me, the same themes are of course repeating today: Immigrants who come to the U.S. looking for work face this same desperation, for they are the ones who have taken on many of these wage labor jobs. Moreover, much of the plight of landless people that I´ve witnessed in India or Ghana or here in Nicaragua is echoed in the events of this story. This story is still unfolding today, and it is dangerous to consider it solely a quaint relic of what America once was.

He describes ¨native¨Californians as reacting fearfully, angrily, and unlawfully against these immigrants from Oklahoma. The Okies are Americans, for generations Americans, but they are unwanted. Throughout the book, Steinbeck plays with ideas of community and exclusion, pointing the paradoxes in the ideals we hold dear.

Above all, Steinbeck asks hard questions of the reader, hard questions about how we can stand to profit from another man´s tragedy. Reading this, I couldn´t help but thinking: What would I do to prevent my family from starving? What lengths would I go to fight injustices perpertrated against me? And more ominously: In my own hard-heartedness, have I denied bread to a starving man? In what ways have I conspired to dampen the hopes of the yearning poor?

(Next up: Edmund Morris´ ¨Theodore Rex¨)