by John Steinbeck (Everyman’s Library, 1993)
This novel tells the story of the Joad family, tenant farmers in Oklahoma during the 1930s depression. Times are hard in Dust Bowl Oklahoma. They are evicted from their farm and journey along with thousands of other “Okies” in hope of a better life in California. We see the family slowly disintegrate and the hard times get worse. Homeless and desperate and hungry – “I’m jus’ puttin’ one foot in front a the other”, as the son, Tom Joad, says.
Confession: I born an Oklahoman, but read this book for the first time at age 68. I don’t remember my parents or other adults talking about the Dust Bowl during my childhood (a generation after the depression, 50s-60s) – or perhaps as a child I just didn’t have the interest! I remember driving with my family west to Oregon in the 50s. My sister and I asked why people stopped and stared at us so much on the trip to the Northwest. “It’s because they see our licence plate – Oklahoma.” Even twenty years after the dust bowl and the big emigration to California, people remember Okies. “Okie” = “ignorant, dirty scum”, and if someone had called my dad an “Okie”, he would have gotta punch.
They headed west from near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, on Route 66. They drove through Oklahoma City. The two children “saw it all, and it embarrassed them with its bigness and its strangeness, and it frightened them with the fine-clothed people they saw.” I think the year was about 1936, and I was thinking maybe they saw my mother. A sixteen-year old girl, she and her friends would have dressed up maybe going into town to shop at John Brown department store. This story is fictional you say. Well, Ma said to her daughter Rose of Sharon: ”They’s a time of change, an’ when that comes, dyin’ is a piece of all dyin’, and bearin’ is a piece of all bearin’, and’ bearin’ and dyin’ is two pieces of the same thing. An’ then things ain’t lonely any more. An’ then a hurt don’t hurt so bad, ‘cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn.” So the Joad family is a piece of all the emigrating Okies.
This book, as I said in my review of Cannery Row, reminds me of Charles Dickens, esp the vivid portrayal of popular speech. I could see Steinbeck going around with a notebook, as did Dickens, jotting down fragments of overheard conversation. I’m an Okey myself, and I could hear the voices in my head as I read the dialogue. But also in this book is the anger at social injustice that Dickens shows in his books. For example, Steinbeck’s anger at the destruction of agricultural produce in order to keep the price up (eg spraying kerosene on mountains of oranges to make them inedible and dumping potatoes in the rivers). “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree row, 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 just rot, must be forced to rot…. ”In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy…”
Depression-era refugees and Syrian refugees
During the depression years about three hundred thousand people were drawn west, not just from Oklahoma, but also from Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, Nevada. These refugees were homeless and hungry, looking for food, for work. California people perhaps felt sympathy at first, but then fear, resentment, and worse. This reminds me of the refugee situation in the current world. Go on the Refugees Internation website and you see the sad situation of refugees in parts of Africa, Columbia, Bangladesh, Syria. Especially Syria – the same number of people, about 300,000, are refugees struggling to survive in very difficult conditions. In our smaller world, Syria is as close to us as California was to all Americans back in the 30’s, but the immense scale of the problem means we see all these people as a collective mass and not as individual humans.
deescommonplacebook.com 