The novel begins as Tom Joad hitchhikes his way home after a four-year stay
in prison for killing a man in a fight. On the way he meets Jim Casy, a former
preacher who is returning from a sojourn in the "wilderness," where
he has been soul-searching. Tom invites Jim to walk with him on the dusty
road to the Joad family farm, and to stay for dinner. Arriving there, he sees
that "the small unpainted house is mashed at one corner, and has been
pushed off its foundations so that it slumps at an angle." He realizes
that the farm is deserted and Muley Graves, a nearby tenant farmer, tells
Tom that his family has moved to their Uncle John's house: " . . . They
was going to stick it out when the bank come to tractorin' off the place."
A long drought was making barren ground out of what had once been fertile
farmland.
Early the following morning Tom and Casy walk the eight miles to Uncle John's
farm. As they approach, Tom sees his Pa working on a truck in the yard. Pa's
"eyes look at Tom's face, and then gradually his brain becomes aware
of what he saw." With Tom's homecoming, the Joad family unit is complete.
Now Ma and Pa, the pregnant oldest daughter Rose of Sharon, and her husband
Connie, Grampa, Granma, and all the rest start packing: they were all "goin'
to California" to start over as fruit pickers. Like thousands of other
displaced tenant farmers, the Joads, spurred on by the promise of good wages
and sunshine, sold what they could, bought a used car and headed out on Highway
66, "a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from
the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership."
After the supplies and tools are loaded into the old Hudson, which teen-aged
Al had converted into a truck, the Joad family and Casy (twelve people in
all) squeeze into what little space is left and start west.
During the first overnight stop, Grampa suddenly is hit by a stroke and dies.
They bury him on the roadside.
Soon they meet up with the Wilsons, a married couple with a broken-down car.
After Al tries to fix their vehicle, Ma and Pa Joad invite the Wilsons to
travel with them. "You won't be no burden. Each'Il help each, an' we'll
all git to California," Ma said.
The two groups "crawled westward as a unit", suffering along the
way from too little money, not enough food, dilapidated vehicles, profiteering
junk dealers and overpriced replacement parts. Eastward-bound migrants warned
the travelers that working conditions in California were bad; but they still
pressed on toward the "promised land."
Crossing the border into California, the family camps next to a river that
runs parallel to the town of Needles. "They'd wait until nightfall to
cross the desert." As Tom, Noah and Pa sit down in the shallow river
water to wash off the road grime, they are joined by an itinerant father and
his son who aprises them of the treatment they could expect in California:
"Okie use'ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty
son of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum."
Later that day, Tom's aloof and backward brother Noah tells the family that
he didn't want to go any further and was going to stay behind by the river.
That evening, after saying good-bye to the Wilsons, the Joads begin the last
leg of their journey. Early during the desert crossing, Granma quietly dies,
but Ma waits until they reach Bakersfield before she tells anyone. After another
roadside burial, the family drives on into a "Hooverville" - one
of many designated migrant camps opened during the Depression. Like other
Hoovervilles, it is a chaotic community; "little gray tents, shacks,
and cars were scattered about at random." But the Joads elect to stay.
On their first evening in the camp, two men in a shiny sedan drive up; a
labor contractor and a local sheriff. The contractor had come to offer jobs
to the migrants, but when he declines to reveal the actual wage he is prepared
to pay, a fight ensues. Tom and Casy get in the middle of things and manage
to knock the sheriff out cold. Since Tom is on parole and can't afford any
more trouble, Casy orders him to hide while he stays behind to give himself
up in Tom's place.
That night, before the family drives away, Rose of Sharon's husband sneaks
off, abandoning his wife and soon-to-be-born child. From the Hooverville,
sounds of shouts and screams can be heard as the clattering old Hudson creeps
away in the night.
The next morning the Joads head south toward Weedpatch, where they had heard
a government camp was located. Once there, they are immediately struck by
how different this camp is from the Hooverville. The cabins have clean showers
with hot water and indoor toilets, and on Saturday night the camp even schedules
a dance. The camp's inhabitants have the right to make their own rules and
elect their own leaders. Unfortunately, though, there is no work in any of
the surrounding areas. The children begin having dizzy spells from hunger,
and with Rose of Sharon near to giving birth, they have to make a decision:
they leave the camp on their last tank of gas.
As the worn-out vehicle heads north, the Joads meet a man who points them
to possible work on the Hooper ranch near Pixley. When they finally reach
the ranch, however, they find themselves in the middle of a heated dispute.
A row of policemen are holding back picketing strikers, who shout and curs
at the "scab" peach pickers crossing their lines. But the Joads
don't care; they are hungry. Everyone except Ma and Rose of Sharon, who stays
behind to clean their filthy new home, straightway goes to work. Before nightfall,
the men and children have earned one dollar among them, and Ma takes their
note of credit to the company store, where she is able to buy a little hamburger,
bread, potatoes and coffee. After eating his scanty dinner, Tom ambles down
through the brush along the highway to investigate what all the commotion
is about. He sees a tent and to his surprise, he discovers that Casy the preacher
is one of the main agitators. Casy gives Tom the lowdown: "We come to
work there. They says it's gonna be fi' cents .... We got there an'they says
they're payin'two an'a half cents .... Now they're payin'you five. When they
bust this here strike - ya think they'll pay you five?"
Tom was about to return to the ranch when suddenly he hears "guys comin'
from ever' which way." Everyone scatters for cover, but Tom and Casy
are intercepted by two deputies. "You fellas don'know what you're doin',"
protested Casy. "You're helpin' to starve kids." The nearest deputy
snatches up a pick handle and cracks Casy's skull, killing him in a fit of
passion. Tom wrenches the club free and clubs the deputy to the ground. As
he bolts from the confusion, he receives a deep gash on his face but manages
to make it back to the ranch, where he hides out. As the family works on,
the strike is broken, and just as Casy had predicted, the pay for peaches
drops to two-and-a-half cents a box.
Soon, all the peaches are picked, and once again the Joads set out. Luckily,
they find some work picking cotton. While they camp with other migrants in
abandoned boxcars along a stream, Tom, still hunted by the law, stays a few
miles down the road in a clump of trees. At last the Joads are making enough
money to eat properly.
Then the littlest girl, Ruthie, makes a mistake: during a fight with another
girl, she threatened to get her big brother, who had "already kil't two
fellas. . . " That evening, Ma takes Tom his dinner, tells him about
Ruthie's words, slips him seven dollars that she has saved, and urges him
to leave - for his own and the family's sake. Tom hugs Ma and promises he
will carry on Casy's work of improving the worker's plight.
When the cotton picking ends, the Joads remain in the boxcar; winter was
approaching, along with the birth of Rose of Sharon's baby. The money was
nearly gone. Hunger and hopelessness grows.
Amid heavy rains, Rose finally gives birth to a stillborn son. As the stream
swells into a thundering river, water begins entering the boxcar. The soaked,
frantic and fragmented family runs for higher ground. Finally they find shelte
in a rickety barn. Inside they find a young boy tending his sickly father.
"Got to have soup or milk," he tells them. "You folks got money
to git milk?"
Bereft of her baby, Rose of Sharon now goes to the famished man, bares her
breast, and nourishes him with her milk. It was all they had.
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