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STUDYWORLD STUDYNOTES

The Grapes of Wrath

Quick/Fast Review:

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.