Lonesome Road
At the Intersection of Truth in Narrative
June 9th, 2020
Joe Hunt
“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his own children? You can’t scare him – he has known a fear beyond every other...in Kansas and Arkansas, in Oklahoma and Texas and New Mexico, the tractors moved in and pushed the tenants out. Three hundred thousand in California and more coming… when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need… repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
~ John Steinbeck
In 1929, the United States were enjoying the lavish excess provided by an economy recklessly careening upward, widely regarded by its citizens as robust and invulnerable. Speculation from investors in the US, as well as overseas in European countries, led to a skyrocketing rise in value for stock, unfettered lending, and abundant finance. What was either ignored or unseen: grave agricultural overproduction from farmers, leading to one of the most devastating ecological disasters in US history; overexposure by everyday Americans in stock, leading to severe and significant cutbacks in spending; the insolvency of American banks, unable to return borrowed money to the people. By 1930, stock markets across the globe were in free fall, banks were closing, and people were out of work. The worst global economic depression in history had eclipsed a period of unknown comfort and prosperity.
In America, the effects were felt across the country. Steel workers, automobile manufacturers, store clerks, bankers, and agricultural labourers all felt the effects, disproportionate on some groups as they were. Iniquity, hunger, and desperation were hallmarks of the time. A number of works – fictitious and otherwise – were written, shot, or broadcast to represent the emotions, people, and circumstances of the time. Perhaps the most recognizable work of literature from that era in the US is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which illustrates for readers the conditions that migrant farm workers of America experienced during the period. Criticized by many for it’s vulgarity, supposedly unfair depictions of landowners, socialist/communist sympathies, and for fomenting dissent, Steinbeck’s novel, even now, remains a controversial representation of America. Despite this, the novel is widely read, has influenced a vast number of American readers, politicians, and activists, and won the author the Nobel Prize in literature in 1962. In Steinbeck’s time, as well as our own, his work is praised for its unflinching representation of the meanness and squalor of the conditions many Americans found themselves in, drawing attention to the repressed, and contributing to the richly tumultuous political discourse that the America of the early 19th century participated in.
The Grapes of Wrath, as fiction, was intended to highlight the truth of the Depression that most Americans either weren’t willing to comprehend, or bore no witness to.
The question: what role does fiction serve in enlightening and unveiling the truth? In the following, we will come to know the content of what Steinbeck wrote about, the influences that existed upon his characters, and the veracity of his claims by contrasting the story he wrote with factual, first-hand accounts of survivors of the Great Depression, catalogued by the Chicago author and oral historian Studs Terkel.
John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) hailed from Salinas, California, born to a treasurer and schoolteacher. John enjoyed writing from a young age, and published eight novels before becoming widely famous in 1939. In his most famous novel, Steinbeck depicts the struggles of rural American farmers as they travel west to California in pursuit of work, land, and greater fortune during the Great Depression. Scenes highlighting the bitter hostility towards inbound migrant workers abound: the Joad family encounters violent acts of exclusion, coercion, and abuse throughout the story. The reprieves that the Joads receive stem largely from the efforts of others in their own condition. Only through the collective action with fellow workers does the family ensure their children are fed, the men clothed, and some dignity of the family upheld.
Steinbeck drew many of his observations and inspirations for his characters, settings, and events from his voluntary work in the fields alongside the people he would ultimately immortalize, sampled from experiences in the agricultural fields working alongside Tom Collins, a migrant worker himself and administrator of the Weedpatch camp near Bakersfield, California.
Further scenes of violence against these workers by landowners, the police, and local officials, most notably, perhaps, by the American Legion and local sheriffs, often appear in the forefront of the family’s struggle across the southwest, drawing condemnation from Steinbeck.
Critics assail the depictions of American poverty, working conditions, and the plight of labourers, particularly the criticism of police, which drew a great deal of ire from the communities that Steinbeck wrote about, resulting in significant backlash and from California residents who resented their depiction in his novel. At one point, The Grapes of Wrath was banned from schools in California following actions from Kern county farmers organizations; since it’s publication, it has been also banned in libraries, schools, and states across the country on the basis of vulgarity, explicit sexuality, and for maligning public perception of large landowners and corporate farms. The response to his novel wasn’t only local: Steinbeck himself was caught in the crossfire for his sympathy toward the Communist party, embodied by his membership in the League of American Writers and a trip to Moscow in 1957. His contributions to Communist-sympathizing writer’s organizations won him few friends politically.
Studs Terkel and Hard Times
Studs Terkel (1912 – 2008) was a Chicago-born oral historian and author, serving as a radio host and writer for the Federal Writer’s Project in Chicago during the Great Depression. Hisis radio program aired from 1952 – 1997. From a young age, Terkel enjoyed speaking with and learning about people from all walks of life, fostered by his employment as a young man as a concierge. Terkel would later go on to write a number of oral histories, including the Pulitzer prize-winning 1985 The Good War. Hard Times, published in 1970, documents the recollections and opinions of bankers, musicians, labourers, politicians, farmers, and artists who lived during the Great Depression, serving as a cross-sectional study of the cultural, economic, and political impact of the depression on American life. Terkel’s collection offers a comprehensive look at the social and political landscape of the era, with accounts of the Roosevelt administration, the Dust Bowl, labour union organization, the Bonus March, and the Communist Party USA, to name only a few.
The American Farmer and Labourer
“… They was weddin’s, all in them houses. An’ then I’d want to go in town an’ kill folks. ‘Cause what’d they take when they tractored the folks off the lan’? What’d they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin’ on the groun’, an’ Joe yellin’ his first breath, an’ me jerkin’ like a billy goat under a bush in the night. What’d they get? God knows the lan’ ain’t no good. Nobody been able to make a crop for years. But them sons-a-bitches at their desks, they jus’ chopped folks in two for their margin a profit. They jus’ cut ‘em in two. Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car. They ain’t alive no more. Them sons-a-bitches killed ‘em”.
At the heart of the novel, Grapes of Wrath is a story about disenfranchised American labour. The Joad family, former landowners in Oklahoma, are forced to seek greater fortune and a new home west in California after their homestead is repossessed by the local bank, torn down and turned into agricultural land worked by tractors and run by corporate farms. The Joad family is composed of three generations: Ma and Pa Joad, matriarch and patriarch; their parents; their brother-in-law, Uncle John; Tom, Al, Rose of Sharon, Noah, Ruthie, and Winfield Joad – the 3rd generation. The family is accompanied by Rose of Sharon’s husband and father of her unborn child, Connie Rivers, as well as former preacher – and the novel’s most visible proselytizer – Jim Casey. The eldest members of the Joad family pass away early in the journey west, unable to cope with the supplantation of the family from their home. The family further loses Noah, Connie, Uncle John, and Al as they split off from the family, intent on finding their own fortune separate from their original vision.
The toll of the journey: a fractured family, dispossessed of their values, reduced to hunting for wage labour.
The Joads first leave for California in the hopes of well-paid work picking crops on large farms, impelled by a leaflet published and disseminated across the US by large-scale growers seeking cheap labour. Along the way, the family encounters families converging on the same goal alongside them, who watch the flight of wretched, broken people stream out away from California. One such individual describes: “Maybe he (the landowner) needs two hunderd men, so he talks to five hunderd, an’ they tell other folks, an’ when you get to the place, they’s a thousan’ men. This here fella says, “I’m payin’ twenty cents an hour’. An’ maybe half a the men walk off. But they’s still five hunderd that’s so goddamn hungry they’ll work for nothin’ but biscuits. Well, this here fella’s got a contract to pick them peaches or chop that cotton. You see now? The more fellas he can get, an the hungrier, the less he’s gonna pay.”
Throughout the latter half of the novel, Steinbeck illustrates the phenomenon further: deputies and agents representing landowners solicit migrants, often at exceedingly low wages, uncertain terms, and duplicitous representations of working conditions. Stripped of natural rights and subjugated into neo-serfdom, the travelers bargain and protest with the only thing they have: their labour. Their strikes are cracked down upon by local police, citizens, and farm owners, fed the false pretext of damping down “agitators”, “reds”, and “Bolsheviks”.
Jim Casey, witness of events transpiring on the road, in labour camps, and in the spirit of the American, correctly identifies the spirit of the time:
“… if ya listen, you’ll hear a movin’, an’ a sneakin’, an’ a rustlin’, an’ – an’ a res’lessness. They’s stuff goin’ on that the folks doin’ it don’t know nothin’ about – yet…. They’s gonna come a thing that’s gonna change the whole country…”
The Labour Organizer César Chávez
Terkel meets with and discusses the memories of one such agricultural labourer, who describes to the reader his experiences not only witnessing, but experiencing, the same troubles:
“Oh, I remember having to move out of our house… He had inherited this from his father, who had homesteaded it. I saw my two, three other uncles also moving out. And for the same reason. The bank had foreclosed on the loan…
One morning a giant tractor came in, like we had never seen before. My daddy used to do all his work with horses. So this huge tractor came in and began to knock down this corral, this small corral where my father kept his horses. We didn’t understand why. In the matter of a week, the whole face of the land was changed. Ditches were dug, and it was different….
We all of us climbed into an old Chevy that my dad had. And then we were in California, and migratory workers… it must have been around ‘36… we had been poor, but we knew every night there was a bed there, and that this was our room… that all of a sudden changed. When you’re small, you can’t figure these things out. You know something’s not right, and you don’t like it, but you don’t question it and you don’t let that get you down. You sort of just continue to move.
But this had quite an impact on my father. He had been used to owning the land and all of a sudden thee was no more land.”
On migrant work and labour strikes:
“… We trusted everybody that came around. You’re traveling in California with all your belongings in your car: it’s obvious…. This is bait for the labour contractor. Anywhere we stopped there was a labour contractor offering all kinds of jobs and good wages, and we were always deceived by them and we always went. Trust them…
We got hooked on a real scheme once. We were going by Fresno on our way to Delano. We stopped at some service station and this labour contractor saw the car. He offered a lot of money. We went. We worked the first week: the grapes were pretty bad and we couldn’t make much. We all stayed off from school in order to make some money. Saturday we were to be paid and we didn’t get paid. He came and said the winery hadn’t paid him. We’d have money next week. He gave us $10. My dad took the $10 and went to the store and bought $10 worth of groceries. So we worked another week and in the middle of the second week, my father was asking him for his last week’s pay, and he had the same excuse. This went on and we’d get $5 or $10 or $7 a week for about four weeks. For the whole family.
… The winery said they had paid him and they showed us where they had paid him. This man had taken it.”
“… My dad didn’t like the conditions, and he began to agitate. Some families would follow, and we’dg go elsewhere. Sometimes we’d come back. We couldn’t find a job elsewhere, so we’d come back. Sort of beg for a job… We were among these families who always honoured somebody else’s grievance. Somebody would have a personal grievance with the employer… Even when we were working, we’d honour it… They (the contractors) knew it, and they rubbed it in quite well. Sort of shameful to come back. We were trapped. We’d have to do it for a few days to get enough money to get enough gas.”
Chávez later went on to found the United Farm Worker’s Association (UFW) in 1962, serving the interests and needs of Mexican-American farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley; he helped organize labour strikes, establish credit unions, and advocated for peaceful protest in support of workers in the years to come.
In the Shadow of the Valley
When the Joad family does reach California, they find their expectations at gross odds with reality. The family’s first encounter of the conditions in California is an unpleasant one: families living in abject poverty, scraping together places to live out of used sacks, tarps, tents, and turf. Children follow and linger around the family, silently begging for food. There are many, many others looking for the same opportunities as the Joads in the farmlands, but low wages, high competition, and local sentiment keep the workers on the move, unable to formally settle down anywhere. In one of the first labour camps the family stops in, a young man named Floyd confirms for the Joads what was explained to them before: local landowners, recognizing the enormous labour force present, offer abysmally low wages for an hour’s work. Unlivable wages are competitive, as there is no shortage of hungry children. Furthermore, by forcing migrant workers to continue moving, they are denied the ability to own land or property, which further prevents them from voting – the major tool necessary to advocate for their rights.
Tom Joad, appreciating the situation, asks why workers won’t simply refuse to work. The response is simple: landowners recognize that workers can refuse the pay, and leave the produce to rot. However, known leaders and instigators are targeted by police and local militias, beaten, jailed, and removed from influence. Individuals caught sympathizing or supporting organization are written onto a blacklist, which prevents them from working again in the area. “Well, a fella eats in jail anyways”, Tom replies in exasperation, but hear the response: “His kids don’t. How’d you like to be in an’ your kids starvin’ to death?”.
In the same day, a labour contractor comes into the camp looking to hire men for field work in Tulare county. Floyd, having seen the tactic before, asks to see the contract, the wage, and how many men he’ll be hiring, arguing that if everything is above board, there’ll be a contract to sign, and the men would happily go to work. No such terms are given. The contractor calls for his companion, Joe – a local sheriff's deputy – who then falsely accuses Floyd of being involved in a break-in at a car lot in an attempt to detain him, saying: “Might be a good idear to go… Board of Health says we got to clean out this camp. An’ if it gets around that you got reds out here – why, somebody might git hurt. Be a good idear if all you fellas moved on to Tulare. They isn’t a thing to do aroun’ here. That’s jus’ a friendly way a telling you. Be a bunch of guys down here, maybe with pick handles, if you ain’t gone.”.
Mike Widman and the Detroit Ford Strike
Similar scenes perforate American history in this period. Terkel explores several such strikes, ranging from the Bonus March in Washington by veterans in 1932 to automotive strikes in the late thirties and early forties; in particular, he discusses the actions of workers at a Ford assembly plant in Detroit, Michigan, who recollects his experiences with the union and their struggle for better conditions. Widman worked with John L. Lewis, a progressive unionizer serving with the American Federation of Labour, The Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the United Mine Workers of America. Widman describes a strike that occurred in April of 1941.
“… The life of a ford worker was quite miserable. These service men (hired enforcers of the Ford motor company) were everywhere. The way they’d throw men out … today, anybody that wore a blue shirt got laid off. Tomorrow, if you had brown hair, black hair, anything. No recourse.
If they caught some of our people on the street, they slapped ‘em around. When some of our boys first wore union buttons or UAW baseball caps, they were given the works. Some of our boys got fed up and next thing a couple of service men were slightly hurt. That ended their parading in public. But this was later…
On April 1, it happened. The five men on our grievance committee had permission from the foreman to leave their job and see the division superintendent. He said ‘Talk to the employment office.’ At the employment office, they were told ‘you left your jobs. You’re fired.’
We asked the company, through the conciliator, to arbitrate this matter. The answer was: they’re fired, and we don’t care what you do. The word spread in the plant like wildfire…
We called the strike for 12:15, just after midnight. The boys on the day shift stayed in the plant until four o’clock. Now both shifts were inside. We were still trying to get the five men reinstated. Again the company refused. So we let the midnight shift come in. Ford had about eighty-nine thousand workers in that plant all at the same time….
The strikers then set about blocking fourteen highways, using cars, trash, trolley polls, and anything they could use to disrupt traffic. They elicited a response from the governor, guaranteeing that the plant wouldn’t be shut down. Ford kept the plant open, but brought in 5,000 black workers to break the strike.
“This was their first chance to work in the industry, and they were fearful of losing their jobs. They weren’t really scabbing. It was just fear. They weren’t doing any work. They were sitting there making all kinds of homemade weapons, short pieces of iron and rubber pipe. They were afraid somebody was gonna come in and get ‘em. But we weren’t trying to get them out. Ford was keeping them in there twenty-four hours a day. They never went home.”
All of this transpired six years after the passage of the Wagner Act, a law set in place to protect the interests of workers’ rights to organize, strike, and resist unfair labour practices in the workplace.
Migrant Camps
Of particular focus in Steinbeck’s novel is the home of these workers: the labour camp. Oftentimes ramshackle, many of these were created without much planning or organization, thrown up and torn down as necessary while workers moved along to new prospects. Oftentimes, they were small, an outcrop of tents around trucks and cars; at other points, crude shacks and lean-to’s fashioned from old sack, cardboard, and scrap metal. Some landowners provided shelter for their workers – whether as a bid to justify low wages, or to prevent mass uprisings, it isn’t clear. Further in the novel, the Joads are employed as strike breakers and provided with a rough house, clearly disused from previous occupants. Even this, though, the family despises: Ruthie makes the pitiful argument that she’d prefer sleeping in their own tent, rather than share the flop houses.
There is one lone example of a camp that is well organized, clean, and fair to it’s occupants – Weedpatch. The family enters by night, and is guided toward a place to set up camp. Weedpatch is a federally-funded camp for migrant workers, established with running water and permanent structures by the Resettlement Administration. The camp is run by elected officials chosen among the residents, whose role it is to establish rules, keep order, and police their individual sanitary units. Outside influence from landowners, police, or even preachers isn’t tolerated. The Joad family, accustomed to much rougher living situations, are stunned to see such a well-run camp. The family is quickly introduced to the women’s committee, who see about ensuring new residents understand the rules of the camp, know how to participate, and are provided with the necessities to care for their families.
Tom Joad strikes out the next morning looking for work laying gas pipelines on a farm, invited by two other workers. When they arrive at the ranch, they ask the owner about Tom working, which begets the a conversation regarding the lowering of their wages. The farmowner, angry about the situation, explains the cause, stemming from the Farmers’ Association:
“Well, I belong to it. We had a meeting last night. Now do you know who runs the Farmers’ Association? I’ll tell you, The Bank of the West. That bank owns most of this valley, and it’s got paper on everything it don’t own. So last night the member from the bank told me, he said, ‘You’re paying thirty ents an hour. You’d better cut it down to twenty-five.’ I said, ‘I’ve got good men. They’re worth thirty.’ And he says, ‘It isn’t that,’ he says, ‘The wage is twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it’ll only cause unrest. And by the way,’ he says, ‘ you going to need the usual amount for a crop loan next year?’”
The forces acting on the worker didn’t end at sundown: pressure was exerted on migrant camps by landowners, who suspected camps like Weedpatch of nursing and supporting pro-communist sympathizers. The collectivization of workers was seen as a legitimate threat to their way of life, and was not solely a regional concern: critics of the federal Resettlement Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and the Farm Security Administration argued that they contributed to socializing the American labourer. Efforts by the FSA to resettle and re-educate farmers en-masse were hamstrung by Congress.
The Grapes of Wrath forces the reader to reckon with these sentiments. In the same conversation with Thomas, the landowner that Joad is talking to about securing work, the labourers are tipped off to a plan to instigate a riot at Weedpatch, supported by the local landowners, as a way of justifying the shutdown of the camp:
“Thomas walked quickly back to the house. The door slammed after him. In a moment he was back, and he carried a newspaper in his hand. ‘Did you see this? Here, I’ll read it: “Citizens, angered at red agitators, burn squatters’ camp…”
...Well, the Association don’t like the government camps. Can’t get a deputy in there. The people make their own laws, I hear, and you can’t arrest a man without a warrant. Now if there was a big fight and maybe shooting – a bunch of deputies could go in and clean out the camp.’
...’Why, for God’s sake? Those folks ain’t bothering nobody.’
‘I’ll tell you why’, Thomas said. ‘Those folks in the camp are getting used to being treated like humans. When they go back to the squatters’ camps they’ll be hard to handle.’
The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and Rex Tugwell
Recognizing the dire situation in the west, the Roosevelt administration set about forming a bureau specifically designed to address the concerns of farmers in US. Established in 1933, and headed by FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, the organization sought to raise the price of grown goods and livestock, providing subsidies and benefit to American farmers. C.B. Baldwin, administrator of the restructured Resettlement Administration, recounts his experience working with Wallace and the AAA during Wallace’s tenure in politics.
“Wallace was actually opposed to crop restriction. Very few people know this. But we had a problem. Hog prices had just gone to hell. What were they – four, five cents a pound? The farmers were starving to death. They were at the mercy of the packers. We tried to reach an agreement, similar to the tobacco deal (an agreement with industry processors to raise the price) – which, despite everything, had worked out fairly well.
They decided to slaughter piggy sows… They decided to pay the farmers to kill them and the little pigs. Lots of ‘em went into fertilizer. This is one of the horribly contradictions we’re still seeing.
They lowered the supply goin’ to market and the prices immediately went up. Then a great cry went up from the press, particularly the Chicago Tribune, about Henry Wallace slaughtering these little pigs. You’d think they were precious babies. The situation was such, you had to take emergency measures. Wallace never liked it.
You had a similar situation on cotton. Prices were down to four cents a pound and the cost of producing was probably ten. So a program was initiated to plow up cotton. A third of the crop, if I remember. Cotton prices went up to ten cents, maybe eleven.”
Administrators of the AAA harboured serious concerns about the welfare of tenant and sharecroppers. Understanding that the landowners bore the largest benefit from government subsidies, the AAA sought to directly share the benefits of the program to the men and women working the field, which was often difficult to do. Baldwin recalls a picket against the Department of Agriculture by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which he acknowledges the legitimacy and necessity of, given the department’s failures to always work for the benefit of the people. Despite their good intentions, the AAA inadvertently affected sharecroppers and tenant farmers negatively, in particular black farmers in the south.
Baldwin also recollects his experiences working with the Rural Rehabilitation Division, a department under the Resettlement Administration run by Rex Tugwell from 1935 – 1937, later run by him.
“The Rural Rehabilitation had to do with buying sub-marginal land. To retire it from cultivation, reforest it and convert it into a state park. Much of the land we were authorized to buy was in the Great Plains area, damaged by dust storms. Tugwell’s idea was: These people should be moved to better land, mot just kicked off bad land.
This is what Rex and I were most interested in. There were about six million farmers in the country. I think we helped over a sixth of the farm families. A million farms. The most exciting part was the resettlement projects.
Tugwell had a passion for athe adjustment of people to the land. But being a good economist, he foresaw what was gonna happen to small farmers, who just couldn’t meet the competition. So we set up a number of co-op farms, about a hundred of ‘em around the country. About twenty thousand families…
I’ll just tell you about one of ‘em. We bought this beautiful delta land in Arkansas for about $100 an acre. It’s worth about $700 now. We set up this little community of five or six thousand acres. We brought in about fifty young families. A carefully selected group of young families…
We built these houses, put in a school, nursery… they had individual garden plots. It was diversified land – livestock, cotton, fruits, vegetables. They were paid so much a month, and at the end of the year, when the crops were in, they’d divide the profits. It has been operating about two years. They were doin’ pretty well…
Will Alexander spent several days on the project visiting with these families. He’d talk to them in the evening, when they were relaxed. They’d say ‘Dr. Alexander, this is wonderful. You know, if we’re able to stay here four, five years, we’ll be able to go out on our own farm’.
It came to us as sort of a shock. See, this hunger for land ownership… Although they were happy and more secure than they’d ever been in their lives, they were lookin’ forward to getting’ out and ownin’ their own land. You have to reckon with this kind of thing.
These projects were all stopped cold, after the death of Roosevelt, all liquidated. Congress saw to it. It’s one of the really sad things. They had all sort of problems, sure – but this certainly would have been an important answer to poverty, as we see it now. Over half the farm families have disappeared. They are contributing to the ghetto problems of the city, black and white.”
Baldwin later worked to employ photographers, such as Dorothea Lange, to photograph the plight of the American migrant. Lange, alongside Jack Delano, Marion Post Wolcott, and many others, worked to represent on film the face of the Depression. The photographs taken by this group were interred in the Library of Congress; 164,000 finished negatives have been made available online for public viewing.
One of the most famous, published in a San Francisco editorial, you have already seen: “Migrant Mother”, by Dorothea Lange.
Epilogue
The accounts of the Joad family, crafted from Steinbeck’s experiences working himself with migrant workers and through his relationship and correspondence with Tom Collins, horrify and stun. The depths of misery that a man or woman can witness, least of all in our own country, are difficult to observe. Terkel, himself a dedicated historian and curator of American memories, similarly refuses to shy away from the harsh realities and experiences of the people; in interviewing Americans, his work not only creates a repository of memory, it legitimizes and lends credence to events and people who’s suffering and struggles were so great. Far from complete, the examples chosen here highlight only a few of the efforts that many Americans made to survive or support themselves and their families, only a few generations ago.
To forget history is not simply to tarnish memory, or to cripple progress: it is the marginalization of so many men and women, whose actions and stories not only inform us of what came before, but inspire us forward in the present towards a better future.
Tom speaks best, in his final chapter; in response to all he has witnessed, he speaks to his mother before leaving her:
“...Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one – an’ then - …. 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...”