Goin’ Right On

It ain’t big enough. There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn’t you go back where you come from?

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a huge book. My edition runs to over 500 pages, but I don’t mean that kind of huge. On one level it’s the story of a journey, an exhausting, heartbreaking exodus undertaken by one family among thousands of others, tenant farmers forced to leave their smallholdings in the Dust Bowl that states like Oklahoma had become in the 1930s. The story of the Joad family is what keeps us turning the pages right to the end. On another level, it’s a furious tirade against the capitalists who profited during the Depression by exploiting the poor: first of all the banks who cause the landowners to send tractors literally to flatten the homesteads, it being decided that bigger would be better – or anyway more profitable. Then there are the little men who swindle the desperate refugees, buying their few possessions at knock-down prices, selling them vehicles for the trek that are barely roadworthy, charging them high prices for food along the way. Finally, the cruellest blow is dealt when these virtually destitute people arrive in California, that promised land where they have been told work and plenty await them, only to learn that the labour market has been so deliberately flooded that they can hardly earn a life-sustaining wage. And what is more, any whiff of workers co-operating to strike for better pay provokes a vicious reaction from the authorities. Steinbeck pulls no punches and is angry with almost everybody. So, a political tract dressed up as fiction, or a gripping novel with some powerful messages? Either way, you cannot fail to be enthralled, appalled, sobered and moved. And, as the quotation I opened with shows, this is in so many ways a story for our times. Whole families uprooted, forsaking their homes and way of life, finding at best a cool welcome in the places where they seek sanctuary: this is something we can recognize. The Joad family, by no means saints (Tom, the central character, has just been released from jail after serving a sentence for a homicide he doesn’t regret), are tough tenant farmers who have always lived on the same patch of land. They are not afraid of hard work; they just want to get by. But they can’t make the land pay. The poor farming practices of the past have degraded the land, erosion has set in, and a prolonged drought seems to cap it all. The bank – on ‘orders from the east’ – has decided they must go. With the Depression causing widespread unemployment and suffering, the Joads are bewildered and helpless, unsure who to blame. ‘Where does it stop? Who can we shoot?’ They have to make painful decisions about what to take and what to leave – ‘How will we know it’s us without our past?’ – and pare their possessions down to scant essentials. The extended family of three generations number thirteen when they set off, including a friend Tom has met on his way home from jail. As the novel progresses they are picked off one by one in different ways, the group being reduced to just six at the end. Ma, the ‘citadel of the family’, has done her best to keep her family together, saying at the start, ‘What we got lef’ in the worl’? Nothin’ but us. Nothin’ but the folks . . . all we got is the family unbroken,’ so for her the disintegration of the family unit is the bitterest tragedy of all. For Pa, the greatest loss is the land; even at the end, months later, he is grieving for his homestead.

I ain’t no good any more. Spen’ all my time a-thinkin’ how it use’ ta be. Spen’ all my time thinkin’ of home, an’ I ain’t gonna see it no more . . . thinkin’ the willow’s los’ its leaves now. Sometimes figgerin’ to mend that hole in the south fence.

Meanwhile their journey westwards is gruelling, all of them piled high on a truck with their few possessions, unloading mat tresses each night to camp by the roadside, light a fire and eat their dwindling supply of salt pork. Worry about the roadworthiness of the truck and the cost of new tyres is constant: ‘the men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened apprehensively. How far between towns? It is a terror between towns.’ As they travel the Joads encounter cynicism and prejudice but kindness too, and they befriend a family in difficulties with whom they travel for a while. Steinbeck is always keen to show that if people in need co-operate and help each other, lives are made better.

It might be that one family camped near a spring, and another camped for the spring and for company, and a third because two families had pioneered the place and found it good. And when the sun went down, perhaps twenty families and twenty cars were there. In the evening a strange thing happened: the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.

But as they travel, they change. They become wary and anxious, hearing enough stories about the difficulties awaiting them in California to dent their earlier confidence. Connie, the son-in-law, wants nothing more to do with farming, and Al, Tom’s younger brother, wants to be a garage mechanic. Ma is beginning to worry about the fragmentation of the family. The two smaller children run wild, Uncle John yearns to go on a drinking binge and Tom’s elder brother Noah, who has only ever had a fragile understanding of life, wanders off down a river, declaring he will travel no further. Finally the Joads reach California, and Steinbeck describes movingly how these farming people, the ‘Okies’ who had always been close to their land, were struck not only by the beauty and abundance but also by the impersonality of the farming; here farming is business and owners do not get their hands dirty. They are also shocked at the wastefulness:

And a homeless hungry man, driving the roads with his wife beside him and his thin children in the back seat, could look at the fallow fields which might produce food but not profit, and that man could know how a fallow field is a sin and the unused land a crime against the thin children.

And worse, much worse, is the way small farms are put out of business by big canneries paying such low prices for the produce that it becomes uneconomic to harvest it. Thus whole crops are left to rot and, in order to stop the poor scavenging this surplus, kerosene is sprayed on oranges, potatoes are dumped in rivers, slaughtered pigs are buried. Steinbeck intersperses the chapters telling the Joads’ story with other, more general chapters describing the political background, the social changes, the climate, the scenery. His range is huge and, while he rages against injustice, he is even-handed when it comes to the problems faced by the ‘little fella’, the tractor-driver crushing the farm shacks or the farmer forced by his association to lower wages. These men also have families to support. The plight of the children is ever-present. If it’s not pellagra or rickets, it’s starvation. ‘A kid starves quick. Two-three days for a kid.’ Surprisingly, there are encouraging moments. Kind people are met along the way, good deeds done, and the Joads find a camp with plumbing. Being able to wash revives dignity and self-respect, and Ma can say, ‘Why, I feel like people again.’ With some food on credit from the camp shop (never charity, that would bring shame) and the kindness shown them by the camp manager, it does not take much to restore a little happiness. This particular camp has its own jurisdiction, and Steinbeck again shows how a community that co-operates to look after its own brings out the best in people; but the authorities fear the ‘reds’ and organized resistance, so they are continually trying to stir up trouble which might justify clearing the place out or even burning it down. They know that when people unite and act together, that is when they are strong. The need for work forces the Joads to move on, and although it might seem that things can get no worse, they definitely do. Tom makes a serious mistake and has to go into hiding, eventually striking out alone with no idea if he will see his family again. The pregnant daughter Rosasharn is, like them all, desperately undernourished; the youngest child is having fits. Torrential rains flood out the camps. But amid all these disasters, the human spirit (often embodied by Ma) is somehow indomitable. She can say, when everyone around her despairs, ‘We ain’t gonna die out. People is goin’ on – changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.’ She too knows that strength lies in co-operation: ‘If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.’ And in the unforgettable scene which concludes the book we see humanity at its most desperate and pitiable and yet at the same time its most triumphant. Steinbeck’s writing powerfully evokes not only some entirely believable characters but also the desiccated farmland of Oklahoma, the terrifying desert of the Texas Panhandle, the gorgeous beauty of California. And he excels at summoning up smaller, quieter scenes, like that of the deserted homestead:

On a night the wind loosened a shingle and flipped it to the ground. The next wind pried into the hole where the shingle had been, lifted off three, and the next, a dozen. The midday sun burned through the hole and threw a glaring spot on the floor. The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but they did not mew at the doorstep any more. They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice. And on windy nights the doors banged, and the ragged curtains fluttered in the broken windows.

There will be many, today, wondering like Pa if the willow has lost its leaves.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 90 © Posy Fallowfield 2026