John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath Sep 20, 2018

First Edition cover, 1939

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family, the Joads, caught in a storm of dust, a country reeling from the Great Depression of the economy, and the violence of the 1930s. It is about a family being forced off the land and onto the road in one of the largest migrations in American history. It is a story that touched such a nerve in America that many forgot that the Joads were only make-believe, a fictional family from the mind of a 36-year old novelist, John Steinbeck. From their harrowing journey West to the novel’s disquieting ending The Grapes of Wrath remains one of the most loved (and hated) novels of the 20th century. [narration taken from a video]

The Dust itself was the combined result of prolonged drought and faulty farm practices, exacerbated by the storms and tornadoes that are common in the mid-West that carry away the topsoil. The Great Depression of 1929 caused such a huge hit to the economy of America (a quarter of the working population was thrown out of work) that it took almost 12 years and the onset of WWII production (financed by Government borrowing) and the enormous war-time production of goods and services, before the economy could be restored to full employment and a normal level of consumption. During that time people who were rendered jobless tried to find work, but they received only subsistence wages at best. Often they had to depend on soup kitchens for relief from hunger. The large-scale poverty has been recorded unsparingly by wonderful photographers like Dorothea Lange.

Small time farmers who until then were able to make a living off the land with agriculture and farm animals suddenly found themselves ruined by crop failure and insufficient feed or water for their animals. They had nowhere to go for relief and found themselves enticed by handbills promising work as fruit and cotton-pickers in California, nearly 2,000 miles ways. Gathering a few belongings and selling off their redundant farm equipment, they embarked on the long journey West on Route 66, the mother road, in cars that were often in poor condition, jalopies really. One such is the Hudson model 1926 in which the Joads traveled:

The 1926 Hudson used in the film produced by Darryl F. Zanuck in 1940

For those who know cars this was the wrong model to employ in the novel, for the Hudson was not a car for the masses, but rather an upper-class people’s car.

What makes the novel poignant is that the promised hope of living-wage jobs and permanent homes in California never materialised for the Joads. Steinbeck attributes this directly to the greed of the orchard owners and the landed class that owned large cotton fields and fruit farms. They preyed on the masses of cheap labour available, competing for the limited seasonal jobs, and succeeded in beating down wages to bare subsistence levels. Steinbeck’s exposure of the union-bashing labour practices of the large agribusinesses was the reason he encountered hate after releasing the novel in 1939. He had what for an author is the distinct honour of having his novel banned and burned in his native town in California, Salinas.

The National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA

Today the Steinbeck Museum is the chief attraction of Salinas and an engine of tourism. The Grapes of Wrath was the kind of novel an activist might write, although Steinbeck was avowedly not a public person. His novel did have the effect, particularly when it was followed by John Ford’s film (produced by Darryl F. Zanuck), of being noticed by leading people like Eleanor Roosevelt who came to California and saw at first hand what Steinbeck described. Through her work the politics of the country changed and Congress took action to ameliorate conditions in the camps and legislate minimum wages. 

Steinbeck books - 19 of the 27 he wrote greet the visitor on entry

Donald Sutherland narrates a most interesting introduction to the novel in a Youtube video that I recommend highly.

The Joad fambly heads West for a supposed paradise

A picture of the group at the end of the reading is below. Two of the readers, Pamela and Shoba, had to leave early.

(standing) Geetha, Zakia, Gopa, Saras, Devika, KumKum, Priya
(sitting) Joe, Hemjit, Thommo

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – Full Account and Record of the Reading on Sep 20, 2018

John Steinbeck in 1940

The next reading will be on Oct 15 – Poets in Translation. Three of readers (Devika, Joe, Kavita) will celebrate their birthday in October.

It would be good if readers selected the novels for next year’s reading by then. Some have already done so. Please make sure an edition is available at moderate cost, and the length should preferably not exceed 250K words. Anna Karenina would be lovely to read but it is 350K words long, and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy would take the prolixity prize at 600K words (War and Peace is only a trifle less). The assignment for 2019 is as follows:

Jan — Saras, Devika 

Mar — Kavita, Preeti, Geetha 

May — Thommo, Priya 

Jul — Sunil, Zakia, Shoba 

Sep — Hemjit, Pamela, Gopa

Nov — Joe, KumKum

Introduction to the Novel

When Priya went for a Creative Writing Course in 2014 conducted by East Anglia University in Kolkata, she was asked by one of the team leaders whether she had read The Grapes of Wrath. It was highly recommended. That was what set Priya on her way to reading and appreciating this novel of 181,000 words, written in 3 months, according to a diary Steinbeck kept. 

The Dust Bowl of the central plains in the mid thirties

But though it was short in the writing it was long in the planning and preparation. In 1937, Mr. Bristol, a photographer for Life magazine, called up Steinbeck after reading his novel In Dubious Battle. This 1936 novel set in the California apple country, portrays a strike by migrant workers and the attempts by labour unions to organise, and lead the striking fruit pickers. The two men spent many weekends over two months traveling together in the winter of 1937-38. The novelist cultivated excellent rapport with the people. But for some reason, Steinbeck withdrew from the project before it was done and disavowed further connection with it.

This famous archival photo by Dorothea Lange shows migrant worker Florence Thompson with her children in 1936

Photograph of migrating families camping by the road on their way to California, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1937

It was this experience that formed the seminal inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath. In 1939, the novel was published. According to writers Ken Conner and Debra Heimerdinger, “There is little doubt that Steinbeck based the central characters in his masterpiece on the farm workers he and Bristol had encountered in Visalia during the winter of 1937-38.” The novel, was written in 100 days in a fury of dedicated writing at the rate of 10,000 words a week; but it drew on years of other work and an agonised sense of duty to migrant farm workers. “I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this,” said Steinbeck, about the suffering caused to those in search of work at any wage to feed their families, after having abandoned their farms in the dust bowls of Kansas. He described people who had lost their homes, their livelihoods, their sense of worth. “Dignity is all gone,” he wrote, “and spirit has turned to sullen anger before it dies.” 

Some people who read the book, particularly the big growers in the California fruit and wine orchards, considered it anti-capitalistic, and the book was banned and burned in Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, CA. However, it sold 428,900 hardcover copies in the first year at $2.75 a copy, a stiff price in those days (roughly equivalent to $48 in 2018).  Steinbeck was not comfortable with the fame the novel brought him; a year and a half later he threw a party to celebrate, after it had fallen off the best seller charts. It has sold 14m copies over the past 75 years, and is still selling well, thanks to the fact that it is required reading in many literature courses world-wide.

The Grapes of Wrath publication date of April 14, 1939, marked the fourth anniversary of ‘Black Sunday,’ the most devastating of all Dust Bowl storms

The novel starts with the searing experience of the dust storms that blew up in the thirties in central plains of the United States, reducing the area to uncultivable land, over a wide area called The Dust Bowl:

“The wind grew stronger, whisked under stones, carried up straws and old leaves, and even little clods, marking its course as it sailed across the fields.  The air and the sky darkened and through them the sun shone redly, and there was a raw sting in the air.  During a night the wind raced faster over the land, dug cunningly among the rootlets of the corn, and the corn fought the wind with its weakened leaves until the roots were freed by the prying wind and then each stalk settled wearily sideways toward the earth and pointed the direction of the wind.

The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as that day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.”

A dust storm

One of the salutary effects of this novel was that Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went to visit the migrant camps. She defended Steinbeck’s portrayal as accurate. Congressional hearings were held on the conditions of migrant workers, and labor laws were changed. The US Senate held that, if anything, the novelist had underestimated the violation of human rights on the west coast. 

The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, and was made into a film by Darryl F. Zanuck starring Henry Fonda, and directed by John Ford. It was largely for this novel’s fame that Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize, but it was very late in his life in 1962, by which time tastes in writing had changed. The citation read: “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.”

Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath with Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) and Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon)

The choice, however, was heavily criticised, and described as “one of the Academy's biggest mistakes” in one Swedish newspaper. The New York Times (in the person of professor and critic Arthur Mizener) asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose “limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing”, adding: “we think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age.”

Steinbeck himself, when asked if he deserved the Nobel, replied: “Frankly, no.”

John Steinbeck - photo from the Nobel archives - Born-27 February 1902, Salinas, CA, USA  Died-20 December 1968, New York, NY, USA

At this point The Rescue of John Steinbeck published in the New York Review of Books on April 17, 2008 would make rewarding reading.

Our reader, Thommo, narrates that when the film was screened in the Soviet Union, Stalin at first praised the movie, viewing it favourably for its anti-capitalistic theme. After a couple of months, however, Stalin banned it, not because it contained any obscenity, but because it showed poor folk migrating across the country, driving their own cars. Stalin did not want the Soviet people to see that even poor Americans owned cars, rickety jalopies though they might be. Thommo was to deliver a homily on The Christian Response to Poverty  at the CSI Emmanuel Church, the following Sunday in which he would take this as an illustration and publicise the Kochi Reading Group. Thank you, Thommo!

The title for the novel was chosen by Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol. It is a reference to the lyrics of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward Howe, often sung on national occasions in America:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Thommo said the title phrase may be further traced back to Proverbs in the Bible.

Steinbeck scholar John Timmerman sums up the book's influence: “The Grapes of Wrath may well be the most thoroughly discussed novel – in criticism, reviews, and college classrooms – of 20th century American literature.” The ending was controversial: Rosasharn offers her lactating breast to an old-timer who is dying of starvation. This is a note of hope, because Rosasharn, who has just endured the birth of a still-born child, finds in herself the strength to put aside her own feelings in order to save the life of a total stranger.

A hack called Ruth Comfort Mitchell attempted to refute the novel and justify California’s treatment of immigrant workers, in a now-forgotten book, Of Human Kindness. However, Pearl Buck, author of The Good Earth, supported Steinbeck.

1. Priya

Priya’s reading was about the dumping of agricultural produce to keep prices high at a time when so many suffered from hunger. Thommo mentioned that the tune of the The Battle Hymn of the Republic,  was the same as John Brown’s Body, a marching song about the abolitionist John Brown. KumKum said of the title that she read it was originally taken from the Bible Book of Revelation passage 14:19-20, which reads, “So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.”

Zakia & Priya sheathed in their flowery designer kameez

Thommo mentioned that the next verse of the hymn is

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

which reminds one of the Weedpatch camp in which the Joads lived for a while, a camp that seemed like an oasis of friendly warmth in an otherwise unwelcoming state:

“Got nice toilets an' baths, an' you kin wash clothes in a tub, an' they's water right handy, good drinkin' water; an' nights the folks play music an' Sat'dy night they give a dance. Oh, you never seen anything so nice. Got a place for kids to play, an' them toilets with paper. Pull down a little jigger an' the water comes right in the toilet, an' they ain't no cops let to come look in your tent any time they want, an' the fella runs the camp is so polite, comes a-visitin' an' talks an' ain't high an' mighty. I wisht we could go live there again.”

Jim Casy’s character was actually that of a real person whom Steinbeck came across in the same camp which he visited earlier with Bristol, the Life magazine journalist, said Thommo.

2. KumKum

KumKum said she chose her passage for its poetic description of the productive agriculture of California. It begins with an invocation of spring: 

“The spring is beautiful in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks.” 

Then Steinbeck goes on to detail the painstaking work done by agricultural scientists in developing the plant breeds fit for the climate and the soil. California produces many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts in quantities unmatched elsewhere in America: grapes, almonds, strawberries, oranges and walnuts. California produces almost all of the country's almonds, apricots, dates, figs, kiwi fruit, nectarines, olives, pistachios, prunes, and walnuts. It leads in the production of avocados, grapes, lemons, melons, peaches, plums, and strawberries. Gilroy is well known for its garlic crop and for the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, featuring various garlicky foods such as garlic ice cream, leading to the city's nickname as the “Garlic Capital of the World.”

As a point of interest Vikram Seth’s magnificent novel in verse, The Golden Gate, is set in the central fruit valley of California, at about the time it was busily metamorphosing into Silicon Valley. It has much detail about viniculture. I cannot resist quoting sonnet 12.5 from the novel, a sumptuous description, which may serve as a companion piece to this reading from Steinbeck’s novel:

It’s spring! Melodious and fragrant

Pear blossoms bloom and blanch the trees,

While pink and ravishing and fragrant

Qunice burst in shameless colonies

On woody bushes, and the slender

Yellow oxalis, brief and tender,

Brilliant as mustard, sheets the ground,

And blue jays croak, and all around

Iris and daffodil are sprouting

With such assurance that the shy

Grape hyacinth escapes the eye,

And spathes of Easter lilies, flouting

Nomenclature, now effloresce

In white and Lenten loveliness.

3. Pamela 

Pamela read a short passage first, in which Al Joad ruminates about getting drunk and having a girl to talk to. He is the car mechanic of the family, and as a teenager he likes to ‘tomcat’ which means he is sexually active with girls. At first he has no intention of getting married but by the end of the novel he is engaged to a girl who lives in the same abandoned boxcar (covered goods wagon).

In the second passage a preacher talks credulous poor folk into grovelling on the ground and crying out that they’ve been saved after dunking them in water for baptismal salvation, symbolic of a new birth. Steinbeck, no believer himself, was demonstrating how preachers could have power over simple folk then, even as they do now, with their Hallelujahs, Amens, and upraised arms invoking the blessings of God with one hand, while handing out the collection platter with the other. People were so full of despair. Hemjit noted Casy the preacher is always reducing things to sin, not excluding his own behaviour.

4. Hemjit

The passage Hemjit read contrasts the inanimate efficiency of machines (a tractor, for instance) with the vitality of living breathing things (men, horses). There is a similar passage in Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, heralding the arrival of steam threshing machines in the Wessex countryside:

“ … here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet [a place the Bible describes, where worshipers engaged in the human sacrifice of children to the pagan gods Moloch and Baal], who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master.”

5. Zakia

The passage is abstract, hinting at the deeper causes of revolutionary changes that occur, stemming from the urge of Man “to build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam…”. 

Thommo said he too had chosen this passage. Zakia thought these reflections in the novel were beautiful, the whole of chapter 14 in fact. Reference was made to the allegorical nature of the Turtle Walk in chapter 3. The animal carries his house on his back, which is like the Joads when they set out, carrying all their domestic assets in their Hudson, with its top sawed off to accommodate their itinerant dwelling. There are other allegories: the migration westward is like the Exodus in the Bible of the twelve tribes of Israel; the journey of the Joads starts with twelve persons too.

Tom Joad and siblings Ruthie and Winfield in the 1940 movie 

6. Saras

Saras chose the slowest chapter of the book, chapter 3 which devotes 636 words to the peregrination of a turtle. She said the description succeeds in involving the reader in the entire walk and the perils as the turtle negotiates the road and the ditches en route. 

KumKum called such passages ‘intercalary’ as her professor once told her, although Joe said it should be intercalatory, from its Latin derivation, but the former is more common. It means a passage inserted at intervals between the pages of a longer composition, for relief, contrast, or commentary. 

KumKum said the book she liked most by Steinbeck was Of Mice and Men, a novella about George Milton (intelligent but uneducated) and Lennie Small (a simpleton, but very strong physically), two displaced migrant ranch workers, who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States. The title is taken from Robert Burns' poem To a Mouse, where the oft-quoted phrase occurs: “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley.” Gang aft agley = Often go awry (Scots.)

Why did the turtle cross the road? Read on to the end for the answer.

7. Thommo

The passage chosen was from chapter 5  having to do with the tractor driver laying waste farm houses; he is only concerned with getting his three dollars a day for  the work. A tenant farmer objects, “But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?”

The driver replies, “Can't think of that. Got to think of my own kids. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day. Times are changing, mister …”

8. Devika

Devika read from chapter 15 in which migrants travel on Route 66, the arterial road West (the mother road as it is called) in caravans of cars, stopping at night in makeshift camps by the road. It offers the instructive insight that those who have little are willing to share their little. 

Thommo said it was like a hundred years before when Americans moved west in wagon trains. The United States government promised free land at that time to anyone who worked hard to make a homestead by farming the land. Families usually traveled in covered wagons pulled by horses or oxen. Each wagon held one family and all of their belongings. Groups from the same hometown traveled together in wagon trains and formed a circle at night for protection. 

Route 66, the arterial road West, the mother road as it is called

The Conestoga Wagon was the new technology that allowed superior locomotion west. Conestoga wagons were large, sturdy wagons with high sides. Their strong, broad wheels made them capable of crossing rutted roads, muddy flats, and the non-roads of the prairie. An unusual feature was a curved floor, designed to reduce load shifting – and Conestogas were capable of loads up to six tons! The Conestoga carried enough goods for a large family at a fair rate of travel. They were usually pulled by six horses. 

The Conestoga Wagon

Pioneers moving West in wagon trains

Thommo referred to a Woody Guthrie song. Perhaps it is this, the Ballad of Tom Joad Part 1, and Part 2. You can read the Lyrics which Woody wrote in a single night at a typewriter in New York fuelled, by a half gallon of wine, after watching the 1940 Darryl F. Zanuck movie directed by John Ford.

Rose of Sharon is the name of a flower; most commonly it is taken to refer to a species of hibiscus called Hibiscus syriacus (see below):

Hibiscus syriacus

But other flowers have been ascribed to this name, including roses.

The name first appears in Hebrew in the Song of Songs of Solomon, 2:1, where the speaker (the beloved) says “I am the rose of Sharon, a rose of the valley.” It is a beautiful section of the Hebrew Tanakh in which appear many lovelorn words, including this phrase from 2:16 that is often engraved on the rings of a married couple:

My beloved is mine, and I am his. 

My Beloved is Mine and I am His (Hers) - English Posy Ring in Sterling Silver

9. Joe

Joe & Thommo - Photo credit, Priya

Ma Joad listens to Tom Joad’s words before going away

Joe chose a passage from the end, chapter 28, in which Ma Joad takes leave of Tom who has to get away from the law. He makes the famous farewell prophecy: “I’ll be ever'where—Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.” It’s a striking scene in the 1940 film, and the black and white shot in subdued chiaroscuro of Henry Fonda’s face testifies to the eloquence of the novel:

There’s also a bit of philosophy in the final conversation with Ma Joad that Tom ascribes to the preacher, Casy:

“Guess who I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember—all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn' think I was even listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone.”

It echoes John Donne’s well-known Meditation XVII:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 

own were; any man's death diminishes me, 

because I am involved in mankind. 

And therefore never send to know for whom 

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

10. Shoba

It was the passage from chapter 22 where Granma dies. Al Joad says matter of factly: “Well, she was ol'. Guess her time was up, ever'body got to die.” The novelist has decided to kill off the old folk before the Joad fambly gets to California where the real trials are set to begin. Even the young ‘uns are going to find it hard, and pregnant Rosasharn will come to grief when her time approaches.

11. Gopa 

Gopa’s reading was from chapter 13 as Granpa dies and they bury him by the roadside with a message in a bottle so that nobody would suspect foul play in future if the body were discovered. They have no paper, but a woman at their temporary halt tears a flyleaf out of her Bible and they scratch a note: “This here is William James Joad, dyed of a stroke, old old man. His fokes bured him becaws they got no money to pay for funerls. Nobody kilt him. Jus a stroke and he dyed.”

Ma wants a verse that sounds religious to go with it, and scanning the Bible, Tom comes up with : ‘Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.’  Ma rinsed and wiped a fruit jar and Tom screwed the lid down tight on this message and they buried it with the corpse. Then they moved on from the roadside burial to the hoped-for Eden of California.

12. Geetha

Geetha & Pamela

In her passage at the end of chapter 8 Geetha read about the preacher Casy who comes up with an original impromptu Grace at the last meal before setting out for California. Granma wanted a grace to be said when she learns Tom has got a preacher in their midst. Casy, the preacher, is nervous and says, “I got to tell you, I ain't a preacher no more. If me jus' bein' glad to be here an' bein' thankful for people that's kind and generous, if that's enough—why, I'll say that kinda grace. But I ain't a preacher no more.”

Casy continues: “Nighttime I'd lay on my back an' look up at the stars; morning I'd set an' watch the sun come up; midday I'd look out from a hill at the rollin' dry country; evenin' I'd foller the sun down. Sometimes I'd pray like I always done. On'y I couldn' figure what I was prayin' to or for. There was the hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing was holy.”

“Hallelujah,” said Granma, and she rocked a little, back and forth, trying to catch hold of an ecstasy.

He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the Amen signal. “I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all.” The heads stayed down. The preacher looked around. “I’ve got your breakfast cold," he said; and then he remembered. “Amen,” he said, and all the heads rose up.

“A—men,” said Granma, and she fell to her breakfast.”

So that was the holy meal before they set out, full of hope for the promised land, California, and a very authentic grace it was that Casy said. This was the route they would take:

The Joads’ Journey map - click to enlarge

Turtle Answer: To get to the ''Shell'' station!

Readings 

1. Priya Ch 25 - the forced dumping of food and fruit to keep prices up artificially 

Then the grapes—we can't make good wine. People can't buy good wine. Rip the grapes from the vines, good grapes, rotten grapes, wasp-stung grapes. Press stems, press dirt and rot.

But there's mildew and formic acid in the vats.

Add sulphur and tannic acid.

The smell from the ferment is not the rich odor of wine, but the smell of decay and chemicals.

Oh, well. It has alcohol in it, anyway. They can get drunk.

The little farmers watched debt creep up on them like the tide. They sprayed the trees and sold no crop, they pruned and grafted and could not pick the crop. And the men of knowledge have worked, have considered, and the fruit is rotting on the ground, and the decaying mash in the wine vat is poisoning the air. And taste the wine—no grape flavor at all, just sulphur and tannic acid and alcohol.

This little orchard will be a part of a great holding next year, for the debt will have choked the owner.

This vineyard will belong to the bank. Only the great owners can survive, for they own the canneries, too. And four pears peeled and cut in half, cooked and canned, still cost fifteen cents. And the canned pears do not spoil. They will last for years.

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, 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 certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

2. KumKum Ch 25 - All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy (604 words)

THE SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL in California. Valleys in which the fruit blossoms are fragrant pink and white waters in a shallow sea. Then the first tendrils of the grapes swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks. The full green hills are round and soft as breasts. And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.

And then the leaves break out on the trees, and the petals drop from the fruit trees and carpet the earth with pink and white. The centers of the blossoms swell and grow and color: cherries and apples, peaches and pears, figs which close the flower in the fruit. All California quickens with produce, and the fruit grows heavy, and the limbs bend gradually under the fruit so that little crutches must be placed under them to support the weight.

Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge, and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insects, the rusts, the blights. These men work carefully and endlessly to perfect the seed, the roots. And there are the men of chemistry who spray the trees against pests, who sulphur the grapes, who cut out disease and rots, mildews and sicknesses. Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of knowledge. The men who graft the young trees, the little vines, are the cleverest of all, for theirs is a surgeon's job, as tender and delicate; and these men must have surgeons' hands and surgeons' hearts to slit the bark, to place the grafts, to bind the wounds and cover them from the air. These are great men.

Along the rows, the cultivators move, tearing the spring grass and turning it under to make a fertile earth, breaking the ground to hold the water up near the surface, ridging the ground in little pools for the irrigation, destroying the weed roots that may drink the water away from the trees.

And all the time the fruit swells and the flowers break out in long clusters on the vines. And in the growing year the warmth grows and the leaves turn dark green. The prunes lengthen like little green bird's eggs, and the limbs sag down against the crutches under the weight. And the hard little pears take shape, and the beginning of the fuzz comes out on the peaches. Grape blossoms shed their tiny petals and the hard little beads become green buttons, and the buttons grow heavy. The men who work in the fields, the owners of the little orchards, watch and calculate. The year is heavy with produce. And the men are proud, for of their knowledge they can make the year heavy. They have transformed the world with their knowledge. The short, lean wheat has been made big and productive. Little sour apples have grown large and sweet, and that old grape that grew among the trees and fed the birds its tiny fruit has mothered a thousand varieties, red and black, green and pale pink, purple and yellow; and each variety with its own flavor. The men who work in the experimental farms have made new fruits: nectarines and forty kinds of plums, walnuts with paper shells. And always they work, selecting, grafting, changing, driving themselves, driving the earth to produce.

3. Pamela Ch 23 - Al Joad ruminates about getting drunk and having a girl to talk to; and how a preacher talks credulous poor folk into grovelling on the ground and crying out they’ve been saved

(1) And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth. Then there was no loneliness, for a man could people his brain with friends, and he could find his enemies and destroy them. Sitting in a ditch, the earth grew soft under him. Failure dulled and the future was no threat. And hunger did not skulk about, but the world was soft and easy, and a man could reach the place he started for. The stars came down wonderfully close and the sky was soft. Death was a friend, and sleep was death's brother. The old times came back—a girl with pretty feet, who danced one time at home—a horse—a long time ago. A horse and a saddle. And the leather was carved. When was that? Ought to find a girl to talk to. That's nice. Might lay with her, too. But warm here. And the stars down so close, and sadness and pleasure so close together, really the same thing. Like to stay drunk all the time. Who says it's bad? Who dares to say it's bad? Preachers—but they got their own kinda drunkenness. Thin, barren women, but they're too miserable to know. Reformers—but they don't hit deep enough into living to know. No—the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy—everything, even me.

(2) Beside an irrigation ditch a preacher labored and the people cried. And the preacher paced like a tiger, whipping the people with his voice, and they groveled and whined on the ground. He calculated them, gauged them, played on them, and when they were all squirming on the ground he stooped down and of his great strength he picked each one up in his arms and shouted. Take 'em, Christ! and threw each one in the water. And when they were all in, waist deep in the water, and looking with frightened eyes at the master, he knelt down on the bank and he prayed for them; and he prayed that all men and women might grovel and whine on the ground. Men and women, dripping, clothes sticking tight, watched; then gurgling and sloshing in their shoes they walked back to the camp, to the tents, and they talked softly in wonder:

We been saved, they said. We're washed white as snow. We won't never sin again.

And the children, frightened and wet, whispered together:

We been saved. We won't sin no more.

Wisht I knowed what all the sins was, so I could do 'em.

THE MIGRANT PEOPLE looked humbly for pleasure on the roads.

4. Hemjit Ch 11 - Contrasts the inanimate efficiency of machines (tractor) with the vitality of living breathing things (men, horses)

THE HOUSES WERE LEFT vacant on the land, and the land was vacant because of this. Only the tractor sheds of corrugated iron, silver and gleaming, were alive; and they were alive with metal and gasoline and oil, the disks of the plows shining. The tractors had lights shining, for there is no day and night for a tractor and the disks turn the earth in the darkness and they glitter in the daylight. And when a horse stops work and goes into the barn there is a life and a vitality left, there is a breathing and a warmth, and the feet shift on the straw, and the jaws clamp on the hay, and the ears and the eyes are alive. There is a warmth of life in the barn, and the heat and smell of life. But when the motor of a tractor stops, it is as dead as the ore it came from. The heat goes out of it like the living heat that leaves a corpse. Then the corrugated iron doors are closed and the tractor man drives home to town, perhaps twenty miles away, and he need not come back for weeks or months, for the tractor is dead. And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.

5. Zakia Ch 14 - An abstract passage hinting at the deeper causes of revolutionary changes that occur

THE WESTERN LAND, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simple—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

6. Saras Ch 3 - The turtle walk

The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet. And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along. The barley beards slid off his shell, and the clover burrs fell on him and rolled to the ground. His horny beak was partly open, and his fierce, humorous eyes, under brows like fingernails, stared straight ahead. He came over the grass leaving a beaten trail behind him, and the hill, which was the highway embankment, reared up ahead of him. For a moment he stopped, his head held high. He blinked and looked up and down. At last he started to climb the embankment. Front clawed feet reached forward but did not touch. The hind feet kicked his shell along, and it scraped on the grass, and on the gravel. As the embankment grew steeper and steeper, the more frantic were the efforts of the land turtle. Pushing hind legs strained and slipped, boosting the shell along, and the horny head protruded as far as the neck could stretch. Little by little the shell slid up the embankment until at last a parapet cut straight across its line of march, the shoulder of the road, a concrete wall four inches high. As though they worked independently the hind legs pushed the shell against the wall. The head upraised and peered over the wall to the broad smooth plain of cement. Now the hands, braced on top of the wall, strained and lifted, and the shell came slowly up and rested its front end on the wall. For a moment the turtle rested. A red ant ran into the shell, into the soft skin inside the shell, and suddenly head and legs snapped in, and the armored tail clamped in sideways. The red ant was crushed between body and legs. And one head of wild oats was clamped into the shell by a front leg. For a long moment the turtle lay still, and then the neck crept out and the old humorous frowning eyes looked about and the legs and tail came out. The back legs went to work, straining like elephant legs, and the shell tipped to an angle so that the front legs could not reach the level cement plain. But higher and higher the hind legs boosted it, until at last the center of balance was reached, the front tipped down, the front legs scratched at the pavement, and it was up. But the head of wild oats was held by its stem around the front legs.

7. Thommo end of Ch 5 - The tractor driver is only concerned with getting his three dollars a day

The exhaust of the tractor puttered on, for fuel is so cheap it is more efficient to leave the engine running than to heat the Diesel nose for a new start. Curious children crowded close, ragged children who ate their fried dough as they watched. They watched hungrily the unwrapping of the sandwiches, and their hunger-sharpened noses smelled the pickle, cheese, and Spam. They didn't speak to the driver. They watched his hand as it carried food to his mouth. They did not watch him chewing; their eyes followed the hand that held the sandwich. After a while the tenant who could not leave the place came out and squatted in the shade beside the tractor.

"Why, you're Joe Davis's boy!"

"Sure," the driver said.

"Well, what you doing this kind of work for—against your own people?"

"Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner—and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day."

"That's right," the tenant said. "But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go out and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?"

And the driver said, "Can't think of that. Got to think of my own kids. Three dollars a day, and it comes every day. Times are changing, mister, don't you know? Can't make a living on the land unless you've got two, five, ten thousand acres and a tractor. Crop land isn't for little guys like us any more. You don't kick up a howl because you can't make Fords, or because you're not the telephone company. Well, crops are like that now. Nothing to do about it. You try to get three dollars a day someplace. That's the only way."

8. Devika Ch 15 - Migrants travelled in cars and stopped in makeshift camps at night by the road 

THE CARS OF THE migrant people crawled out of the side roads onto the great cross-country highway, and they took the migrant way to the West. In the daylight they scuttled like bugs to the westward; and as the dark caught them, they clustered like bugs near to shelter and to water. And because they were lonely and perplexed, because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country. Thus 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. And it might be that a sick child threw despair into the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people; that a birth there in a tent kept a hundred people quiet and awestruck through the night and filled a hundred people with the birth-joy in the morning. A family which the night before had been lost and fearful might search its goods to find a present for a new baby. In the evening, sitting about the fires, the twenty were one. They grew to be units of the camps, units of the evenings and the nights. A guitar unwrapped from a blanket and tuned—and the songs, which were all of the people, were sung in the nights. Men sang the words, and women hummed the tunes.

9. Joe Ch 28 - Ma takes leave of Tom - I'll be ever'where—Wherever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there (652 words)

She crawled close to his voice. "I wanta touch ya again, Tom. It's like I'm blin', it's so dark. I wanta remember, even if it's on'y my fingers that remember. You got to go away, Tom."

"Yeah! I knowed it from the start."

"We made purty good," she said. "I been squirrelin' money away. Hol' out your han', Tom. I got seven dollars here."

"I ain't gonna take ya money," he said. "I'll get 'long all right."

"Hol' out ya han', Tom. I ain't gonna sleep none if you got no money. Maybe you got to take a bus, or somepin. I want you should go a long ways off, three-four hunderd miles."

"I ain't gonna take it."

"Tom," she said sternly. "You take this money. You hear me? You got no right to cause me pain."

"You ain't playin' fair," he said.

"I thought maybe you could go to a big city. Los Angeles, maybe. They wouldn' never look for you there."

"Hm-m," he said. "Lookie, Ma. I been all day an' all night hidin' alone. Guess who I been thinkin' about? Casy! He talked a lot. Used ta bother me. But now I been thinkin' what he said, an' I can remember—all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn' have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn' think I was even listenin'. But I know now a fella ain't no good alone."

"He was a good man," Ma said.

Tom went on, "He spouted out some Scripture once, an' it didn' soun' like no hellfire Scripture. He tol' it twicet, an' I remember it. Says it's from the Preacher."

"How's it go, Tom?"

"Goes, 'Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif' up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.' That's part of her."

"Go on," Ma said. "Go on, Tom."

"Jus' a little bit more. 'Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.'"

"An' that's Scripture?"

"Casy said it was. Called it the Preacher."

"Hush—listen."

"On'y the wind, Ma. I know the wind. An' I got to thinkin', Ma—most of the preachin' is about the poor we shall have always with us, an' if you got nothin', why, jus' fol' your hands an' to hell with it, you gonna git ice cream on gol' plates when you're dead. An' then this here Preacher says two get a better reward for their work."

…

Tom laughed "...Casy says, a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big one—an' then—"

"Then what, Tom?"

"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. See? God, I'm talkin' like Casy. Comes of thinkin' about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes."

10. Shoba Ch 22 — Grandma dies

And Ruthie whispered, "Tha's Granma, an' she's dead."

Winfield nodded solemnly. "She ain't breathin' at all. She's awful dead."

And Rose of Sharon said softly to Connie, "She was a-dyin' right when we—"

"How'd we know?" he reassured her.

Al climbed on the load to make room for Ma in the seat. And Al swaggered a little because he was sorry. He plumped down beside Casy and Uncle John. "Well, she was ol'. Guess her time was up," Al said. "Ever'body got to die." Casy and Uncle John turned eyes expressionlessly on him and looked at him as though he were a curious talking bush. "Well, ain't they?" he demanded. And the eyes looked away, leaving Al sullen and shaken.

Casy said in wonder, "All night long, an' she was alone." And he said, "John, there's a woman so great with love—she scares me. Makes me afraid an' mean."

John asked, "Was it a sin? Is they any part of it you might call a sin?"

Casy turned on him in astonishment, "A sin? No, there ain't no part of it that's a sin."

"I ain't never done nothin' that wasn't part sin," said John, and he looked at the long wrapped body.

Tom and Ma and Pa got into the front seat. Tom let the truck roll and started on compression. And the heavy truck moved, snorting and jerking and popping down the hill. The sun was behind them, and the valley golden and green before them. Ma shook her head slowly from side to side. "It's purty," she said. "I wisht they could of saw it."

"I wisht so too," said Pa.

Tom patted the steering wheel under his hand. "They was too old," he said. "They wouldn't of saw nothin' that's here. Grampa would a been a-seein' the Injuns an' the prairie country when he was a young fella. An' Granma would a remembered an' seen the first home she lived in. They was too ol'. Who's really seein' it is Ruthie an' Winfiel'."

11. Gopa Ch 13 - Granpa is buried by the roadside with a message in a bottle

On the edge of the ring of firelight the men had gathered. For tools they had a shovel and a mattock. Pa marked out the ground—eight feet long and three feet wide. The work went on in relays. Pa chopped the earth with the mattock and then Uncle John shoveled it out. Al chopped and Tom shoveled. Noah chopped and Connie shoveled. And the hole drove down, for the work never diminished in speed. The shovels of dirt flew out of the hole in quick spurts. When Tom was shoulder deep in the rectangular pit, he said, "How deep, Pa?"

"Good an' deep. A couple feet more. You get out now, Tom, and get that paper wrote."

Tom boosted himself out of the hole and Noah took his place. Tom went to Ma, where she tended the fire. "We got any paper an' pen, Ma?"

Ma shook her head slowly, "No-o. That's one thing we didn' bring." She looked toward Sairy. And the little woman walked quickly to her tent. She brought back a Bible and a half pencil. "Here," she said. "They's a clear page in front. Use that an' tear it out." She handed book and pencil to Tom.

Tom sat down in the firelight. He squinted his eyes in concentration, and at last wrote slowly and carefully on the end paper in big clear letters: "This here is William James Joad, dyed of a stroke, old old man. His fokes bured him becaws they got no money to pay for funerls. Nobody kilt him. Jus a stroke and he dyed." He stopped. "Ma, listen to this here." He read it slowly to her.

"Why, that soun's nice," she said. "Can't you stick on somepin from Scripture so it'll be religious? Open up an' git a sayin', somepin outa Scripture."

"Got to be short," said Tom. "I ain't got much room lef' on the page."

Sairy said, "How 'bout 'God have mercy on his soul'?"

"No," said Tom. "Sounds too much like he was hung. I'll copy somepin." He turned the pages and read, mumbling his lips, saying the words under his breath. "Here's a good short one," he said. "'An' Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord.'"

"Don't mean nothin'," said Ma. "Long's you're gonna put one down, it might's well mean somepin."

Sairy said, "Turn to Psalms, over further. You kin always get somepin outa Psalms."

Tom flipped the pages and looked down the verses. "Now here is one," he said. "This here's a nice one, just blowed full a religion: 'Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.' How's that?"

"That's real nice," said Ma. "Put that one in."

Tom wrote it carefully. Ma rinsed and wiped a fruit jar and Tom screwed the lid down tight on it. "Maybe the preacher ought to wrote it," he said.

Ma said, "No, the preacher wan't no kin." She took the jar from him and went into the dark tent. She unpinned the covering and slipped the fruit jar in under the thin cold hands and pinned the comforter tight again. And then she went back to the fire.

12. Geetha end of Ch 8 - The preacher Casy comes up with an original impromptu Grace at the last meal before setting out for California.

Suddenly Tom said, "Hey! Where's the preacher? He was right here. Where'd he go?"

Pa said, "I seen him, but he's gone."

And Granma raised a shrill voice, "Preacher? You got a preacher? Go git him. We'll have a grace." She pointed at Grampa. "Too late for him—he's et. Go git the preacher."

Tom stepped out on the porch. "Hey, Jim! Jim Casy!" he called. He walked out in the yard. "Oh, Casy!" The preacher emerged from under the tank, sat up, and then stood up and moved toward the house. Tom asked, "What was you doin', hidin'?"

"Well, no. But a fella shouldn't butt his head in where a fambly got fambly stuff. I was jus' settin' a-thinkin'."

"Come on in an' eat," said Tom. "Granma wants a grace."

"But I ain't a preacher no more," Casy protested.

"Aw, come on. Give her a grace. Don't do you no harm, an' she likes 'em." They walked into the kitchen together.

Ma said quietly, "You're welcome."

And Pa said, "You're welcome. Have some breakfast."

"Grace fust," Granma clamored. "Grace fust."

Grampa focused his eyes fiercely until he recognized Casy. "Oh, that preacher," he said. "Oh, he's all right. I always liked him since I seen him—" He winked so lecherously that Granma thought he had spoken and retorted, "Shut up, you sinful ol' goat."

Casy ran his fingers through his hair nervously. "I got to tell you, I ain't a preacher no more. If me jus' bein' glad to be here an' bein' thankful for people that's kind and generous, if that's enough—why, I'll say that kinda grace. But I ain't a preacher no more."

"Say her," said Granma. "An' get in a word about us goin' to California." The preacher bowed his head, and the others bowed their heads. Ma folded her hands over her stomach and bowed her head. Granma bowed so low that her nose was nearly in her plate of biscuit and gravy. Tom, leaning against the wall, a plate in his hand, bowed stiffly, and Grampa bowed his head sidewise, so that he could keep one mean and merry eye on the preacher. And on the preacher's face there was a look not of prayer, but of thought; and in his tone not supplication, but conjecture.

"I been thinkin'," he said. "I been in the hills, thinkin', almost you might say like Jesus went into the wilderness to think His way out of a mess of troubles."

"Pu-raise Gawd!" Granma said, and the preacher glanced over at her in surprise.

"Seems like Jesus got all messed up with troubles, and He couldn't figure nothin' out, an' He got to feelin' what the hell good is it all, an' what's the use fightin' an' figurin'. Got tired, got good an' tired, an' His sperit all wore out. Jus' about come to the conclusion, the hell with it. An' so He went off into the wilderness."

"A-men," Granma bleated. So many years she had timed her responses to the pauses. And it was so many years since she had listened to or wondered at the words used.

"I ain't sayin' I'm like Jesus," the preacher went on. "But I got tired like Him, an' I got mixed up like Him, an' I went into the wilderness like Him, without no campin' stuff. Nighttime I'd lay on my back an' look up at the stars; morning I'd set an' watch the sun come up; midday I'd look out from a hill at the rollin' dry country; evenin' I'd foller the sun down. Sometimes I'd pray like I always done. On'y I couldn' figure what I was prayin' to or for. There was the hills, an' there was me, an' we wasn't separate no more. We was one thing. An' that one thing was holy."

"Hallelujah," said Granma, and she rocked a little, back and forth, trying to catch hold of an ecstasy.

"An' I got thinkin', on'y it wasn't thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin'. I got thinkin' how we was holy when we was one thing, an' mankin' was holy when it was one thing. An' it on'y got unholy when one mis'able little fella got the bit in his teeth an' run off his own way, kickin' an' draggin' an' fightin'. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they're all workin' together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that's right, that's holy. An' then I got thinkin' I don't even know what I mean by holy." He paused, but the bowed heads stayed down, for they had been trained like dogs to rise at the "amen" signal. "I can't say no grace like I use' ta say. I'm glad of the holiness of breakfast. I'm glad there's love here. That's all." The heads stayed down. The preacher looked around. "I've got your breakfast cold," he said; and then he remembered. "Amen," he said, and all the heads rose up.

"A—men," said Granma, and she fell to her breakfast, and broke down the soggy biscuits with her hard old toothless gums. Tom ate quickly, and Pa crammed his mouth. There was no talk until the food was gone, the coffee drunk; only the crunch of chewed food and the slup of coffee cooled in transit to the tongue. Ma watched the preacher as he ate, and her eyes were questioning, probing and understanding. She watched him as though he were suddenly a spirit, not human any more, a voice out of the ground.