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Home , The Harvest Gypsies

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Frank Eugene Cruz

Steinbeck Review, Volume 4, Number 2, Fall 2007, pp. 52-75 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press DOI: 10.1353/str.0.0014

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/str/summary/v004/4.2.cruz.html

Access provided by Goteborgs universitet (15 Jun 2014 09:10 GMT) Steinbeck Review s ss ay E

The Joads prepare to leave in a movie still from John Ford’s (1940).

52 “In Between a Past and Future Town”: Home, The Unhomely, and The Grapes of Wrath e vi w R Frank Eugene Cruz t e inb ec k S

To be unhomed is not to be homeless. . . . The unhomely moment creeps upon you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself with Henry James’s Isabel Archer “taking the measure of your dwelling” in a state of “incredulous terror.” . . . In a feverish stillness, the intimate recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting. In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible. It has less to do with forcible eviction and more to do with the uncanny literary and social effects of enforced social accommodation, or historical migrations and cultural relocations. —Homi K. Bhabha (141)

As American studies scholar Michael Denning points out in The Cultural Front, the Depression era in the United States witnessed an increase in the production of so-called “social protest novels.” According to Denning, the authors of these texts sought to memorialize various proletarian movements of the 1930s and to inform and engage a mainstream audience about the plight

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of the laboring class. Denning also points out that while these

s ss ay myriad authors aspired to create enduring “mythic narratives” E of the people from historical events, none succeeded in creating “enduring icons in popular culture” —none, perhaps, except ’s 1939 text The Grapes of Wrath (263). While Denning only suggests that the “failure of [these other] events to become a myth, to create enduring icons in popular culture” is most “interesting,” he also presents an important question: “Why did the story of the ‘ exodus’ have [such] mythic power” (262- 3)? Denning’s question leads to another: why did The Grapes of Wrath become myth, both as a Popular Front genre, but perhaps more importantly, as a literary text?1 Denning acknowledges that much of the “mythic resonance” of the Grapes of Wrath narrative—both as a Popular Front genre and as a novel—“lies in its story of migration” (264). While I agree with Denning, I also believe that traditional literary readings of The Grapes of Wrath have often tended to define the text in four reductively: 1) as a story of migration; 2) as a recasting of Christian themes and motifs into an American context; 3) as a work of social protest; 4) or, finally, as a powerful, sentimental epic. These definitions, however, do not produce a satisfactory answer to Denning’s question, nor do they adequately explore the complexities of Steinbeck’s literary production. This new reading of John Steinbeck’s greatest novel, then, suggests that this work is ultimately concerned with what is best described as an “in-betweenness,” as manifested in the novel’s representations of home and the unhomely (to borrow a term from the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha).2 Steinbeck’s treatment of these latter themes goes far in explaining why The Grapes of Wrath “succeeded” in becoming both myth and a lasting work of literary art. For various reasons, including historical and methodological limitations, traditional readings of The Grapes of Wrath did not recognize Steinbeck’s careful consideration of , the unhomely, and the impact of these forces on the text. From the tenant-farms of , to the boxcars of ’s Central Valley, and all the “camps” in between, the novel’s “geographies of home” (a term borrowed from Loida Maritza Pérez) provides a framework for re-reading The Grapes of Wrath which sheds light on the novel’s emphasis on the unhomely and in-between experience, which Bhabha documents in his own postcolonial criticism. My re-reading of The Grapes of Wrath draws on three

54 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F more recent theoretical paradigms based on the work of Bhabha, rank Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation of the Borderlands (a site she E

describes as “a vague and undetermined place created by the ug e n emotional residue of an unnatural boundary”) and José David

Saldívar’s Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies C (25). While discussing the squatters’ camps, work camps, migrant ruz camps, and government camps which populate the California section of the novel, this re-reading also considers the work of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his theory of “the age of camps” in order to show Steinbeck’s relation to modernity and the relation between “camps” and the unhomely in The Grapes of Wrath. The Grapes of Wrath highlights the subtleties of an in- between experience. It is the representation of this experience which continues to resonate with readers and accounts (at least in part) for the novel’s persistent presence, relevance, and place in our popular cultural imagination, as well as its highly successful translation into other mediums—including music, film and theater—in spite of a generally negative (or perhaps simply neglectful) critical response from the “upper-echelon” present-day literary establishment.3 This reading of The Grapes of Wrath is significant because the “American experience” is quickly becoming more about multiple, rather than monolithic subjectivities—more about in-between, as opposed to essentialist conceptions of culture and ethno-racial formations, as the lines between “Us” and “Them,” “Here” and “There,” and “Home” and “World” blur. Perhaps the only borders which still appear entrenched—in the U.S. and abroad—are the lines of class. It is no surprise that Steinbeck’s Depression-era text addresses these contradictions as well. As “American” culture comes to more closely approximate the in-between experience Steinbeck was exploring in his writing as early as 1939, then, reexaminations of The Grapes of Wrath will become more central to considerations of the in-between and unhomely experience of both Steinbeck’s age and our own. Several questions are central to this re-reading. For example, what is the relation between house and home symbols in The Grapes of Wrath, on the one hand, and in-betweenness, on the other? Is there textual evidence in The Grapes of Wrath to support a claim that before Bhabha, Bauman, Anzaldúa or Saldívar put pen to paper, Steinbeck was considering problems in his text similar to ones that they would later develop in their own

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theoretical writings (the postcolonial unhomely, the twentieth

s ss ay century as an age of camps, and border theory)? Is there a way to E read The Grapes of Wrath in light of these theoretical paradigms that will further understanding of the novel and perhaps help to redeem Steinbeck in the eyes of a modern academy that has all but dismissed his work?4 This re-reading of The Grapes of Wrath suggests that in-betweenness and Steinbeck’s treatment of home and the unhomely are major thematic threads which hold the novel together. Focusing on Steinbeck’s linguistic symbols of in- betweenness and the representations of home and the unhomely in the text, this study considers in three broad categories: homes lost, homes hoped for, and temporary homes (or camps) established in-between.

Expressions of the Unhomely: Steinbeck’s Symbols of In-Betweenness If the “shrill alarm of the unhomely” can be heard “in 1873 on the outskirts of Cincinnati, in the mumbling houses” at 124 Bluestone Road in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as Homi Bhabha suggests, then on the tenant farms of Oklahoma in 1938, the shrill alarm of the unhomely can likewise be heard in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (142). While the Joads’ unhomely experience often takes the form of “incommunicability”—of “‘unspeakable thoughts, unspoken,’” as it does in Beloved (while duly acknowledging the radically different experiences of these two texts)—the unhomely in The Grapes of Wrath also finds expression through specific textual symbols of in-betweenness (Morrison qtd. in Bhabha 142). According to Bhabha, “In the stirrings of the unhomely, another world becomes visible,” and the unhomely world of the Joads is an in-between one, with its visibility revealed in recurring images (141). Steinbeck’s text opens with a stark, naturalistic image of in- betweenness: the earth: To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale. . . . The

56 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F surface of the earth crusted, a thin hard crust, rank and as the sky became pale, so the earth became E

pale, pink in the red country and white in the ug e n gray country. (Grapes 1)

These first words of the novel subtly announce Steinbeck’s interest C in in-betweenness. The country described as both red and gray ruz is ultimately neither red, nor gray, but a new, in-between color. This kind of mental negotiation will be required repeatedly as concepts of in-betweenness occur throughout the text, requiring such “mental acrobatics” (to echo Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth) because the in-between experience is, like the unhomely one, divided and disorienting.5

Yet the country involved in the neither/nor negotiation is still a “gray country,” and the color gray is a recurring symbol of in-betweenness throughout the novel. This grayness literalizes in-

As a hybridization of black and white, gray becomes a signifier of places, things, and people that occupy an un- homely space.

betweenness so that the symbol functions by connecting specific sites of in-betweenness with the “color” of in-betweenness: a gray cat is left alone at the abandoned Joad house and a gray flock of pigeons appear at Uncle John’s house. As a hybridization of black and white, gray becomes a signifier of places, things, and people that occupy an unhomely space. Men, women, and children in The Grapes of Wrath, for example, are constantly displaced. As a result of their geographical displacement, they are in-between, and their gray color gives figurative depth to their in-between position. In addition to the in-betweenness represented by the “gray country,” the pale earth and sky introduced in the first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath are also manifestations of in- betweenness. The use of earth/sky imagery to signify this state continues throughout the text. From its opening pages—“as the sky became pale, so the earth became pale”—to the last chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, this symbol is present. The last home- space in the novel, for example, is the boxcar camp at the end.

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While the boxcars “made good houses, water-tight and draftless,”

s ss ay Steinbeck’s use of paling earth/sky imagery and the color gray E signify that they are nonetheless sites of in-betweenness and sites of the unhomely: In the lightless car, Ma stirred, and then she pushed the blanket back and got up. At the open door of the car the gray starlight penetrated a little. Ma walked to the door and stood looking out. The stars were paling in the east. (Grapes 425) Later, as the migrants pick cotton in the twilight of early morning, The gray dawn came. . . . The people moved quickly out into the cotton field and took their rows. . . . Pa looked quickly at the western hills. Big gray clouds were coasting over the ridge, riding the wind swiftly. “Them looks like rain- heads,” he said. . . . They came to the other side of the field and ran to get a new row. And now they faced into the wind, and they could see the high gray clouds moving over the sky toward the rising sun. (Grapes 428-9) These gray clouds will bring the floods that devastate the Joads, and the morning after Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child (itself a tragic symbol of in-betweenness, a child born, yet dead), “the light grew stronger outside, a gray metallic light” (Steinbeck, Grapes 447). The incommunicability that Bhabha describes as “the house of fiction speak[ing] in tongues,” as the “undecipherable mumbling enunciations that emanate from Beloved’s ‘124,’” are analogous to Rose of Sharon’s stillborn child being asked to speak the silent terror of its existence and demise with unspeakable words unspoken (143). Uncle John’s benediction for the stillborn child, as he places it in the river, admonishes it to “speak” to California’s owning-class and its nativist citizens: “Go down an’ tell ‘em. Go down in the street an’ rot an’ tell ‘em that way,” he fiercely tells the dead infant; “That’s the way you can talk” (Grapes 448). Just as the sky and earth in The Grapes of Wrath have symbolic import, so do the novel’s characters. The displaced and in-between men from the region, as opposed to the Californians, are invested with a physicality of in-betweenness. One of the more memorable images of the novel is of the men

58 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F in the dirt, their hands busy with sticks and rocks, rank “thinking—figuring” (Grapes 4). This posture first occurs in the E

novel when Tom Joad meets the preacher on his way to the Joad ug e n house. As if to foreshadow the in-betweenness waiting at the Joad

place, where the home of his childhood stands abandoned, still his C home, but at the same time no longer a home at all, Tom’s body ruz occupies a place in-between sitting and standing: “He squatted on his hams,” Steinbeck writes, “and set the bottle [of liquor] upright against his coat roll” (Grapes 20). This physicality is by no means unique to Tom Joad: nearly all Midwesterners in the text, including Mr. Wilson from and Mr. Wainwright, with whom the Joads share their boxcar- home, take on this physical expression of in-betweenness. This physicality of in-betweenness becomes explicit when the family decides to set out on the road: Pa walked around the truck, looking at it, and then he squatted down in the dust and found a stick to draw with. One foot was flat to the ground, the other rested on the ball and slightly back, so that one knee was higher than the other. Left forearm rested on the lower, left knee; the right elbow on the right knee, and the right fist cupped for the chin. Pa squatted there, looking at the truck, his chin in his cupped fist. And Uncle John moved toward him and squatted down beside him. . . . Tom and Connie and Noah strolled in and squatted, and the line was a half-circle with Grampa in the opening. (Grapes 100) Here the men assume an in-between physical position immediately before crucial moments of in-betweenness in the narrative, as if their physicality anticipates the unhomely moments to come. The first instance—Tom’s squatting while talking to Casy—occurs immediately before the two men find Tom’s home abandoned and desolate. The second comes as the family is finally forced out onto the highway, which is perhaps one of the master symbols of in-betweenness in the text, much in the same way the wilderness became a site of in-betweenness for the Israelites and the Atlantic a site of in-betweenness for the millions of Africans displaced during the Middle Passage. While this physicality of in-betweenness is general to all of the dispossessed migrants in Grapes, specific characters in the

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novel also act as symbols of in-betweenness. The awkward

s ss ay description of Tom’s ill-fitting suit in chapter two, for example, E gestures towards his symbolic function in the text: His suit was of cheap gray hardcloth and so new that there were creases in the trousers. His blue chambray shirt was stiff and smooth with filler. The coat was too big, the trousers too short, for he was a tall man. The coat shoulder peaks hung down on his arms, and even then the sleeves were too short and the front of the coat flapped loosely over his stomach. (Grapes 6) The image is at once comic and disorienting. Like a face lacking symmetry, Tom’s clothing calls attention to its own incongruity: one piece too big, another too small. When Tom first meets “the preacher” he calls out to Casy, “‘Why, you’re the preacher. You’re the preacher’” (Grapes 20). Casy replies, “‘I was a preacher . . . . Reverend Jim Casy—was a Burning Busher. . . . But not no more. . . . Just Jim Casy now. Ain’t got the call no more’” (Grapes 20). The process of the Joads’ naming and Casy’s disavowal of the name occurs frequently throughout the text. Three times at Uncle John’s place, Casy tells the family, “I ain’t a preacher no more” (Grapes 80). Yet the Joads and the narrator insist on calling him “preacher.” Casy’s de-identification with the name and idea of preacher when juxtaposed against all these assertions that he is a preacher, renders him, like Tom, a symbol of in-betweenness. He is both insistently the preacher and insistently not the preacher at the same time. This ambivalence allows for a character who is and is not: who is in-between. Other recurring images and symbols of in-betweenness include the Joads’ jalopy, the Hudson Super-Six sedan, “a truck with high sides, . . . the front of it . . . a sedan, the top . . . cut off in the middle and the truck bed fitted on” (Grapes 70). Muley Graves, stubbornly alive, yet at the same time not alive at all—“a damn ol’ graveyard ghos’” is another as are “the moving, questing people”—the migrants (Grapes 51, 282)—and the interchapters, used throughout the book to describe the wider social and/or historical frameworks of the Joads’ experience, are themselves formal representations of in-betweenness. But perhaps the most prevalent dimension of in-betweenness in The Grapes of Wrath is the negotiation throughout the text between home and homelessness, or home and the unhomely, as the Joads are forced

60 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F into an historical in-between space, with the home behind them rank destroyed and the home in front of them unclear and uncertain. E

When Tom sees the Joad place knocked off its foundation ug e n and its windows broken, he witnesses not only the work of a

Caterpillar tractor and children who will walk “twenty miles to C bust a window,” but also the destructive, intra-colonial forces ruz of the world (Grapes 42). These intra-colonial forces produce results similar to those Bhabha describes in his formulation of the unhomely: enforced forms of social accommodation, historical migrations, and cultural relocations (Bhabha 141). As Tom enters this unhomely space, the text announces a world of in- betweenness that its characters will occupy until and after they reach the “rain-blackened barn” of the final chapter (Grapes 452). Mario Barrera’s theory of internal colonialism argues that marginalized people of color maintain a colonial place

Muley (John Qualen) tries to stop a “cat” but the driver tears right through his shack home in this movie still from John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

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in contemporary society. Although Barrera’s conception of

s ss ay internal colonialism is dependent on ethno-racial difference, E it is instructive to view the white Anglo-Saxons of The Grapes of Wrath as a marginalized, even “racialized” people. It is also useful to consider the connections between the experiences of marginalized people of color in the U.S. and the marginalized U.S. underclass—an economically dispossessed group which knows no color boundaries and in a sense is more central than marginal to the current sociopolitical system. Terry Eagleton questions whether there is a “clear division between margins and majority”: As far as the transnational corporations go, great masses of men and women are really neither here nor there. Whole nations are thrust to the periphery. Entire classes of people are deemed to be dysfunctional. Communities are uprooted and forced into migration. . . . Who or what is key to the system is debatable. The destitute are obviously marginal . . . but what of the low-paid? The low-paid are not central, but neither are they marginal. It is they whose labour keeps the system up and running. And on a global scale, the low-paid means an enormous mass of people. . . . As long as we think of margins as minorities, this extraordinary fact is conveniently obscured. (Eagleton 19-20) While the Joads, Wilsons, and Wainwrights are certainly not “people of color,” they were nonetheless both a marginalized underclass and a subaltern migrant workforce: I would expand Barrera’s theory to accommodate Eagleton’s blurring of the line between margins and majority, to argue that both marginalized people of color and the marginalized economic underclass occupy a subaltern/colonial position in contemporary American society. Bearing in mind the intra-colonial experience of The Grapes of Wrath the Joads may be viewed in a subaltern, racialized position and as border crossers. They are among those who occupy unhomely spaces and endure the gamut from homes lost, to homes hoped for, to “homes” in-between.

62 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F “Swapped My Farm for a Ford Machine”: Homes Lost in the rank Oklahoma Chapters6 E

The various social, economic, and environmental causes ug e n of the massive Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s are complex

and well documented.7 The reason for the displacement of the C Joad family is perhaps much simpler, for to address questions of ruz in-betweenness, Steinbeck needed his Joads on the highway. To illustrate issues of home/lessness, he needed them to be without a home, “just a-roamin’ round,” like the poetic subject of Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballad (“No Home” 1). Yet the function of the first home-space occupied and lost by Steinbeck’s protagonist, Tom Joad, is a more difficult issue to consider. A discussion of homes lost in Oklahoma may begin at this unlikely and problematic site: the McAlester Penitentiary. While a facility of incarceration may be a strange place to call “home,” it clearly qualifies as one of Tom’s more comfortable locations within the context of the novel: “How they treat you in McAlester?” Casy asked. “Oh, awright. You eat regular, an’ get clean clothes, and there’s places to take a bath. It’s pretty nice some ways. . . . They was a guy paroled. . . . ’Bout a month he’s back for breakin’ parole. A guy ast him why he bust his parole. ‘Well, hell,’ he says. ‘They got no conveniences at my old man’s place. Got no ’lectric lights, got no shower baths. There ain’t no books, and the food’s lousy.’ Says he come back where they got a few conveniences an’ he eats regular. He says it makes him feel lonesome out there in the open havin’ to think what to do next. . . . The guy’s right, too. . . . Las’ night, thinkin’ where I’m gonna sleep, I got scared. . . . An’ this mornin’ I didn’ know what time to get up. Jus’ laid there waitin’ for the bell to go off.” (Grapes 26) By the time the Joad family enters the Hooverville camp of chapter twenty, Tom, like the inmate from McAlester who “bust his parole” to get his “conveniences” back, begins to long for his lost “home” of incarceration: “[Tom’s] eyes started over the camp, over the gray tents and the shacks of weed and tin and paper. ‘Wisht I had a sack a Durham,’ he said. ‘I ain’t had a smoke

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in a hell of a time. Use ta get tobacco in McAlester. Almost wisht

s ss ay I was back’” (Grapes 251). E Why did Steinbeck choose to open his novel in the long shadow of the McAlester prison? Steinbeck undoubtedly knew, when he began his book in the shadow of McAlester, that he would follow the Joads through the work camps and squatters’ camps of later chapters before arriving finally at the rain-blackened barn in Tulare County, California. The McAlester Penitentiary, then, functions in sharp contrast to these later formulations of camps in the novel. Consider, for example, the function of this first lost home in Oklahoma compared to the other camps of later chapters, where children die of starvation, “their bellies puffed out an’ jus’ skin on their bones” (Grapes 190). Perhaps the function of the first home lost in Oklahoma can be better understood when we consider the sad irony that McAlester—a facility for incarcerating criminals—seems desirable when compared to the “Promised Land” of California and the later camps occupied by the Joads. According to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the death camps and forced labor camps of the World War II era served as examples of the effectiveness of modernist principles of “scientific management,” leading to his description of the twentieth century as an “age of camps” (266). The long shadow cast by McAlester— as a modern site of detention and incarceration—in The Grapes of Wrath may be viewed then as an American counterpart to the camp mentalities Bauman encountered on the European fields of oppression, with the camps themselves becoming effective prisons to contain the dispossessed. While the figure of McAlester works in counterpoint to the later camps in California and also places The Grapes of Wrath in dialogue with Bauman’s theory of the age of the camps, the other homes lost in the novel—the Joad house and Uncle John’s house—depict the unhomely space of in-betweenness intimately associated with the Joads’ intra-colonial experience. When Tom and Casy approach the Joad place, it is apparent that the “little cluster of buildings” has become a site of trauma (Grapes 30). “‘Looka that house,’” Tom says, “‘Somepin’s happened. They ain’t nobody there’” (Grapes 30). The house has become unhomely, as much because of its emptiness as because of its physical condition, “mashed at one corner . . . pushed off of its foundations so that it slumped at an angle” (Grapes 40). As Tom reluctantly investigates the dooryard, the barn, and the house, the Joad place is transformed from a home-site to a site

64 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F of the unhomely. The border between the home and the world rank blurs as Tom recalls images of the past: the specters of the bare E

feet of children, stamping horses’ hooves, and broad wagon ug e n wheels which over generations packed the earth hard in front

of the door (Grapes 40). The border between the home and the C world further deteriorates as Tom simultaneously sees the house ruz crushed inward, where “through a maze of splintered wood the room at the corner was visible,” where “the front door hung open inward,” revealing once intimate recesses of private space (Grapes 41). This process of recalling the intimate images of the home, despite its destruction, disallows Muley Graves (and Grampa) the possibility of finding another home in California or anywhere else. The Joads, on the other hand, choose to comply for the most part with the forced relocation of the home, and as a result, must disassociate themselves from the intimate imaginings and experiences of the old, now unhomely home-space. This disjunction with the past takes place beside the stove at Uncle John’s house, the last home lost in the Oklahoma chapters, as Ma burns a stationary box filled with letters, newspaper clippings, and photographs and bites “her lower lip, thinking, remembering. At last she made up her mind. . . . She lifted the stove lid and laid the box gently among the coals. Quickly the heat browned the paper. A flame licked up and over the box” (Grapes 108). Floyd C. Watkins finds this scene unrealistic and demeaning to the Joads, suggesting that among all the possessions crammed into the Hudson, it is “implausible” that they couldn’t find a place for this box of memories (63). But Ma’s actions are less a matter of choice than of emotional necessity. This scene of disassociation from the past does not make the Joads “unfeeling;” instead, this process of disremembering is a necessary negotiation for a character who wishes to avoid the social death that transforms Muley into “an ol’ graveyard ghos’” (Watkins 63; Grapes 51). Yet however necessary this process of disremembering is, the prospect of being unhomed is frightening, and the narrative poses hard questions: How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it. . . . How’ll it be not to know what land’s outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and

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know—and know the willow tree’s not there?

s ss ay Can you live without the willow tree? (Grapes E 88-89) After the Hudson is packed for the trip, the family stops, standing about, each “reluctant to make the first move to go. They were afraid, now that the time had come—afraid in the same way Grampa was afraid” (Grapes 112). With the reality of the unhomely moment full upon them, the Joads are confronted by an “incredulous terror” (Bhabha 141). At the disorienting instant when the private and public become one and the same, the novel moves from the space of home to the unhomely. When the Hudson Super-Six rolls away from Uncle John’s farm, “Ma tried to look back, but the body of the load cut off her view. She straightened her head and peered straight ahead along the dirt road. And a great weariness was in her eyes” (Grapes 114). Ma can’t look back, towards the home lost, nor is the reality of the home she hopes for in California clear and certain. All she can see is the dirt road in front of her, a place for the unhomed—the road of in-betweenness.

“Ain’t That America”: Homes Hoped For and the Myths of the West and the American Home8 Before considering the highway and other home-sites of in-betweenness, it is important to consider a ghost that haunts all three sections of The Grapes of Wrath—in Oklahoma, on the highway, and in California: the ghost of homes hoped for. According to Louis Owens, Steinbeck’s work rejects “repeatedly the American vision of California as Promised Land”—a vision he believed to be a fatal and destructive illusion (6). Still, his characters fall victim to it, for it shapes the Joads’ perceptions of California at the outset of their journey and their vision of the home hoped for in California. First, the Joads conflate home with a dream of sustainability. While the land in Oklahoma has been “cottoned damn near to death” by the sharecroppers, the land in California (in keeping with the Garden of the West myth) is fertile and thriving—a country where “it never gets cold . . . [where] you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange . . . [where] there’s always some kind of crop to work in” (Grapes 47, 34). Second, the family dreams of home as a place of sustenance. California is a land of produce (in both senses of the word); a land “where the fruit grows” (Grapes 87). Grampa imagines California to be a place, “where I can pick

66 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F me an orange when I want it. Or grapes. There’s a thing I ain’t rank never had enough of. Gonna get me a whole big bunch a grapes E

off a bush, or whatever, an’ I’m gonna squash ‘em on my face ug e n an’ let ‘em run offen my chin” (Grapes 82-3). Grampa’s speech

highlights the belief that in the new home-space in California, the C land will be fertile. The new home will be a place where food is ruz not only available, but available in abundance, a hope important for a people who are “half starved now. The kids hungry all the time” (Grapes 33). Another American myth, equally powerful, urges the Joads on across the country in their doomed search for a new home. This myth, which still preoccupies us today, determines the literal form of the home hoped for. While the Promised Land myth may speak to the Joads’ stomachs, this myth speaks to their hearts. It is the myth of the American home—of getting a little land, building a little house, and surrounding it with a white picket fence. It is this myth of the American home that Ma describes to Tom: “I like to think how nice it’s gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold. An’ fruit ever’place, an’ people just bein’ in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees. I wonder— that is, if we all get jobs an’ all work—maybe we can get one of them little white houses.” (Grapes 91) Here the two myths bleed together, creating one vision of what the home in California will be like. For Ma, the home hoped for holds the promise of both orange trees and a little white house—both milk and honey and the archetypal Anglo-American dwelling. Ma’s vision of a “little white house,” apparently inspired by a picture on a calendar, is countered by Tom with an alternate vision of California: one much closer to the reality the Joads encounter after they cross the border into the state. This vision of home is one of dirty camps, malnourished workers, and competition for even the lowest of wages (Grapes 91-92). In spite of this competing vision, nearly every adult member of the family chooses to embrace Ma’s dream of the little white house in California. Before the family sets out on the road, for example, Pa reiterates to Al what the home hoped for will look like, juxtaposing the home hoped for against the family’s experience in Oklahoma: “‘We had hard times here. ’Course it’ll be all different out there—plenty work, an’ ever’thing nice an’ green, an’ little

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white houses an’ oranges growin’ aroun[d]’” (Grapes 109).

s ss ay This theoretical home-space, the imaginative home hoped E for, is conjured up again by Mr. Wilson the night that Grampa dies at the Joads’ first road-side camp and again by Tom as the men bathe in the Colorado River near the desert border town of Needles, California (Grapes 147, 204, 206). Yet while the ghost of homes hoped for haunts the characters and the pages of the text from Sallisaw, Oklahoma to the rain-blackened barn in Tulare County, California, it only approaches verisimilitude two times in The Grapes of Wrath, and both times it belongs not to the migrants, but to the owning-men of California. The benevolent small-farmer, Mr. Thomas, who gives Tom his first job in the Golden State, for example, lives in the mythic home Ma hopes for: he has “a small kitchen orchard; and behind the trees . . . a small white farm house, a few shade trees, and a barn; behind the barn a vineyard and a field of cotton” (Grapes 294). This formulation of home exists at the intersection of the myth of the American home and the myth of the Garden of the West—two myths which reveal themselves as such as the Joads travel, literally and figuratively, further away from the little white house of their dreams. Even before the Hooverville camp, the work camp, and the government camp show that the old myths of the Garden of the West and the American home are “destructive and even fatal illusion[s],” Tom Joad recognizes their illusiveness (Owens 4). As the Joads enter the California desert, Tom prophetically declares: “This here’s a murder country. This here’s the bones of a country. Wonder if we’ll ever get in a place where folks can live ’thout fightin’ hard scrabble an’ rocks. I seen pitchers of a country flat an’ green, an’ with little houses like Ma says, white. Ma got her heart set on a white house. Get to thinkin’ they ain’t no such country.” (Grapes 204)

“In Between a Past and Future Town”: A Murder Country9 From the moment the Hudson rolls off of the farm until the end of the novel, the Joads occupy not a lush Garden of the West, with little white houses, but instead something approximating the metaphorical murder country Tom foresees in the river outside of Needles, California.

68 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F The first murder country occupied by the Joads, between the rank home lost in Oklahoma and the home hoped for in California, E

is the highway. This home-space, very literally, is an in-between ug e n one; the highway not only cuts through the states en route to

California, but it is also a bridge of asphalt connecting Oklahoma C and California, existing between the two. While the Joads ruz gradually “settled into a new technique of living” in which “the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression,” the contradictions inherent in the highway-as- home remain (Grapes 163). Such contradictions are not lost on Casy, who understands that the road, as a site of continuous movement, is a place of in-betweenness that can never be an adequate substitute for the home lost in Oklahoma: “‘Folks [are] out lonely on the road, folks with no lan’, no home to go to. They got to have some kind of home’” he asserts (Grapes 56). The lonely road, according to Casy, cannot replace the home lost, for the road itself signifies their dispossession. As the Joads move from the unhomely highway and the first camp where Grampa dies and cross the state line into Texas, they enter into the long tradition of border-crossers in the South West. While Gloria Anzaldúa’s formulation of the Borderlands and border crossers is concerned with transnational migrations, it can also be conceived more broadly, for she states that “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (19). The Joads’ Borderland experience may be considered in the light of this definition and of José David Saldívar’s formulation of a critical border theory. Certainly, as Mimi Reisel Gladstein has suggested, a primary struggle in The Grapes of Wrath is intercultural.10 If the Borderlands are present, where two or more cultures “edge each other,” then certainly such conditions exist between the and the Californians, approximating such a Borderland paradigm (19). Gladstein notes that the cultural differences are so pronounced in The Grapes of Wrath that when Ma is confronted by a California police officer outside of Needles, “Ma and the policeman see themselves as coming from different countries, not as citizens of the same country” (688). Furthermore, although the Dust Bowl migrants and the citizens of California come from the same ethno-racial background, there is something in the ethnophaulism of “Okie,” that resonates with Américo

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Paredes’s description of the derogatory, racialized use of the name

s ss ay “Mexican” in his own Depression-era, southwestern text, George E Washington Gómez.11 In The Grapes of Wrath, “‘Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma. [But now] it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you’re scum. Don’t mean nothing itself, it’s in the way they say it’” (Grapes 205-6; my emphasis). Similarly in George Washington Gómez “the word Mexican” came to symbolize “hatred and loathing” to most Anglotexans, a word often pronounced with contempt—“through clenched teeth” as “M-m-mex-sican” (118). The significance of these two words, “Okie” and “M-m-mex-sican,” lies in their performative commonalities, for both change depending on the context of their utterance; neither holds a negative connotation in and of itself, but rather take on an often negative meaning in performance. Although the Okies and Californians are the same “color,” the Borderlands are physically present when they meet because, affectively, the site becomes one “where people of different races occupy the same territory” (Anzaldúa 19). Considering the experience of The Grapes of Wrath in relation to critical border theory, this metonymic relationship brings Anzaldúa’s description of the Borderlands as a “place of contradictions” into dialogue with Bhabha’s divided and disorienting unhomely experience and Tom Joad’s figure of the in-between “homes” of The Grapes of Wrath as a murder country (Anzaldúa 19). All three sites are places of in-betweenness. This theoretical connection between these conceptions of in- betweenness provides access to a new way of considering the last camps of The Grapes of Wrath.

Violence in Hooverville, as Jim Casy (John Carradine) kicks deputy bully while Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) holds his leg. Movie still from John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

70 Steinbeck Review Steinbeck Review F These last camps are places of in-betweenness because, rank as Steinbeck writes, the migrants “had hoped to find a home, E

and they found only hatred” (Grapes 233). Like Anzaldúa’s in- ug e n between Borderland of contradictions, the squatters’ camp of

chapter twenty and the work camp of chapter twenty-six, are C places where “hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent ruz features of [the] landscape” (Anzaldúa 19). (The experience at the government camp at Weedpatch, however, is far different.) The experience of hatred encountered by the Joads at most of these camps is evidenced in part by the deputy who shoots off a migrant woman’s hand and his colleague who responds, “a little proudly”: “‘Jesus, what a mess a .45 does make’” (Grapes 267). The hatred can be seen in the red, drunken face of a vigilante as a mob surrounds the Joad truck outside of the squatters’ camp; it is apparent in his voice when he says, “‘We ain’t gonna have no goddamn Okies in this town’” (Grapes 279). The hatred and anger, which for Anzaldúa are prominent fixtures of any in- between Borderland site, are present just outside of Steinbeck’s camps and his narrative in the interchapter where the native Californians reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights. They said, These goddamned Okies are dirty and ignorant. They’re degenerate, sexual maniacs. These goddamned Okies are thieves. They’ll steal anything. . . . And the defending people said, They bring disease, they’re filthy. We can’t have them in the schools. They’re strangers. (Grapes 283) Further, Saldívar’s figure of the Borderlands as a place of “militarized ‘low intensity’ conflict” is prefigured by Steinbeck’s description of the native Californians outside the Joads’ camp who “formed units, squads, and armed them—armed them with clubs, with gas, with guns” (Saldívar ix; Grapes 283). The camps in-between the home lost in Oklahoma and the home hoped for and never attained in California, therefore, are unhomely because of this constant and systemic threat of violence. The Grapes of Wrath is much more than a narrative of migration. It is, rather, a complex and contradictory text of in-betweenness, a work concerned in significant ways with questions of home and the unhomely; placing this Depression-era novel in dialogue with transmodern theoretical paradigms, such

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as postcolonial theory and border studies, brings to light the rich

s ss ay theoretical connections yet to be drawn between Steinbeck’s text E and these critical discourses.

Notes

1 Several narrative formations have been identified by scholars as sub-genres of the Popular Front social movement of the 1930s. One such genre is what Denning calls the “grapes of wrath” narrative, which he defines as a mythic discourse which captured the nation’s near- complete attention, albeit briefly, in 1939 and 1940, with the publication of Steinbeck’s bestselling novel, and Twentieth Century Fox’s film adaptation (Denning 259). The narrative is one of California’s “migrant agricultural workers,” of “the ‘Okie exodus,’ the tale of southwestern farmers traveling out of the -ridden Dust Bowl of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri” (Denning 259) and to a place Woody Guthrie ironically described as “a Garden of Eden”—California (“Do Re Mi” 9). It should also be noted that Guthrie qualifies his Edenic description of California in his song “Do Re Mi”: “California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see; / But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot / If you ain’t got the do re me” (9-11). The emphasis in the last line, of course, is on the “dough.” 2 For a working definition of the “unhomely,” see Bhabha’s passage from “The Home and the World” quoted at the beginning of this paper. 3 For examples of these translations see Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Ballads, rec. 26 Apr. 1940 and 3 May 1940, Buddha, 2000; Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Columbia, 1995; Rage Against the Machine, “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” Renegades, Columbia, 2000; John Ford, dir., The Grapes of Wrath, perf. Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and John Carradine, Twentieth Century Fox, 1940; David Patrick Stearns, “Steppenwolf’s Gritty Honesty Dazzles in Clear, Classic Style,” rev. of The Grapes of Wrath, perf. by Steppenwolf Theater Co., USA Today 23 Mar. 1990: 4D; Mimi Kramer, “Tender Grapes,” rev. of The Grapes of Wrath, perf. by Steppenwolf Theater Co., New Yorker 2 Apr. 1990: 87-8. 4 See Jackson J. Benson, “John Steinbeck: The Favorite Author We Love to Hate,” The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism, ed.

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Donald R. Noble, (New York: Whitston, 1993) 8-22. rank 5 Booth’s theory of poetics and the “mental acrobatics” of the mind E

in relation to works of literary art, was articulated in his undergraduate ug e n course on lyric poetry at the University of California, Berkeley. C 6

Woody Guthrie, “Talking Dust Bowl Blues,” rec. 26 Apr. 1940, ruz Dust Bowl Ballads, Buddha, 2000. 7 See James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford U P, 1989); John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath (1936; Berkeley: Heyday, 1988). In The Cultural Front, Michael Denning writes that “The Grapes of Wrath . . . began as a documentary book,” referring to the articles Steinbeck wrote for The San Francisco News three years before the publication of Grapes; titled The Harvest Gypsies (and also published collectively as Their Blood is Strong), this non-fiction account of the Dust Bowl migrants in California served as Steinbeck’s factual basis for his fictional text (Denning 119). 8 John Mellencamp, “Pink Houses,” Uh-Huh, Mercury, 1983. The chorus of Mellencamp’s song reads: “Oh but ain’t that America for you and me / Ain’t that America somethin’ to see baby / Ain’t that America home of the free / Little pink houses for you and me” (6-9). While the chorus of Mellencamp’s song shifts the color of Ma’s home from white to pink, his pop-culture text is nevertheless an instructive example of the “American home” myth’s continued presence as signifier in the late twentieth century. 9 Bright Eyes, “We Are Nowhere and It’s Now,” by Conor Oberst, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Saddle Creek, 2005. Oberst’s lyric seems particularly appropriate to this essay: “In our wheels that roll around, as we move over the ground. And all day it seems, we’ve been in between a past and future town. We are nowhere, and it’s now” (Bright Eyes). 10 See Mimi Reisel Gladstein, “The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck and the Eternal Immigrant,” The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism, by John Steinbeck, ed. Peter Lisca and Kevin Hearle, 2nd ed. (1972; New York: Viking, 1997) 682-691. 11 The term “ethnophaulism,” from Vincent N. Parrillo’s Strangers to These Shores: Race and Ethnic Relations in the United States, is defined as the language of prejudice, the verbal picture of a negative stereotype.

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s ss ay Works Cited E

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Barrera, Mario. Race and Class in the Southwest: A Theory of Racial Inequality. 1979. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2002. Bauman, Zygmunt. “A Century of Camps?” The Bauman Reader. Ed. Peter Beilharz. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 266-280. Benson, Jackson J. “John Steinbeck: The Favorite Author We Love to Hate.” The Steinbeck Question: New Essays in Criticism. Ed. Donald R. Noble. New York: Whitston, 1993. 8-22 Bhabha, Homi K. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141-53. Bloom, Harold, ed. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Chelsea, 1988. Bright Eyes. “We Are Nowhere And It’s Now.” By Conor Oberst. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. Saddle Creek, 2005. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. London: Verso, 1998. Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. Ford, John, dir. The Grapes of Wrath. Perf. Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, and John Carradine. Twentieth Century Fox, 1940. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. “The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck and the Eternal Immigrant.” The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism. Ed. Peter Lisca and Kevin Hearle. By John Steinbeck. 1972. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1997. 682-691. Gregory, James N. American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Guthrie, Woody. “Do Re Mi.” Dust Bowl Ballads. . Dust Bowl Ballads. Rec. 26 Apr. 1940 and 3 May 1940. Buddha, 2000. . “I Ain’t Got No Home.” Dust Bowl Ballads. . “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.” Dust Bowl Ballads. Kramer, Mimi. “Tender Grapes.” Rev. of The Grapes of Wrath. Perf. by Steppenwolf Theater Co. New Yorker 2 Apr. 1990: 87-8. Mellencamp, John. “Little Pink Houses.” Uh-Huh. Mercury, 1983. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985.

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Paredes, Américo. George Washington Gómez, A Mexicotexan Novel. rank Houston: Arte Publico, 1990. E

Parrillo, Vincent N. Strangers to These Shores: Race and Ethnic Relations ug e n in the United States. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn, 2000. C

Rage Against the Machine. “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Renegades. ruz Columbia, 2000. Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Stearns, David Patrick. “Steppenwolf’s Gritty Honesty Dazzles in Clear, Classic Style.” Rev. of The Grapes of Wrath. Perf. by Steppenwolf Theater Co. USA Today 23 Mar. 1990: 4D. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. New York: Penguin, 2002. . The Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to The Grapes of Wrath. 1936. Berkeley: Heyday, 1988. Watkins, Floyd C. “Flat Wine from The Grapes of Wrath.” Bloom, John Steinbeck’s 57-66.

Frank Eugene Cruz received his Bachelor’s degree in English with high honors from the University of California, Berkeley where he is currently working on a Ph.D. This essay was excerpted from his undergraduate honors thesis, which was produced under the direction of Carolyn Porter and José David Saldívar. His interests include the twentieth century U.S. novel, trans-American literature, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and U.S. cultural studies.

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