The Grapes of Wrath
|
800 PICKERS WANTED
Work in California
Good Wages.
Tents and Cabins Furnished Free.
Store on Camp Ground.
Busy From October to February.
COME AT ONCE!
Bill Macey, Labor Contractor
In the central part of the United States of America lies a limited area called 'The Dust Bowl,' because of its lack of rain. Here drought and poverty combined to deprive many farmers of their land.
This is the story of one farmer's family, driven from their fields by natural disasters and economic changes beyond anyone's control and their great journey in search of peace, security, and another home.
The opening image shows a flat, paved highway road in rural Oklahoma lined by telephone poles. A small figure walks out of the distance toward the camera. At a crossroads, one of the poles at the left of the frame leans dramatically askew. Outside the Cross Roads restaurant, as the jaunty tune "A Tisket, A Tasket" plays on the soundtrack, the man, wearing a new but ill-fitting suit of clothes, approaches and asks a truck driver (of an "Oklahoma City Transport Company" diesel) for a "lift." Their opening conversation reflects polarized social class differences - the rich are 'heels' and the poor are 'good guys.'
Figure: How about a lift,
Mister?
Driver: Can't you see that sticker? [NO RIDERS ALLOWED - Instructions of
Owner]
Figure: Sure, I see it. But a good guy don't pay no attention to what
some heel makes him stick on his truck.
Driver: Well, scrunch down on the running board 'til we get around the
bend.
Tom Joad is hitchhiking on his way home to his family's sharecropping farm after serving a short prison term for homicide. Becoming short-tempered, Tom tells the suspicious, nervous truck driver about his criminal background during their ride:
Tom: You know what I'm talkin' about. You've been goin' over me ever since I got in. Why don't you ask me where I've been? That big nose of yours been goin' over me like a sheep in a vegetable patch. Well, I ain't keepin' it a secret. I been in the penitentiary. I been there four years. Anything else you wanna know? I'm just tryin' to get along without shovin' anybody, that's all.
To satisfy the driver's curiosity as he leaves the cab of the truck, a surly Tom shocks and alarms the driver by characterizing himself as a violent killer:
Tom: You're about to bust a gut to know what I done, ain't ya? Well, I ain't a guy to let ya down. Homicide!
Tom finds a slightly mad, apostate, itinerant ex-preacher named Casy sitting under a willow tree. [Casy functions as an allegorical figure in the film, conveying the spiritual yearnings of the working class characters).
Tom learns that Casy was the preacher who baptized him, but now Casy has "lost the call" and his faith:
Tom: Ain't you the preacher?
Casy: Used to be. Not no more. I lost the call. But boy, I sure used to
have it. Oh, I used to get an irrigation ditch so squirmin' full of repentant sinners I
pretty near drowned half of 'em. Not no more. I lost the spirit. I got nothin' to preach
about no more, that's all. I ain't so sure of things.
Like a religious madman, the gaunt-faced Casy represents religious principles, but functions as a secular saint. After Tom offers Casy a drink, the ex-preacher's eyes glow as he moralizes about his beliefs:
Casy: I asked myself, what is this here call Holy Spirit? Maybe that's love. Why, I love everybody so much, I'm fit to bust sometimes. So - maybe there ain't no sin, and there ain't no virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain't so nice. And that's all any man's got a right to say. 'Course I'll say a grace if somebody sets out the food, but ma heart ain't in it.
Isolated from events and absent from his sharecropping family for a few years, things have changed considerably during Tom's prison term. He explains his past crime and his early parole from prison after being convicted of self-defense manslaughter in a drunken, bar-room brawl:
Tom: I've been in the penitentiary for four years. I'd do what I'd done again. Killed a guy in a dance hall. We was drunk - he got a knife in me and I laid him out with a shovel. Knocked his head plum to squash. He had a knife in me, that's why they only give me seven years. I got out in four - paroled.
They leisurely walk together to the Joad family tenant farm. Along the way, Casy describes Pa Joad's behavior during a baptizing. To imitate Pa Joad's "run at that bush," the eccentric preacher howls and jumps a fence:
Casy: Last time I seen him was at a baptizin'. He had one of the biggest doses of the Holy Spirit I ever seen. Got to jumpin' over bushes, howlin' like a dog-wolf at moon-time. Finally, he picks hisself out a bush big as a pianah, and he lets out a squawk and takes a run at that bush.
In the dark, deserted, abandoned, wind-blown Joad cabin , Tom cries out:
Tom: Ma!? Pa!? Ma!? Nobody here. Somethin's happened. They're all gone or dead.
Thinking that his folks are dead because no one is there in the semi-haunted farmhouse, Tom fears the worst. From the shadows emerges a crazy, "touched," dispossessed tenant farmer, a former neighbor named Muley Graves.
Tom learns that his own family, two weeks earlier, was forced to move to the farm of Uncle John, "but they can't stay there either. Cause John's got his notice to get off." In the spooky light of a candle, the half-crazed fugitive Muley tells them about the "notices" of eviction that have been driving farmers off their land. He also blames "the dusters" - the extreme, unending 1930s dust storms, fearful weather conditions, and the ravages of a merciless drought:
Tom: What happened? How come
they got to get off? We lived here fifty years, same place.
Muley: Everybody's got to get off. Everybody's leavin', goin' out to
California. Your folks, my folks, everybody's folks. Everybody except me. I ain't gettin'
off.
Tom: Who done it?
Muley: Listen. (Muley gestures toward the howling wind.) That's some of
what done it. The dusters. They start it anyways. Blowin' like this year after year.
Blowin' the land away. Blowin' the crops away. And blowin' us away now.
Tom: You crazy?
Muley: Some say that I am.
In the first of two flashbacks that emphasize the wide gap between the rich and poor classes, Muley remembers how he, one of the dispossessed, was driven off the land by the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. The coming of mechanized farming, combined with severe weather conditions, caused landlords to notify homes of possession and force hundreds of tenant farmer families off their lands. An agent of the impersonal company, seated in his automobile, speaks to Muley as he stands and learns with his family that they must leave their homeland. As the flashback concludes, the half-mad ("touched"), lost Muley speaks movingly, eloquently and poignantly about what the land means to him and his family:
Agent: The fact of the
matter, Muley, after what them dusters done to the land, the tenant system don't work no
more. You don't even break even, much less show a profit. Why, one man and a tractor can
handle twelve or fourteen of these places. You just pay him a wage and take all the crop.
Muley: Yeah, but uh, we couldn't do on any less than what our share is
now. Why, the children ain't gettin' enough to eat as it is, and they're so ragged. We'd
be ashamed if everybody else's children wasn't the same way.
Agent: I can't help that. All I know is, I got my orders. They told me to
tell you to get off, and that's what I'm tellin' ya.
Muley: You mean get off of my own land?
Agent: Now don't go to blamin' me! It ain't my fault.
Muley's son: Who's fault is it?
Agent: You know who owns the land. The Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.
Muley: And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company
Agent: It ain't nobody. It's a company.
Muley's son: They got a President, ain't they? They got somebody who
knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?
Agent: Oh son, it ain't his fault, because the bank tells him what to do.
Muley's son: All right, where's the bank?
Agent: Tulsa. What's the use of pickin' on him? He ain't nothin' but the
manager. And he's half-crazy hisself tryin' to keep up with his orders from the East.
Muley: Then who do we shoot?
Agent: Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell ya. I just don't know
who's to blame.
Muley: I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody gonna push
me off my land! My grandpaw took up this land seventy years ago. My paw was born here. We
was all born on it. An' some of us was killed on it. (Muley squats down and fingers the
dust of the farm he has just lost.) An' some of us died on it. That's what makes it arn.
Bein' born on it and workin' on it and dyin', dyin' on it. An' not no piece of paper with
writin' on it.
With terse, illustrative shots accompanying his tale, Muley explains his futile resistance when the re-possessing bank moved in with mechanized, farm machinery and ruthlessly evicted and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their lands and homes:
They come. They come and pushed me off. They come with the cats, the cats, the caterpillar tractors. And for every one of 'em, there was ten, fifteen families thrown right out of their homes. A hundred folks and no place to live but on the road, one right after the other, they got throw'd out. Half the folks you and me know throw'd right out into the road. The one that got me come oh, about a month ago.
In a second flashback scene, Muley - with his shotgun - futily confronts a house-demolishing caterpillar driven by another sharecropper's son. The tractor driver is a traitorous sell-out to the rich - he works for "three dollars a day," and rationalizes contemptuously:
Bulldozer driver: I got two little kids at home, my wife, my wife's mother. Them folks gotta eat. First and only, I think about my own folks. What happens to other people is their own look-out.
The driver warns Muley that if he is shot, another guy would show up in two days to take his place. The bulldozer moves in and knocks down the dilapidated shack in its path. The cat's tire tracks in the dust cut across the shadows of the family.
Although his family has already moved west, Muley has stubbornly vowed to stay (as "an old graveyard ghost") and virtuously defend his lost land even though he is hopelessly beaten:
Muley: What was the use? He was right, and there wasn't a thing in the world I could do about it....There wasn't nothin' to eat, but I couldn't leave. Somethin' just wouldn't let me. So now I just wander around and sleep wherever I am. I used to tell myself that I was lookin' out for things, so that when the folks come back everything'd be all right. But I know'd it wasn't true. There ain't nothin' to look out fer. There ain't nobody ever comin' back. They're gone! And me, I'm just an old graveyard ghost. That's all in the world I am.
When Muley hears a night patrol conducted by the agents of the owners, he teaches Tom and Casy to furtively hide out to avoid detection. Tom laments how he must hide out on his "own place" from armed watchmen ("a superintendent with a gun"), agents of the rich:
Muley: Come on, come on, we
gotta hide out.
Tom: Hide out for what? We ain't doin' nothin'.
Muley: Well, you're trespassin', Tom. This ain't your land no more. And
that's a superintendent with a gun. Come on!
Casy: Come on, Tom. You're on parole...(The superintendent needlessly
smashes one of the windows of the deserted cabin with a rock.)
Tom is exasperated by the plight he finds himself in, after the patrol car drives
off:
Tom: Anybody ever tol' me I'd be hidin' out on my own place...!
Tiny figures silhouetted against the cloudy horizon the next day, Tom and Casy continue on to Uncle John's farm where everyone in the extended Joad family is at breakfast, gathered to prepare for a trip westward to California. During the meal, Uncle John enthusiastically shows off a handbill advertising high wages for workers in California to harvest fruits and vegetables:
Uncle John: It says, 'Plenty of work in California. Eight hundred pickers wanted.'
800 PICKERS WANTED
Work in California
Good Wages.
Tents and Cabins Furnished Free.
Store on Camp Ground.
Busy From October to February.
COME AT ONCE!
Bill Macey, Labor Contractor
Grampa bubbles over, excitedly exclaiming to Granma about how easy it will be to pick oranges and grapes in California:
Grampa: Wait til I get to Californey. I'm gonna reach up and pick me an orange whenever I want it. With some grapes. Now there's somethin' I ain't never had enough of.
In a tender reunion scene, Tom's mother Ma Joad comes out to greet her son in the yard. She is worried about her boy's experiences in prison - thinking that he may have been hardened:
Gramma: I was so scared we was goin' away without ya and we'd never see each other again. Did they hurt ya, son? Did they hurt ya and make ya mean mad? Sometimes they do somethin' to ya. They hurt ya and ya get mad and then ya get mean. Then they hurt ya again and ya get meaner and meaner til you ain't no boy nor man anymore, just a walkin' chunk of mean mad. Did they hurt ya that way son? Why, I don't want no mean son.
Pa Joad and other members of the family greet Tom, naively sorry to learn that "the jailbird" hasn't broken out of jail but has only been paroled:
Pa Joad: What did ya do son, bust out?
The contemptible Shawnee Company agent drives up in a convertible to remind sharecropper Uncle John:
Agent: We'll be comin' through here tomorrow, ya know.
The large, extended Joad family of twelve prepares to leave at daybreak, packing everything into an old, dilapidated, rickety and lurching truck for a long journey westward to the 'Promised Land' of California.
Woody Guthrie
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[God Blessed America]
*all you can write is what you see. - original copy of this song 1940 |
| Woodrow Wilson Guthrie Picked up a guitar in 1929 at age 17 and an uncle showed him how to chord. Soon after, Woody — only his mother called him Woodrow — "commenced to singing," performing in the Pampa (Texas) Junior Chamber of Commerce Band. He was America's troubadour, "harsh voiced and nasal," wrote John Steinbeck, "his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim." Guthrie would write some 2,500 songs, two novels, hundreds of essays and influenced several generations of musicians. Before making the draft to fight in World War II, Woody fought the war through his songs. New York in the 1940s was breeding ground for individual expression. There, Woody found a thriving community of folk musicians who shared his passion for freedom from oppression. His guitar reads "this machine kills fascists." Throughout his life, Woody cultivated an inner creativity, relying upon his many journals and notebooks for inspiration. Although his art and writing were prolific, Woody was never able to create a cohesive whole to these journals. It was up to his second wife Marjorie to take on such a project. In 1943, Woody published Bound for Glory, an autobiographical account of his life. Despite being a country boy from the Dust Bowl, Woody spent much of his life in New York City, where he moved in 1940. He and Marjorie settled into a neighborhood on Mermaid Avenue, where Woody spent time at home with his children. When strains in their marriage forced Marjorie to divorce him, Woody left for California only to return to New York a few years later when his worsening physical condition drove him to be hopitalized. In the late 1940's, Woody began to exhibit the symptoms of Huntington's Chorea, a debilitating disease of the nervous system. There was no known cure at the time. Woody Guthrie died in 1967, at the age of 55. |
About the migrant worker photographs:
The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."
From Popular Photography, Feb. 1960
