February 21, 2004
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
My mother passed away a little over four years ago (has it been that long?). I still on occasion reach back for those moments we shared untainted happiness, or commonality, together. I certainly disappointed her at times, indeed perhaps devastated her at times, but I think I also brought her joy. My girls would be evidence of this.
In the spring of 1968 she was into The Grapes of Wrath, and also into being the social service unit of Upper Effingham County. I can't tell you how many Saturdays my brother and I spent in the car going from the library to the courthouse to the housing authority. There simply was not a social safety network in place, not in a segregated county, and Mom did what she could. She felt, for want of a better word, obliged.
My mother grew up poor as dirt in southeast Georgia in the Depression, and my father didn't fare much better in Atlanta, although he was considered upper middle-class. His parents still had to send him back to the family farm in Pine Mountain every summer to fatten him up (walking distance to the Little White House, by the way).
So it's strange that Mom took such a shining to Grapes. Even after the Old Man got his Senatorship, both of my parents remained virulent anti-Rooseveltians, because although they were relatively poor, they had no truck for hand-outs. Those were for "white trash" and "niggers".
But Grapes fascinated her. She'd read a chapter and tell me, "We lived just like that!". Sad, indeed. And also Uplifting. Mom really related to the Joads, and their plight, and she just saw the trek to California as something that Must Be Done, and the Department of Agriculture waystation was just Socialist bullshit.
See, Mom related to Grapes, but she considered Federal Gummint help wrong shit. Grapes was an uplifting story to her, not a cry for help.
I still read it that way. I can't help it. You don't ask the feds to help you out when the white trash tries to run you out of town, you fuck them up. You take charge of your life, your circumstance, and you deal with it.
Steinbeck raised more questions than I think he would like answered. And for that I glorify him.