Searching for the ghost of Tom Joad

In between web and writing projects, I've just finished re-reading "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck.

For about 20 of my 27 teaching years, "Of Mice and Men" was on a classroom loop for me, but I rarely ventured into Steinbeck's other great works, until recently.

"East of Eden" was read about 2 months ago and its events and characters are still razor-etched in my consciousness and, today, the last page of "The Grapes of Wrath" was read where the bereaving daughter and grieving mother, Rose of Sharon, breastfeeds a dying starving man, just hours after losing her stillborn child.

It's a novel, that Springsteen and Woody Guthrie, have immortalised in song and in 2023, it remains a powerful novel and one that is relevant and should resonate across the world today.

The Joad family, like so many others, are being displaced by mechanical and technological advances in farming and are sold the (American) dream of the west coast of California where fruit picking, land and property ownership will become theirs, with thousands of others.

Their journey sees them lose grandma and grandpa, early on; the man engaged to Rose of Sharon, Connie, disappears and the protagonist of the novel is in jail, awaiting release for manslaughter.

The family is held together by a granite-like matriarch, Ma Joad, who never gives up, never despairs and stoically marches on when all is lost.

It's a beautiful, though depressing, read. 30s America is brutal in places yet the communities these poor, desperate people create are remarkable. We see a camp - policed by committee, with no crime, no hunger, hot water, toilets and showers, which the Joads reluctantly leave to find work picking cotton and fruit.

There's deaths of family, the preacher Casy and losses of new life with the stillborn baby. It's an utterly desperate situation and one that I can see parallels with in with the refugees across the world.

Sunak, Braverman and their coterie of evil government supporters are the Californian equivalent of the Sheriffs and Deputies, breaking up camps, setting unfair pay regulations and watching desperate families die. Their time will soon be up though, we hope.

There is hope too in "The Grapes of Wrath".

Tom Joad disappears after a second murder with these words famously said to his mother from his hiding place in a culvert:

I'll be around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can't eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.”

Biblical rain descends, the family are forced to higher ground to an abandoned barn, a young child breastfeeds a starving man, but, lingering in the background, unstated, unfeatured, invisible for now, is some semblance of hope - Tom Joad, with his seven dollars from his mother, who will perhaps return with his principles, ready to create some collective action.

A depressing novel yes but one that is so relevant to 2023 and beyond.

Go read it.