I finished reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath this week. From the very first page, I have sensed the heavy, oppressive circumstances the Joad family experiences. What adds to this feeling is the current economic conditions that have a powerful impact on so many lives—I keep questioning the connections the Joads have with us today.
The Joads have done absolutely nothing wrong—they just experience the consequences of many interconnected events, each leading to their crop failure, to the destruction of their home and loss of their farm, their hopeful forced migration to California to look for work, to no job opportunities, prejudice, humiliation, despair, and even death. No chapter gets better; no chapter gives the Joads or us a breather. Yet, I couldn’t put the novel down.
I also keep seeing my grandparents through this novel. My grandparents were also sharecroppers here in Idaho. For much of my grandparents early marriage, they sharecropped sugar beets for U&I Sugar Company. While one set of my grandparents raised the sugar beet crops in Osgood, my other grandfather worked in the sugar factories in Rigby and Lincoln. My grandparents both began their marriages a few years before the Great Depression, and they raised their families during that unbelievably, difficult time.
But what keeps me reading The Grapes of Wrath are the characters, especially Ma Joad—I don’t think we ever get her name—she’s just Ma. This woman takes her family who is tearing apart, and she actively leads the battle to unite them and to encourage them. She steps in and becomes the woman and leader that others don’t expect. When her son Tom suggests splitting the family, she threatens to hit him with a tire jack to prevent that split. She takes action in the government Weedpatch camp and gives her husband Pa a reason to fight. She demands that they leave their secure boxcar home to find higher ground and food. Her chief desire is “to keep the fambly whole.”
Ma doesn’t give up; she’s tired; she continues to move forward, day by day, even when all appears hopeless. She raises and teaches her family. She places all needs above her own. Even though the family sees no future in the end of the novel, we readers do get a glimmer of hope because of Ma’s influence on her daughter Rose of Sharon.
Get this great quotation. Elder George Q. Cannon in 1863 reminds us that “God sees not as man sees; that he does not willingly afflict his children, and that if he requires them to endure present privation and trial, it is that they may escape greater tribulations which would otherwise inevitably overtake them. If he deprives them of any present blessing, it is that he may bestow upon them greater and more glorious ones by and by.”
Just think about that quotation and the difficult things we work through day after day. I also like this quotation I read yesterday from an Ethan Canin short story “The Palace Thief”: “A man’s character is his character.” These trials, burdens, heartaches make us who we are.
Now back to my Grampa and Gramma Jensen. During the terrible Great Depression as sharecroppers there was an early freeze that froze all the beets in the field, so the workers weren’t able to harvest the beets and make their obligations to the sugar company. Nearly all gave up. But Grampa and Gramma went to the supervisor and gave him all the money they had been saving for their own farm and paid off their debt. The supervisor told them that they were the only family who paid in full, and most of the others just packed up and moved out in the night. My grandparents, although with no money, left sharecropping with their integrity.
You have integrity, and you are made up of your own challenges. Don’t give up—keep looking to the future while you daily make the best of whatever you do. Remember those real promises that glorious blessings are available both for you now and by and by.
Bless you, pup.
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