A Journey of Sticking Together
Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck deals with the successes and failures of unity on a trip to California. The Joads, like many others, are having their farms taken over by the government. After this unfortunate event, they have to travel to California in order for a better life. The deal with successes and failures of unity in the beginning, middle, and the end. They struggle with the hardships of leaving yet, they still have to deal with the troubles of staying together.

In the beginning of the novel, Steinbeck stresses how important it is for the Joads family to stick together on the long journey to California. Ma Joad is the first to realize how many people that are moving to California for a better life. At this point, Tom had been in prison for two years, and they decided to let him out early because of his good behavior. He decided to go back to the Joad family farm, but realized they weren’t there. Then he was told to go to his Uncle Johns house where he found them. He had a deep conversation with Ma about life. She told Tommy how if everybody would just fight together, that they would not be in the same position that they are in now. Ma Joad tells Tommy, “Tommy, don't you go fightin' 'em alone. They'll hunt you down like a coyote. Tommy, I got to thinkin' and dreamin' and wonderin'. They say there's a hun'erd thousand of us shoved out. If we was all mad the same way, Tommy-they wouldn't hunt nobody down-." (104 Steinbeck). This shows how Ma thinks about having all of the migrant families just stick together to make it a better place. Then they decided that they were going to leave to California pretty soon. Although the Joad truck is going to be filled with people, they decide to hold a meeting seeing if preacher Casey can come too. At the meeting, Ma says how that one more person will not be that hard to accommodate. Ma also states how that she never heard of any Joads ever denying man food, shelter, or a lift to anybody. Earlier in the book, the first failure of the people not sticking together is when the banks come and take over the farms with these tractors called Cat’s. The men on the farms complain about how the bank is not like men. They say that they are monsters because of what they are doing to all of these people. The men also realize how that they bank is made up of men who hate what they do, yet they still keep on going with their daily lives of ruining others peoples lives. When they were about to leave the saw another failure of unity. In the beginning, they realize the guy who is driving the tractor over family’s farms is one of their neighbors. When Tom first gets home he realizes that there are no families that are still at their homes. The bank is taking away everybody’s land. “That’s what makes it ours – being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it” (Steinbeck 45). The banks are just driving over the land and saying it’s theirs, but the people who lived their think it belongs to them, but they have no choice but to leave He is helping put out his neighbors because his family needs the money and the banks who own the tractors are paying him three dollars a day. Some people are betraying people in the same situation by just becoming part of the monster that separates the people.

In the middle of the novel, The Joads meet the Wilson family along side the road. They talk to the Wilson’s for a while and they realize that there are on the side of the road because their car broke down. At this point, Grandpa was very sick and the Wilson’s let him lay down in their tent to rest, but Grandpa ends up dying in their tent. After this kindness of the Wilson’s, the Joads insist that the Wilson’s and Joads would benefit by traveling together to California. “If some of us folks could ride with them an’ take some a their light stuff in the truck, we wouldn’t break no springs an’ we could git up hills. An’ me an’ Al both knows about a car, so we could keep that car a-rollin’” (Steinbeck 202). In the middle of the novel, this family stops at a dinner on the way to California. The dinners don’t like the migrant families because they are either stealing or begging for something, but one of the families was very lucky. They stopped and asked to buy a loaf of bread there for ten cents. The waitress kept insisting that the bread was 15 cents, but one of the cooks in back made her sell them the loaf for ten cents. They also end up selling candy to the little boys in there for a lot cheaper then what they were. Some of the truck drivers that were in their rewarded the diners’ kindness with a big tip. Rose of Sharon was the first to talk about splitting up once they get to California. She said that once they arrived, she and Connie want to live in town. Ma asks “Ain’t you gonna stay with us-with the family?” (Steinbeck 225). She says Connie wants to study at night in preparation to manage his own store. He also wants to get a job in a store or in a factory. Ma is worried because she doesn’t want the family to split up. Rose of Sharon is day dreaming and saying that when they get there she will have a doctor when the baby is born. And that they will have a little car. That they will go to movies. Rose of Sharon is thinking ahead of herself. Another problem they face when they arrived in California, was crossing the desert. The stop in the desert by a nearby river to take a bath and cool off. Noah decided he wanted to stay there and be alone. He felt this way because he feels useless and alone in the family. When they are there, they also end up leaving the Wilson’s behind because Sairy is sick; the Wilson’s didn’t want to burden the Joads any longer. Once they leave, they travel a bit until they are stopped by a police who inspects their car. They realize Grandma has been dead for a while, but Ma is the only one who knew. She didn’t tell anybody because she wanted to bury Grandma properly.

At the end of the novel, the Joads arrive at government camp called the Weedpatch camp. They stay at this government sponsored camp where the migrants govern themselves. “Here they discover that they are more than an isolated family and that they are part of the community of migrant workers who care and share with one another” (Harris 382). They realize although there are so many camps that treat the people bad, there is still hope. This camp actually seems like a humane place compared to the other camps they’ve seen. When Ma was cooking stew all of these children came around her and asked if they could help her. Ma knew that they wanted some of the stew. She tried her best to do what she could. She gave the family their shares, and what was left she let the children have; Ma felt bad for them. In this camp they knew that they had to stick together in order to have such a fair camp. On Saturdays the camps have dances. Government people weren’t allowed in this camp, but they were trying to sneak in. Although the government was trying to break the migrants up, they were able to work together to prevent that from happening. The government hired some people to go into the dance and start trouble. So the people in the camp assigned certain people to keep a lookout. They found a group of guys that looked suspicious. They saw that the group of guys was starting to get rowdy so they ran to break up the fight immediately. They brought them to the back and forced them to tell who made them do this. They did it because if there was a fight at the camp, the government was allowed to come in. The boys who started the fight were also migrant people who did it in order to earn some money. This is similar to what some of the migrants did in the beginning. Another failure of unity, is the small farms are being demolished by the big farms. Since the big farms are able to hire so many workers, they are able to gain income. The small farms don’t have enough workers or any money which makes it hard for them to make any money. The small farms end up putting poison on the fruit that falls off the trees so that way nobody can come and eat it. The small farms and migrants could beat the big farms if they would just all work together. Although the Joads were excited to see advertisements of work in the cotton fields, they end up getting ripped off. The wages were nice, but the workers had to buy their bag on credit for cotton picking. Since there were so many workers in the fields, a lot of the workers weren’t able to pay off their bags. Also, some of the owners would even rig the scales when they weighed the cotton, but the migrants also loaded stones into their sack to try and get some extra weight added on.

Throughout the Grapes of Wrath, the Joads have to struggle in order to stay united. In the beginning, middle, and the end the have successes and failures with sticking together. They realize that if they were to all work together, they could take over the government and farms. “The California experiences of the Joads – and particularly of Ma and Tom – make explicit to them the difference between ‘I’ and ‘we’” ( Bloom 98). The journey to California transformed them from I to we. They learned to stay together no matter what it took. Although the majority of them stuck together, they did fail by losing some members of the family.

Citations

Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations : The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988.

Harris, Laurie Lanzen. Characters in 20th-century Literature. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1990.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1992.