John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath Chapters 21-25

THE MOVING, QUESTING people were migrants now.

THE MIGRANT PEOPLE, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement.

And they scampered about, looking for work; and the highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people.

There in the Middle—and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands.

There in the Middle—and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands.

The smoke of the morning fires arose all over the camp, and the mutter of talk came from all sides.

Rose of Sharon, unkempt and sleepy-eyed, crawled out of the tent.

Rose of Sharon said sullenly, "I don' feel good: I wisht Connie would come.

Ma called them back, held up their faces with a handunder each chin, and looked into their nostrils, pulled their ears and looked inside, and sent them to the sanitary unit to wash their hands once more.

He came to the fire and squatted on his hams, and the last of Ma's resistance went down.

You pick him up—bloody an' twisted, an' you spoiled somepin better'n you; an' eatin' him don't never make it up to you, 'cause you spoiled somepin in yaself, an' you can't never fix it up.

About mid-afternoon child bathing began, and as each child was caught, subdued, and washed, the noise on the playground gradually subsided.

Grampa's grampa, he fit in the Revolution.

She backed away and cocked her head to see how Rose of Sharon would take such a revelation.

This here was sin an' delusion an' devil stuff.

And"—the voice grew bleak and ominous—"she thinned out and she skinnied out, an'—she dropped that baby, dead."

"Well, some folks here done it, an' one girl, she dropped her baby—dead—an' bloody, like it was a judgment."

She didn't look again, but she was conscious of the approach of the committee.

And the committee walked down the road with dignity.

Ma whirled around as though she had been caught off guard.

Ma flustered, "We ain't in very good shape yet.

"If a body's ever took charity, it makes a burn that don't come out.

When the committee called on Ma, Ruthie and Winfield faded imperceptibly back out of reach.

For a moment she stared at them, and then she flung down the mallet and ran crying for home.

Ruthie sprang at her, slapped her, pushed her, and wrested the mallet from her hands.

Ruthie scowled fiercely and her hands tightened on the mallet.

And then she looked in amazement.

Defiantly she hit the ball again.

THE TRUCK moved along the beautiful roads, past orchards where the peaches were beginning to color, past vineyards with the clusters pale and green, under lines of walnut trees whose branches spread half across the road.

THE TRUCK moved along the beautiful roads, past orchards where the peaches were beginning to color, past vineyards with the clusters pale and green, under lines of walnut trees whose branches spread half across the road.

No trespassing."

I tell ya, ya eternal soul ain't got a chancet in this here camp.

Slowly the woman sank to her knees and the howls sank to a shuddering, bubbling moan.

Could go through dry leaves, an' make no rustle.

Took three regiments to kill a hundred braves—always.

The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great words because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them.

Well, they git caught at some kind a radical meetin' but they ain't radicals.

Thin, barren women, but they're too miserable to know.

Folks gits along nice; an', God Awmighty, why can't they let us do it 'stead of keepin' us miserable an' puttin' us in jail?

Fella says they's fiddles four hundred years old, and they git mellow like whisky.

And the preacher paced like a tiger, whipping the people with his voice, and they groveled and whined on the ground.

Every bit of electric wire had been requisitioned.

The city dump had been visited for wire, every tool box had contributed friction tape.

Willie saluted in mockery and went out.

An' he says, 'Railroads an' shippin' companies draw subsidies—ain't that relief?'

"You know a vagrant is anybody a cop don't like.

A boy with a guitar sang the "Down Home Blues," chording delicately for himself, and on his second chorus three harmonicas and a fiddle joined him.

In front of their tents the Jesus-lovers sat and watched, their faces hard and contemptuous.

And he said nonchalantly, "I can waltz."

The girl's lip quivered.

Tom looked at the hawk nose and the high brown cheek bones and the slender receding chin.

"Swing to the right an a swing to lef'; break, now—break—back to—back," the caller sang the high vibrant monotone.

Willie yelped, "Le's go!"

"We don't need a warrant if there's a riot."

Then the first tendrils of the grapes swelling from the old gnarled vines, cascade down to cover the trunks.

And on the level vegetable lands are the mile-long rows of pale green lettuce and the spindly little cauliflowers, the gray-green unearthly artichoke plants.

Behind the fruitfulness are men of understanding and knowledge, and skill, men who experiment with seed, endlessly developing the techniques for greater crops of plants whose roots will resist the million enemies of the earth: the molds, the insectsthe rusts, the blights.

Doctors of preventive medicine, men at the borders who look for fruit flies, for Japanese beetle, men who quarantine the sick trees and root them out and burn them, men of knowledge.

Five dollars for forty fifty-pound boxes; trees pruned and sprayed, orchards cultivated—pick the fruit, put it in boxes, load the trucks, deliver the fruit to the cannery—forty boxes for five dollars.

Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation.

There is a failure here that topples all our success.

And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath.

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.