“We’re
Joads. We don’t look up to nobody. Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the
Revolution. We was farm people till the debt. And then—them people.
They done somepin to us. Ever’ time they come seemed like they was
a-whippin’ me—all of us. An’ in Needles, that police. He done somepin
to me, made me feel mean. Made me feel ashamed. An’ now I ain’t
ashamed. These folks is our folks—is our folks. An’ that manager,
he come an’ set an’ drank coffee, an’ he says, ‘Mrs. Joad’ this,
an’ ‘Mrs. Joad’ that—an’ ‘How you getting’ on, Mrs. Joad?’” She
stopped and sighed. “Why, I feel like people again.”
After the Joads arrive in the Weedpatch
government camp in Chapter 22, Ma discusses the effects
of life on the road. It has, she reports, changed her. The open
gestures of hostility the family has suffered at the hands of policemen
and landowners have made her “mean,” petty, hardened. In Weedpatch,
however, for the first time since leaving Oklahoma she is treated
like a human being. The camp manager’s kindness rekindles her sense
of connection in the world: “These is our folks,” she says. Ma’s
speech underlines the importance of fellowship among the migrants,
suggesting that, given their current difficulties, one cannot afford
to bear one’s burdens alone.
Throughout The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
emphasizes the importance of the self-respect and sense of dignity
that Ma displays here. The unfair treatment the migrants receive
does not simply create hardship for them; it diminishes them as
human beings. As long as people maintain a sense of injustice, however—a
sense of anger against those who seek to undercut their pride in
themselves—they will never lose their dignity. This notion is reinforced
particularly at the end of the book, in the images of the festering
grapes of wrath (Chapter 25) and in the last of the short,
expository chapters (Chapter 29), in which the worker women,
watching their husbands and brothers and sons, know that these men
will remain strong “as long as fear [can] turn to wrath.”
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