Summary: Chapter 22
[T]hat police. He done somepin to me,
made me feel mean . . . ashamed. An’ now I ain’t ashamed . . . Why,
I feel like people again.
See Important Quotations Explained
Later that night, the Joads come across the Weedpatch
camp, a decent, government-sponsored facility where migrants govern themselves,
thus avoiding the abuse of corrupt police officers. Appointed committees
ensure that the grounds remain clean and equipped with working toilets
and showers. Early in the morning after their arrival, Tom wakes
and meets Timothy and Wilkie Wallace, who invite him to breakfast.
They agree to take him to the ranch they have been working on to
see if they can get him a job. At the ranch, the boss, Mr. Thomas,
tells the men about the Farmers’ Association, which demands that
he pay his laborers twenty-five cents an hour and no more. Even
though he knows his men deserve a higher wage, Thomas claims that
to pay more would “only cause unrest.” He goes on to say that the
government camp makes the association extremely uncomfortable: the
members believe the place to be riddled with communists, or “red
agitators.” In hopes of shutting the facilities down, Mr. Thomas
says, the association is planning to send instigators into the camp
on Saturday night to start a riot. The police will then have the
right to enter the camp, arrest the labor organizers, and evict
the migrants.
Back at the camp, the rest of the Joad men go to find
work, and Ma is visited by Jim Rawley, the camp manager, whose kindness makes
her feel human again. A religious fanatic named Mrs. Sandry appears
and tells Rose of Sharon to beware of the dancing and sinning that
goes on in the camp: the babies of sinners, she warns, are born
“dead and bloody.” The camp’s Ladies Committee then drops in on
Ma and Rose of Sharon, introducing the women to the rules of the
camp. Pa, Al, and Uncle John return from a day of fruitless searching
for work, but Ma remains hopeful, for Tom has been hired.
Summary: Chapter 23
When the people are not working or looking for work, they
make music and tell folktales together. If they have money, they
can buy alcohol, which, like music, temporarily distracts them from
their miseries. Preachers give fire-and-brimstone sermons about
evil and sin, haranguing the people until they grovel on the ground,
and conduct mass baptisms. These are the various methods the migrants have
for finding escape and salvation.
Summary: Chapter 24
It is the night of the camp dance—the night that the Farmers’
Association plans to start a riot and have the camp shut down. Ezra
Huston, the chairman of the camp committee, hires twenty men to
look out for instigators and preempt the riot. Although Rose of
Sharon goes to the event, she decides not to dance for fear of the
effect it might have on her baby. As the music begins, Tom and the
other men quickly spot three dubious-looking men. They watch the
men carefully. When one of the suspected troublemakers picks a fight
by stepping in to dance with another man’s date, the men apprehend
the trio and evict them from the camp. Before they leave, Huston
asks the three why they would turn against their own brethren, and
the men confess that they have been well paid to start a riot. Later
that night, a man tells a story about a group of mountain people
who were hired as cheap labor by a rubber company in Akron. When
the mountain people joined a union, the townspeople united to run them
out of town. In response, five thousand mountain men marched through
the center of town with their rifles, allegedly to shoot turkeys
on the far side of the settlement. The march served as a powerful
demonstration. The storyteller concludes that there has been no
trouble between the townspeople and the workers since then.
Analysis: Chapters 22–24
Life in the Weedpatch government camp proves to turn the
Joads’ luck around. Perhaps for the first time since leaving Oklahoma,
the family finds itself in a secure position. Tom finds a job, and
the camp manager treats Ma with such dignity that she says she feels
“like people again.” The charity, kindness, and goodwill that the migrants
exhibit toward one another testifies to the power of their fellowship.
When left to their own devices, and given shelter from the corrupt
social system that keeps them down, the migrants make the first
steps toward establishing an almost utopian mini-society. Moreover,
life in Weedpatch disproves the landowners’ beliefs that “Okies”
lead undignified, uncivilized lives. Indeed, the migrants show themselves
to be more civilized than the landowners, as demonstrated by the
way in which they respond to the Farmers’ Association’s plot to
sabotage the camp. Most of the wealthy landowners believe that poverty-stricken,
uneducated farmers deserve to be treated contemptuously. These men
maintain that to reward farmers with amenities such as toilets,
showers, and comfortable wages will merely give them a sense of
entitlement, embolden them to ask for more, and thus create social
and economic unrest. The migrants, however, meet the association’s
scheming and violent plot with grace and integrity. Here, the farmers
rise far above the men who oppress them by exhibiting a kind of
dignity that, in the world Steinbeck describes, often eludes the
rich.
The Joads’ experiences in the Weedpatch camp serve to
illustrate one of the novel’s main theses: humans find their greatest
strength in numbers. When Ma tries to help Rose of Sharon to overcome
her grief at Connie’s abandonment, she reminds the girl, “[Y]ou’re
jest one person, an’ they’s a lot of other folks.” As the novel
has suggested time and again, the needs of the group supersede the
needs of the individual. As the novel moves into its final chapters,
this philosophy takes center stage. The unity of the migrants poses
the greatest threat to landowners and the socioeconomic system on
which they thrive. This idea begins to dawn on the farmers, who
realize the effects that their numbers, once organized, might have.
The story about the rubber workers and their mass march indicates
the desperation of people in these times to obtain not only economic
solvency but the respect they deserve as human beings.
As Tom’s political involvement increases, the reader notes
a change in his character. At the beginning of the novel, Tom asserted that
he was interested only in getting through the present day; thinking
about the future proved too troubling a task. Now, however, devoted
as he is to his family and his fellow migrants, Tom begins to look
toward the future and its possibilities.
The Weedpatch camp changes not only individual characters
but also the interactions among groups of characters. Thus, we witness a
shift of power taking place within the Joad clan. Always a source of
strength and indomitable love, Ma Joad begins to move into a space
traditionally reserved for male family members: as Pa Joad suffers
one failure after another, Ma is called upon to make decisions and
guide the family. The altered family structure parallels the more
general revision of traditional power structures in the camp. The
farmers now make their own decisions, delegating duties according
to notions of fairness and common sense rather than adhering to
old hierarchies or submitting to individual cravings for control.
As Jim Casy had predicted in Chapter 10 when he insisted on helping
Ma salt the family’s meat, when faced with unprecedented hardship,
people can no longer afford to stratify themselves according to
gender, age, or other superficial differences.
