THE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECK.doc

THE WORLD OF JOHN STEINBECKS JOADS A hundred years ago as I write, people waited in covered wagons and on horses for the signal to begin the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 and get a new start on free land. Fifty years ago John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath chronicled the beginning of the Joad familys trip west from Sallisaw, Oklahoma, out of an exhausted land, hoping for another new start in California. These images of Oklahoma dominate the popular imagination-and neither has much to do, geographically or historically, with eastern Oklahoma.Steinbeck is so closely identified with Oklahoma that for years even scholars believed, apparently from internal evidence in the novel, that he had come to Oklahoma to travel west with the Okies.Jackson R. Benson, his first real biographer, actually traced his movements and discovered that he had driven across the state on U.S. 66, well north of the Joads route until Oklahoma City, but did no special research. Steinbeck did travel with migrant Okies, but only in California.Some Oklahomans were aware that Steinbeck knew absolutely nothing about the Sallisaw area, but even they concentrated on the general picture of the collapse of tenant and small farming and the destruction of a whole class of people and a way of life. Those who did notice seem, from Martin Shockleys account in The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma,1 to have used his errors in description as an excuse for rejecting the real point. In fact, the official position in Oklahoma was that big capital was benevolent, Oklahomas agricultural workers were among the most fortunate in the country, there were no Joads, and all was for the best-considering.Since no Steinbeck critic seems to have bothered to check on the site of the first two hundred pages of the novel, I decided to make the journey to eastern Oklahoma to see what Steinbeck had missed and to get a sense of what he had been able to infer about the land and the people from the Oklahomans he had met in the California fields. What I found, not on any map or in any photograph I took, but there, between the lines of the novel where even Steinbeck could not have suspected it, was a piece of my own past and the past I share with my forebears and some of my contemporaries but not with my children. In fact, I am part of the last generation likely to read or read about the novel for whom it is not purely historical and scarcely credible.Granted, my parents were not migrants, though they were certainly mobile during the Depression years; but I was born in the middle of the Dust Bowl. My family lived for a while in Coffeyville, Kansas, about sixty miles west of Galena, starting point for the Wilsons who accompany the Joads from Bethany, Oklahoma, to Needles, California. My grandparents and later my parents hid out from the Depression on hardscrabble farms in Morgan County, Missouri, back far enough in the woods that, like Winthrop and Ruthie Joad, I encountered my first flush toilet with deep suspicion. My father, moreover, had a good deal in common with Tom Joad, including his distrust of government and his attachment to family, besides their age.Furthermore, although I am not, to Oklahomans, an Oklahoman, having lived here only twenty-two years, my roots are in the region, and to bicoastal types and Yankees of all descriptions, including my colleagues, I apparently sound, look, and act like their stylized conception of an Okie. So I had some idea how it feels-and an even clearer idea after my journey through the countryside and through the novel.At the beginning of the trip, however, I was only interested in tracing the route of the Joads. In outline, the geography of the first part of the novel is fairly simple: the narrative begins with Tom Joad near the end of his journey from McAlester State Prison northeast to the farm where his family live as tenants. The land is so fiat that a truck travels a mile to the first turn and the distance, toward the horizon, was tan to invisibility.2 The dirt and dust are red; the land is under intense cultivation except where it is going back to sparse brush (37).Uncle Johns farm is near a highway (U.S. 59?) roughly twenty miles west of the Arkansas border, less than a days journey by horse-drawn wagon going the back way, by Cowlington (112). Thus the Joads live in northwest Le Flore County or northeast Haskell County, south of the Arkansas River, which forms the southern boundary of Sequoyah County, of which Sallisaw is the county seat.In fact, though Steinbeck probably did not know and certainly, concerned with the plight of what he clearly though of as real (i.e., white) Americans, did not care, the Arkansas was not only the boundary between the Choctaw and Cherokee Nations when this was Indian Territory, but it was one route for the Trail of Tears, which brought the Five Civilized Tribes to the region after an upheaval at least comparable to the Joads displacement by dust and tractors. Eastern Oklahoma is no longer Indian Territory, and in fact some whites settled there by relatively peaceful means before the Territory was subsumed into Oklahoma; but a lot of Indians still live there, and they are very much present in the consciousness of Oklahomans. The only Indian the Joads are aware of is the one pictured on the pillow that Grampa Joad has appropriated. In the minds of the generic tenant farmers in an intercalary chapter, they have a right to the land because Grampa took up the land, and he had to kill the Indians and drive them away (45).When the Joads themselves are driven off the land-Steinbeck has no sense of history repeating itself-they begin their journey on a red-dirt road until they reach Sallisaw, where they turn west on a concrete highway. From that point, and all the first day of the trip, Steinbeck gives precise mileage from town to town but almost no sense of the land on either side of the highway, because both he and the Joads focus intently on the road ahead.The exact measurement illustrates in reverse Ernest Hemingways theory that a writer can leave things out if he really knows them. Anyone who travels the Joad route can see that Steinbeck hadnt the vaguest idea what the country was like but took refuge in very sharp close-ups of individual figures and in tableaus of groups, counting on readers as well as characters to focus panoramically, seeing no detail, but . . . the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once (154). He was consistently wrong about what texture he gave. The land he purports to describe is in fact foothill country, the roads rising and falling, the horizons at most a mile or two away and always above eye level, the earth tan, the hills wooded, and the untended land soon choked with trees.Of course, documentary precision has uncertain relationships to art, even to an art like Steinbecks; and even had he been the most exact recorder of travels in the region, his novel would still be useless as a guide to the contemporary traveler. (Route 66, the Okie route to the Promised Land, has itself disappeared, subsumed into Interstate 44 east of Oklahoma City and into Interstate 40 westward.) Uncle Johns farm would either be valuable lake-front property or at the bottom of Robert S. Kerr Lake. In fact, Oklahoma, its rivers dammed into lakes the shape of crab nebulae, now has more shoreline than Minnesota, and in eastern Oklahoma tourism and water sports are big business. As cause and by-product of all this water, modern Joads and landlords could ship their cotton via barge all the way to New Orleans on the Kerr-McClellan Arkansas River Navigation System. But there is no cotton to ship. The bottom land shows no signs of cultivation except for occasional huge cylinders of hay too big for any man to lift, products of mechanization that will be applauded by anyone who has bucked eighty-pound bales six high on a flatbed truck in July. The land is, as Muley Graves says it should have remained, grazing land.Steinbecks Jeffersonian ideal of a little piece of land is not dead, however. Just south of Sallisaw and just north of We Never Sleep Bail Bonds is a billboard for Wild Horse Estates / Want a Small Farm? / We Got Them: two-and-a-half-acre tracts and running water, electricity, and telephone lines. As the various trailer parks and RV sales lots indicate, though, Oklahomans are still on the move-if Dans Mobile Home Repo Center or the adjacent cemetery doesnt get them first.Once under the bridge that carries I-40 across Oklahoma, franchised America gives way to the world-if not the country-of the Joads. In Sallisaw it becomes clear that Steinbeck did know something about the people of Oklahoma.A dark-haired man with an anxious look urges a battered yellow Japanese two-door along Cherokee Avenue, U.S. 64 and the main drag. A lean and ancient man-Grampa Joad buttoned up for Sunday-grasps a post supporting a metal sidewalk awning, his cane hooked over his free arm.Scattered through town and all along the highway west are fossil records of the preinterstate era, when two-lane concrete U.S. highways were state of the art. The buildings (mission-style garages, Bonnie-and-Clyde tourist cabins, mom-and-pop frame grocery stores, tumbledown gas stations stripped of hand pumps become chic decor) stand because no one needs the space they occupy and because it is cheaper to board them up than to demolish them.The highways-U.S. 64 to Warner, U.S. 266 to Henryetta (Steinbeck spells it Henrietta), U.S. 62 to Oklahoma City-exist in a time warp. They arent quite the Joad route: the old Hudson Super Six traveled eighty-two miles from Sallisaw to Henryetta; today the trip is ten miles shorter. Essentially, though, the road is the same: two lanes, no shoulders, the hard edge of the slab visible and dangerous, expansion joints whupping at the tires and jolting up through the backside every ten feet or so even in a modern car.At Henryetta the Joads route disappears for nineteen miles into Interstate 40, and the modern traveler is forced to reenter the late twentieth century. Here life is an accelerated version of what Steinbeck described in his intercalary chapters. The trucks are bigger, faster, and scarier than ever, and the drivers can no longer casually turn aside for a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and a solitary flirtation with a fading waitress in a roadside diner; now they gather in flocks at enormous truck stops that have everything a temporarily homeless man needs, including bunks, showers, electronic games, and sometimes assignations with hookers who conduct their business in mobile homes.Some descendants of the Joads now travel the interstates. Ahead of me is a pickup truck bought, the little sign on the tailgate shows, in Blanchard, Oklahoma, loaded neatly, mattresses on edge lengthwise in the center, smaller pieces to either side, all roped snugly down. The driver, lean, weathered, and glum, his right hand atop the steering wheel with a cigarette sticking up between the index and middle fingers, might be, fifty years later, the reality of what Al Joad dreamed of becoming.The man from Blanchard is too well off and not anxious enough to be a Joad. In fact, very few modern Joads use the interstate, because their cars cannot maintain the pace. Occasionally you will overtake a rusting, quivering, oversize American car of uncertain color and vintage, battered outside and tattered within, driven by an unshaven man with both hands firmly on the wheel, a shapeless wife beside him, and a bevy of tousled children staring from every win-dow-open, in the summer, because either the car never had air conditioning or it no longer works. If you think like a social scientist, you will agree with the Oklahoma sociologist, sympathetic in intention, who commented: The farm migrant as described in Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath was the logical consequence of privation, insecurity, low income, inadequate standards of living, impoverishment in matters of education and cultural opportunities and a lack of spiritual satisfaction.3 If you are an ordinary person, you will feel a moments empathy for anyone condemned to that pace in that feeble a machine before thinking, in truckers parlance, I couldnt live like that. If you are in heavy traffic, you will curse the car and its inhabitants for clogging the flow of vehicles and will check the side mirror to be sure that no one is going to cowboy through by changing lanes right in front of you; but you are not likely to think that the inhabitants of the truck are anything like you, because if you did, or did for very long, you would not be able to stand the thought of someone living by standards of food, shelter, clothing, hygiene, and general quality of life that you could not endure. One of Steinbecks major accomplishments as a polemicist and as a novelist is that he presents us with a picture of a life we could not endure, lived by people we could not tolerate for a minute in everyday life, and not only gives us no alternative to seeing them as human but makes us turn against our own kind and ourselves for looking away in distaste from a sleazy roadside diner or for driving too fast in new cars to avoid a dog on the road.We didnt see any Joads on Interstate 40, but we did overtake a Mercedes 300, driven well under the speed limit by a man dressed in camouflage fatigues and picking his nose. I assume that Steinbecks waitress would label him a shitheel. That is an interesting term, undefined by Steinbeck but apparently referring in a literal sense to someone so accustomed to indoor plumbing that, when forced to defecate in the woods, he or she is so unpracticed as to befoul the backs of the feet. Literally, if the fatigues were for use rather than for fashion, the man in the Mercedes may not have deserved the label. Most of us would, though, and we would most especially deserve it in the connotative sense for equating humanity with a particular stage of domestic technology-or a regional accent or set of customs. The Joads, and to some extent these heirs of their dispossession, seem alien to us because they live in the way that country people had done for centuries before the rivers were dammed and the high lines brought Rural Electrification Administration power to light the houses and run the motors on the wells so that hand pumps could be replaced by indoor plumbing and before tanks of liquified petroleum gas made wood gathering a recreation rather than a necessity.That was not a comfortable life; it seemed, and was, a long way to the outhouse on a winter night, and even a chamber pot chills quickly after the fire dies. A coal-oil lamp doesnt give off much light or a wood stove much heat, and you have to keep about both in ways that even modern farmers cannot imagine. In fact, however, that life wasnt as hard to live as it is to imagine, because country people had always lived that way. It was the culture they knew, material and otherwise, and they knew how to use it.We dont, which is what makes us shitheels in varying degrees. But not very far beneath the surface, all of us Oklahomans-the sour man in the Chevy half-ton, the nose-picker in the Mercedes, and me in my stockpiled vita and 81 Honda-are Okies to somebody because of the way we talk or where we live or what we do and how we do it. To the sophisticated we are all quaint and irrelevant to what is really going on.That morning I had left a motel whose marquee boasted, or pleaded, AMERICAN OWNED. The man from Blanchard carried a bumper sticker with the legend BUY AMERICAN GROWN, AMERICAN MADE-IT MATTERS.Perhaps I should get a bumper sticker reading HUMANISM: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT in response to new and alien technologies.Like Muley Graves and the nameless tenant farmers in the intercalary chapters of The Grapes of Wrath, someone we dont know is doing something we dont understand and have no control over that is going to affect our lives in ways we dont even want to think about. We are going to have to change what we do or at least the way we do it, and at the same time, to preserve continuity and dignity, we must preserve a sense that what we did was coherent and valuable. The difference between us Okies, geographic and spiritual, and the rest of humanity is that we know it and resent it, asking in our various ways the question of Steinbecks baffled tenant farmer: Who do I shoot? The next question, less satisfying but more constructive, is What do I do now? The first step is to understand that there is a process and then to discover how to adapt to it, and if you are lucky or clever, to adapt it to your tastes and abilities. The Joads begin by feeling the process and then disc