Grapes of Wrath Plot Summaries Ch. 16-30 – Flashcards

The Joad and Wilson families travel for two days. On the third day, they settle into a new routine whereby "the highway became their home and movement their medium of expression." Rose of Sharon declares that when they arrive in California, she and Connie plan to live in town, where Connie can study at night in preparation for managing his own store. This worries Ma Joad, who balks at any idea of splitting up the family. The Wilsons' car breaks down again. Tom and Casy offer to stay behind to repair it, but Ma refuses to go on without them. Instead, the whole group waits while Al and Tom go into town to find parts at a local car lot. The brothers find the needed part, and spend some time talking to the bitter, one-eyed attendant. The man complains tearfully of the injustices of his job. Tom urges him to pull himself together. At the crowded camp that night, Pa Joad tells a man that he is traveling to look for work in California. The man laughs at him, saying that there is no work in California, despite what the handbills promise. Wealthy farmers, the man reports, may need 800 workers, but they print 5,000 handbills, which are seen by 20,000 people. The man says that his wife and children starved to death because he took them to find work in California. This worries Pa, but Casy tells him that the Joads may have a different experience than this man did.

As masses of cars travel together and camp along the highway, little communities spring up among the migrant farmers: "twenty families became one family." The communities create their own rules of conduct and their own means of enforcement. The lives of the farmers change drastically. They are no longer farmers but "migrant men."

After traveling through the mountains of New Mexico and the Arizona desert, the Joads and Wilsons arrive in California. They still face a great obstacle, however, as the desert lies between them and the lush valleys they have been expecting. The men find a river and go bathing. There, they meet a father and son who are returning from California because they have been unable to make a living. The man cautions the Joads about what awaits them there: the open hostility of people who derisively call them "Okies" and the wastefulness of ranchers with "a million acres." Despite these warnings, the Joads decide to continue on, and to finish the journey that night. Noah decides to stay behind, saying he will live off fish from the river. He claims that his absence will not really hurt the family, for although his parents treat him with kindness, they really do not love him deeply. Tom tries in vain to convince him otherwise. Granma, whose health has deteriorated since Grampa's death, lies on a mattress hallucinating. A large woman enters the Joads' tent to pray for Granma's soul, but Ma sends the woman away, claiming that the old woman is too tired for such an ordeal. Soon afterward, a policeman enters the tent and rudely informs Ma that the family will have to move on. When Tom returns to camp and reports that Noah has run off, Ma laments that the family is falling apart. The Joads must pack up and are forced to leave the Wilsons behind: Sairy's health is failing, and Ivy insists that the Joads move on without them. During the night, police stop the truck for a routine agricultural inspection. Ma pleads with the officer to let them go, saying that Granma is in desperate need of medical attention. When they cross into the valley, Ma reports that Granma has been dead since before the inspection. Ma lay with the body all night in the back of the truck.

The narrator describes how California once belonged to Mexico but was taken away by hungry American squatters who believed that they owned the land because they farmed it. The descendants of these squatters are the wealthy farmers who defend their land with security guards and protect their wealth by paying their laborers extremely low wages. They resent the droves of "Okies" flooding into the state because they know that hungry and impoverished people are a danger to the stability of land ownership. For their part, the Okies want only a decent wage and freedom from the threat of starvation. Settling in workers' camps, they try their best to look for work. Sometimes one of the them tries to grow a secret garden in a fallow field, but the deputies find it and destroy it.

Because they do not have enough money for a proper burial, Ma and Pa Joad leave Granma's body in a coroner's office. They rejoin the family at Hooverville, a large, crowded, and dirty camp full of hungry families unable to find work. One young man, Floyd Knowles, tells Tom that when he encounters police, he must act "bull-simple": he must speak ramblingly and incoherently in order to convince the policeman that he is an unthreatening idiot. Floyd says that there are no jobs. Tom wonders why the men do not organize against the landowners, but Floyd says that anyone who discusses such possibilities will be labeled "red" and dragged off by the police. Men who attempt to organize are put on a "blacklist," which ensures that they will never find work. Casy discusses the injustice of the situation with Tom and wonders what he can do to help the suffering people. Connie tells Rose of Sharon that they should have stayed in Oklahoma, where he could have learned about tractors. She reminds him that he intends to study radios and that she "ain't gonna have this baby in no tent." Ma cooks a stew that attracts a bevy of hungry children. After feeding her family, she hands over the meager leftovers, which the children devour ravenously. A contractor arrives in a new Chevrolet coupe to recruit workers for a fruit-picking job in Tulare County. When Knowles demands a contract and a set wage for the fruit pickers, the man summons a police deputy, who arrests Knowles on a bogus charge and then begins threatening the others. A scuffle ensues. Knowles runs off, and the deputy shoots at him recklessly, piercing a woman through the hand. Tom trips the deputy, and Casy, coming from behind, knocks him unconscious. Knowing that someone will need to be held accountable, Casy volunteers, reminding Tom that he has broken parole by leaving Oklahoma. Backup officers arrive and arrest Casy. The sheriff announces that the whole camp will now be burned. Uncle John is distraught by Casy's sacrifice. Uncle John had spoken with Casy about the nature of sin, and now that the former preacher is gone, John's wife's tragic death lies heavy upon him. He tells the family that he must get drunk or he will not be able to bear his sorrow. They allow him to go buy alcohol. Rose of Sharon asks if anyone has seen Connie, and Al says that he saw him walking south along the river. Pa insists that Connie was always a good-for-nothing, but Rose of Sharon is beside herself with grief at his absence. Meanwhile, convinced that his family needs to leave the camp before further trouble erupts, Tom rounds up Uncle John, knocking the man unconscious in order to get him on the truck. The Joads depart, leaving word at the camp store for Connie in case he returns. Coming upon a nearby town, the family is turned away by a crowd of pick-handle and shotgun wielding men, who have stationed themselves by the road to keep Okies out. Tom is enraged, but Ma Joad reminds him that a "different time's comin'."

The hostility directed toward the migrants changes them and brings them together. Property owners are terrified of "the flare of want in the eyes of the migrants." California locals form armed bands to terrorize the "Okies" and keep them in their place. The owners of large farms drive the smaller farmers out of business, making more and more people destitute and unable to feed themselves or their children.

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.

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.

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.

Spring is beautiful in California, but, like the migrants, many small local farmers stand to be ruined by large landowners, who monopolize the industry. Unable to compete with these magnates, small farmers watch their crops wither and their debts rise. The wine in the vineyards' vats goes bad, and anger and resentment spread throughout the land. The narrator comments, "In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

After nearly a month in the government camp, the Joads find their supplies running low and work scarce. Ma Joad convinces the others that they must leave the camp the next day. They make preparations and say good-bye to their friends. The truck has a flat tire, and as they are fixing it, a man in a suit and heavy jewelry pulls up in a roadster with news of employment: the Joads can go to work picking peaches only thirty-five miles away. When they arrive at the peach farm, they find cars backed up on the roads leading to it, and angry mobs of people shouting from the roadside. The family learns that they will be paid only five cents a box for picking peaches; desperate for food, they take the job. At the end of the day, even with everyone in the family working, they have earned only one dollar. They must spend their entire day's wages on their meal that night, and afterward they remain hungry. That evening, Al goes looking for girls, and Tom, curious about the trouble on the roadside, goes to investigate. Guards turn him away at the orchard gate, but Tom sneaks under the gate and starts down the road. He comes upon a tent and discovers that one of the men inside is Jim Casy. Jim tells Tom about his experience in prison and reports that he now works to organize the migrant farmers. He explains that the owner of the peach orchards cut wages to two-and-a-half cents a box, so the men went on strike. Now the owner has hired a new group of men in hopes of breaking the strike. Casy predicts that by tomorrow, even the strike-breakers will be making only two-and-a-half cents per box. Tom and Casy see flashlight beams, and two policemen approach them, recognizing Casy as the workers' leader and referring to him as a communist. As Casy protests that the men are only helping to starve children, one of them crushes his skull with a pick handle. Tom flies into a rage and wields the pick handle on Casy's murderer, killing him before receiving a blow to his own head. He manages to run away and makes it back to his family. In the morning, when they discover his wounds and hear his story, Tom offers to leave so as not to bring any trouble to them. Ma, however, insists that he stay. They leave the peach farm and head off to find work picking cotton. Tom hides in a culvert close to the plantation—his crushed nose and bruised face would bring suspicion upon him—and the family sneaks food to him.

Signs appear everywhere advertising work in the cotton fields. Wages are decent, but workers without cotton-picking sacks are forced to buy them on credit. There are so many workers that some are unable to do enough work even to pay for their sacks. Some of the owners are crooked and rig the scales used to weigh the cotton. To counter this practice, the migrants often load stones in their sacks.

At the cotton fields, the Joads are given a boxcar to live in, but they are forced to share it with another family, the Wainwrights. They soon make enough money to buy food and clothing, and Ma Joad is even able to indulge and treat Ruthie and Winfield to a box of Cracker Jack candy. When another girl, envious of Ruthie's treat, picks a fight with her, Ruthie boasts angrily that her older brother has killed two men and is now in hiding. Ma Joad hurries into the woods to warn Tom that his secret has been revealed. Sorrowfully, she urges him to leave lest he be caught. Tom shares with his mother some of Jim Casy's words of wisdom, which he has been pondering since his friend died: every man's soul is simply a small piece of a great soul. Tom says that he has decided to unify his soul with this great soul by working to organize the people, as Casy would have wanted. Ma reminds Tom that Casy died for his efforts, but Tom jokes that he will be faster to duck out of harm's way. As Ma returns to the boxcar, the owner of a small farm stops her and tells her he needs pickers for his twenty acres. Ma brings the news of the job back to the boxcar, where Al announces that he and Agnes Wainwright plan to be married. The families celebrate. The next day, the two families travel to the small plantation, where so many workers have amassed that the entire crop is picked before noon. Glumly, the family returns to the boxcar, and it begins to rain.

Rain lashes the land, and no work can be done during the deluge. Rivers overflow, and cars wash away in the coursing mud. The men are forced to beg and to steal food. The women watch the men in apprehension, worried that they might finally see them break. Instead, however, they see the men's fear turning to anger. The women know that their men will remain strong as long as they can maintain their rage.

The rain continues to fall. On the third day of the storm, the skies still show no sign of clearing. Rose of Sharon, sick and feverish, goes into labor. The truck has flooded, and the family has no choice but to remain in the boxcar. At Pa's urging, the men work to build a makeshift dam to keep the water from flooding their shelter or washing it away. However, an uprooted tree cascades into the dam and destroys it. When Pa Joad enters the car, soaked and defeated, Mrs. Wainwright informs him that Rose of Sharon has delivered a stillborn baby. The family sends Uncle John to bury the child. He ventures into the storm, places the improvised coffin in the stream, and watches the current carry it away. The rains continue. Pa spends the last of the family's money on food. On the sixth day of rain, the flood begins to overtake the boxcar, and Ma decides that the family must seek dry ground. Al decides to stay with the Wainwrights and Agnes. Traveling on foot, the remaining Joads spot a barn and head toward it. There, they find a dying man and small boy. The boy tells them that his father has not eaten for six days, having given all available food to his son. The man's health has deteriorated to such an extent that he cannot digest solid food; he needs soup or milk. Ma looks to Rose of Sharon, and the girl at once understands her unstated thoughts. Rose of Sharon asks everyone to leave the barn and, once alone, she approaches the starving man. Despite his protests, she holds him close and suckles him.