Why Is the Joad Family at First Apprehensive About Burying Grampa Without Informing the Authorities
In a memorable, powerful candle-lit scene (without dialogue) during the pre-dawn hours, accompanied by the plaintive strains of "Red River Valley" on an accordion, Ma Joad must decide which of her seemingly worthless possessions to keep from her promise chest and which to exit backside earlier vacating her subcontract for the last time. Wordlessly and nostalgically, she moons, reminisces and sorts through a small box of momentos and souvenirs she has acquired over the years. She burns a postcard and a newspaper clipping of Tom's imprisonment ("Joad Gets Seven Years") and other valuable keepsakes which she cannot take with her, giving upwardly parts of her past that are at present irretrievably lost. With desolation in a scene of tremendous, abrupt-edged visual power, she holds up two earrings to her ears and wistfully looks at her reflection, thinking back to some unforgotten moments of pleasure.
In the early morning light, she resolutely tells Tom: "I'm ready." As the family boards the overloaded, unbalanced truck, Old Grampa Joad suddenly resists leaving for California (but earlier, he couldn't await to go out). He stubbornly revolts and balks to get out his land at the last moment. The family subdues him and gets him sleepy drunk past pouring a big dose of the children's soothing syrup downward his throat:
Grampa: I ain't goin' to California. This is my country and I belong here. (He scoops upward and clutches a lifeless scattering of Oklahoma clay) This is my clay. It's no proficient, but information technology'southward mine, all mine.
Tom: Either nosotros got to tie him up and throw him in the truck or somethin'. He can't stay here.
Pa: Nosotros tin can't tie him. Either we'll injure him or he'll get so mad, he'll hurt hisself. Reckon we could get him drunk?
Tom: Ain't no whiskey, is there?
Ma Joad: Now wait, there's a half a canteen of soothin' syrup here. Here. Used to put the children to sleep.
At the concluding minute, Casy (who has expressed an interest in going: "There's somethin' goin' on out in that location in the West and I'd like to effort and acquire what it is") is invited by the family to join them, fifty-fifty though they take already hurriedly calculated that the truck is dangerously overloaded. In the cab of the truck equally they depart, Ma Joad is dogged and refuses to wait dorsum at the dust storm rising over the deserted business firm. Resigned to forces across her command, she gripes to Al the driver:
We're goin' to California, ain't nosotros? All right so, permit's become to California...I never had my business firm pushed over before. Never had my family stuck out on the route. Never had to lose everything I had in life.
Along Highway 66 (conveyed in a brusk montage of images of road signs in Oklahoma) - "the Female parent Road", the trip soon takes its toll on the family. Tired and weak after existence wrenched away from his land, elderly Grampa is the first to die on their journey. He expires after they pull over to the side of the road and unload him. Tom writes (and reads outloud) a grave marker for him, torn out of the flyleaf of the family Bible:
This here is William James Joad, dyed of a stroke, former, old man. His fokes bured him because they got no money to pay for funerls. Nobody kilt him. Jus a stroke and he dyed.
He puts the newspaper in a fruit jar to be buried with his grandfather by the roadside, to prevent the government from thinking it's a murder: "It looks like a lotta times, the gov'ment got more interest in a dead man than a alive one." Casy eulogizes the old patriarch with a "few words" over the grave - a brief simply dignified funeral oration to plea for the conservancy of the living:
This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' jus' died out of it. I don't know whether he was proficient or bad, an' it don't matter much. Heard a fella say a poem once, an' he says, 'All that lives is holy.' Just I wouldn't pray jus' for an ol' man that'southward dead, cause he's awright. If I was to pray, I'd pray for folks that'due south alive an' don't know which way to turn. Grampa here, he ain't got no more trouble like that. He's got his chore all cut out for 'im - so cover 'im upwardly an' allow 'im go to it.
More than montages of signs announced along the way, e.thousand., "Water xv¢" and "Camp 50¢". In a migrant campground, possibly in the Texas panhandle, the Joads camp for the dark and are entertained in the flickering light by Connie, Rosasharn'south husband, who accompanies himself on a guitar and sings I Ain't A-Gonna Be A-Treated This A-way. During the song, Pa Joad strikes up a chat with another fellow migrant from Arkansas who had to give up "a kind of a general notions shop." The man speaks nostalgically almost his lost store: "I had as dainty of a little shop equally you e'er saw. I sure did hate to give information technology up."
Another man in the grouping, a returning migrant from California, laughs scornfully at Pa'southward delusionary optimism about conditions in the West and speaks bitterly about his tragic experience. He foreshadows what the Joads and others will soon notice out for themselves, that the California growers, who have printed more handbills than they need, are hoping to attract a glut of workers that they tin then exploit (with the laws of supply and demand):
Migrant: I've been and seen it. I'm goin' dorsum and starve, considering I'd rather starve all over at once.
Pa: Say, what exercise you think you're talkin' about? I've got a handbill hither says they're payin' good wages. And I seen in the papers that they need pickers.
Migrant: All right, go on, nobody'due south stoppin' ya.
Pa: Yeah, but what near this?
Migrant: I ain't gonna rile ya, go on.
Tom: (challenging) Wait a minute, buddy, you merely done some jack-assin'. Y'all tin't shut up at present! The handbill say they need 800 pickers. You express joy and say they don't. Which one's a liar?
Migrant: Now, how many of y'all all got them handbills?...(The men respond that they all have them) There you are, same xanthous handbill. 800 Pickers Wanted. All right, the man wants 800 men, so he prints five,000 handbills and perchance 20,000 people see 'em. And mayhap two or 3 k people start W on account of that handbill. Two or iii 1000 people that are crazy with worry headin' out for 800 jobs. Now does that brand sense?
One of the men: Say, what are you, a trouble-maker? You sure you ain't one of them labor finks?
Migrant: I swear I own't, mister.
I of the men: At present don't y'all become around here tryin' to stir up any trouble.
Migrant: I tried to tell you folks what it took me a year to fin' out. Took ii kids dead, took my wife dead, to show me. Only nobody could tell me neither. I tin can't tell ya about them picayune fellas layin' in the tent with their bellies swelled out and simply skin over their bones. A-shiverin' and a-whinin' like pups. And me a-runnin' around lookin' for piece of work. Not for money, non for wages, but for a cup of flour and a spoon of lard. So the coroner come up. 'Them children died of heart failure,' he said. He put it downward in his newspaper. Heart failure! And their lilliputian bellies stuck out like a squealer bladder.
The migrant's sobering words and feel shake the grouping, and the distressed campers breaks up for the night. Pa asks Casy and Tom whether they think the human being was telling the truth. The Joad'due south futurity is still ambiguous and in question:
Casy: He'south tellin' the truth, the truth for him. He wasn't makin' it upward.
Tom: Is information technology the truth for us?
Casy: I don't know.
The Joad truck overheats and steams up as it pulls into a New United mexican states filling station. There, the service station possessor asks contemptuously whether they have money to pay for the gas. Tom responds sharply and with pride to the animosity: "Well, ask right. You ain't talkin' to bums, you know." In the truckstop diner, in one of the film's almost upbeat, hopeful scenes displaying good folks who compassionately assist the poor, a waitress is joshing effectually with 2 truck drivers at the counter. Pa Joad enters with the two young Joad kids and asks to purchase a loaf of staff of life for a dime. The cavalier waitress replies: "This ain't a grocery store. We got bread to brand sandwiches with...Why don't you buy a sandwich? We got overnice sandwiches...Yous can't purchase no loaf of bread for a dime. We simply got xv cent loafs." Charitably, the short-order melt Bert (Harry Tyler) behind the counter gruffly suggests selling Pa a day-one-time loaf for a dime. Subsequently the waitress generously and kindly obliges the two migrant kids with inexpensive candy, the two drivers exit her a large tip to 'repay' her:
Pa: It may sound funny bein' so tight, but we got a thousand miles to go and nosotros don't know if we'll make information technology. (As he goes to pay for the loaf) Is them penny candies, 1000'am?
Waitress: Which ones?
Pa: At that place, them stripey ones.
Waitress: Oh, them, well, uh, no. Them's ii for a penny.
Pa: Requite us two then, m'am. (To the children) Get on, take 'em, take 'em. Thank ya, m'am.
Truck driver: (After the Joads accept left) Them ain't two for a cent candy.
Waitress: What'due south it to you?
Truck commuter: Them's a nickel a piece candy...(Both truck drivers go out her hefty tips, a half-dollar coin, when they pay for their meals)
Waitress: Hey look a minute, you got change comin'!
Truck commuter: What's it to ya?
Waitress: (While holding the coins in her hand) Bert, look! (reverently looking later on her customers) Truck drivers.
As the Joads drive farther and cantankerous the state border into Arizona, Tom explains to the state agronomical inspection officer how long they will be in the state: "No longer than to go across." On the Will Rogers Highway in Arizona, they pass by herds of sheep and the adobe-mud hunts of an Indian village - past other country-dispossessed families and individuals. At the Colorado River, the border betwixt Arizona and California, they pull over and are awed by a view of California in the distance - "the country of milk and dearest." Connie is frightened past the desolate desert that they are forced to cross: "Well, if that's what we came out here for!..." They swim, cavort, and refresh themselves in the Colorado River.
At some other service station, one of the disdainful white-uniformed attendants criticizes the Joad'southward trip - one of many existence taken by indigent Okies who are streaming toward California. He ominously mentions the obstacles that are facing them across the desert, but Tom replies with practicality and strength:
Attendant: Yous people got a lot of nerve...crossing the desert in a jalopy like this.
Pa: Y'all been beyond?
Bellboy One: Certain, plenty but never in no wreck similar that.
Tom: If we interruption down, perhaps somebody'll give u.s. a hand.
Attendant One: Well, I'm glad. Even I'd hate to exist doin' it. It takes more nerve than I got.
Tom: It take no nerve to do somethin' ain't nothin' else y'all can practice.
Delirious (calling for her dead husband) and most death, Granma is comforted by Ma Joad, who strokes her brow. As the Joads pull away from the Last Take a chance service station, the two insensitive and cruel uniformed attendants inhumanly despise the migrant Okies as they chew gum and carry on a casual conversation:
Attendant Two: You and me got sense. Them Okies got no sense and no feelings. They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live the fashion they do. A human couldn't stand to be so miserable.
Attendant One: Just don't know any better, I guess.
Equally they pass through the desert, the three riders in the truck's cab are seen through the windshield upon which the desert is reflected:
Al: What a place! How'd ya like to walk across it?
Tom: People done it. They could. We could.
Al: Lots must accept died likewise.
The youngest Joad children fantasize nigh finding the basic of those who crossed the desert and died. Ma Joad encourages Granma: "We got to get across, Granma. The family'southward got to get beyond." Connie complains to Rosasharn about his thwarting that he didn't become a radio mechanic ("dainty clean work") instead of moving and taking the trip. At another agricultural inspection station, the California officers want the Joads to unload their truck, but Ma protests that Granma is a "sick old lady" and must be rushed to a md: "I swear we own't got anything, I swear it." They are allowed to proceed when an ever-resourceful Ma Joad convinces the caring officers that Granma is deathly ill. In reality, she has lied to them considering the quondam lady has already died in her lap.
The Joads push the truck upwards a long hill to bring the family to a scenic overlook, where they gaze at the natural beauty of the Tehachapi Valley of California at dawn. Pa exclaims, "Thar she is." In contrast to the climactic, joyous, glowing end of their trip, Ma quietly announces that Granma has died before in her arms in the back of the truck during the night, even before the inspectors had stopped them en road: "Oh, thank God, and we're however together, most of us...Granma's dead...since before they stopped us last dark...So it'southward all right. She'll go cached where it'due south dainty and green and trees and flowers all around, and she got to lay her head down in California later all."
Afterward pushing their dysfunctional, out-of-gas, anguished jalopy [a symbol of their exhausting trip] into Plainview, California, a friendly policeman (Ward Bail) (an Oklahoma native himself) greets them with a weary defensiveness when shown their handbill. The working weather are unlike what the handbills had advertised:
Policeman: If I've seen ane of them things, I've seen ten k of 'em.
Pa: Own't it no good?
Policeman: Not here, not now. At that place was some pickin' around hither about a calendar month ago, but information technology's all moved south...What I gotta tell ya is this, don't attempt to park in boondocks tonight. Just go correct on out to that camp. If I take hold of ya in boondocks later on nighttime, I gotta lock ya up.
Pa: But what are we gonna do?
Policeman: Well pop, that just ain't up to me. I don't heed tellin' ya the guy they ought to lock up is the guy that sent them things out.
[Nigh one-one-half of the film's 128 minutes (the 2d half of the film) are the sequences at iii contrasting camps in California - the Hooverville (14 minutes), the Keene Ranch (22 minutes), and the Wheat Patch government camp (25 minutes). For the rest of the pic, the Joads are forced to movement through unlike kinds of communal life, from squalid transient camps to labor camps, searching for decent wages and deficient jobs.]
The Hooverville Transient-Migrant Military camp:
They make it at the first, transient migrant camp two miles from the urban center limits (a sign reads "City Limit" - both literally and figuratively). In a memorably effective subjective camera view through the Joad's windshield from the cab, they realize that the army camp is crowded with other hungry, starving, jobless and desperate travelers. The jalopy slowly and uneasily makes its careful manner through the rutted dirt road between the huts and around the campsite'due south haunted-faced inhabitants, who movement in slow-motion and size up the new arrivals. Their first exposure to the human junkyard is truly despairing, as Tom ironically observes: "Certain don't expect none as well prosperous." With merely a gallon of gas, they are forced to bring together the utterly hopeless scene of anarchy, confusion, squalor and disillusionment.
After setting up the tent, Ma Joad finds starving children surrounding and besieging her when they gather around her campfire and scout or offer to assist, in gild to get a handout of stew. She is overwhelmed but willing to share the family's meager leftovers with them: "Well, I don't know what to exercise. I've got to feed the family unit and what are we gonna do about all these here?" The Joads are disturbed by the face of poverty - shown by a lingering view of the children'due south faces, simply willing to help intendance for them.
In a contrasting scene, one of the land contractors who hires migrant laborers drives into the camp in a shiny convertible and offers employment picking fruit. One of the disgruntled migrants named Floyd (Paul Guilfoyle) asks to meet the contractor'due south license and credentials. "Then yous brand out an order, where and when and how much you're gonna pay, and you lot sign information technology and we'll go." Knowledge virtually the unfair laws of supply and demand, Floyd accuses the employer of adulterous the desperate men with his solicitation:
Twice now I fell for that line. Possibly he needs a thou men. And then he gets five thousand there and he'll pay xv cents an hour. So yous guys volition accept to take it, cause yous'll be hungry. If he wants to hire men, permit him ride it out and say what he'due south gonna pay. Ask to encounter his license. He ain't allowed by police to contract men without a license.
In i of the film's most powerful examples of man'southward inhumanity to man, the contractor identifies and labels Floyd as an "agitator" to a gun-toting sheriff's deputy who accompanies him. The officeholder falsely accuses the man with trumped-up charges - of "hangin' around that used car lot that was busted into. Yep, that's the fella!" Floyd is ordered into custody, but he resists abort and slugs the deputy in the mouth - and and then flees during the scuffle. The brutish sheriff shoots and mistakenly wounds (mortally) an innocent bystander - a mother in the military camp - in a bungled endeavour to stop his flying.
As he pursues Floyd, Tom and Casy intervene. Tom tackles the sheriff and Casy kicks him in the head to knock him unconscious. Casy forces Tom, because he is violating his parole by migrating, to hibernate out in the willows and return only if signaled with "four loftier whistles." When a carload of hostile deputies pulls up, Casy takes the blame for the entire incident: "This man of yours, he got tough so I hit him. Then he started shootin' and hit that woman at that place and so I striking him over again." He is subsequently handcuffed (after offering his two wrists) and driven away. One of the law-enforcement deputies is dismayed past the shooting, just is trivial concerned about the dying woman:
Boy, what a mess them .45s make.
That evening, Tom sneaks dorsum into the military camp with word that the family must hurriedly pack and motion out because a mob is planning to burn down the campsite:
A guy downwardly at the willows was just tellin' me some of them poolroom fellas figgerin' on burnin' the whole camp out tonight. We gotta get the truck loaded.
Tom learns that Rosasharn's hubby Connie has deserted them and his meaning wife:
Ma Joad: He lit out this evenin'. Said he didn't know information technology was gonna be like this.
Pa Joad: Glad to get shet of him. Never was no good, never will be.
Tom tries to console Rosesharn who is distraught and feeling abandoned: "I just don't feel like nothin' at all. Without him, I but don't wanna live." As they exit, Rosasharn speculates: "Maybe Connie go and get some books to study up with. He gonna exist a radio good, you know. Perchance he figgured to surprise us." Ma Joad encourages her delusionary rationalization.
His smoldering frustration now heated upward, Tom is angered past the senseless, capricious violence, exploitation of the migrant workers, and the deposition of his spirit by human selfishness and cruelty:
Tom: Ma, there comes a time when a man gets mad.
Ma: You told me, y'all promised me...
Tom: I know, Ma, I'grand tryin' to. If there was a police force they was workin' with, maybe we could have it simply it ain't the law. They're workin' abroad on our spirits, tryin' to brand us cringe and crawl, workin' on our decency.
Ma: You promised Tom.
Tom: I know, I'g a-tryin' to, Ma...
Ma: You lot gotta keep clear. The family'south a-breakin' up. You gotta proceed clear.
Their truck is halted by a roadblock composed of a mob of aroused vigilantes. Although Tom is ready to strike dorsum with a jackhandle, Ma begs him to exist subservient and let the danger pass. With a flashlight shining in their faces, the Okie family is confronted and ordered by the prejudiced mob to disperse or face up devastation: "Nosotros don't want no more Okies in this town. There ain't plenty work here for them that'due south already here...Plough right effectually and head north, and don't you come back until the cotton wool's ready."
The side by side twenty-four hour period, the Joad vehicle pulls over to fix a apartment tire. Every bit they work on the repair, another human being named Spencer (Robert Homans) in a shiny open convertible drives by, stops, and offers them piece of work picking peaches "well-nigh forty miles up hither just this side of Pixley." As they approach the Keene fruit ranch and laissez passer through an assembled gauntlet outside the gates - a murmuring mob of motorcycle police, striking farmers, and migrant trucks - they are waved through without being told what's wrong. They are apprehensive and confused past the apparent conspiracy of silence.
Source: https://www.filmsite.org/grap2.html
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