Grapes Guide.pdf - Minnesota Opera

his conversion, say for the second time, “I’m just puttin’ one foot in front a the other,” and again in a few pages, “I ruther
jus’ lay one foot down in front a the other.” He doesn’t trust people enough to extend himself. So deeply engrained is
this suspicion that even at the government camp he is immediately suspicious of the “committee” which he is told will
visit them tomorrow, and Pa Joad is openly hostile toward the camp manager’s visit, although both occasions are
friendly and helpful. Casy tells the story of the organizer who got a union started to help the workers: “And know what?
Them very folks he been tryin’ to help tossed him out, Wouldn’ have nothin’ to do with ‘im. Scared they’d get say in
his company. Says, ‘Git out. You’re a danger on us.’ ”
Along with suspicion and distrust is ignorance. There is the simple ignorance of the hired tractor driver who perhaps
lives twenty miles away in town and needs not come back to his tractor for weeks or months:
And this is easy and efficient. So easy that the wonder goes out of work, so efficient that the wonder goes out of land and the
working of it, and with the wonder the deep understanding and the relation. And in the tractor man there grows the contempt
that comes only to a stranger who has little understanding and no relation. For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the
length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all of these, but he is much
more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth,
turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that
man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis. But the machine man driving a dead tractor on
land that he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the
corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.
A more complex aspect of ignorance as a force against community appears in the interchapters, most clearly in that
chapter wherein migrants are forced to sell their household goods to profiteers who take advantage of their need in order
to pay very little for honest goods, and who are addressed by the choric voice: “you’re buying bitterness. Buying a plow
to plow your own children under, buying the arms and spirits that might have saved you. Five dollars, not four. I can’t
haul them back – well, take ‘em for four. But I warn you, you’re buying what will plow your own children under. And
you won’t see. You can’t see … But watch it, mister. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses
– so beautiful – a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower some day. We could have saved you, but you
cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you.” Perhaps no other passage in the
novel carries so convincingly this great truth of human community, that no man is an island, that what you do unto the
least of these you do unto me. The tenor of all these forces of ignorance against community is, of course, in Casy’s dying
words, an echo of Christ’s own words – “You don’t know what you’re doin’.”
Because it is not theological or sociological determinism, but ignorance breeding selfishness and distrust, that is so
largely responsible for the forces against community, it follows that the establishment of the new community will come
out of true knowledge, out of which in turn will come love and sharing. It is Casy, the spiritual leader, who first
abandons the old ways and becomes a seeker for new truth. When he first appears he has already abandoned his
conventional notions of sin, hellfire, and the salvation of individual souls for the doctrine of universal love and the
transcendental Oversoul. He asks to go along with the Joads because he wants to learn more: “I’m gonna work in the
fiel’s, in the green fiel’s, an’ I’m gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the glass, gonna hear ‘em talk,
gonna hear ‘em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin’ mush. Gonna hear husban’ an’ wife poundin’ the mattress in the night.
Gonna eat with ‘em an’ learn.” What he finally learns, in jail after giving himself up to save Tom and Floyd, is that
man’s spiritual unit must express itself in a social unity, which is why he becomes an organizer. The grace which he
reluctantly gives over his first breakfast with the Joads is already groping in this direction: “I got to thinkin’ how we
was holy when we was one thing, an’ makin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’able
little fella got the bit in his teeth an’ run Off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin’ an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the
holiness. But when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the
whole shebang – that’s right, that’s holy!‘
It is this growing knowledge of the necessity of sharing with strangers far beyond the usual circle of family and friends
that becomes the most powerful force for establishing the new community. The novel’s action opens with a series of acts
of sharing. The truck driver shares a ride, Tom offers to share his whiskey with him and does share it with Casy. Muley
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