Grapes of Wrath was Mr. Manning’s favorite book.
The green meets the industrialized | original Depression Auntie photo
Although we had read it the year before, with a different teacher, he played the whole audiobook for us over a yawning span of weeks. A disembodied voice narrated the Westward journey of the Dust Bowl era protagonist family while we simply existed and absorbed the story, sitting in well-worn desks.
He was a polished man, Mr. Manning. He knew his stuff, was kind, willing to lend an ear.
With a straight face, I told him I didn’t want to get ‘stuck’ at a local university that was a popular choice for teachers, a place he may have even graduated from.
The hubris of young people is astounding, and this is one of the most tragically dense things I’ve ever said. All he could do was take a pause and say in an even voice that the place in question was a very good school.
I liked Steinbeck’s meditative chapters best, the ones that sit like interludes between stages of a more structured, defined plot. These chapters were told without many proper names (a scene relaying the dialogue between nameless tenant farmers and ‘owner men,’ for example), so they convey what was happening to the Joad family while also illustrating patterns. The zooming out, the blurring of specifics let them illuminate the sordid maze capitalism wrought, the reason that struggle and displacement was the thrust of the long tale.
For some reason I thought to re-read some of Grapes recently. I spiritually feel transported back to whenever an elder would refer to when folding their hands, setting them on a table and sighing through words like ‘hard times.’ I spent the past month watching good new friends pack up their lives for a necessary move in uncertain conditions. A runaway market that refuses to Go Home, It’s Drunk sparks the fear in many that they, too, will be driven from places they’ve become accustomed to because a small set of powerful people decided prices can’t stop climbing.
Even social media platforms, which like apartments or tenant farms were never truly “ours” to begin with, feel like they’re made of dusty soil where creators find ideas aren’t taking root, communities aren’t blooming like they used to because that soil is exhausted from churning out the rot that its real owners value. The owners will kill that land and they know it.
“Can’t make a living on the ‘gram unless you’ve got two, five, ten dozen brand deals and a super PAC.”
After I read the chapter that narrated a family getting driven off their land, I couldn’t sleep. The teen version of me didn’t know well how the complicated balance sheet of staying housed was calculated, but she knew about helplessness.
The words hit particularly hard when they describe banks as monsters that need infinite growth to live, which makes it clear how unserious AND terrifying this whole thing was/is.
“And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.
But the monster’s sick. Something’s happened to the monster.’
Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.
But - you see, a bank, or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they ear the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so.’
‘When the monster stops growing, it dies. It can’t stay one size. … We have to do it. We don’t like to do it. But the monster’s sick. Something’s happened to the monster.’“
Because of a sick monster, a tractor driver from the same neighborhood as the tenants then cuts orderly lines into the soil without respecting the curves and contours of the land or the horror of crushing a house like a bug.
I work in media, not farming, but have long felt a pang at the lyrics of “Helplessness Blues,” a Fleet Foxes song and a reference by which you can detect my elder millennial status.
“If I had an orchard, I’d work ‘til I’m raw. If I had an orchard I’d work ‘til I’m sore.”
“If I had an orchard,” they sing, “I’d work ‘til I’m raw. If I had an orchard I’d work ‘til I’m sore.”
If the conditions were different, if we didn’t have to cram artistic, cultural and generative work into a shareholder/monster-driven model, the rows of trees we’d walk through would be forever fragrant.
Instead we till the immaterial souls of our mind, dig into our inner reserves, until the ground beneath us is fallow, someone drives algorithmic lines through it and tells us, like the owner man would, to leave. And to standardize the parts of ourselves that have times when they can produce and times when they need rest.
“Big shots won’t give you three dollars a day if you worry about anything but your three dollars a day.”