[In the following essay, Salter discusses Steinbeck's descriptions of places and landscapes to explore the effects of human mobility on geographical issues.]

There is no need to write additional textbooks in cultural geography. All the messages of the profession are already committed to ink. The motivations, processes, patterns and the consequences of human interaction with the landscape have all been discovered and chronicled with grace and clarity. Authors dedicated to the comprehension and elucidation of order within the overtly haphazard flow of human events have given academics the materials needed to profess the patterns which illustrate this order. We fail, however, as scholars to make adequate use of these data for the simple reason that this material is labelled ‘fiction’.¹

Fiction in its primary meaning denotes invention. Ironically, the process of invention in the human species is one of the most consistently lauded acts that we can be associated with. Invention in professional fields is celebrated as creativity and insight. The same act in the commercial world generates considerable cash. And even greater commendation is heaped on the inventor if the product of his or her imagination can be used in fields other than the inventor's own. That becomes the product of genius.

Yet, invention in the field of creative writing—the fiction of imaginative observation—is too often held to be non-transferable. It is in this domain that—for academics—fiction can assume its pejorative connotation. Constrained by a narrowly conceived framework of objectivity, the inventions of a good literary mind may indeed be unsuitable source material for research or teaching. The nature of human experience, however, whether that between fellow humans or in their relationship with place, cannot be captured in a rigidly objective framework. Imaginative literature articulates the kaleidoscope of human experience and the teacher of cultural geography who adopts an alternative artistic or humanistic stance to such material may himself be deemed inventive. The arguments in favour of such a literary teaching programme for cultural geography may be briefly enumerated.

Consider first the learning atmosphere engendered by the use of a novel in addition to, or in lieu of, an orthodox text in cultural geography. Largely because a novel is a work of fiction, a reader slips into the narrative with a curious mind. The interest in understanding the author's work derives from an informal competition between the reader and the author. What is the message here? asks the student. Can the author make me concerned enough about it to give of my mind, wit and time?

In the same situation, a traditional textbook would be anticipated as a collection of facts strung together as beads on a time line. The ambition of the reader would be most probably focused upon retention rather than upon understanding, hence diminishing creative speculation regarding the implications of the material presented. A novel gains strength because it may fire one's imagination through subtle allusion and illusion. A textbook, on the other hand, damps down the same fire through demands for inclusion and conclusion.

Literary fiction works well with cultural geography because the substance of both endeavours is life itself. The capacity for attitudes that shape environmental manipulation are present in all people, whether their perspectives emerge from an author's pen or a social scientist's interview data. The task of the cultural geographer is the same regardless of the data base: to mould individual specifics into understandable, reliable predictabilities. If the target audience of such an intellectual effort becomes involved in and concerned with the specifics of the human process, it will be easier for the teacher to instruct in the larger realities. These mundane specifics are exactly the material the novelist employs to create his fiction.

THE GRAPES OF WRATH AS EXAMPLE

Because so many works of fiction are fundamentally genuine in their description of people and place, the range of works available to a class is large. In the selection of a novel for such an experiment, therefore, the teacher's best guide is his or her own personal preference in authors and settings.² The re-reading of a classic, with an eye focused upon the themes of cultural geography, may well produce new insights and new analysis.

… I have chosen to use the major work by the American author John Steinbeck. In his 1939 The Grapes of Wrath³ several significant criteria are met. In the first place, the novel is the product of vital and personal fieldwork by the author. He was writing of a world that he knew very intimately.⁴ Secondly, he has his characters move through a variety of distinct physical and cultural regions. Such movement adds variety to the geographic observations that are potential in a novel. In the third place, Steinbeck employs a useful literary convention in the book in his use of inner chapters. These short episodes that break up the specific narrative of the Joad family provide the reader with an overview of the cultural landscape during the time the fiction of the novel takes place. By interrupting the flow of the personal narrative of the primary family, Steinbeck effectively causes the reader to back away from the specific incidents of his main family and, instead, to view the difficulties of these people as part of a larger social fabric. While such a technique is far from unique to Steinbeck, the structure of The Grapes of Wrath is particularly well suited to developing societal themes as opposed to simply personal themes.

The final reason for the selection of The Grapes of Wrath is that if members of a class become interested in Steinbeck's style and concerns, there exists a large corpus of work that may be subsequently turned to. Once a student begins to read fiction with part of his mind searching out distinctive landscapes and culture systems, education has essentially reached a new and higher level. It is fitting that a cultural geographer should play some role in that attainment.

In The Grapes of Wrath three major theme areas in cultural geography are particularly evident for elaboration. Human mobility—the kinetic energy of so much landscape transformation—plays a dominant role in Steinbeck's narrative. Tensions between competing modes of land use spark much of the drama in the novel, while illustrating the social consequences of such variant decisions in economic patterns. Finally, the specific social and spatial configurations encountered by the Joads during their epic move from Oklahoma to California serve as vignettes around which a geographer can structure expanded explanations of human transformation of the land. In this paper, our concern is focused upon the themes of human mobility.

HUMAN MOBILITY AS A DOMINANT FORCE IN CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY AND IN THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Systems of belief as well as spatial order are constantly subject to change. The intrusion of competing systems—through the processes of migration and expanded communications—is a key force in such change. To the cultural geographer human mobility affords a thematic domain that embraces environmental perception, regional, cultural and economic variation, problem landscapes that impede migration and mobility, as well as contesting systems of custom, government and settlement. Steinbeck weaves all of these elements into his novel of America in the 1930s. By sorting out several of the most significant sub-themes in this universe of movement, an orderly analysis of both the novel and this aspect of cultural geography is possible.

INFORMATION FIELDS AND THE SELECTION OF A GOAL AREA

Axial to any model of decision-making in a migration scenario is the process of deciding where one is to go when the hearth area no longer accommodates a person or a people. The information available in that selection of a goal area derives from hearsay, media messages, feedback from earlier migrants, reading and current folklore. This initial consideration of the choice of goal area is appropriate in our analysis of The Grapes of Wrath because so great a part of the novel is concerned with the search for a haven. In this process, the Joads and their fellow travellers were continually confronted with the riddle of ‘where to go’. The image of California that was known in Oklahoma was one of a tarnished Eden. Although news of the fields, the fruit, the opportunity for land and the generalised abundance of everything in California was widespread, there were increasing rumours of the existence of an ugly dark side to this vision. In the two passages below, members of the Joad family touch on the emotional extremes of the images that came to the Okies as they were forced to pack up their few belongings and set out for new lands. Grampa speaks first, representing the popular image of an abundant reward awaiting those who chose California for a goal area in the departure from the drought-stricken Great Plains.

The old man thrust out his bristly chin, and he regarded Ma with his shrewd, mean, merry eyes. ‘Well, sir,’ he said, ‘we'll be a-startin' ‘fore long now. An', by God, they's grapes out there, just a-hangin' over inta the road. Know what I'm a-gonna do? I'm gonna pick me a wash tub full a grapes, an' I'm gonna set in 'em, an' scrooge aroun', an' let the juice run down my pants.’⁵

Just before that passage, Ma Joad allowed herself to speculate on some of those same images when she allowed herself to think of

how nice it's gonna be, maybe, in California. Never cold. An' fruit ever'place, an' people just bein' in the nicest places, little white houses in among the orange trees … An' the little fellas go out an' pick oranges right off the tree. They ain't gonna be able to stand it, they'll get to yellin' so.⁶

But a parallel ambivalence the family felt about California and the decision to uproot and head west is evident in this turn of the conversation between Ma and her son, Tom, who has just been paroled from prison.

‘I knowed a fella from California. He didn't talk like us. You'd of knowed he come from some far-off place jus' the way he talked. But he says they's too many folks lookin' for work right there now. An' he says the folks that pick the fruit live in dirty ol' camps an' don't hardly get enough to eat. He says wages is low an' hard to get any.’

A shadow crossed her face. ‘Oh, that ain't so,’ she said. ‘Your father got a han'bill on yella paper, tellin' how they need folks to work. They wouldn't go to that trouble if they wasn't plenty work. Costs 'em good money to get them han'bills out. What'd they want ta lie for, an' costin' 'em money to lie?’⁷

This refusal of Ma to accept the information that Tom brought from prison—from one who had witnessed a different image of the state—is significant, for it is illustrative of the manner in which the migrant begins to exclude information that threatens the positive image of the goal area. Once plans for a migration have been made, blinkers are put on in an attempt to disallow any dilution of that resolution. As one ponders the trauma of an uprooting from the home and place that has served as home for decades for a family, such a response becomes increasingly understandable. The psychological costs of such a move provide the second theme for consideration.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL COSTS OF MOBILITY

The whole tone of movement in The Grapes of Wrath is one of regretful departure. Except for occasional, if powerful, allusions to a better life in California voiced by the young Joads and Grampa, the family leaves their Oklahoma sharecropping past with reluctance.⁸ This wrenching of the move is not limited to the Joads. Steinbeck creates one of his strongest characters in the person of Muley, one of the few people the reader meets who has decided not to move to California. The combination of Ma Joad and Muley—although they never share the same stage—is effective in making an observer realise that this process of uprooting at a time of crisis has deep and profound psychological costs far beyond the economic dislocation associated with such a migration.

In the one case—that of Ma Joad—there is a buffer created by the fact that she is taking her family with her. She will at least be able to maintain basic associations with the people who are most important in her life. In the case of Muley, Steinbeck creates a character who is cast adrift entirely. In his attempts to maintain his attachment to the past and his personal tradition, he reverts to a near-primitive, taking solace in his attempts to make trouble for the agents of change sent by the banks and the police.⁹

This trauma of movement derives also from the sheer financial burdens of relocation. For the Okies, to whom Steinbeck gives his novel, there were few resources available to lighten the burden of the move. Human resources were the greatest riches these farmers had, and it was these very family members who found themselves at odds with each other because of decisions about where to go or how to travel or what to drive. Details in the inner chapters as well as the Joad narrative point out to the reader the complexity of human mobility, a complexity that involves both the emotions and the finances of individuals and families. Such an understanding helps an observer to realise the gravity of the decision to uproot and move on.

Passages that demonstrate the power of these themes of dislocation come from conversations between Tom and Muley, Ma and Tom, and descriptions of the car lots in the inner chapters. In the first excerpt below, Muley, Tom and Casy are talking around a small fire on the nearly deserted farmlands of the town where Tom and Muley were raised. Muley is getting increasingly excited as he explains how he felt as he saw his house emptied, his parents leave and his farmland all reduced to a sameness under the power of the new tractors on the land.

‘I wanta talk. I ain't talked to nobody. If I'm touched, I'm touched, an' that's the end of it. Like a ol' graveyard ghos' goin' to neighbors' houses in the night. Peters', Jacobs', Rance's, Joad's; an' the houses all dark, standin' like miser'ble ratty boxes, but they was good parties an' dancin'. An' there was meetin's and shoutin' glory. They was weddin's, all in them houses. An' then I'd want to go in town an' kill folks. 'Cause what'd they take when they tractored the folks off the lan'? What'd they get so their ‘margin a profit’ was safe? They got Pa dyin' on the groun', and Joe yellin' his first breath, an' me jerkin' like a billy goat under a bush in the night. What'd they get? God knows the lan' ain't no good. Nobody been able to make a crop for years. But them sons-a-bitches at their desks, they jus' chopped folks in two for their margin a profit. They jus' cut 'em in two. Place where folks live is them folks. They ain't whole, out lonely on the road in a piled-up car. They ain't alive no more. Them sons-a-bitches killed 'em.’ And he was silent, his thin lips still moving, his chest still panting. He sat and looked down at his hands in the firelight. ‘I-I ain't talked to nobody for a long time,’ he apologized softly. ‘I been sneakin' around like a ol' graveyard ghos'.’¹⁰

Ma shows some of the same unprecedented irritation as she attempts to organise her family's goods for the uncertain trip west.

‘Ma,’ he said, ‘you never was like this before!’ Her face hardened and her eyes grew cold. ‘I never had my house pushed over,’ she said. ‘I never had my fambly stuck out on the road. I never had to sell-ever'thing …’¹¹

A little later on, Ma looks at the pile of household goods that the family cannot carry and asks a most critical question: ‘How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.’¹²

The economic difficulties of the sharecroppers' moves are compounded by the size of the multitude that is taking to the road. In one of the novel's most effective inner chapters, Steinbeck gives the reader a close-up of a used car lot. In the excerpt below, the reader gains a strong sense of how victimised migrants can be when some environmental or social catastrophe forces so many people to move simultaneously that individuals lose any economic leverage they might otherwise have.

What you want is transportation, ain't it? No baloney for you. Sure the upholstery is shot. Seat cushions ain't turning no wheels over.

Cars lined up, noses forward, rusty noses, flat tires. Parked close together.

Like to get in to see that one? Sure, no trouble. I'll pull her out of the line.

Get 'em under obligation. Make 'em take up your time. Don't let 'em forget they're takin' your time. People are nice, mostly. They hate to put you out. Make 'em put you out, and then sock it to 'em.

Cars lined up, Model T's, high and snotty, creaking wheel, worn bands. Buicks, Nahes, De Sotos.

Yes, sir. '22 Dodge. Best goddam car Dodge ever made. Never wear out. Low compression. High compression got lots a sap for a while, but the metal ain't made that'll hold it for long. Plymouths, Rocknes, Stars.¹³

This reality is further exploited in scenes from town when the Joads attempt to sell their household goods. There is little return on a lifetime of accumulation when the entire farm community is trying to sell its untransportable furniture and farm implements at the same time.¹⁴

Notwithstanding the agonies associated with the move, the people do uproot and leave. Not only is that departure essential to the novel, but it is a reality in consideration of human mobility. Even in the face of the hardships narrated in The Grapes of Wrath, as well as in the myriad others that exist in all migration, people do carry through with the plan to try some other place, hoping that the change will bring them more benefit than cost. In that movement, the people and the landscape are changed. Such change introduces a third major theme area in the study of human mobility from the perspective of cultural geography.

PERSONAL AND LANDSCAPE CHANGES ASSOCIATED WITH THE PROCESS OF HUMAN MOBILITY

It is not the migrants alone who are changed by the process of migration. Demographic shifts modify the complexion of the hearth area as well as the goal area. If the process or the novel that we are studying is based on an individual's experience, then the scale of such impact is probably small. However, as the size of the population in motion grows, the magnitude of the influence created by the migration increases accordingly. Additionally, the corridor through which the movement takes place is bombarded with new demands, demands which are seldom met with welcome.

The nature of this intermediate response is captured in a number of episodes by Steinbeck, but perhaps most powerfully in his scenes from a Highway 66 diner. The excerpt below shows the pensive nature of a waitress, for example, who has had her entire universe confused by all of the people and families moving west.

Flies struck the screen with little bumps and droned away. The compressor chugged for a time and then stopped. On 66 the traffic whizzed by, trucks and fine stream-lined cars and jalopies; and they went by with a vicious whiz. Mae took down the plates and scraped the pie crusts into a bucket. She found her damp cloth and wiped the counter with circular sweeps. And her eyes were on the highway, where life whizzed by.¹⁵

This life that whizzed by in Mae's eyes brought changes all along Highway 66. Traditionally free services such as water and air at the roadside gas stations became so overused that dealers began to charge for such facilities. Used tires, fan belts and engine service all became more expensive as service-station owners' reactions went from irritation and suspicion to entrepreneurial opportunism, creating an image of their services through roadside junk.

The truck drove to the service-station belt, and there on the right-hand side of the road was a wrecking yard—an acre lot surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, a corrugated iron shed in front with used tires piled up by the doors, and price-marked. Behind the shed there was a little shack built of scrap, scrap lumber and pieces of tin. The windows were windshields built into the walls. In the grassy lot the wrecks lay, cars with twisted, stove-in noses, wounded cars lying on their sides with the wheels gone. Engines rusting on the ground and against the shed. A great pile of junk; fenders and truck sides, wheels and axles; over the whole lot a spirit of decay, of mold and rust; twisted iron, half-gutted engines, a mass of derelicts.¹⁶

The images of the migration process—whether in the novel or in a teacher's reality—are frequently tied to this very problem of transportation. Just as the covered wagon of a century earlier became metonymy for the entire process of American westward expansion and settlement, the jalopy with its children, inverted chairs, wooden barrels of dishes, pans and rags became the visual signature of the migration depicted by Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. These rigs required impressive levels of self-reliance and inventiveness, qualities that begin to emerge in any migration as the movers are forced to deal with the landscapes and the people they encounter in their flight from the past.

Thus they changed their social life—changed as in the whole universe only man can change. They were not farm men any more, but migrant men. And the thought, the planning, the long staring silence that had gone out to the field, went now to the roads, to the distance, to the West. That man whose mind had been bound with acres lived with narrow concrete miles. And his thought and his worry were not any more with rainfall, with wind and dust, with the thrust of the crops. Eyes watched the tires, ears listened to the clattering motors, and minds struggled with oil, with gasoline, with the thinning rubber between air and road. Then a broken gear was tragedy. Then water in the evening was the yearning, and food over the fire. Then health to go on was the need, and strength to go on, and spirit to go on. The wills thrust westward ahead of them, and fears that had once apprehended drought or flood now lingered with anything that might stop the westward crawling.

The camp became fixed—each a short day's journey from the last.¹⁷

To accompany this psychological change in attitude came an associated change in setting. Finding a few physical elements deemed necessary for a nighttime haven—water, a little firewood and perhaps a nearby dump for scavenging—these people began a pattern of creation anew each night. As some of these ‘Hoovervilles’ became established, they began to take on a geography of their own. Such settlements are a bona fide segment of the landscape of change in this human movement.

There was no order in the camp; little gray tents, shacks, cars were scattered about at random. The first house was nondescript. The south wall was made of three sheets of rusty corrugated iron, the east wall a square of moldy carpet tacked between two boards, the north wall a strip of roofing paper and a strip of tattered canvas, and the west wall six pieces of gunny sacking. Over the square frame, on untrimmed willow limbs, grass had been piled, not thatched, but heaped up in a low mound. The entrance, on the gunny-sack side, was cluttered with equipment. A five-gallon kerosene can served for a stove. It was laid on its side, with a section of rusty stovepipe thrust in one end. A wash boiler rested on its side against the wall; and a collection of boxes lay about, boxes to sit on, to eat on. A Model T Ford sedan and a two-wheel trailer were parked beside the shack, and about the camp there hung a slovenly despair.

Next to the shack there was a little tent, gray with weathering, but neatly, properly set up; and the boxes in front of it were placed against the tent wall. A stovepipe stuck out of the door flap, and the dirt in front of the tent had been swept and sprinkled. A bucketful of soaking clothes stood on a box. The camp was neat and sturdy. A Model A roadster and a little home-made bed trailer stood beside the tent.

And next there was a huge tent, ragged, torn in strips and the tears mended with pieces of wire. The flaps were up, and inside four wide mattresses lay on the ground. A clothes line strung along the side bore pink cotton dresses and several pairs of overalls. There were forty tents and shacks, and beside each habitation some kind of automobile. Far down the line a few children stood and stared at the newly arrived truck, and they moved toward it, little boys in overalls and bare feet, their hair gray with dust.¹⁸

Every choice humankind makes for the manipulation of an environment sets in motion a tension. The prior state of development at any given point was either natural (increasingly unlikely) or represented some other human wish or design. Cultural geography finds much of its meaning from the process of analysis and evaluation of such a change process, and resultant environments. Questions of natural conditions, technology, economic systems, social attitudes, demography, custom and, finally, special forces of the moment all must be factored into any equation that attempts to explain change. The creation of the Hoovervilles—noted above—was one of the most explicit signals to the Californians that their state was destined to undergo marked social and spatial change in response to this migration stream that had been initiated more than a thousand miles away. These response patterns in the goal area introduce us to our final theme in the cultural analysis of mobility in the novel.

CULTURAL RESPONSE PATTERNS IN THE GOAL AREA

Although public response to the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath was vastly supportive in terms of book purchases, Steinbeck found himself very uncomfortable in California.¹⁹ His portrayal of his state's citizens as being unsympathetic, avaricious, even malicious towards this stream of migrants from Oklahoma and other states of the Dust Bowl, sorely wounded the pride of the folk with whom Steinbeck had grown up.²⁰ Criticism was focused upon his inability to acknowledge the impact this immigration of penniless, rural and distraught folk would have on the social order of California. The Great Depression, although not damaging this western state as profoundly as it had other parts of the country, had already taxed municipal and state agencies to the margin of their abilities to cope with unemployed, angry people. The spectre of additional hundreds of thousands of like souls, but souls new to the state, making similar demand on modest resources excited no small anxiety in the eyes of nearly all Californians.

Steinbeck establishes the potentially explosive mood of this tension between the migrants and Californian patterns of farming in one of his strongest inner chapters. He describes the capital-intensive nature of local farming, pointing out the fixed expenses for chemical fertilisers, spraying and irrigation technology. The depressed prices, however, of the late 1930s drove prices below a level that generated essential income for the strictly managed farms. Instead of selling at such a level, owners decided to destroy fruit in order

to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came from miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains …

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorry here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot … In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.²¹

One of the classic confrontations of the new migrants with the old order in California came in the hiring of pickers for the ripening fruits up and down the central valley of the state. Contractors would go to the Hoovervilles, offer work at 30 cents an hour at some distant farm and give families directions on how to get there. Arriving at the place, having exhausted resources and given up space at the camp, people would be told that the rate was only 15 cents an hour—and there would be a surplus of workers even at that rate. Occasionally, migrants who had been caught up in this painful misrepresentation several times would attempt to dissuade the Okies from falling into the trap. The scene below illustrates one such happening.

‘You men want to work?’ … men from all over the camp moved near. One of the squatting men spoke at last. ‘Sure we wanta work. Where's at's work?’

‘Tulare County. Fruit's opening up. Need a lot of pickers.’

Floyd spoke up. ‘You doin' the hiring?’

‘Well, I'm contracting the land.’

The men were in a compact group now. An overalled man took off his black hat and combed back his long black hair with his fingers. ‘What you payin'?’ he asked.

‘Well, can't tell exactly, yet. ‘Bout thirty cents, I guess.’

‘Why can't you tell? You took the contract, didn't you?’

‘That's true,’ the khaki man said. ‘But it's keyed to the price. Might be a little more, might be a little less.’

Floyd stepped out ahead. He said quietly, ‘I'll go, mister. You're a contractor, an' you got a license. You jus' show your license, an' then you give us an order to go to work, an' where, an' when, an' how much we'll get, an' you sign that, an' we'll all go.’

The contractor turned, scowling. ‘You telling me how to run my own business?’

Floyd said, ‘'F we're workin' for you, it's our business too …’

Floyd turned to the crowd of men. They were standing up now, looking quietly from one speaker to the other. Floyd said, ‘Twicet now I've fell for that. Maybe he needs a thousan' men. He'll get five thousan' there, an' he'll pay fifteen cents an hour. An' you poor bastards'll have to take it 'cause you'll be hungry. 'F he wants to hire men, let him hire 'em and write out an' say what he's gonna pay. Ast ta see his license. He ain't allowed to contract men without a license.’²²

Clandestine farming was another point of contention between the uprooted farmers of the Dust Bowl and the California residents who became increasingly uneasy about the threat to their patterns of agriculture.

Now and then a man tried; crept on the land and cleared a piece, trying like a thief to steal a little richness from the earth. Secret gardens hidden in the weeds. A package of carrot seeds and a few turnips. Planted potato skins, crept out in the evening secretly to hoe in the stolen earth.

… Secret gardening in the evenings, and water carried in a rusty can.

And then one day a deputy sheriff: Well, what you think you'r doing?

I ain't doin' no harm.

I had my eye on you. This ain't your land. You're trespassing.

The land ain't plowed, an' I ain't hurtin' it none.

You goddamned squatters. Pretty soon you'd think you owned it … Get off now. And the little green carrot tops were kicked off and the turnip greens trampled … Did ya see his face when we kicked them turnips out? Why, he'd kill a fella soon's he'd look at him. We got to keep these here people down or they'll take the country … Outlanders, foreigners … Sure, they talk the same language, but they ain't the same. Look how they live. Think any of us folks'd live like that? Hell, no!²³

In The Grapes of Wrath—and even more so in the reality of the migration—there were instances of a more welcoming response to the migrants. People were able to see these families as fundamentally hardworking farm people who had been set in motion by the extraordinary combination of the natural forces of the drought and dust conditions of the Great Plains and the economic chaos of the Depression. Steinbeck portrays one such sympathetic farmer in the person of a Mr Thomas who hires men from the government camp of Weedpatch. He is a small farmer, deeply dependent upon a credit line from his bank, even though he appears to have been an efficient farmer. In this excerpt Mr Thomas has just told his small work crew that the 30 cents an hour they had been getting was being reduced to 25 cents that morning.

Timothy said, ‘We've give you good work. You said so yourself.’

‘I know it. But it seems like I ain't hiring my own men any more.’ He swallowed. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I got sixty-five acres here. Did you ever hear of the Farmers' Association?’

‘Why, sure.’

‘Well, I belong to it. We had a meeting last night. Now, do you know who runs the Farmers' Association? I'll tell you. The Bank of the West. That bank owns most of this valley, and it's got paper on everything it don't own. So last night the member from the bank told me, he said, “You're paying thirty cents an hour. You'd better cut it down to twenty-five.” I said, “I've got good men. They're worth thirty.” And he says, “It isn't that,” he says. “The wage is twenty-five now. If you pay thirty, it'll only cause unrest. And by the way,” he says, “You going to need the usual amount for a crop loan next year?”’ Thomas stopped. His breath was panting through his lips. ‘You see? The rate is twenty-five cents—and like it.’²⁴

Conditions, then, at the place of arrival paralleled the set of conditions that drove the farmers off the land and onto Highway 66. The banks that had been seeking the ‘margin of profit’ that Muley spoke of in Oklahoma appeared to be in charge of farming decisions on small and large landholders alike in California. The vagaries of nature that brought drought and turned sharecropping counter-productive also produced the prolonged rains and floods that end the book with the remnants of the Joad family stranded in a desolate boxcar, still out of touch with the land that they had set out for. Although migration had been undertaken, the same paucity of options that faced these families at the outset seems to characterise their future as the novel is closed.

That, perhaps, is the fiction that cultural geographers should do battle with in their instruction on human mobility. Even with the specifics broadly varying from case to case, the fact of migration does open new options. People change in the process of movement; places change as the migrants grow more familiar with the setting and cultural fabric of these new locales. In a harsher sense, the least adaptive of the initial migrants have probably left the migration stream, diminishing the competition in the search for support at the final destination.

New skills are learned by the migrant farmers as they leave the land to their past and find outlets for their ambition in the cities. New settlement features grow up around the migrants who finally do create a marginal haven for themselves and their families, and bring their music, foods, clothes and language into the society of the new setting. Almost nothing is able to escape some modification in the face of a migration stream as robust and intense as this particular American flight from the Great Plains in the mid-1930s. The event in itself is a dramatic exercise in the elements of cultural geography.

CONCLUSION

To the cultural geographer, then, lessons from the landscape and human movement in The Grapes of Wrath provide focus for instruction in migration, settlement forms, economic systems, cultural dualism, agricultural land use patterns, transportation technology and social change. To the reader of creative fiction, these same realities generally lie scattered within the pages of this epic of one family's unsuccessful search for a new beginning. But, to the reader of fiction who is also attempting to comprehend something of the underlying systems in this chaos of conflict and flight, the study of this novel provides a window on geographic phenomena broadly ranging from mental maps to economic infrastructures.

In the face of such complexity, effective thinking—let alone instructing—calls for the use of all the human resources available. Evocative fiction in creative literature is one of these resources. Such work, when read with a searching mind, and then re-read with a disciplined perspective, is capable of illustrating patterns, preferences and problems of humankind. And it conveys all of these dynamics with vitality. Cultural geographers—in their ambitious quest for the understanding of human society and cultural landscapes—would do well to capture and utilise such dynamics and such vitality. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath is one volume that possesses both qualities in such abundance that it serves provocatively as a primer for cultural geography.

Notes

1. There is a broad literature discussing the use of fiction in both teaching and research. Some of the items of interest in the literature of fiction include A. J. Lamme III, ‘The Use of Novels in Geography Classrooms’, Journal of Geography, vol. 76, no. 2 (February 1977), pp. 66-8; D. W. Meinig, ‘Environmental Appreciation: Localities As a Humane Art’, Western Humanities Review, vol. 25 (Winter 1971), pp. 1-11; C. L. Salter and W. J. Lloyd, ‘Landscape in Literature’, Resource Papers for College Geography (Association of American Geographers, Washington DC), no. 76-3 (1977); Sherman E. Silverman, ‘The Use of Novels in Teaching Cultural Geography of The United States’, Journal of Geography, vol. 76, mp/4 (April/May 1977), pp. 140-6; C. L. Salter, ‘Signatures and Settings: One Approach to Landscape in Literature’ in Karl W. Butzer (ed.), Dimensions of Human Geography (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1978), pp. 69-83; John Conron, The American Landscape (Oxford University Press, Chicago, 1973).

2. Salter and Lloyd, ‘Landscape in Literature’, pp. 29-30, includes a number of useful references for searching out fiction to coincide with region and, sometimes, theme of a teacher or researcher.

3. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Viking Press, New York, 1939).

4. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (eds.), Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (Penguin, New York, 1976). This collection has two sections that deal with the period of preparation for The Grapes of Wrath (pp. 57-190). These Steinbeck letters and their associated discussion provide the reader with a strong sense of how immediate the Oklahoma sharecropper migration was to Steinbeck during the 1930s. See also John Steinbeck, Their Blood is Strong (Simon J. Lubin Society, San Francisco, 1938); Peter Lisca, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (pp. 75-101), and George Bluestone, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ (pp. 102-21) in Robert Murray Davis (ed.), Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972).

5. Steinbeck, Grapes, p. 126.

6. Ibid., p. 124.

7. Ibid.

8. Grampa fills the role of a particularly tragic character in the early part of the novel because of the naivety of his vision of California, as well as his difficulty in comprehending the magnitude of the family move. The Joad children and their friends become caught up in the adventure of moving and exploration, also failing to sense the impending rupture in the family's situation. See Chapter 10 (pp. 122-56).

9. In Chapter 6 (pp. 54-82) Muley shows Tom and Casy how thorough his adaptation to his new life has been. He anticipates the arrival and search behaviour of the sheriff; produces rabbits that he has caught with a fierce efficiency, and he rants on and on about the bank and its determination to ruin the sharecroppers of the region for its ‘margin a profit’. Steinbeck uses this character to illustrate the consequences of making a decision not to move away from this drought-plagued region.

10. Steinbeck, Grapes, pp. 70-1.

11. Ibid., p. 104.

12. Ibid., p. 120.

13. Ibid., p. 84.

14. Chapter 9 (pp. 117-21) is a short inner chapter that dramatises the deep frustration that the sharecroppers felt as they tried to sell the goods that they could not transport west. The intensity of this sorrow and anger was shown as families piled household goods in their front yards, set fire to them, and watched them burn as they climbed into their overloaded trucks and headed for their uncertain future. Peter Lisca discusses these inner chapters and their accuracy, while pointing out that Steinbeck's novel launched numerous volumes supporting and disputing the images created by his characterisation of the migration. Lisca, ‘The Grapes’, pp. 78-93.

15. Steinbeck, Grapes, pp. 220.

16. Ibid., pp. 241-2.

17. Ibid., pp. 267-8.

18. Ibid., pp. 328-9.

19. The Viking Press issued the first edition of Grapes in April 1939 and the book went through ten printings before the end of the year.

20. Steinbeck once revealed that an undersheriff of Santa Clara County in California—a prime agricultural county at the time—warned him to be careful because local people had plans to set up a fake rape case in order to discredit him (Steinbeck and Wallsten, Letters, p. 187). In a conversation with a librarian in Salinas, California, in the summer of 1979, I was told that only ‘in the last few years have the townspeople taken any pride at all that John Steinbeck was born here. Before that he was seen as a disgrace.’

21. Steinbeck, Grapes, pp. 476-7.

22. Ibid., pp. 358-9.

23. Ibid., pp. 321-2.

24. Ibid., p. 402.

The extracts from The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, copyright 1939, renewed © 1967 by John Steinbeck, are reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.