Furious Grapes

I have been teaching a literature class virtually for high school students in China for the last ten weeks on The Grapes of Wrath.  An elementary school student in one of my ESL writing classes saw my name listed as the instructor on the online class portal and asked me, “Are you teaching a class on The Furious Grape?”  That’s how it translates from Mandarin.

 
I’m tempted to play at appearing cerebral and evolved by saying how much I adore this foundational tome at the center of the classic American literary cannon, but I can’t.  Unfortunately, I don’t love it.  It’s kinda, well, boring. 
 
But I do appreciate Steinbeck’s genius evident in various ways throughout the novel.  His portrayal of migrant farm workers in 1930’s America hits the reader like a tire iron to the head, and numerous passages throughout the book are sheer poetry.  Even more, his insight into issues of the individual vs. the community, greed vs. kindness, and empty religion vs. a more humanistic interpretation of the divine is downright profound. 
 
Too bad it’s kinda boring.  Nonetheless, it’s worth trekking along Route 66 with the Joads for the entire journey if for no other reason than the striking parallels between the challenges migrant farmers faced nearly a century ago and those that confront us today.
 
 The very first page of the novel sets the scene during the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma where extreme drought has made “the surface of the earth…a thin hard crust” in which “every moving thing lifted the dust into the air.” These conditions caused respiratory issues and forced people to tie “handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out…” (Steinbeck 1).  Sound familiar?
 
Of course, the dust is merely a physical problem; the depression is a financial, emotional, and psychological one.  Steinbeck has harsh words for the heartless, industrialized “Bank Monster” that he blames for kicking small farmers off their land and leaving the stomachs of their children with a persistent, gnawing hunger.  “The tenant system won’t work anymore.  One man on a tractor can take the place of twelve or fourteen families….  The bank is something more than men, I tell you.  It’s the monster.  Men made it, but they can’t control it” (14).  Perhaps Steinbeck thought the Bank Monster was too big to fail?  “…when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away…” (108).  Sound familiar?
 
But the thick blankets of dust and the economy in depression weren’t the Joads’ only challenges.  The disgust that rained down upon them at the hands of those who were better off was soul-crushing at every turn.  “Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling.  They ain’t human.  A human being wouldn’t live like they do.  A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.  They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas” (100).  Steinbeck believed that when push comes to shove, people who are treated as “less than” will eventually rise up.  There is a “little screaming fact that sounds through all history:  repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”  Sound familiar?
 
While it’s true that this book is about migrant farmers and Bank Monsters and Oakies and Hoovervilles, at its very core, it is a book about the virtue of righteous anger.  After all, Steinbeck appropriated a line from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” for the title of his book:  “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” (Julia Ward Howe).  Indeed, Steinbeck seems to suggest that justice is impossible without rage.  Jesus himself was no stranger to the use of anger for addressing social ills as he demonstrated when overturning the tables of the money changers in the Temple (Matthew 21: 12-13).
 
“And the anger began to ferment” (Steinbeck 129).  What was true of migrant farmers in the 30’s is just as true for us today.  People are angry.  Very angry. 
 

People were angry when the Nazis exterminated Jews, angry when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed just three years after Selma, angry when genocide tore through Rwanda, angry when the banks were bailed out while the 401ks of average Joe’s were ravaged.  And today people are angry when COVID-19 keeps children from their elderly grandparents, angry when black lives are considered less valuable than white ones.
 
Perhaps we should be angry about something else too.  Perhaps we should be angry with ourselves because we haven’t learned from the failures of our past rage.  Perhaps we should be angry that the words “never forget” that we proclaimed when the Nazis were defeated have been treated with the same careless indifference as the words “I can’t breathe” today.
 
The grape vines are heavy with fruit, the skin of the grapes ripping apart from the pressure within.  The anger has begun to ferment.  But anger without memory – without an understanding that today’s anger is the very same rage we felt at the sight of concentration camps in the 40s and the lynching trees in the 60s and the machete-ravaged Rwandan corpses in the 90s – then we will never stop repeating the sins of past.  “Furious grapes” untethered from the vine of history’s dark lessons are a knee on the neck of justice.