Osame Osayande’s Reviews > The Grapes of Wrath > Status Update

"Remember?" she said. "Remember what we'd always say at home? 'Winter's a-comin' early,' we said, when the ducks flew. Always said that, an' winter come when it was ready to come. But we always said, 'She's a-comin' early.
I wonder what we meant."

— Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both.

The land company— that's the bank when it has land -wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good— not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. —

—Says a wilderness ain’t no good, ’cause his little piece of a soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole. Funny how I remember. Didn’ think I was even listenin’. But I know now a fella ain’t no good alone."

"I been thinkin’ what he said, an’ I can remember – all of it. Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’t have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. —

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!

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don't need much. They wouldn't know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny-deport them.

"If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can doll make him feel rich-not rich like Mis' Wilson was when she give her tent when Grampa died.

If you who own the things people must have could un-derstand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we?

Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revo-lution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other.

For here "I lost my land" changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate "We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and as perplexed as one