The Ghost Of Tom Joad-Resurrected-With John Ford’s Film Adaptation Of John Steinbeck’s “Grapes Of Wrath” In Mind 

By Zack James

The ghost of Tom Joad weighted heavily on Bart Webber’s fertile mind, some would say futile including a couple of ex-wives who nevertheless bled him dry, ever since he had first read John Steinbeck’s Grapes Of Wrath in high school. He was not sure whether he had read it as part of an English class assignment, not likely since he was not into reading then as much as he would later turn his after-burners on and read everything that he could lay his grubby rawhide hands on, or had read it in the library in the days when he was trying to break from his reckless addition to the midnight creeps of corner boy life. The midnight creep being simple nighttime burglaries of waiting and inviting homes-not all of them loaded with riches but as likely to be low-hanging fruit convenient places in the working class neighborhood of Carver where he had come of age. 

Reason: simplicity itself-that was where goods that could be “fenced” were found which allowed him and his corner boys to survive if not in style then to have date night money during high school. One night he and Jimmy Jenkins his closest corner boy were almost nabbed by the coppers as they came out a house which had a silent security system guarding the premises something unusual at the time although almost an afterthought now. The haul brought about twenty bucks and he began to think better of the idea of avoiding hard time in county or the state pen for such little benefit. And so the summer between junior and senior year he dived into whatever the library had to offer to keep him occupied. Now some forty years later as he thought about it more that was probably the place where he read the book.

But the genesis of his admiration for John Steinbeck’s best-known work was not what was making his carry a heavy Tom Joad load lately. That had been directly prompted by two separate events, or better occurrences. First he had gone to an exhibit of photography at the local art museum (that designation being a little disingenuous since that was the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which is much more that a local hang-out but that is what drives Bart’s expressions sometimes and so we will indulge his habits and move on) which featured some of the photography of Dorothea Lange who was famous for her work with the hard scrabble farm migrants from which a character like Tom would have come, would have come out of the hills of Oklahoma like the second coming or something. The photos not only struck a chord as pieces of history but made him rage inside against his own Joad-like beginnings, a feeling that was never very far from the surface.

The second occurrence was one night when his wife, Loretta (wife number three and a keeper after those two previous blood-lettings) happened to have gone to the local library (this was a correct designation since it was merely a branch of the Cambridge library system) looking for some DVDs of interest. For some reason the John Ford film adaptation of Steinbeck’s book was featured prominently in the DVD section and having always loved Henry Fonda and she not having seen the film or read the book thought that Bart would enjoy seeing the film with her.                       

Bart certainly had enjoyed the film that night but a few days later he began to flash back in his mind how vividly he felt the fate of Tom Joad, of Tom Joad’s people as they were thrown out of dust bowl Oklahoma and left to their own circumscribed capacities to get to sunny California, the new garden of Eden the best way they could. Which was none too good. He had been most struck by the totally destitute condition the Joad clan was in when they were hustled off the land just ahead of the bulldozers come to do their foreclosure best to obliterate a couple or three generations of work on the land (the dust balls having set the whole frame up as well as the world-wide Depression that they were incapable of doing anything about even if they understood how the damn thing melted down-which they didn’t taking it as providence lacking any other suitable explanation).        

But it was really Tom Joad and his fate which gathered Bart’s attention. Tom had, as the film opened, just gotten out of prison for a homicide that he had committed a few years before over some girl or something at a dance. (Half of Bart’s corner boys had before they were done been through some prison or other and as mentioned it had been a close thing in his own case, a very close thing.) He went looking for his people back in Podunk Oklahoma and they were not at the old homestead but had begun the first stage of the trek to the “promised land”. Tom caught up with them at a relative’s homestead and decided that he would head west with them despite that decision being a violation of his parole conditions. Along the way, the tough road west in a beaten down jalopy held together mostly by prayers, the tough Highway 66 through the high desert into Southern California Tom and the family sensed that once again they will be left out of the garden. That they had been sold a bill of goods. That proved to be the case as they hit the overcrowded farm stoop labor company store camps where a million other Joads were losing their illusions if not their dreams.     

The part of the film though that drew Bart’s fervent attention was when Tom, a guy like him and his corner boys really as far as their early up-bringings had made them very conscious of their poverty but also clueless about what had caused that condition and more importantly what to do about it-if anything. But Tom out west “got religion,” saw that nothing was going to change, no family, including his, was going to get ahead in this wicked old world if they just sat there and took it, let the bosses beat them down and then throw them away. Some Okie/Arkie hard-headed gene about what was right and what was wrong got kick-started. He would devote himself to taking care of whoever and whatever of the beaten down peoples of this good rich earth where he saw things going wrong.

Bart didn’t know if Tom’s epiphany would have survived the Okie/Arkie settling down after the war when everybody was expecting to make it on their own and let the devil take the hinter post. Sure there were the aimless hot-rodders and Hell Angels motorcyclists who lived for the moment and didn’t give a damn about living the ticky-tacky life but mostly the brethren did. All Bart knew was that the weight of Tom’s commitment to some rough-hew justice as he settled in the West was driving him crazy of late since the current political situation pointed to his own having to get back out on the streets, to “get religion” again after years of conducting an “armed truce” with what was happening in Washington and elsewhere. Hell he was getting too old for this. Then the ghost of Tom Joad entered his brain with these words from the film:

“I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.”     

Damn old Tom Joad, damn him to hell.