Steinbeck Book's Raw Words Tell Painful Truths

By Joe Rodriguez

Saturday, June 8, 2002

"We ain't gonna have no goddamn Okies in this town."

That's what a man from Tulare, armed and smelling of whiskey, tells Tom and Ma Joad in John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath." And after the Joads turn back, Ma tries to console her humiliated husband:

"Rich fellas come an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But, Tom, we keep a-comin'. Don't you fret none, Tom. A different time's comin'."

As Tom Joad would say, Jesus H. Christ! California, the hotbed of liberal political correctness and conservative utopianism, has picked the perfect book to get us Golden Staters thinking, talking, arguing and making up like normal people again. Starting Friday, Steinbeck's 1939 epic novel about migrant farmworkers from the Midwest is our first assignment in the "One Book" reading craze sweeping across the land.

There's something for every one of us in the saga of the Joads. It's about struggle in the promised land and the poorest of the poor. It's the story of America. It's about commitment to our fellow man, and it spouts more allusions to Jesus Christ and Exodus than a street preacher.

Going against the grain
What intrigues me most about "Grapes of Wrath" today is how it flies against two unfortunate trends. One is the liberal tendency to strip literature of language that might offend any particular group. The other is the conservative pretense that group differences don't matter in a colorblind society.

Take the word "Okie." It's everywhere in Steinbeck's book because that's what Californians called the poor, Midwestern whites who migrated here during the Dust Bowl years. All poor whites eventually became Okies, even the Nebraska family that lived next door to us in the urban barrio of East Los Angeles in the 1950s and '60s.

I remember how my mother wouldn't let us walk barefoot outside and what she said when I asked her why. "Only Okies walk barefoot," she answered.

Of course, a lot of Mexican and black kids poorer than us went shoeless in those days, but nobody was considered lower in Los Angeles at the time than a barefooted Okie.

I'm bound to catch hell -- another popular word in the book -- from all sides for saying as much or even "One Book" discussions. Censoring the words only protects the nasty prejudices behind them from head-on examination.

Ripping readers' nerves
Let's take the common slur about African-Americans, the one that's gotten masterpieces like "Huckleberry Finn" in trouble with politically correct school boards. Even my editors won't let me spell it out for you here, but every Californian who reads "Grapes" will find it in Chapter Four, where the otherwise sympathetic Joad says, "There he spied a . . ."

I predict Steinbeck's book will offend more than a few groups of contemporary Californians. Take Pa Joad's description to Ma of sheriff's deputies:

"Did you ever see a deputy that didn' have a fat ass? An' they waggle their ass an' flop their gun aroun'. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they come a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop."

Who might object? Well, the brotherhood of law enforcement officers, advocates for "full-body" people, anger-management counselors and school boards who think the book endorses bad grammar.

"I am not writing a satisfying story," Steinbeck wrote in 1939. "I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags. . . . I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written."

Let the reading begin and don't you fret none, California. A different time's comin'.