As Tom and Casy pull up to the Joad's family home, they witness the dry fields and abandoned homes that are a result of the Oklahome Dust Bowl. I can't imagine what it must have felt like for Tom to see his childhood home so lonesome and left to decompose. The two begin talking to Muley Graves, a family friend of the Joads, and he informs the men that the Joad family and their neighbors were forced to desert their homes and belongings in order to find pay and a new life elsewhere. I feel sympathetic towards these families because they were forced out by the land owners. It would be shameful enough to be unable to make a paycheck for your family, but it would be even more embarrassing to be forced to go because you couldn't pay off the land owners. Not to say that the families didn't fight for their farm land. "You're grampa stood out here with a rifle, an' he blowed the headlights off that cat' (Steinbeck 46)," Muley told the men. The situation is especially sad because it wasn't that the farmers weren't working hard, but because of the weather conditions that they couldn't produce enough crop. Muley eventually telld the guys that the Joad's went to stay with in uncle in hopes of finding new work and pay, which leads them to their next destination.
Chapter seven is another breif chapter that is told by a different narrator. I have become fond of these chapters because it gives the reader a break from all the sympathetic plot. This one happens to be a corrupt car salesman who sells junk cars to the needy, migrant farmers. "Owners with rolled up sleeves. Salesmen, neat, deadly, small intent eyes watching for weaknesses (Steinbeck 61)." He does rotten things to cars to make them sound or look better, but not necessarily run better. However, he is able to sell the vehicles at high prices becasue the farmers are uneducated. As if these poor farming families haven't gone through enough, deceitful car salesmen have to be thrown into the mix.
[Bibliography]
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.
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