Chapter nine is another one of those chapters where the focus goes off of the Joad family and to something or someone else. This time, its tenant farmers selling all of the things they can not take with them for outrageously low prices.
This is another chapter where Steinbeck emphasizes the pain and trouble the tenant farmers had to go through when they were kicked off of their farms. Now that they are convinced there will be a better life in California, they are selling all of their possessions that they can not bring with them. And of course where there is money to be made, there are going to be plenty of people to swindle honest people out of their money. They would buy things that would usually cost thirty dollars for five; just because they knew that the farmers needed money and there was no way that they could take a mule team or a bath tub with them.
The pain that the farmers are going through also shows when they start saying things like “You’re not buying only junk, you’re buying junked lives. You’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bows, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek. You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk. There’s a premium goes with this pile of junk and the bay horses—so beautiful—a packet of bitterness to grow in your house and to flower some day. We could have save you, but you cut us down, and soon you will be cut down and there’ll be none of us to save you” (Steinbeck 87). The people are angry at the people for making them practically giving their stuff away, and now it seems like they just now realized how important some of the things are, like how the horses are not just horses, they are all of the memories surrounding the horses.
Steinbeck, John, and Robert J. DeMott. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.
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