Chapter 23

Chapter twenty three talks of how the farmers, tenant farmers, their families, and other migrants find peace inside the camps. The people find a way to escape from their usual broken down lives in California. Some of the ways they do this is in telling stories, singing songs, playing instruments, and dancing. "The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug for pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes. And it came about in camps along the roads, on the ditch backs beside the streams, under the sycamores, that the story teller grew into being, so that the gathered in the low firelight to hear the gifted ones. And they listened while the tales were told, and their participation made the stories great." Chapter twenty three outlines each of these escapes.

The migrants enjoy telling stories to each other about the olden days. They also enjoy telling comical stories, because it helps to ease their minds off of their dreary and desolate predicament. "The story tellers, gathering attention into their tales, spoke in great rhythms, spoke in great works because the tales were great, and the listeners became great through them." Another way for people to escape their dark world for a short while, was to get drunk. "And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth. Failures dulled and the future was no threat." The other ways were playing music and dancing to that music. The people enjoyed this very much, because everyone could take part in it. "These three in the evening, harmonica and fiddle and guitar. Playing a reel and tapping out the tune, and the big deep strings of the guitar beating like a hear, and the harmonica's sharp chords and the skirl and squeal of the fiddle. People have to move close. They can't help it. The square closes up and the dancing starts, feet on the bare ground, beating dull, strike with you heels."

John Steinbeck includes this chapter and the ways the people escaped from their hardship to show the reality of the situation. These people were not dirty foreign vagrants that the people of the west had unjustly prejudiced against. These were real people of the United States of America, who had troubles when the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl hit. They were moving for a better future, and the western people treated them cruelly and had no right to do so. The migrants were real people looking for a way out of their terrible predicament. And some of their ways out were through singing, dancing, playing instruments, telling stories, and telling jokes. These were all real ways of escape from a real and desolate situation by real American people.