Contents
Chapter 5
Overview
Bank agents order tenant farmers off their land, justifying evictions as impersonal necessities of profit. Tractors replace families, severing people from soil and turning farms into factory lines. A tenant confronts a local driver but learns there is no single culprit. Mechanization literally crushes a homestead, signaling irreversible displacement.
Summary
Owner representatives arrive in closed cars to tell tenant farmers the land is failing and the tenant system no longer works. They frame the bank and large companies as a relentless “monster” that must grow, insisting that one tractor can replace many families and demanding the tenants leave.
Tenants argue that birth, labor, and death on the land make it theirs, but the owner men deny responsibility, pointing to banks and distant orders. They warn that resistance will bring sheriffs and troops, and suggest the dispossessed try relief, cotton picking elsewhere, or California.
After the owners depart, families quietly brace for collapse while men calculate their options in the dust. Tractors arrive like iron insects, driven by masked operators fused to the machine, carving straight lines through fences, dooryards, and fields, reducing soil to unloved, industrialized ground.
At noon a tractor driver—Joe Davis’s son—eats as hungry children watch. A tenant confronts him about the cost of his wages to many families. The driver pleads necessity and orders, arguing times have changed and small holdings can’t survive; the tenant reflects on how property can either enlarge a man or enslave him.
The tenant threatens to defend his home, but the driver explains killing him won’t stop the system; orders come from the bank, which itself follows distant commands. The tenant vows there must be a way to change a man-made wrong, yet the tractor proceeds, clips the house, and topples it like a crushed bug while the family watches, stunned.
Who Appears
- Tenant manDispossessed farmer who questions orders, defends his home, and confronts the tractor driver.
- Tractor driver (Joe Davis’s boy)Masked operator paid three dollars a day; follows orders despite harming neighbors.
- Owner men (bank agents/spokesmen)Arrive in cars; justify evictions as demands of the bank and profit.
- Tenant women and childrenWatch fearfully, avoid angering the men, witness the home’s destruction.
- The Bank/Company (“the monster”)Impersonal force demanding constant profit, portrayed as beyond individual control.