Contents
Chapter 23
Overview
Migrant families, battered by scarcity, invent and seek out pleasures—storytelling, movies, drink, music, dancing, and revivalist baptisms—to soften hardship and loneliness. These communal rituals restore dignity, intimacy, and briefly suspend hunger and fear, revealing how culture and faith help them endure displacement and exploitation.
Summary
As work remains scarce and life precarious, migrant families deliberately seek amusement to survive the grind. In firelit camps, storytellers command attention with grand rhythms and war tales that elevate listeners, who feel both awe and loss when heroism collapses into mortality.
Some spend precious coins on movies and return to recount plots—mistaken poverty, romance, jail, and newsreels—sparking debate over make-believe versus hunger. Others turn to drink, chasing warmth and companionship as sorrow softens, memories glow, and judgments blur into a holy-seeming peace.
Music becomes a portable refuge: harmonicas for pocket ease, cherished guitars passed down and worn smooth, and shrill fiddles scraped to life. Evening reels draw a crowd; a tireless Texas boy and a Cherokee girl dance fiercely, stirring elders’ smiles and young lovers’ memories and desires in the moonlit dark.
As the fire wanes, story songs follow, tying past to present. Then, beside an irrigation ditch, a calculating preacher whips a crowd to groveling repentance before baptizing them en masse, sending them back to camp wet and wide-eyed, vowing purity.
The chapter closes with children’s awed confusion and mischievous curiosity, while the migrants continue to look humbly for pleasure—small, communal moments that momentarily lift the burdens of hunger, fear, and dispossession.
Who Appears
- Migrant familiesDispossessed workers who seek shared amusement to endure hunger, fear, and loneliness.
- StorytellersCampfire narrators whose rhythmic tales elevate and console listeners.
- Musicians (harmonica, guitar, fiddle)Evening players whose reels and songs spark communal dancing and memory.
- Texas boyEnergetic dancer who drives the reel with relentless, flashy steps.
- Cherokee girlDancing partner to the Texas boy, fierce and tireless in the square.
- MoviegoerReturns from town films to retell plots that briefly replace hardship.
- DrinkerFinds warmth and imagined fellowship in alcohol, easing sorrow and fear.
- Revival preacherManipulates a crowd into repentance, then baptizes them in the ditch.
- Baptized campfolkMen and women who, drenched and awed, vow not to sin again.
- ChildrenFrightened, fascinated witnesses to the baptisms, curious about forbidden sins.