Chapter 26

At Weedpatch, Ma forces the starving family to confront their situation. With only scraps left and Rose of Sharon near term, they decide to leave at dawn. On the road a nail puncture delays them, but a recruiter directs them to the Hooper peach ranch. State police escort a convoy through angry pickets into a fenced, armed camp, where the Joads receive a shack and five cents per box rates on peaches with credit at the company store.

Inside, fear and silence dominate. The family learns to handle fruit gently, and Ma buys overpriced food on credit, shamed but helped by the timid clerk who slips her sugar. As dusk falls, Tom, uneasy about the pickets, slips past a guard and discovers Jim Casy leading a strike, explaining wages had been cut to two-and-a-half cents. Casy urges Tom to warn workers they’re being used as strikebreakers.

Guards ambush the strikers at a bridge. A vigilante crushes Casy’s skull; Tom, enraged, kills the attacker but is clubbed and flees through ditches and orchards back to camp, his face smashed. By morning the ranch drops pay to two-and-a-half cents as waves of desperate workers arrive. Tom confesses, and Ma insists they hide him rather than let him run.

That night the family packs, conceals Tom in a mattress “cave,” and bluffs past the guards, trading their work slip for gas. They drive back roads until they find a cotton-pickers’ siding of boxcars. To keep Tom safe, they agree to take cotton jobs and lodge in the cars while Tom hides in creek brush and a culvert, to be fed secretly until his face heals.