Such is the case with one of the greatest Mothers in Literature, Ma Joad, the true hero in John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. When we first meet her more than seventy pages into the book, the expectation is that were reading Toms story. In Steinbecks intimate third-person language, we stand alongside Tom as we first look at her: Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers An inauspicious first impression, and one that is deepened as the reader realizes that Ma is the only primary character in the novel without her own name. She is always Ma.

However, from here on out, Mas scenes are the most critical in the book. Early on as the Joad family takes stock of Toms return from prison, it is Ma who cuts to the crux of the matter: You aint poisoned mad? You dont hate nobody? They didn do nothin in that jail to rot you out with crazy mad?

And from that moment, although Tom continues to play a key role and develops his own epiphanies, the story of The Grapes of Wrath becomes Mas story. When Tom puts forward to the family the proposition of bringing the former preacher, Jim Casy, with them, Pa points out that they may not have enough food An kin we feed a extra mouth? Ma, though, foreshadows the books last scene some four hundred pages early when she replies, It aint kin we? Its will we?

It is Ma who can admit to doubts, as when she, not Tom, first raises doubts about the journey to California, yet is also Ma who reassures Al once the trip has begun. Up ahead theys a thousan lives we might live, but when it comes, itll be ony one.

And when, after Grampas death, the truck breaks down, and Tom suggests that most of the family go on ahead with the Wilsons, Pa agrees. For a moment it looks as though this is what will happen until Ma speaks, telling Tom, You done this thout thinkin much. What we got lef in the worl? Nothin but us.

As the narrator puts it, She had taken control. As the remaining three hundred pages of the novel play out, Steinbecks narrator often following Tom, takes the reader through the perilous adventures and horrific injustices that the Joads and all the Dust Bowl migrants face. Its like a crazy morality play, in which those with morals lose out, and certainly it would seem that no one, not Ma, not anyone has taken control.

And yet, at the end, the book unlike the movie, which became a heroic meditation of Tom remains true to the universal struggle of people trying to make it by staying focused on Ma. For it is she who comes up with the idea for Rose of Sharon to use her breast milk to feed a dying man, it is she who rejoices at the books end saying to her daughter, I knowed you would. I knowed! It is Ma who understands how strong her daughter has become and understands that theyll struggle on somehow. And its the particular in Ma, even more than Toms famous speech of always being there when a cops beating up on someone that Steinbeck chooses to close on. When Rose of Sharon smiles mysteriously, shes following her mothers footsteps, saving who she can, living the one life shes got.

A native Californian, born and raised in the Central Valley, Michael Shaler grew up loving the work of John Steinbeck. While teaching in California public schools in both Southern California and the Bay Area, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State. A member of an ongoing writing group, and currently working on a novel, his nonfiction has appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly, and he has fiction forthcoming in The MacGuffin. He lives with his wife and ideal reader, Ellen, in Oakland, CA.
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