This will give the deputies a pretense to destroy the camp, which will weaken the laborers’ bargaining power. One day, Tom discovers that the greedy Farmers’ Association, working in tandem with corrupt deputies, plans to start a riot at an upcoming dance. At this camp, the Joads find some comfort and friendship, but only Tom can find work. Instead of a police presence, the camp is governed by a committee elected by the migrants themselves. The Joads leave the Hooverville and find refuge at a more comfortable, government-run camp. Tom flees and Casy willingly takes the blame for the fight the preacher is arrested and taken into custody. When Tom and a friend from the Hooverville try to negotiate better wages from a contractor, they get into a tussle with a deputy. At this camp, Connie Rivers-the husband of Tom’s pregnant sister, Rose of Sharon-abandons the Joads. The family is forced to inhabit a Hooverville, a squalid tent city (named after President Herbert Hoover) where migrants live at the whim of unscrupulous contractors and corrupt deputies. Granma Joad dies during the family’s passage through the Mojave desert. Once the family arrives in the state, these rumors prove to be true, and their hardships continue.
On their way to California, the Joads receive disheartening reports about a lack of jobs and hostility towards “Okies” in California. Noah, Tom’s older brother, abandons the family at this border, choosing instead to subsist on his own. The Wilsons travel with the Joads until the California border, where Sairy becomes too ill to continue. Once on the road, the Joads befriend a migrant couple, Ivy and Sairy Wilson, and shortly thereafter, the cantankerous Grampa Joad dies of a stroke. Pa Joad reveals that the family saw fruit-picking jobs advertised on handbills, and they are heading west to take advantage of these opportunities. When Tom and Casy arrive at Uncle John’s, they find the Joads loading up a car in preparation to leave for California. Muley tells the men that they can find Tom’s family at the home of Uncle John, the brother of Tom’s father, Pa Joad. Muley Graves, a neighbor who has stayed behind, explains to the two men that the farming families have all been evicted by the landowners and the banks, who have repossessed their land and now use tractors to cultivate it. Together, Tom and Casy travel back to the Joad homestead, but discover that it has been abandoned. Casy no longer preaches of virtue and sin, and instead holds the unity and equality of human spirit as his highest ideal. As Tom returns home, he meets Jim Casy, an ex-preacher whom Tom knew as a child. Tom Joad is a young man from a farming family who has just been paroled from prison, after serving four years on a homicide charge. In Oklahoma during the Great Depression, drought and dust storms-the Dust Bowl-have ruined farmers’ crops and destroyed livelihoods already damaged by the failing economy.
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