A Twenty-First-Century Grapes of Wrath: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

Author(s): Brian Railsback

Source: The Steinbeck Review , Vol. 13, No. 2 (2016), pp. 179-195
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/steinbeckreview.13.2.0179

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Intercalary

A Twenty-First-Century Grapes of Wrath: Jesmyn Ward’s

­Salvage the Bones
Brian Railsback

Abstract
Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, is a
striking complement to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Like the Joad family, the
Batistes of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, are economic outcasts at the mercy of social
and environmental forces beyond their control. By the end of the novel, the Batistes
have no home; after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, they end up like the
Joads: homeless flood victims with no hope except their innate survival instinct and
their tenacious ability to lean on each other. Salvage the Bones reminds us that for
the impoverished in the United States and around the globe, the dismal existence
portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath not only still exists but in some ways has become
worse.

Keywords: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of
Wrath, income inequality, climate change, twenty-first century despair

I. Introduction: Steinbeck and the Contemporary Writer

In April 2016 American novelist Ayana Mathis characterizes contemporary

writers as being “flummoxed by joy.” Mathis writes, “With few exceptions . . .
we seem to have decided that despair, alienation and bleakness are the most
meaningful, and interesting, descriptors of the human condition,” a result of
our “end-of-days malaise” (BR 27). The general absence of joy in twenty-first-
century American fiction has an abundance of bleak but important milestones.
In Cormac McCarthy’s No County for Old Men, Sheriff Bell considers the vio-
lent wasteland of the Texas/Mexico borderland and concludes that it will just get

steinbeck review, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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worse; the novel ends with Bell’s dream of following his father into a dark, frigid
terrain. McCarthy’s next novel, The Road, fleshes out Bell’s dream as a doomed
father and son trek through a dismal, cold, apocalyptic deathscape. Don DeLillo’s
latest novel, Zero K, refutes Ernest Hemingway’s famous line in For Whom the
Bell Tolls when Robert Jordan’s final thoughts are “The world is a fine place and
worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it” (467). In DeLillo’s novel,
a billionaire who is grieving over the terminal illness of his second wife decides
to finance a postmodern cryogenic house of horrors where wealthy people may
literally be frozen out of the present world and reanimated when, after, or if
things get better. By means of filmed or theatrically produced scenes of modern
disaster—such as climate catastrophes, terrorists, bloody wars, even suicide by
self-immolation—the cryogenic center, known as the Convergence, provides a
reminder of the world’s incessant failure. American fiction today, then, seems
to reflect a new century that is rife with disorder, environmental degradation,
economic unease, cultural and racial division, and a general feeling of angst as
the world seems to be ever teetering on the edge of chaos. As an aside, this angst
was manifested over and over again during the unusually ugly and distressing
2016 U.S. presidential race.
Perhaps it takes great works of art to make sense of this disarray. As Robert
Frost writes, “We rise out of disorder into order and the poems that I make
are little bits of order.” The 1930s, another era of disorder, brought a decade
beginning with the Great Depression and ending with World War II, and while
prominent American authors reflected the impending despair of their age, they
also searched for ways to overcome it. Even as they witnessed vast systems of
order—Democracy, Fascism, and Communism—in massive collision, they
tended to believe in order. Paul Mariani’s 2016 biography of Wallace Stevens,
The Whole Harmonium, depicts Stevens as a poet who dedicated his life to find-
ing ideas of order in the tenuous bridge between reality and imagination found
in poetry. His 1936 Ideas of Order is a milestone artifact of the poet’s quest.
Although at the time Stevens himself was a Hoover Republican with some affin-
ity for Mussolini’s brand of Fascism, his poems did not subscribe to a particular
“ism,” but shone with confidence that an order in some degree may be found.
As Mariani notes, “The question now—as everyone from Franco to Mussolini
to Hitler to FDR was discovering or imagining—was what shape the new order
should take” (202). The general trend to find the shape of the new order was so
pervasive in the literature of the 1930s that when F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared
to drop out of the literary scene with his highly personal “Crack-Up” Esquire
pieces of 1936, Hemingway took him to task. And, quite pointedly, John Dos
Passos scolded him: “I’ve been wanting to see you, naturally, to argue about

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your Esquire articles—Christ, man, how do you find time in the middle of the
general conflagration to worry about all that stuff? . . . We’re living in one of
the damndest tragic moments in history” (Fitzgerald 311). Fitzgerald’s sad last
meeting with Hemingway, who was finding his own kind of order in steadfast
resistance to Fascism, occurred when Hemingway visited Hollywood in July
1937 to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists. The two authors probably did not
speak, as Fitzgerald was in the audience, keenly feeling his failure as an artist
and regretting that his “close friendship” with Hemingway had ended (Bruccoli
421). While many major American writers of the 1930s believed in order, or
a sense of the rightness of things—if a person could find it or depict it—for
writers like Dos Passos or Stevens, the search for order, or meaning, was the
primary mission of the artist.
John Steinbeck experienced this driving rage for order as well, but he typi-
cally went his own way, searching in places quite different from his contempo-
raries. Although he was well read, in the 1930s Steinbeck was not necessarily
looking for answers to be found in artists, philosophers, or political move-
ments, but rather he was more likely to find his ideas of order in books of sci-
ence or anthropology or from observations of the tide pools. John Steinbeck
made order out of environmental degradation, income inequality, and social
divides in his monumental novel, The Grapes of Wrath. And seventy-two years
later, Jesmyn Ward was attempting to make sense of the disaster brought on
by Hurricane Katrina. Her novel, Salvage the Bones, has clear parallels with
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and may be viewed as a striking twenty-first-
century rendition of that mighty work. As a product of 2011, however, Ward’s
novel reaches a conclusion far removed from that in Steinbeck’s text and, the-
matically, it is far bleaker.

II. The Concept of Order in John Steinbeck: Meaning in The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck’s path to the writing of The Grapes of Wrath wound over a half
dozen years as he traveling a road that—much like his own mind—branched
out in several directions. Important influences and experiences on this pathway
have been significantly detailed over more than a half century of scholarship.
From 1934 to the publication of his novel in 1939, Steinbeck inhaled relevant
books, film, and newspaper articles that ranged across the social and hard sci-
ences, as well as information gleaned from firsthand reports, interviews, and
personal trips into the field. Jackson J. Benson’s The True Adventures of John
Steinbeck, Writer provides a sweeping narrative of the novelist’s field research,
while Robert DeMott’s Steinbeck’s Reading: A Catalogue of Books Owned and

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Borrowed demonstrates the wide range of Steinbeck’s reading. And my Charles
Darwin and the Art of John Steinbeck reviews this novel’s scientific underpin-
nings. The important influence of the biologist/naturalist Edward F. Ricketts
may be found in Richard Astro’s John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The
Shaping of a Novelist and, in an even more personal view of Ricketts, Eric Enno
Tamm’s Beyond the Outer Shores. A portrait of Carol Henning Steinbeck as the
writer’s wife and partner, who worked shoulder to shoulder with him as e­ ditor,
typist, and personal/creative force, is provided in Susan Shillinglaw’s Carol and
John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage. A record of Steinbeck’s writing of the novel
may be found in journal entries written before, during, and after his work on
the book—123 entries between February 1938 and January 1941—entries that
have been compiled and edited by Robert DeMott and titled Working Days: The
Journals of The Grapes of Wrath. Suffice it to say here that Steinbeck’s research
into the California labor problem, first in Of Mice and Men and In Dubious Battle
and culminating in The Grapes of Wrath, became an all-consuming personal
and professional enterprise—so much so that the novel completely exhausted
him. As DeMott writes in “This Book Is My Life,” when Steinbeck finished the
novel on October 26, 1938, “it should have been cause for wild celebrating, but
between bouts of bone-weary tiredness and nervous exhaustion, Steinbeck felt
only numbness and perhaps some of the mysterious satisfaction that comes from
having transformed the weight of his whole life, his entire body, into the new
book, though at that moment he had no idea how debilitating that would prove
to be” (186). His work leading up to and including the writing of the novel was
so intense that at first the process galvanized his working partnership with Carol,
only to lead to the unraveling of their marriage on the novel’s completion. Susan
Shillinglaw observes, “For John and Carol, finishing Grapes finished them, leav-
ing them physically and emotionally drained and setting the stage for marital
problems” (202). By March 1943, they were divorced.
The Grapes of Wrath begins with an all-seeing narrator’s view of the world,
with an omniscient understanding of the environmental disaster brought on by
the Dust Bowl, a drought exacerbated by reckless corporate farming practices.
In the first chapter, men and women are writ small, hardly perceptible in a nar-
rative that examines plants, ant lions, and gophers with equal attention until
the end, where the unnamed men sit in doorways, fingering rocks and sticks,
“thinking-figuring” to no good end (Steinbeck 7).
Steeped in the science of his day and a holistic view of human in nature,
Steinbeck devotes a great deal of space in the early chapters of The Grapes of
Wrath to describing the wasteland of Dust Bowl Oklahoma. Chapter 3 is dedi-
cated to the trek of a single turtle across the ruined landscape, and as Tom Joad

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 Fig. 1 John and Carol Steinbeck at a train station, 1937.
Photo from the scrapbooks of Carol Steinbeck, in the collection of the Martha
Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

meets Casy and later the rest of the Joad clan, they walk through a terrain of
seemingly endless dried-out crop rows and remnants of busted or obliterated
farm houses—these early scenes are reminiscent of McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic
novel, The Road. The drought is magnified because the tenant farmers do not
rotate crops as they should and natural wind breaks have been bulldozed so
as to plant even more nutrient-depleting cotton. The ruin is accelerated by the
recklessness of the bank “monster” and corporate greed (Steinbeck 43). Part
of the environmental degradation that creates the mass migration of the Joads
and others like them is caused by human beings, as Tamm underscores: “The
Dust Bowl was a wholly man-made disaster; misguided farming practices had
destroyed the native sod which was a vital buffer against wind and drought”
(40, emphasis added).
Vastly separated by wealth and power from people like the Joads, those
bosses and managers, who have hastened the environmental disaster and accel-
erated the subsequent migration to California in order to feed an inhuman
labor machine, might as well be living in another country. Chapter 5 depicts
these owners, or more often their spokesmen, as they visit the tenant farms in
“closed cars.” Through an open car window, they explain to the tenants why the

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 Fig. 2 Illustration by L. Brodat from 1940 Russian translation of The Grapes
of Wrath. “Glava Tretya” (Chapter 3).
Collection of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

land is dying and why they must move away. The “owner men,” they say, are
“caught in something larger than themselves,” and they describe the faceless
company or bank as “a monster . . . which had ensnared them” (42–43). The
wealth gap between the farmers and the corporate owners is vast—a case of
immense income inequality. Other members of this “upper,” distant class of
people include voracious farm equipment buyers who cheat the small farmers
out of a fair price for goods they must sell, used car salesmen who sell “lemons”
with a warranty of excellence, and the vacationing “shitheels” who drive luxury
cars across the country to sightsee in California and complain that nothing is
ever quite good enough (212). But there is an even greater divide than that of
income inequality—a racial inequity that, if mentioned at all, is relegated to
the fringes—perhaps an ugly joke about African Americans that Tom hears
but cannot fully recite or a vague reference to a white cotton picker who gives
birth to a black child. The Joads, therefore, begin their trek to California amid
environmental destruction, meeting with economic oppression and misery at
every turn in a social order that has been violently fractured between the haves
and the have-nots.
Despite all that the Joad family’s suffering, however, the godlike omniscient
narrator in the intercalary chapters suggests that there is a intelligible system
representing some kind of order—indicating that if they can only figure out

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how this system works, they may be saved by that knowledge. The ­progression
of the novel is their movement toward that understanding. Chapter 14, an echo
of John Steinbeck’s 1936 articles for the San Francisco News, explains that the
owners cannot understand how oppressed people come together to overcome
their oppressors, if need be, by revolution of the kind that gave birth to the
United States. While nervous owners worry that some kind of dramatic change
to the old system is coming, they do not understand the undeniable will of
oppressed people: “When theories change and crash, when schools, philoso-
phies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow
and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward. . . . Having stepped forward,
he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back” (Grapes 204–5).
At the end of the novel, Tom, Ma, and Rose of Sharon understand that by giv-
ing themselves to something bigger than themselves and their own ­narrow
­interests.  As Tom puts it, the people will prevail, and he himself will be
“ever’where,” all about, looking over them (572).
When the Great Depression ends, Steinbeck does not leave the issues raised
in The Grapes of Wrath to the dustbin of history. In Travels with Charley and
America and Americans particularly, he was ahead of his time in the early
1960s, understanding the dangerous persistence of environmental degradation,
vast income gaps between classes, and racial segregation. Yet he retains his opti-
mistic view that with a holistic understanding of their problems, the American
people will not fail, or as he puts it in the last words of America and Americans:
“We have never slipped back—never” (205).
In a chapter from this text titled “Americans and the Land,” Steinbeck sum-
marizes the mindless environmental destruction of waters, forests, farmlands,
and distressed flora and fauna in North America. Echoing his depiction of the
Dust Bowl in The Grapes of Wrath as at least in part the result of human reck-
lessness, Steinbeck notes in this later book that “the plows went in and ripped
off the protection of the buffalo grass and opened the helpless soil to quick
water and slow drought and the mischievous winds that roamed through the
Great Central Plains” (128). This observation, together with his proclamation
that the “destruction of the forests changed the rainfall,” is an eerie prediction
of the present climate change dilemma (128). Nevertheless, despite the ultimate
environmental destruction threatened by the atomic bomb, Steinbeck con-
cludes that Americans are becoming more aware of—even frightened by—the
changing ecology: “We are no longer content to destroy our beloved country. . . .
We are slow to learn; but we learn” (130). Although this chapter is a catalog
of ecological disasters, like The Grapes of Wrath it ends on a hopeful note: the
American people can learn from the past and overcome.

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 Still, Steinbeck’s optimistic outlook for the future and his persistent belief
in human progress are always tempered by hardheaded, well-researched real-
ism. Perhaps he is never more cautious about a brighter future for his beloved
country than in his consideration of race relations in the United States. In
economic terms, while the oppression of “Okies” and other migrant workers
by the owners and their allies in California is a central issue in The Grapes
of Wrath, racism is not a major concern in this novel. And in Travels with
Charley, Steinbeck recalls very little direct observation of racial prejudice in
his childhood, primarily because the one black family, the Coopers, whom he
knew in Salinas, were industrious members of the community. “These were
the only Negroes I knew or had contact with in the days of my flypaper child-
hood,” he writes, “and you can see how little I was prepared for the great
world” (929). But by September 23, 1960, when Steinbeck left Sag Harbor in
his overloaded truck quixotically dubbed Rocinante, he was well traveled and
incredibly experienced.
Although by November he seemed weary of the trip and more than ready
to come home to New York and his wife, Elaine, he nevertheless continued his
quest to gain an understanding of the race problem in America. Employing
firsthand observation and field study as he had done in preparation for writing
The Grapes of Wrath over twenty years earlier, he plunged into the heart of the
school integration controversy, driving to New Orleans to observe the infa-
mous “Cheerleaders,” middle-aged viragos, as they came to scream profanities,
supported by a roaring crowd as they protested school integration. What he saw
made a deep impression on Steinbeck, and he drew an ugly, disgraceful portrait
of racism and intolerance in America at the time:

Two big black cars filled with big men . . . pulled up in front of the
school. . . . Four big marshals got out of each car and from somewhere
in the automobiles they extracted the littlest Negro girl you ever saw,
dressed in shining starchy white, with new white shoes on feet so little
they were almost round. . . . The little girl did not look at the howl-
ing crowd but from the side the whites of her eyes showed like those
of a frightened fawn. . . . Her little round feet took measured, reluc-
tant steps between the tall guards. Slowly they climbed the steps and
entered the school. (256–57)

“But this was not the main show,” Steinbeck writes, for “the crowd was waiting
for the white man who dared to bring his white child to school. And here he

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came along the guarded walk, a tall man dressed in light gray, leading his fright-
ened child by the hand” (257). Aside from a hateful rally for the cameras and
crowds, this demonic scene made little sense to Steinbeck: “Here was no prin-
ciple good or bad, no direction. . . . These were not mothers, not even women.
They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience” (937).
Later, Steinbeck relates discussions he had along the way—a thoughtful con-
versation with a Southern gentleman; a blunt exchange with a black hitchhiker
who is instinctively terrified by Steinbeck’s innocent queries; a blatant racist
who applauds the work of the Cheerleaders, whom Steinbeck kicks out of the
truck; and finally a black student impatient with the slow but peaceful progress
of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s passive resistance and wanting “action now” (947).
Steinbeck’s report was admittedly sparse—“I’ve only told what a few people said
to me and what I saw”—but his observations led him to believe that eventually
a “solution” will arrive. Hopefully, he writes, “The end is not in question” (948).
Still, he worries about how this end will arrive: “It’s the means—the dreadful
uncertainty of the means” (948). In America and Americans, Steinbeck opti-
mistically believes that blacks “are surging toward the equality we promised
them and did not give them in 1867,” supported by religion, art, education, and
a key factor that was long denied them: “economic importance and impact”
(66). While he recognizes the racial hatred that makes true equality in the
United States difficult to achieve, he hopes for a day when “we cannot remem-
ber whether the man we just spoke to in the street was Negro or white” (66).
Although Steinbeck’s observations, particularly in America and Americans,
are strikingly relevant and prescient today, he is nonetheless the product of
a generation of writers who tended to believe in systems of order—even as
those writers hotly debated the existence of such systems. He believes that with
understanding, knowledge, sheer humanity, and the willingness to fight hard—
whether they are up against an oppressive upper class, an environmental disas-
ter, crushing racism, or all three—the people will eventually, somehow, prevail.

III. “We are savages”: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

and Hurricane Katrina

John Steinbeck’s measure of hope for the future is absent from Jesmyn Ward’s
Salvage the Bones, a Grapes of Wrath for the twenty-first century. Just as The
Grapes of Wrath is the quintessential novel depicting the Dust Bowl crisis,
Salvage the Bones has been hailed as the best novel that has been published about
Hurricane Katrina, winning the 2011 National Book Award. Ward’s novel recasts

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important issues she finds in The Grapes of Wrath. Both Steinbeck and Ward
warn readers about persistent environmental degradation, income inequal-
ity, and social fragmentation with such artistic force and compelling empathy
that the books are not easily dismissed as quaint discussions of literary history.
Salvage the Bones suggests that Depression-era conditions still exist for impov-
erished people in places such as rural Mississippi.
As Steinbeck explored labor problems in 1930s California in several novels,
Jesmyn Ward similarly depicted poverty and despair in rural Mississippi in her
first novel, Where the Line Bleeds in 2008, followed by Salvage the Bones in 2011.
The poverty cycle and social fragmentation brought on by racial and economic
divides that Ward dramatizes in her first two novels are discussed explicitly in
her 2013 memoir, Men We Reaped, and a 2016 collection of essays titled The Fire
This Time that examine the American racial dilemma.
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men suggests a coming apocalypse,
later fulfilled in The Road Where the Line Bleeds that introduces rural life in
fictional Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, a town modeled after Ward’s hometown,
DeLisle. McCarthy’s novel concludes just before the small town’s apocalyptic
event—Hurricane Katrina. Salvage the Bones takes up the town’s story after
the second McCarthy novel, depicting the absolute devastation wrought by a
Category 3 storm as it makes landfall on August 29, 2005. McCarthy’s Where
the Line Bleeds portrays the summer of 2005 in Bois Sauvage, a time when twin
brothers, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle, graduate from high school and begin
their careers. Whereas the first Creole settlers could eke out a living on ten-
acre farms that few others wanted—“sandy earth that reeked of rotten eggs in
a dry summer and washed away easily in a wet one”—prospects in this part of
Mississippi have never been easy for black families (6). Still, poor blacks and
whites could serve the white upper class, who built their mansions nearby on
the coast. Over the years these workers “intermarried with others like them-
selves,” made their own liquor, started families as teenagers, lived in ram-
shackle houses, and found enough work to get by on the poverty line (6). By
2005, boys like Joshua and Christophe could get work at big box stores or fast
food restaurants in nearby towns or they could make better money by dealing
drugs. Joshua lands one of the best jobs around as a stevedore at the docks, but
Christophe, depressed by dead-end job prospects and rejected applications for
work, succumbs to the local drug trade. There is a sense of decline in the com-
munity, from the bootleg liquor of earlier generations to marijuana, cocaine,
and crack for young and old by 2005. Since their mother, Cille, has gone to
Atlanta for a better job and their father has become a dealer known as the
Sandman—and also a hopeless addict—the two boys have been raised by Cille’s

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mother, Ma-mee. Their grandmother does the best she can, but years of house-
keeping drudgery have broken her down; now she is a diabetic who has gone
blind. Over a short span of time, the tension between Joshua and Christophe
increases, primarily because Christophe hates the drug trade and resents his
brother’s success. Then the two young men are confronted by the return of the
Sandman, a father whom they both despise. In a deadly confrontation at the
local drug dealer’s house, the Sandman cuts Christophe open with a broken
beer bottle, and he nearly dies. At the end of the novel, the brothers fish with
their friend, Dunny, who is another reluctant employee in the drug trade. There
is vague talk of a hurricane forming somewhere east of Cuba. Feeling a puff
of wind and looking up at the pink sky, Christophe muses, “Bad luck every-
where” (235). While fishing, the three discuss the strange disappearance of the
Sandman, the possibility of jobs at the docks, and some hope for their future.
But Joshua looks over the undersize mullets he returns to the water, thinking
the young fish, although “battered and cunning,” will be able to survive (238).
The novel concludes with Joshua’s dark imaginings of the older fish bloated
and dead in deep water: “Out and out through the spread of the bay until their
carcasses, still dense with the memory of the closed, rich bayou in the marrow
of the bones, settled to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and turned to black silt
on the ancient floor of the sea” (238–39). As tough as the people of Bois Sauvage
may seem, an overwhelming tide is coming their way. The future, ever dim, is
becoming darker.
Narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl named Esch, Salvage the Bones chroni-
cles twelve days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, documenting the
experiences of the Batiste family in Bois Sauvage. A poor black family who own
the remnants of a destroyed farm, the Batistes eke out a living, barely getting by.
Although Claude, the father, is frustrated by unemployment and uses alcohol
as an escape on occasion, he works well with his hands when given the chance.
Like Steinbeck’s tenant farmers, he is a tinkerer and a figurer with too little
work and too much to figure out. Randall, the oldest boy, is like Steinbeck’s Al
with his dreams of success in Hollywood or Rose of Sharon’s husband, Connie
Rivers, with his correspondence school plans. Randall is a young man dreaming
of a way out, an escape—hoping for a basketball scholarship that never comes.
Ironically, Randall’s admirable decision to stick by his family during a scuffle
at a high school basketball game where recruiters are watching on the sidelines
dashes his college opportunities. Skeetah, a year younger than Randall, hopes
that dog fighting and selling pit bulls will enable him to earn money and live
a better life, pinning all his hopes on China, his prize bitch. But Skeetah, too,
chooses family over economic opportunity when he sacrifices China in order to

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save Esch from the floods of the hurricane. Junior, like Steinbeck’s Ruthie and
Winfield, is the youngest family member, and in the chaos of events he is largely
neglected. And like Rose of Sharon, Esch must endure the tragedies that befall
the family while she is pregnant. But the situation for the Batistes is worse than
that of the Joads, for there is no Ma figure because Mama Batiste died while
giving birth to Junior. This aching loss has dismasted the family, leaving them
no center of strength.
As devastating as the Dust Bowl was for the Joads and other migrants, the
environmental disaster brought on by Katrina roots out and nearly destroys
the Batistes. Experiencing the monumental hurricane herself, Ward describes
Katrina as a storm that “unmade the world”—destroying trees, houses, people
(“National Book Award Winner” 262). As a novel about Hurricane Katrina,
Salvage the Bones is a book associated with climate change. In his study of the
impact of climate change on contemporary regional fiction, Raymond Malewitz
notes that “the rapid and often catastrophic results of weather linked to climate
change play a prominent role in contemporary regional fiction,” turning to
Salvage the Bones as an example (716). Like the ravaged Joad farm, the Batiste’s
home has been destroyed. Even before Katrina, the good soil had been sold off
to white developers. What remains is a crumbling cliff left behind by dump
trucks, bare clay where there had been soil, and a deep pool of toxic runoff that
the children swim in. “The Pit,” as the family dubs their land, is susceptible to
flooding and vulnerable to the destruction Hurricane Katrina has in store for
it. In a shallow ditch next to the Pit, the Batistes burn their garbage, leaving the
surrounding ground smelling “like burnt plastic” (15).
In over 650 pages of analysis, statistics, and notes, Thomas Piketty’s Capital
demonstrates that in every country where the economy can be measured,
income inequality has grown rapidly in the twenty-first century. In the United
States, the gap between rich and poor resembles the situation during the Gilded
Age. Ironically, the gap between rich and poor was narrower during the Great
Depression than it is now. Not surprisingly, then, the distance between the
classes in Salvage the Bones—between poorer blacks and wealthier whites—is
even greater than it was during the era depicted in The Grapes of Wrath. In
Steinbeck’s novel the Joads may at least come face to face with people of means
through business transactions. Emissaries of the owners, for example, come
to explain to the tenants that they are all victims of a vast banking system. But
there are no emissaries in Salvage the Bones, and there are no explanations of a
larger system at work—nothing save the looming hurricane, described in bro-
ken weather alerts through the spotty reception on Claude Batiste’s old televi-
sion. The whites in this novel are the people with property and means, who may

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as well be far-removed aliens of another species. When Skeetah plans to rob a
white farmer to secure some medicine for his sick dog, he uses the convenient
boogeymen—white people—to keep Junior in line: “You ever heard of Hansel
and Gretel? Well, that’s who own that house, and they want to fatten you up like
a little pig and eat you” (75). When the white farmer sees them on his property,
he shoots at them with his gun, but he seems so far away that he looks like a
dot on the horizon. The white man’s dog, his emissary, chases after the fleeing
Batistes until he comes on their property and is almost killed by Skeetah’s pit
bull, China.
Salvage the Bones also lacks the big picture that Steinbeck provides in his
intercalary chapters. In The Grapes of Wrath, the omniscient narrator in these
chapters slowly converges a generalized, overall perspective with the Joads’
very personal story as Tom, Ma Joad, and Rose of Sharon begin to under-
stand the larger picture and its greater truths. In the final intercalary chapter of
Steinbeck’s novel, the narrator describes the flood and its aftermath as a storm
of another kind looms—a coming revolution—and the men come together,
“the fear” gone from their faces, replaced by anger (592). Earlier, Steinbeck had
written of such conclusions in his San Francisco News articles that were later
organized into a book, The Harvest Gypsies. There he observes the oppression
suffered by Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Filipino, and “Okies” in California.
And there he predicts, too, that unless owners begin to treat these migrants
better, “the whole mass of labor will revolt” (61). In the scheme of Steinbeck’s
panoramic, big picture of California, he predicts that eventually workers will
come together and prevail in a powerful labor movement that will transform
the state. If owners persist in their “fascistic methods,” he writes, revolution
may be the only answer (61). Yet Steinbeck holds out the hope that the work-
ers are not alone, that there can be a “militant and watchful organization of
middle-class people, workers, teachers, craftsmen, and liberals to fight this
encroaching social ­philosophy, and to maintain this state in a democratic form
of government” (61–62). A demonstration of this power of moving from I to
we is apparent as Rose of Sharon smiles, looking out across the barn, in the
conclusion of The Grapes of Wrath. Despite the chaos and despair portrayed at
the end of Steinbeck’s novel, then, there is faith that the people will not finally
fail, but will move forward.
Sadly, there are no great movements or possible systems of order—even a
new order—that the Bastiste family can look toward as they endure Hurricane
Katrina and its aftermath. The social fragmentation and the economic gap
between people are unrelentingly cast, as though etched in stone. There are
no omniscient narrators in intercalary chapters to set the narration within a

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broader context. The system—whatever it is and if there is one at all—remains
too remote for Esch and the Batistes to benefit from it. The distance between
their current impoverished state and a better life—whether brought on by race,
or class, or geography—is just too great and their resources just too few. All that
remains for the Batistes is Hurricane Katrina, a force of nature that destroys
Mississippi, Louisiana, and the little town of Bois Sauvage—flooding the Pit,
demolishing the Batiste home, and finally engulfing the family as they flee in
a remarkably chaotic 348-word sentence that ends on a single, wailing note:
“no” (236).
Even before the hurricane, as she considers her pregnancy, Esch under-
stands that her options have narrowed “to none” (103). And after Katrina, noth-
ing changes. Although the Batistes and their few friends are fierce and band
together in a small knot, just as the Joads did at the beginning of their trek, Esch,
her family, and friends in the community remain isolated. In Steinbeck’s novel
Rose of Sharon has lost her baby, but Ma assures her that someday there will
be others; and as the teenager gives her breast to a starving man, she glimpses
a world bigger than herself. Esch has no mother for guidance and although she
will likely keep her baby, the novel ends with her pining for the day when her
most powerful maternal role model—the missing pit bull, China—may return
from the flood. What matters to her most in the last line of the book is that the
dog China “will know that I am a mother” (258).
It may be tempting to read some of the hope implied at the end of The Grapes
of Wrath into the bleak pages of Where the Line Bleeds and particularly into
Salvage the Bones. In both novels there is a small but tight community of sur-
vivors, and there is some cheerful talk in Salvage the Bones near the end of
the story when Big Henry—a good friend who quietly loves Esch—responds
encouragingly when she declares that her coming child “don’t have a daddy”
(254). Hearteningly, Big Henry comforts her, “This baby got plenty of daddies. . . .
Don’t forget you always got me” (255). But this warm moment is undercut as
Esch squats over “the ruined ground,” wishing he could have been there to
help when the storm came (255). Immediately her thoughts turn to Hurricane
Katrina: “She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the
mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands,
committed to blood, comes” (255). In the wreckage of the storm that has
brought everyone to their knees—white, black, Vietnamese—Esch surveys the
complete destruction and concludes, “No one is coming” (250). At the end of
the novel Skeetah and Esch cling to the hope that somehow China will return,
but that other mother—absolute destruction—is more likely to come for them

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someday. The image of a coming force, merciless and committed to blood, is
chilling and devastating.
As Ward remarks in an interview with Paris Review, hope resides in “your
hands, your feet, your head, your resolve to fight, you do the only thing you can:
you survive” (264). In her memoir, Men We Reaped, she describes an epidemic
of death in a span of just four years that killed five young black men close to
her, including her brother, Joshua. By writing Salvage the Bones, she hopes to
gain some understanding of “why this epidemic happened . . . how the history
of racism and income inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility
festered and soured and spread here. Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother
died while I live, and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten . . . story” (8).
While she believes that Salvage the Bones isn’t “political enough,” her memoir
makes the politics of her two novels clear (Paris Review 266). And there is no
mistaking Ward’s fierce anger toward a “lapsed public” that has forsaken her
family and her community. Of C.J., one of the dead men who had realized that
he would die young, Ward writes, “Maybe he looked at those who still lived and
those who’d died, and didn’t see much difference between the two; pinioned
beneath poverty and history and racism, we were all dying inside. . . . He saw
no American dream, no fairy-tale ending, no hope” (121). Beneath the perpetu-
ally crushing and cruelly ruinous life of poverty, Ward writes that her “entire
community suffered from a lack of trust,” for everyone lacks faith in a society
that will not provide them with a good education, safe neighborhoods, careers,
or even “fairness in the justice system” (189). Ward lived through the general
downward spiraling of her community under a distressing array of factors—
from drugs to apocalyptic storms—and Men We Reaped shows how clearly her
two novels are mapped from bitter firsthand, lifelong experience. On October
2, 2000, after her brother was killed by a drunk white driver, who would later
be sentenced to only five years in prison, Ward bemoans, “By the numbers, by
all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty,
and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing” (237). The idea
of an order out there, of some system of progress that will prevail for the people,
is nonexistent in Ward’s world. In a deprived, tough community that becomes
even more deprived and tougher each year, there is only one sure reality: “We
survive; we are savages” (250).
The world of The Grapes of Wrath is no more; the Okies are no more. While
some may consider the disastrous corporate farming practices that contributed
to the Dust Bowl to have been rectified, in actuality, they seem to have been
exacerbated—time will tell. And Steinbeck’s warning of a coming revolution in

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California now seems a relic of the bygone Depression. Although our awareness
of ecology has increased, the environmental wreckage depicted in The Grapes of
Wrath persists in dead zones in our oceans, toxic landfills, and more. Although
still optimistic about human progress nearly thirty years after writing his great-
est novel, in America and Americans Steinbeck warned about the dangers of
environmental degradation, of the emptiness of excess consumerism/capital-
ism, and of the sad state of race relations in the United States. And Salvage the
Bones is our Grapes of Wrath for today, for Ward has created a contemporary
warning cut from ever-widening income inequality, growing racial alienation,
and disastrous climate change—all without the comfort of a system by which to
analyze our problems or of a promise that somehow the people will keep mov-
ing forward. Perhaps, Salvage the Bones suggests, in the twenty-first century the
people have nowhere to go.

dr. brian railsback is a Professor of English and founding Director of the

Office of National and International Awards at Western Carolina University,
where he has been Department Head of English and the founding Dean of The
Honors College. He has authored Parallel Expeditions: Charles Darwin and the
Art of John Steinbeck (Idaho 1995) and co-edited A John Steinbeck Encyclopedia
(Greenwood 2006) as well as many essays or book chapters concerning Stein-
beck. He has presented lectures on the author in the U.S., Japan, Mexico, Portugal,
and the Republic of Georgia. He has published short stories (one winning the
Papa Hemmingway Award) and two novels. He was named the 2004 University
Scholar at WCU.

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Malewitz, Raymond. “Climate-Change Infrastructure and the Volatizing of American
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