New Wine From the Grapes of...

When his college classes let out in 1955, Dan Morgan, “dreaming of the open road,” took to the highway in his ’52 Ford to search for the America he had seen described so powerfully in John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Seventeen years later, a similar impulse struck Toby Sonneman, even though she initially felt that “becoming a fruit picker was not even a remote possibility for a Jewish high school student living on Chicago’s South Side.”

Once Morgan and Sonneman had found Steinbeck’s world, their interest only burgeoned. Sonneman went on to spend many years as a fruit-picker (with her husband Rick Steigmeyer), and though Morgan quit picking in the middle of the first summer, he never stopped wondering about the people he had met and how they were related to the earlier generation Steinbeck had depicted.

Similarities between “Fruit Fields in My Blood” and “Rising in the West,” however, essentially end here. Both follow the history of Okie migrants into the 1980s and ‘90s, but while Sonneman’s book details the lives of those who continued to labor in migration, Morgan follows those migrants and relatives who headed up the social scale into regular jobs and a settled life in town.

As Morgan shows, the Okies came to Oklahoma from the South, bringing crops and farming methods that managed to exhaust the rather poor soil within a single generation, as well as a long tradition of revivalist religion, individualism, suspicion of authority and closely knit family life.

While unsuccessful in both Oklahoma and California, Morgan’s protagonist, Oca Tatham, is in some ways a typical Okie figure: independent and a little wild, good with horses and mules and telling stories but finally unable to settle into a life of marriage or at least steady employment. By contrast, Oca’s son Bill is a successful businessman in the mold of our times--taciturn and canny, hard-working, remote from his family and very wealthy.

Oca’s exploitation of certain Okie traits, especially a love of and talent for “horse-trading” (small-scale, semi-legal buying and selling), enables him to rise from a figure like Steinbeck’s Pa Joad--the character who packed family and friends in a ramshackle car and headed to California to look for work--to a man who trades in his Cadillac every year for a new one and lives in a big house in a new section of town, a man whose sons have enough money to think of owning a football team and influencing state and national elections.

Morgan focuses especially closely on the Tathams’ religious beliefs--Pentecostal Christians, many of whom speak in tongues and practice faith healing. Through them, Morgan explores the rising power of the Christian right, with whom Ronald Reagan, who also rose in the West, found favor. Through voting, fund raising, lobbying, building wealthy churches and networking, the Tathams and their friends not only feel no qualms about imposing their beliefs on the nation at large, they feel impelled to do so.

Morgan (who is not Pentecostal) draws a detailed portrait of the Tathams’ religious world with sympathy and even longing. Readers may find this world more frighteningly narrow and threatening than Morgan does, especially given the constraints the religious right has imposed on political discourse in this country over the last 12 years.

Morgan’s attitude toward Oca Tatham, and toward the others, too, is admiring and affectionate; he even allows them to read the manuscript of “Rising in the West” and offer suggestions before its publication. Morgan believes the Tathams benefited from reading what he has said about them: Sons feel closer to fathers; people come to terms with early misadventures.

This reader, however, could not help feeling uncomfortable with such cooperation between observer and subject. Clearly Morgan was moved by his close attention to the family, but this affection seems to sentimentalize his portrait, and to underplay forces and tensions in the family that may not be so agreeable or admirable. He has portrayed them as they surely would have liked, but in the process he has surrendered much of his journalistic authority. In the end, I came to not quite trust his portrait of the Tathams as much as his more objective historical and sociological chapters.

As Toby Sonneman sees it in “Fruit Fields in My Blood,” winner of the Western States Book Awards’ 1992 Citation for Merit, religious issues are hardly preeminent for fruit-pickers still working on the road. More pressing concerns are the Okies’ displacement by Mexican and Central American picking crews, both legal and illegal, and the continuing disjunction between the Okies’ view of their own lives as hard-working and honorable and the belief of many of the townspeople they come in contact with that they are dirty, disorderly, and distasteful. “Those storekeepers look down on us fruit tramps,” one woman remarks bitterly to Sonneman. “Whenever you got dirty hands from workin’ in the fields, they hold their hand six or eight inches from yours and drop your money down into it.”

Many of the laws intended to improve fruit-pickers’ lives actually have hurt them. Federal housing standards established by OSHA, for example, have encouraged many growers to tear down the housing they provided for migrant workers rather than improve it, and child labor laws have interfered with a tradition of family work that Sonneman portrays as benign. Growers, too, have distanced themselves from the old-fashioned personal relationships they had with the pickers, while lowering wages to match those paid to Latino workers. Where once pickers could make a fairly good living as well as enjoy the freedom and the travel that they prefer, Sonneman says, pressures from the growers, Latino crews, and laws and government regulations now prevent this. More and more pickers are leaving the road, often only to find themselves on welfare.

Unlike Morgan, Sonneman and Steigmeyer make no bones about the fact that they have lived and worked and entered into friendships with their subjects, that they came to compose this book to celebrate the dignity of the work the pickers have done.

“Rising in the West” and “Fruit Fields in My Blood” speak to each other about the uneasy relationship between the haves and the have-nots in the American West. Each follows an American literary tradition. Morgan’s book is about success: how a man and his family distinguish themselves economically, and then wrestle with allegiance to their roots. His exhaustively detailed investigation of the Tathams sets them very clearly into a well-understood and well-described American scene. Sonneman’s book is a social document offering insight into those who have not risen, and may never rise, due to historical forces they can’t control. Sonneman’s text and Steigmeyer’s photos are more personal. Their subjects seem more vulnerable and human than the Tathams.

Separately, each book is well worth reading, but together they cover a broad landscape, and resonate with haunting and powerful echoes.