Maybe some of you folks wonder what...

Maybe some of you folks wonder what happened to the Joads after John Steinbeck stopped writin’ about us in “The Grapes of Wrath.” The last you knew, my sister Rose of Sharon had lost her baby and was nursin’ a starvin’ man in a barn surrounded by floodwater. And Tom--that’s me--was on the run after killin’ a strikebreaker and gettin’ his face mashed in by a pick handle.

Well, the water went down, by and by. I don’t recall if that man in the barn lived or died. But they never caught me. My scars healed over. And the Joads--them that survived, anyway--well, we done all right in the end.

It’s a funny thing about people, though. One fella comes home from a war and he’ll never touch a gun again. Another fella makes a career out of the war he was in and can’t wait to start another.

Take me. Even after I got my own acreage, I never forgot what it was like for families to fight for jobs that wouldn’t hardly feed ‘em, with the growers pittin’ ‘em against one another to keep wages down. I was the first in my county to sign a contract with Cesar Chavez’s union, and he didn’t have to force me none either.

But the next fella--he’d forget all about them bad old days and become just as mean as the ones he used to work for.

In the 1960s, white folks like me who’d seen hard times got scared when black folks’ hard times just started to lift a little. I don’t know why. Sheer cussedness, I guess. They called it the “backlash,” except a lash sounds like somethin’ quick, and this one ain’t ended yet.

It bothered Mr. Steinbeck too. After the Harlem riots in 1964, he told me: “Tom, I’m worried about the future of the civil rights movement. I’d like to write Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and share my thoughts. But should I? I’m old now, and rich. Maybe the Nobel Prize has softened my brain. Am I out of touch?”

“Mr. Steinbeck,” I said, “if anybody should know, I do. Your heart’s in the right place. Go ahead.”

The letter he wrote to Dr. King will be up for sale at 10 a.m. Saturday in a manuscript auction at Superior Galleries, 9478 W. Olympic Blvd., Beverly Hills (information: (310) 203-9855). So will a handwritten manuscript by Dr. King of the “Where Do We Go From Here” speech he gave at South Carolina Lutheran College in 1966. He turned that speech--about the backlash, black power and nonviolence--into his book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”

Back in the ‘30s, that was a good question. Seems to me it still is.