JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan A Chance at Grace Inever wanted to see a dramatization of Grapes of Wrath. One of my forever favorites of political world literature, I thought it should just...
...They were perishing from hunger...
...This is the motivating wish behind the howl of human life...
...we can choose to embrace the strangers we must meet in the extremities of common need...
...And so the Joads made that American pilgrimage, crossing the Rockies and coming upon paradise, raggedy but pumped up with hope...
...But she must move or die...
...California meant a new and beautiful life of regular, honest toil beneath blue skies...
...they have nothing left to give or to share...
...With the arrival of Grapes of Wrath some fifty years ago, our national complacency about food supply and farmers and hardworking whitefolks had been pierced forever with shame...
...It is what each of us desires at the utmost depth of consciousness, the saving embrace of grace: that in our most naked need we will be met by comparably naked acts of kindness...
...we, the women who can find no safety anywhere, and the men who pretend to despise or who destroy domestic conditions of peace...
...we cannot avoid the always growing harvest of those grapes of wrath...
...And nobody seemed safe...
...Rose of Sharon can hardly stand...
...Okies," man-made catastrophe swiftly eclipsed the tragedy of drought they had sought to escape...
...In the current Broadway adaptation, Rose of Sharon relinquishes the body of her stillborn infant to her uncle who, horrified by the task, commits the minuscule corpse into the rushing waters of a nearby rising river...
...We had glimpsed the possibilities of shelter that only we can raise as codes of conduct in the world...
...The audience rises up...
...And acts of mercy save the merciful as well...
...Jordan's latest book, "Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems," is available from Thunder's Mouth Press in New York City...
...In their own country, they had become a homeless people having to steal or beg...
...She lifts the head of the dying black man to her naked breast...
...And then Rose of Sharon falls to her knees...
...Lights hold and then fade...
...She kneels there, center stage, with this dark stranger cradled in her arms...
...Around them, nothing and no one familiar or hospitable remained...
...And then, Rose of Sharon, a daughter of the Joads, gives birth to a dead baby...
...Perhaps Steinbeck's work would speak to the agony of street people staggering around in the public daylight of urban America, 1990.1 had to go...
...And we, the homeless and the affluent, the black kids dancing in the street outside the theater and the theatergoers who turned their backs...
...I am breathing the mystery of grace...
...They must reach dry ground...
...For the Joads, as for hordes of other bitterly evicted June Jordan appears in this space every other month...
...In a drive-a-wreck jalopy truck, they took off on the road, traveling to California, where, according to various loose handbills, luscious vineyards and orchards lay spoiling under the sun...
...John Steinbeck's masterpiece telescoped the 1930s demise of hundreds of thousands of farm families into the haunting saga of the Joads who fled west from Oklahoma's dustbowl drought...
...But the Joads do not have anything...
...If the mythical perfection of an industrious, nuclear, all-white family could be blown by natural disaster, if the government of and for these people could not be moved to rescue their homes and their tractors and their beloved land from depredations of agribusiness, investment speculation, and greed-riveted banks, then who among us could assume security...
...One of my forever favorites of political world literature, I thought it should just stay that way: a story to read and reread in private...
...Now they must outwit and evade or endure savage exploitation, forced vagrancy, and the loss of legal rights reserved for the middle class or, at least, permanent residents of a town...
...We stood because we knew we had been staring at our own desperation and our own power as we beheld that onstage moment of such unexpected tenderness...
...But so many friends of mine described the award-winning production now playing in New York as faithful to the book and, on its own terms, as harrowing and powerful, I had to go...
...At this moment, and engulfed by a terrible rainstorm, the entire family must find refuge...
...And we who saw this mystery enacted, we stood up in gratitude and shock...
...California meant sunlight and arable earth and all the work a man could manage, day by day, picking oranges or peaches by the bushel...
...We had seen something completely realistic that was human yet not monstrous, or narrow, or threatening...
...They had been duped by agri-businessmen crafty enough to know that 2,000 men competing for 200 jobs would soon reduce to 2,000 men willing to accept otherwise unimaginably low wages: day labor paying too little to provide for a minimal version of normal life...
...Who could reasonably claim to enjoy political representation on the serious side...
...For the first time in her miserable existence, that young woman, Rose of Sharon, becomes powerful and necessary even as she kneels to feed a stranger...
...Tears choke my throat...
...Pointing to the motionless figure of his father, a young black man pleads with the Joads for help: He needs a piece/a slice of solid food to save his father's life...
...At last the Joads come upon an open barn and inside this haven they discover other people: two black men...
...She undoes her blouse...
...But we can choose to give ourselves a chance at grace...
Vol. 54 • October 1990 • No. 10
