Boxcar camp
The Boxcar camp is the final migrant settlement where the Joad family takes shelter during the cotton-picking season and the subsequent flood, serving as a site of both precarious stability and devastating loss. Located beside a stream in the San Joaquin Valley, the camp consists of twelve wheel-less boxcars arranged in two rows, each end housing a separate family. It is here that the Joads experience their last period of relative prosperity—earning enough to buy meat and new clothes—before the rains come, the stream rises, and Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child. The camp thus marks the family's last attempt at communal living before the flood scatters them and forces the novel's final, harrowing journey.
Location and Physical Description
The Boxcar camp is situated on a little flat beside a stream, with twelve boxcars standing end to end in two rows of six, their wheels removed. Up to the big sliding doors, slatted planks run for cat-walks. The cars make good houses—water-tight and draftless—with room for twenty-four families, one family in each end of each car. There are no windows, but the wide doors stand open. In some cars a canvas hangs down in the center to divide the space, while in others only the position of the door marks the boundary. The Joads have one end of an end car, where a previous occupant has fitted up an oil can with a stovepipe and made a hole in the wall for it. Even with the wide door open, it is dark in the ends of the car. Ma hangs the tarpaulin across the middle of the car for privacy. The narrow stream slips by, out of the willows and back into the willows again. From each car a hard-beaten path goes down to the stream, and between the cars clothes lines hang, covered with drying clothes every day.
Life and Work at the Camp
The Joads are among the first to arrive, securing a place in the boxcars before the tents of late-comers fill the little flat. Those who have the boxcars become old-timers and, in a way, aristocrats. Each night Ma unrolls the mattresses on the floor and each morning rolls them up again. Every day the family goes into the fields to pick cotton, and every night they have meat. On a Saturday they drive into Tulare and buy a tin stove, new overalls for Al, Pa, Winfield, and Uncle John, and a dress for Ma, giving Ma's best dress to Rose of Sharon. The Joads are lucky: they get in early enough to have a place. The camp has a store at the crossroads where pickers buy supplies in the evening. Ma goes to the meat counter, pressing her finger against her lips and thinking deeply before buying pork chops, boiling beef, milk for Rose of Sharon, potatoes, and sirup for hotcakes. Ruthie and Winfield get Cracker Jack. The family earns three dollars and fifty-seven cents in a day, and the Wainwrights, who live in the other end of the same car, earn four dollars.
Social Relations and the Wainwright Alliance
The Joads share their boxcar with the Wainwright family, and the two families develop a close, mutually supportive relationship. Mrs. Wainwright helps Ma when Rose of Sharon goes into labor, bringing her Rochester lamp and a paring knife to slip under the mattress—a folk tradition meant to cut birth pains. She stays to fan Ma and keep watch through the night. Mr. Wainwright comes to Pa with a worry: his daughter Aggie, nearly sixteen, has been walking out every night with Al Joad. He fears shame if Aggie gets in trouble. Ma reassures him, saying they will try to keep shame from the family. Al and Aggie decide to get married, and Al tells Ma he will need to go away soon to get a job in a garage and rent a house. Ma begs him to stay until spring, but the engagement is celebrated with pancakes and sirup in the boxcar that night.
The Flood and the Stillbirth
On the second day of rain, Al takes the tarpaulin down from the middle of the car and spreads it over the nose of the truck. Without the separation, the two families become one. The rain pours down on the nearly flat roof. On the third day, the sound of the stream rises above the drumming rain. Pa and Uncle John watch the water creep up the bank. Pa marks the water level with a twig and sees it rise. The men work all night building a levee, but a falling cottonwood tree snags on the embankment, tears it open, and the water pours through. The flood sweeps into the flat, under the cars, under the automobiles. The truck's engine is full of water, the battery fouled. Inside the car, Rose of Sharon, sick with a heavy cold and fever, goes into labor. Ma and Mrs. Wainwright walk her back and forth between the pains. The baby is born dead—a blue shriveled little mummy that never breathed. Uncle John takes the apple box containing the stillborn child, wades through the flood to the highway, and sets the box in the swift stream, letting it float away. He says fiercely, "Go down an' tell 'em. Go down in the street an' rot an' tell 'em that way."
Abandonment and Aftermath
When the morning comes, Ma insists they must leave. Pa carries Rose of Sharon through the breast-high water to the highway. Uncle John carries Ruthie, and Ma carries Winfield on her shoulder. They stand on the highway and look back over the sheet of water, the dark red blocks of the cars, the trucks and automobiles deep in the slowly moving water. A little misting rain begins to fall. They move slowly along the highway, searching for a dry place. Ma spots a rain-blackened barn on a slight rolling hill, and they head toward it. Inside, they find a starving man and his son. Rose of Sharon, having just lost her own child, bares her breast and nurses the starving stranger. The Boxcar camp, which had offered the Joads their last taste of stability and community, is left behind, swallowed by the flood.
