Pixley

Pixley is a small town in California's Central Valley that marks a decisive turning point in the Joad family's westward journey. It is the landmark that leads them to the Hooper ranch peach orchard, where they are herded in as strikebreakers, subjected to a wage cut from five cents to two and a half cents a box, and where Tom Joad, after witnessing the murder of Jim Casy, kills a vigilante and becomes a fugitive. Pixley is not a place the family ever inhabits; it is a signpost on the road that funnels them into the most brutal confrontation of their migration.

Location and Role on the Migrant Road

Pixley lies on the great westward migrant artery, Highway 66, which Steinbeck describes as "the mother road, the road of flight" . The highway runs through the red lands and gray lands, across the desert and into the rich California valleys . Pixley is one of the towns along this route, a small agricultural community in the San Joaquin Valley. The Joads first hear of it from a man in a roadster who stops while they are fixing a flat tire. He tells them to "go north to Pixley, that's thirty-five or -six miles, and you turn east. Go about six miles. Ask anybody where the Hooper ranch is" . Pixley thus functions as the last identifiable landmark before the family enters the peach orchard, a place that exists in the novel not as a destination but as a directional node on the road.

The Hooper Ranch Trap

When the Joads reach Pixley and turn east, they find the road blocked by a line of cars and white motorcycles . State policemen lead them, along with five other carloads of migrants, through a high wire gate into the Hooper ranch peach camp. The camp consists of fifty square, flat-roofed boxes, each with a door and a window, arranged in a square. Armed guards with shotguns and silver stars patrol the rows. The family is assigned house sixty-three and told the wage is five cents a box. The next day, after the strike is broken, the wage drops to two and a half cents. The pickers are so hungry they work for a loaf of bread. Pixley, then, is the gateway to this system of exploitation, the place where the handbill promise of work is revealed as a mechanism for driving down wages.

Narrative Significance: The Threshold of Violence

Pixley is the threshold across which the Joads pass from the relative order of the Weedpatch government camp into the chaos of the strike. It is here that Tom Joad sneaks out at night to investigate the picket line, finds Jim Casy leading the strike, and watches him be murdered by a vigilante with a pick handle. Tom seizes the club and kills the man. The next morning, with his face bruised and his nose broken, he hides in the truck as the family flees the ranch. Pixley is thus the place where Tom Joad becomes a hunted man, where his parole is irrevocably broken, and where he begins the fugitive existence that leads to his farewell speech in the boxcar camp. The town itself is never described; it is only a name on a sign, a turn in the road, but it marks the point where the novel's central character crosses from witness to outlaw.