Killing of Jim Casy

The killing of Jim Casy is the novel's moral and narrative fulcrum, the moment when the ex-preacher's long arc of thought—from solitary wilderness seeking to active leadership in a labor strike—ends in a brutal, public murder, and when Tom Joad, who has tried to keep his parole clean, is pulled irrevocably into the same fight. Casy dies not as a preacher but as a strike leader, and his death passes his unfinished mission directly to Tom, who will carry it forward as a hunted man.

Causes and Background

Casy had been jailed after taking the blame for Tom's involvement in the Hooverville fight, and in prison he underwent a final transformation. Surrounded by men who had stolen because they "needed stuff," he came to see that "need makes all the trouble" and that collective action—even something as simple as prisoners yelling together on the same tone—could force change. When he was released, he found his way to a peach pickers' strike near Pixley, where the Hooper ranch was paying two and a half cents a box, a wage on which a man could not feed his family. Casy became a leader of the strikers, who were camped in a tent beside a stream under a bridge. The growers' association, working through the Farmers' Association and the Bank of the West, had already cut wages from thirty cents to twenty-five and then to five cents, and the strike was an attempt to resist the next cut. The vigilantes—the same kind of men who had burned the Hooverville and turned the Joads back on the road—were determined to break the strike by force.

What Happens

On the night of the murder, Tom Joad, curious about the shouting he had heard at the main gate, slipped out of the Hooper ranch compound, crawled under a barbed-wire fence, and followed a group of men to the strikers' camp. He found Casy in a tent with three other men, including a wizened little man. Casy was excited to see Tom and asked about his family and the government camp. As they talked, the men outside grew nervous, sensing movement in the darkness. Casy turned out the lantern and they moved under the bridge span to escape. Flashlight beams caught them as they emerged on the other side. A voice called out, "That's him. That shiny bastard. That's him." Casy stood blinded by the light and said, "You fellas don't know what you're doin'. You're helpin' to starve kids." A voice told him to shut up, calling him a "red son-of-a-bitch." A short, heavy man stepped into the light carrying a new white pick handle. Casy said again, "You don't know what you're a-doin'." The heavy man swung the pick handle, and Casy dodged down into the swing. The club crashed into the side of his head with a dull crunch of bone, and he fell sideways out of the light. One of the vigilantes said, "Jesus, George. I think you killed him." George replied, "Put the light on him. Serve the son-of-a-bitch right." The flashlight beam found Casy's crushed head. Tom, standing nearby, leaped silently, wrenched the club free, and struck the heavy man. The first blow missed the head and hit a shoulder, but the second crushing blow found the head, and as the man sank down, three more blows found his head. Tom was struck a glancing blow on the head by another club, then ran, bent low, through a poison-oak thicket and into an orchard, his nose crushed and blood dripping from his chin. He bathed his face in an irrigation ditch and made his way back to the Joad house, where he hid his identity from the guards and told his family what had happened.

Consequences and Aftermath

The killing set off a chain of consequences that reshaped the Joad family. Tom's bruised face made him instantly identifiable, and the vigilantes and deputies spread word that the killer had been hit and would bear marks. The Joads, fearing a lynching, fled the Hooper ranch that night, hiding Tom under a mattress in the truck bed. They moved to a cotton-pickers' camp of boxcars, where Tom hid in a cave of blackberry vines beside a stream. There, in the darkness, he told his mother that he had been thinking about Casy's words—about having only a piece of a great big soul, about the scripture from Ecclesiastes that "two are better than one." He said he would do what Casy had done. When Ma begged him to go far away, to Los Angeles, he refused, saying he would be "all aroun' in the dark" wherever there was a fight so hungry people could eat, wherever a cop was beating up a guy. "I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad an'—I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready." He left that night, a fugitive, carrying seven dollars Ma had saved, and the family never saw him again. The murder also broke the strike; the next morning the wage at the Hooper ranch dropped to two and a half cents, and the Joads, like the other strikebreakers, worked for that wage until the crop was picked. Casy's body was left where it fell, and the official story, as reported in the newspaper, blamed the violence on "red agitators."