The Search for the Dust Bowl Ghost

How Bruce Springsteen's ghost story offers me hope in 2020

History repeats itself; it’s a phrase we’ve all heard and can agree with, and yet, it continues to shock me when I encounter a story from another place and another time that so deeply resonates with the present that you have to question whether the storyteller had some privileged foreknowledge.

This was my experience earlier this year when I was introduced to John Ford’s 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl classic The Grapes of Wrath. As a brief recap (some spoilers ahead), Tom Joad is an Oklahoman who, with his family, moves out west in search of work after losing the family farm during the Great Depression. In short, the Joads struggle to find any work or hope of peace in the “Promised Land,” finding instead extreme poverty, police brutality, greed, violence, labor strikes, and privileged men who confuse the people’s desire for a better life with socialism.

Sounding familiar, yet? Well, hold on, because this story resonated with someone else 25 years ago first.

By 1995, Bruce Springsteen had already established two decades of work that lifted up the downtrodden—from megahit “Born in the USA,” which, though it’s misused every Fourth of July, shone a spotlight on the mistreatment of veterans after coming back from service, to 1978’s “Factory,” which outlines the “mansions of fear” and “mansions of pain” America’s working class is subjected to. However, Springsteen hadn’t seen much change in his 20 years of songwriting and advocacy, and in 1995, he searched for a dust bowl ghost to give him direction.

I don’t know the exact events that inspired Springsteen’s song “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” but it’s hard for me to separate its lyrics and search for hope from the events surrounding the police beating of Rodney King. In The Grapes of Wrath, a California sheriff shoots and kills an innocent bystander in an attempt to shoot a different man who argued with the sheriff about work and wages. Tom Joad responds by knocking out the sheriff and fleeing. The sheriff’s actions here are the same abuse of power we saw in the Rodney King beatings, though without the racial motivations. I can’t help but imagine Springsteen watching these scenes and writing, “Waiting for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last” as he searches for the ghost of a man who defiantly stands against injustice on his journey toward hope.

These stories and events continue to echo into our history. And though the ghosts of injustice, pain, greed, brutality, etc. plague us without end, there is another type of ghost that endures.

Now, Tom said:

“Mom, wherever there's a cop beating a guy
Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight against the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me, Mom, I'll be there
Wherever somebody's fighting for a place to stand
Or a decent job or a helping hand
Wherever somebody's struggling to be free
Look in their eyes, Ma, and you'll see me"

I’m brought to tears as I consider my encounters this year with that ghost. I’ve seen him in the face of an eight-year-old Black child (among thousands) marching down the street, yelling, “No justice, no peace” in the wake of inexcusable injustices. I’ve seen it in the hearts of my own family and friends who have prayed, marched, cried, endured hard conversations, and put relationships on the line in the fight for life. I’ve seen it in the generosity of others who are willing to drop anything to help friends whose houses were devastated by tornados and floods, and in my wife who is always willing to pick up another shift at her terribly understaffed hospital in the midst of a pandemic. I’ve seen it in the grace some people show each other through disagreements (even on social media) and the love of a family who is willing to share each other’s burdens.

Y’all, this is a different kind of ghost story. It’s one that came before even Tom Joad, and it’s one that will endure until this world ends. It’s the story I’m holding onto right now days before an election. Nobody’s kidding nobody about where this American road is going. Regardless of the outcome next week, there will be more pain, more injustice, more heartache, more of the same. So on this Halloween night, I’ll sit by the campfire light, pray for courage, and watch for the Ghost of old Tom Joad.