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Saturday night is old movie night at our place and posting Chaplin’s Great Dictator speech, I decided to follow that with Henry Fonda’s farewell to his mother in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, one of the great moments in American film. This quote at one point was going to be on the title page of the book The Strange Death of Liberal America, but a very precise work limit forced me to eliminate it, so now it becomes part of the blog.
To set the scene: it is late at night after a dance has been held at the humane camp presided over by a man who resembles Franklin Roosevelt. Tom Joad (Fonda) and his mother stand in the moonlight on the edge of the wooden dance floor. In the background Ford has an accordion playing his favorite tune “Red River Valley,” a song that in Ford movies is associated with the fragility of community. Joad has been identified as the man who killed a police-led vigilante squad that comes to assassinate his friend the Preacher Casey, who has been organizing farm workers. Now he must leave his family and take up Casey’s mission.
Fonda speaks:
Maybe it�s like Casey says. A fella ain�t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody. And then it don�t matter. Then I�ll be all around in the dark. I�ll be everywhere…Wherever there�s a fight so hungry people can eat, I�ll be there. Wherever there�s a cop beating up a guy, I�ll be there. I�ll be in the way guys yell when they�re mad�and I�ll be in the way kids laugh when they�re hungry and they know supper�s ready…And when our people eat the stuff they raise, and the houses they build, I�ll be there too.
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