Passages+Ch.23

“The migrant people, scuttling for work, scrabbling to live, looked always for pleasure, dug fir pleasure, manufactured pleasure, and they were hungry for amusement. Sometimes amusement lay in speech, and they climbed up their lives with jokes. And it came about in the camps along the roads, on the ditch banks beside the streams, under sycamores, that the story teller grew into being, so that the people gathered in the low firelight to hear the gifted ones. And they listened while tales were told, and their participation made their stories great.” (pg 325)

This passage implicates the migraters desperation for amusement. Anything to put down the past and brighten the future. From a camp along the road, to gathering under a sycamore tree, "okies" were essentially lifeless without entertainment. As the story tellers told their story, they became more than just story tellers but something much greater. They filled the emptiness within the "okies."