Goodbye to My Family’s Last Okie Migrant, Who Taught Us to Be Californian
The Passing of Great Aunt Fern Marks an Era's End
“They had qualities of humor and courage and inventiveness and energy that appealed to me. I thought that if we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it.” – John Steinbeck, America and Americans
We ain’t Okies anymore.
My great aunt Fern was the last member of our big California family to be born in Oklahoma. But she never much cared for author John Steinbeck’s portrayals of her fellow Okies, in The Grapes of Wrath and other books, as …
