How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"Well, you try to root a few out. We need them. I swear to God the only people in this country with any guts seem to be Negroes. Mind you," he said, "I don't want to keep Negroes out of the hero business, but I'm damned if I want them to corner the market. You dig me up ten white, able-bodied Americans who aren't afraid to have a conviction, an idea, or an opinion in an unpopular field, and I'll have the major part of a standing army." (3.7.8)
Steinbeck's journalist friend claims that he thinks there are no real men left in America at that point, aside from African Americans. It's a weird moment; he apparently is trying to backpedal on appearing racist with his statement, but he also seems to think it's somehow important for white men in particular to reclaim their manliness. Hmm...
Quote #2
The Texans, they say, didn't want to pay taxes and, second, Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, and Texas, being part of Mexico, was required to free its slaves. Of course there were other causes of revolt, but these two are spectacular to a European, and rarely mentioned here. (4.1.8)
Steinbeck is musing on the origins of Texas and its desires to break free of Mexico back in the day. As you can see, slavery played a role in that whole rigmarole, although apparently Americans and Texans are less ready to talk about it than Europeans.
Quote #3
I knew, as everyone knows, the true but incomplete statement of the problem—that an original sin of the fathers was being visited on the children of succeeding generations. I have many Southern friends, both Negro and white, many of them of superb minds and characters, and often, when not the problem but the mere suggestion of the Negro-white subject has come up, I have seen and felt them go into a room of experience into which I cannot enter. (4.2.5)
Steinbeck knows he's viewing a lot of the racial tensions going on in the U.S. as an outsider, since the real hotbed of these problems has been the South and he's definitely not a southerner. Here, he's reflecting on how his friends on both sides of the racial "divide" understand the problem and experience it in a way that he can't.
Quote #4
If there was any color prejudice in Salinas I never heard or felt a breath of it. The Coopers were respected, and their self-respect was in no way forced. (4.2.8)
Musing some more about racial tensions, Steinbeck thinks a lot about the Coopers, an African American family he knew when he was growing up. Apparently, in Steinbeck's view, Salinas was pretty race blind.
Quote #5
Now, these were the only Negroes I knew or had contact with in the days of my flypaper childhood, and you can see how little I was prepared for the great world. When I heard, for example, that Negroes were an inferior race, I thought the authority was misinformed. When I heard that Negroes were dirty I remembered Mrs. Cooper's shining kitchen. Lazy? The drone and clop of Mr. Cooper's horse-drawn dray in the street outside used to awaken us in the dawn. Dishonest? Mr. Cooper was one of the very few Salinans who never let a debt cross the fifteenth of the month. (4.2.9)
Apparently, the big inequality question with respect to the Coopers was whether everyone else could measure up to the bar they had set. This is a big point of contrast to the kind of race-based assumptions about African Americans (and how they measure up to white folks) that Steinbeck sees going on now that he's left Salinas.
Quote #6
Thus it remains that I am basically unfitted to take sides in the racial conflict. I must admit that cruelty and force exerted against weakness turn me sick with rage, but this would be equally true in the treatment of any weak by any strong. (4.2.12)
This is hardly a rallying cry for civil rights (and problematic in its total confidence in the weakness of African Americans), but Steinbeck is basically trying to say that he doesn't approve of the "cruelty" and "force" being used against African Americans in this "racial conflict."
Quote #7
Beyond my failings as a racist, I knew I was not wanted in the South. When people are engaged in something they are not proud of, they do not want witnesses. In fact, they come to believe the witness causes the trouble. (4.2.13)
Both because he wasn't a racist and because he was an outsider, Steinbeck did not feel terribly welcome in the South. To make matters even dicier for him, he was running around with New York plates on his car. Eep.
Quote #8
Recently a dear Southern friend instructed me passionately in the theory of "equal but separate." "It just happens," he said, "that in my town there are three new Negro schools not equal but superior to the white schools. Now wouldn't you think they would be satisfied with that? And in the bus station the washrooms are exactly the same. What's your answer to that?"
I said, "Maybe it's a matter of ignorance. You could solve it and really put them in their places if you switched schools and toilets. The moment they realized that your schools weren't as good as theirs, they would realize their error." (4.2.15-16)
Steinbeck manages to turn the tables on a Southern friend who was trying to defend the whole idea of separate but equal. Wethinks he makes a pretty compelling point: if it's so "equal," why wouldn't the white folks want to use the same facilities as the African Americans?
Quote #9
While I was still in Texas, late in 1960, the incident most reported and pictured in the newspapers was the matriculation of a couple of tiny Negro children in a New Orleans school. (4.3.1)
Steinbeck swings through the South during a pretty volatile time. In New Orleans, there were protests against the enrollment of African American children at a school. Some women called the "Cheerleaders" were camped out yelling nasty things to try to deter the kids from, you know, getting an education. Steinbeck is not impressed.
Quote #10
"Hey, it's a dog! I thought you had a n***** in there." And he laughed delightedly. It was the first of many repetitions. At least twenty times I heard it—"Thought you had a n***** in there." It was an unusual joke—always fresh—and never Negro or even Nigra, always N***** or rather Niggah. That word seemed terribly important, a kind of safety word to cling to lest some structure collapse. (4.3.5)
As with the Cheerleaders, Steinbeck is less than impressed by the many jokes people make about how easy it is to confuse Charley with an African American. Also, he notes the fact that these people tended to cling to the N-word like it was a safety blanket, which speaks to the nasty power that world wielded (and still does).