To me, Ma Joad proves to be the most inspirational and amazing Joad in chapter eighteen when she bravely shows her spirit on many different occasions. 26
By the eighteenth chapter Ma Joad's worst fears are being realized. Her family is falling apart. Grampa has died, Granma is in poor spirits and health, and Noah has decided that his family does not deeply and truly love him and therefore everybody will be better off if he stays behind on the river and lives there from then on. No matter how hard Tom works to assure him that his family does indeed love him very deeply, nothing will change his mind. Ma always believed that as long as the family remained a unit and stayed together nothing could break them apart. However, as this plan seems to be bursting at the seams, it would be understandable for her to finally lose her faith and break apart. But Ma Joad is made of much stronger stock then that as she proves in the chapter. 145
When she is faced with the hostile deputy who kicked her out of the camp and insulted her for being of Oklahoma origin, she chased him around with a cast-iron skillet. But even more bravely, she quietly endures the knowledge that her home has died on her own while she lays beside her all night as the family crosses the desert. There is a man who tries to perform an agricultural inspection on them but Ma gets the family out of it because she informs the authorities that her mother is deathly ill and needs immediate medical assistance, despite the fact that she has been dead since before the inspection. 110
Eventually, though, no matter how strong of heart and spirit a person is, they reach a point where they think they will finally break apart forever. When Tom tries to comfort his mother she shoos him away for fear that if he attempts to comfort her she will completely lose control, and she is far too brave to allow that to happen. She pushes him away as a sacrifice to keep her self-control and ability to move on, and she continues with amazing perseverance towards getting what is left of her family to the life they dream of. 97
