They’s movement now. People moving. We know why, an’ we know how. Movin’ ’cause they got to. That’s why folks always move. Movin’ ’cause they want somepin better’n what they got. An’ that’s the on’y way they’ll ever git it.

This line is spoken in the vernacular of Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl migrants in *The Grapes of Wrath* (1939), set during the Great Depression as tenant farmers are pushed off their land and stream west along Route 66 toward California. The speaker is one of the “Okies” reflecting on the mass migration as both compulsion and hope: people are driven out by foreclosure, drought, and hunger, yet also pulled by the belief that movement might yield dignity and survival. Steinbeck uses such collective, oral-sounding commentary to frame the Joads’ journey as part of a larger historical displacement rather than an isolated family story.

The passage insists that migration is not random restlessness but a rational response to necessity and aspiration. “Movin’ ’cause they got to” emphasizes coercion—economic forces and environmental catastrophe leave no viable alternative—while “want somepin better’n what they got” preserves a stubborn human agency: the desire for improvement. The final claim, that moving is “the on’y way they’ll ever git it,” captures Steinbeck’s tragic optimism. Mobility becomes both a survival strategy and a moral argument about change: when systems deny people stability or justice, motion—physical and social—becomes the only path toward a better life.