WyCo's Wrath

No understatement there. The western side of the county is booming in a vast expanse of big-box, concrete consumerism. Meanwhile, half the people who live in the 66101 zip code, just northeast of downtown KCK, make less than $20,260 a year, based on census figures from 2000. Village West might have changed WyCo's overall financials since the last census, but blocks of 66101 are still boarded up, trashed, burned-out, and marked by a profound sense of emptiness. When ragged churches seem to outnumber liquor stores, you know a neighborhood is full of lost souls.

Tarwater says she has learned that many Wyandotte Countians moved here from western Kansas, blown out by the 1930s Dust Bowl. At events over the past month, they've told her about being on the farm, putting wet towels over their windows, not having anything to eat. "I'm in awe of what people had to live through," she says.

The thing is, it's still happening. "In my neighborhood, three houses have just been foreclosed," says Tarwater, who lives near 78th Street and Riverview. "These people have been my neighbors forever. To have a house for 25 years and lose it to the bank, that's just awful. All over the metro, you see these homes that people lost."

Or, as Steinbeck puts it: "The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it."

It's painful to read The Grapes of Wrath, but the strength to do so comes from Steinbeck's astonishingly beautiful writing, the way he finds words to make us feel what seems too hard to bear, the way he shows us that we're all human beings. Reminding people of that can be dangerous .

"The fascinating thing is that the book was banned by the Kansas City, Kansas, School District in 1939," Tarwater says. "And they banned it from every single library." She didn't know that before she chose it. That's just as well — otherwise, someone might arrest her for trying to incite a riot.

As it is, just reading all the way to the end feels like an act of defiance.