Of Mice and Men – 9

Crooks, a black character, disparages Lennie and George’s dream of owning land and compares their dream to ideas about heaven. He says, “I seen hunderds [sic] of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads…Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.” If Crooks’s disillusionment can be associated with modernism, does his perspective support Toni Morrison’s idea that “Black people were the first modernists,” the first to be disillusioned as a result of their experience in America?