Stable Buck

In the Great Depression, back people suffered as badly as white people and in most cases, a lot worse. They also had trouble finding work and racism sadly played a part in employment in that time and even in today's society. Living conditions in the cities were worse than those they left when travelling and looking for work, and they couldn't live in 'white areas'; there wasn't a law against it but it just wasn't allowed. In this way, large 'ghettoes' of poor housing came to be occupied exclusively by black people.
There is only one black man on the ranch in Of Mice And Men but thought that one man, Steinbeck tries to show what relationships between black and white people were like as a whole; he is a representation on racial diversity in society.

"Crooks said gently, "Maybe you can see now. You got George. You know he's going' to come back. S'pose you didn't have nobody. S'pose you couldn't go into the bunk-house and play rummy 'cause you was black. How'd you like that?""

Crooks is made to live in a place separate from the other men; he can't share the life and conservation of the bunkhouse. Again, there was no law saying this had to be - which makes his situation more tragic in the eyes of the reader. This advantage to whites was taken for granted instead of changed.

Crooks was also called the 'nigger' by everybody. Steinbeck gives some idea of how common racism was by the fact that the ranch-hands do not deliberately intend to insult Crooks as a man when they call him 'nigger.' Steinbeck is reminding us that the majority of black people were constantly degraded in this way, which wasn't seen as unacceptable then, but is now. Alike Crooks, black people in this society felt the hatefulness of it even when it was used casually, which strikes the readers attention more powerfully because now its not used in a casual context.

We could sympathise with the fact that Crooks is quite bitter about the way he is treated and that theres not much he can do about it. No-one dislikes him as a person, but is still treated as an inferior being because of his race, and although he has a crooked back, he will stand up for himself in a fight. The only time that he mixes with the other ranch-hands socially is when they pitch horseshoes, and he beats everyone, which suggests that he should not be seen as useless and minor to the other ranch hands and to the reader - that he should be respected alike other characters such as Slim and George, for example.

What sets him apart from the other workers is that his position on the ranch is permanent; he is not a migrant worker. As a result, he has been able to collect a few possessions together. His possessions tell us a bit about him, both as an individual man and as a representative of black people at this time.

"Crooks possessed several pairs of shoes, a pair of rubber boots, a big alarm clock and a single-barrelled shotgun. And he had books, too; a tattered dictionary and a mauled copy of the California civil code for 1905. There were battered magazines and a few dirty books on a special shelf over his bunk. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles hung from a nail on the wall above his bed."