My grandmother, Helen Lucile Gross (then Helen Beckwith, then Dicks, then Beckwith again) was a tough lady. But that toughness came from an immutable sense of right and wrong. Her ethics weren’t the of the sort studied in college philosophy

In The Grapes of Wrath, the character Tom Joad talks about his mother’s fierceness, telling how she had once beaten a peddler who’d gotten smart with her with a live chicken, until all she had left in her hand were