B O O K S

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10/2006. xxvii, 230 pages. 25 photos, 1 illustration, 2 maps
0896725855
978-0-89672-585-0

Children of the Dust: An Okie Family Story

By Betty Grant Henshaw
Edited by Sandra Scofield
Introduction by Victoria Smith

"With the same effortless matter-of-fact utility as the flour sack dresses she wore, Henshaw, daughter of Oklahoma farmers during the Dust Bowl, offers an episodic account of the lives of migrant farm workers through depression, war and beyond. . . . [Her] portrait of a farmer's life on the move is warm and vivid, steeped in family and labor, and idyllic only in the flawless way she tells it: 'I had hardly become used to the sight of pine trees when we came upon tall cactuses with thick arms reaching toward the sky.' Henshaw's is the story of a family first and a time second, and this Dust Bowl narrative is all the more illuminating for it."--Publishers Weekly

“[This is] not another Dust Bowl story, not a tale of failure. . . . The Grants loved each other and their lives, and it fell to Betty by her nature to record that loving world, with its struggles and its abundant fun, its good folk, and above all, a family that flourished, even in hard times.”—Sandra Scofield, from the Preface

Betty Grant Henshaw was born into a large family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl era. For years her father, Bill, worked himself to exhaustion, trying to earn enough to provide for his wife and nine children and to buy his own small farm, but he was never able to get ahead. Other family members had joined the great migration of Okies to California. Finally yielding to pressure from others, with some reluctance Bill piled his family in the Ford pickup and set off along Route 66 for the Golden State.

There the family found abundant opportunities to work, but work often meant backbreaking labor in the fields for dirt-cheap wages in hundred-degree heat. Bill did his best to shield his family from the brutality of the fields. His abiding respect for work, which he cultivated in his children, led his family through difficult times. In the end, although he missed Oklahoma, Bill was proud to find that the Grants could thrive in any soil.

Now in her seventies, Betty Grant Henshaw lives in Medford, Oregon.

Sandra Scofield is the author of several books, including, most recently, Occasions of Sin: A Memoir.