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03/2008. 272
pages; 25 b/w photos, 1 illustration, 2 maps
978-0-89672-631-4
$22.95 paper
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Children of the Dust
An Okie Family Story By Betty Grant Henshaw; edited by Sandra Scofield, with introduction by Victoria Smith
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 back-breaking 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.
Henshaw’s 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 . . . . [her book] 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
Now in her seventies, Betty Grant Henshaw lives in Medford, Oregon, whre she continues to write. Sandra Scofield is the author of several books, including, most recently, Occasions of Sin: A Memoir and The Scene Book: A Primer for the Fiction Writer.
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