Betty Henshaw came from Oklahoma to California much like John Steinbeck's fictional Joads, rattling around in the back of an old pickup truck with eight brothers and sisters and a mattress on the top. For a long time she ached to tell the story of a family of Okies hitting the Mother Road to stake everything on the dream of a better life in California.

Henshaw's new book, "Children of the Dust: an Okie Family Story," is the realization of that desire.

"It's more than I could ever have dreamed of," she says.

Henshaw plans a reading in early November at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Medford.

The old photos in the book testify to the life the family left behind. Henshaw's mother and her brother Robert bend to pick cotton in a field as dry as it is flat. A photo labeled "Daddy and Mama, 1946" has the hard-bitten quality of photographer Walker Evans' Depression pictures. In another 1946 snapshot, Betty is a pretty 13-year-old sitting on a weathered porch with her brother, many sisters and a tired-looking Mama.

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Henshaw was born in 1933 near Hominy, Okla., south of Claremore, outside of Tulsa. As far back as she recalls, her parents talked of California as if it held some hope of redemption.

"But each season as the crops were brought in," she says, "Daddy decided to stay another year."

Women like Betty Henshaw weren't expected to write books.

"But I was fascinated by them," she says.

Her father, Bill Grant, was a tenant farmer who worked from dawn to dark for almost nothing and sometimes hired himself out to other farmers for a dollar a day. Although he didn't own his land, he resisted pressure from family members to move on, including some who'd made the move to the valleys of California.

It was a hardscrabble life. Laundry was done with a washboard after heating water in a kettle, and hung on an electric fence to dry. There was no indoor plumbing. Sunday dinners might be beans and cornbread and fried green tomatoes. Betty and her sisters wore dresses Mama made of flour sacks on her Grandma Bristol's old Singer sewing machine.

"Mama and my grandmother picked cotton to buy that machine," Henshaw says.

Today the machine sits in a place of honor in the living room of Henshaw's Medford apartment, a piece of the past contrasting with the computer on the desk at the other end of the room.

"It was hard," Henshaw says of leaving Oklahoma. "I left behind a part of myself."

On a Monday in October 1947, Betty's father took his last load of Oklahoma cotton to the gin in a horse-drawn wagon. Daddy bought a 1938 Ford pickup.

The family hired an auctioneer and sold their cows, horses, pigs, chickens, farm tools, the potatoes in the barn and the home-canned fruits and vegetables. Mama kept her sewing machine.

The next morning Betty helped herd the younger children into the truck before first light.

"Daddy and Robert had placed a feather mattress on the pickup bed," she writes. "The babies crawled to the back, grabbed a pillow each, and rolled up in quilts."

Sadness washed over Betty when they drove past the high school that morning. The Ford made it across Texas and New Mexico before breaking down in Chambers, Ariz., in early November. That gave her mother a respite of two non-travel days as they waited for a part. The family's youngest child was 6 weeks old.

There's an old tradition that Okies were supposed to sing and holler when they came over the 3,793-foot Tehachapi Pass near the south end of the Sierra Nevada. The narrow, treacherous road there was seen as the gateway to the agricultural valleys beyond.

"Mama said we were too tired to holler," Henshaw says.

The family settled in the dusty little farm town of Corcoran, Calif., where two of Bill's sisters had moved in the 1930s. There was more cotton to be picked, and labor camps. Mechanical cotton pickers were introduced that year, and Bill had never driven a tractor. He kept working in the fields. The world was changing.

"He turned down other jobs," Henshaw says. "He said there was a freedom out there."

As editor Victoria Smith wrote in the book's introduction, "the stark, harsh reality of life in the fields of California proved to be the foil to so many Okies' dreams ... Grant's descriptions of the migrants' children, particularly, illustrate California's deceptive cruelty."

"It was awful," Henshaw says. "And hotter than Oklahoma."

But there were also aunts and uncles and cousins and hope, and members of the family went on to overcome many obstacles.

Henshaw moved to Medford in the footstep of brother Robert in 1956. She worked as a grocery clerk and nursed an ambition to write her story. She took writing classes in her 30s but was discouraged by an instructor who didn't like her work.

She married, and her husband died after four years of marriage. Years later, in another writing group, she met a writer who encouraged her to collect stories.

"In a couple years I had them all over the floor," she says with a wave and a laugh.

Her pre-computer transition phase involved a manual typewriter. One evening she went to hear a reading by award-winning author Sandra Scofield, who was then living in Ashland. Scofield hailed from Texas, had poor farmers in her family and had written sensitively in both fiction and non-fiction about the dynamics of family life. She was taken with Henshaw's story and agreed to read her work.

"She said it needed to be in the hands of a university press," Henshaw says. "She said it was history."

Scofield alerted Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas, where editors quickly bought it.

"They e-mailed the next day," Henshaw says. "I'm just blown away. If it were not for Sandra my book wouldn't be where it is."

What Scofield found was an uplifting story.

"What I wasn't prepared for," she wrote in the book's introduction, "was a manuscript that made me so happy to read: not another Dust Bowl story, not a tale of failure, but a story with a strong family and a good life."

Henshaw also had a lot of mentoring from children's author Lucia Smith, who resides near Jacksonville.

Her father died two years ago at 98. Mama is 95 and lives in Corcoran.

It's been a long time since Henshaw used to watch the cars on Route 66, just half a mile from the family's rented home, and yearn to go west.

"Now when I look back I'm thankful that Daddy waited," she writes, "because he gave me a rare and wonderful childhood in the Oklahoma hills."

Some of the lessons she didn't get until years later, after leaving the sun-parched cotton fields in California.

"Now I see how the important parts of who I am spring from the rich experience of those early years, when I was the child of farmers and a child of the land."

It started with her father.

"Daddy always told us," she says. "'Be proud you're Okies.'"

Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail bvarble@mailtribune.com.