LET THE WILD GRASSES GROW

Struggles and dreams on Colorado’s high plains.

Essayist and memoirist Johnstun makes his fiction debut with an appealing story centered on two families roiled by the Great Depression, dust storms, racism, and war. Della, the bright, ambitious daughter of a Native American mother and Mexican father, and John, a quiet, diffident boy whose Mexican father labors in the coal mines, recount their lives in alternating chapters beginning in 1927, when the two are children in Trinidad, a town in southeastern Colorado “covered in scrub oak and hard dirt.” Della grows up encouraged to achieve. She is too smart to be a ranchero, her father tells her; her brother will inherit the family’s land, he says, and she must go on to do great things. Devouring books about science in the Trinidad library, Della sees education as the path away from “the stalks, stables, and land of the KKK.” Both families are threatened by racist violence: “Since there were no African Americans living in Southern Colorado,” Della observes, “the KKK had to hate someone, so they hated us.” Nature is another threat. As the drought intensifies in the 1930s, Della’s parents struggle to eke out a living. “At one point,” Della recalls, “I think we ate corn for three months straight.” While Della vows to leave Trinidad, go to college, and make her family proud, John assumes he will become a miner like his father; shyly in love with Della, he imagines her by his side. Dramatic events, though, upend the lives of John, his sister, and two brothers. And World War II radically changes the future for both Della and John. Johnstun knows his terrain well, creating a palpable sense of the sky and soil, grasses and wildlife of the mesa—and the winds of change that swept through the nation for two tumultuous decades.

A tender evocation of grief, hope, and dignity.