Book excerpt: The story of Benjamin Bird is set in Western Oklahoma in the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Benjamin was born in 1934, the third child of a sharecropper. Ben's heritage encompasses the history of late nineteenth-century frontier America, for his grandfathers were born in the aftermath of the Civil War. His paternal grandfather was the son of a former slave owner, and his maternal grandfather, the youngest son of a Confederate veteran, was from an extended family who, for generations, h