Last summer, Sandra Dallas’ daughter hosted a party to mark the intersection of her mother’s 70th year and her first New York Times best seller. The success of “Prayers for Sale” could be chalked up as good luck coming to one who waits, but in Dallas’ case it’s more like the harder she works, the luckier she gets.
She’s returning to bookstores, just shy of one year after her last one, with “Whiter Than Snow.” It is a story of tragedy and redemption and, arguably, Dallas’ best work to date.
On April 20, 1920, nine children from the fictional mining town of Swandyke leave school, unaware that a slab avalanche is barreling down the mountain. Dallas writes, “Nothing stood in the way of the terrifying slide because the mountainside was bare of trees. They had been torn out 40 years earlier in the second wave of mining that came after the prospectors abandoned gold pans and sluice boxes. Men had trained giant hoses on the mountain, washing dirt down the slope to be processed for precious minerals. Hydraulic mining, as it was called, also rid the mountainside of rocks and trees and underbrush that would have interfered with an avalanche — not that anything could have held back the tons of white that slid down Jubilee Mountain that afternoon.”
The children in its path reflect the town’s demographics. “Five of the victims were related, the children of the Patch sisters — Dolly’s three, who were Jack, Carrie and Lucia, along with Lucy’s two, Rosemary and Charlie. The slide was no respecter of class, because it took Schuyler Foote, son of the manager of the Fourth of July Mine, and little Jane Cobb, the Negro girl, whose father labored in the mill, and Sophie Schnable, the daughter of a prostitute. And then there was Emmett Carter, that near-orphan boy who lived with his grandfather.” Four of the nine children survive.
The focus of “Whiter Than Snow” is on families, and the back stories that land them in Swandyke. In a conversation with Dallas at her Denver home, she said she didn’t really know where the idea for this book came from but said that one way of looking at plot was as a way to “bring together a group of people to face a common danger.” Later, she said, “I realized I was writing about an avalanche. I liked the story because I could bring together all my different interests, from New York tenements to the Civil War to conflicts that exist between two sisters. And it has all the things I like, mountains and mining.”
Dallas explores the issue of race through the character of Joe Cobb, who leaves the South and makes his way to Colorado. “I thought that blacks (in the South) were better off after the war ended,” she said, but her research argued otherwise.
“When they were slaves, they had economic value. While their treatment might have been horrible, at least they were kept alive. (After the war ended) there were towns in the South that sold the labor of blacks.” It was an economic model that depended on arresting black men, putting them on trial, and requiring them to work off court costs through indentured servitude to mining, mill or turpentine operations.
While it’s true that Joe still encountered prejudice in Colorado, she said “It wasn’t like the South and a lot of industrial areas.” Colorado had a history of independence. She said, “I think if you worked hard and proved yourself, you’d be accepted.”
Civil War veteran Minder Evans is a survivor of the wreck of the Sultana, which Dallas described as “the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history. The boat was registered for 376 passengers, but there were 2,100 men crammed aboard. Of those, 1,800 died. In contrast, the Titanic lost 1,500 of 2,200 passengers.”
A worker at the town’s whorehouse, Essie Snowball, is a Jewish woman who grew up in a New York tenement. She saves her money, dreaming of the day when she can quit the life of prostitution and take her daughter to Denver, where she can open a dressmaking business. Dallas said that New York’s tenement museum is one of her favorite stops in the city, and her fascination with tenement life was part of the basis of Essie’s character.
It takes most of the novel for Dallas to guide readers through the lives of those who will be directly touched by disaster. The reader knows from the start that children will die, but the specific names and circumstance aren’t revealed until near the novel’s end.
The loss of the children is a gut-punch, even though the reader knows it is coming. By the time Dallas returns the reader to the present, the sense of the impending loss to the families is fully developed.
Dallas said, “I kill off a lot of children (in my books) . . . in large part because I can imagine nothing more painful than the death of a child. My sister died at 13, of polio, I was 9. It is one of the defining moments of my life . . . (also) I’m a mother. I know what it would be like to lose a child.”
She said she also wanted to get across the randomness of death. “You do not die because you are wicked. You are not rewarded because you are good. Things happen for no reason, and you are caught up in them. I think that’s another reason I could let the children die, because it wasn’t their fault and it wasn’t their families’ fault. It was the luck of the draw.”
Meet author Sandra Dallas
Sandra Dallas will discuss her work at the following Colorado locations:
Monday, 7:30 p.m. at the Tattered Cover, 2526 E. Colfax Ave.
Friday, 7 p.m. at Borders, 8557 Park Meadows Center Drive, Lone Tree
Saturday, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, 960 S. Colorado Blvd.
April 13, 6:30 p.m. at Readers Cove, 1001 E. Harmony Road, Unit C, Fort Collins
April 16, 6 p.m. at Barnes & Noble, 8374 S. Willow St., Lone Tree
April 17, 3 p.m., The Next Page Bookstore, 409 Main St., No. 101, Frisco
April 19, 5 p.m. at An Open Book, 4689 W. 20th St., Greeley
April 22, 5:30 p.m. at Murder by the Book, 1574 S. Pearl St., Denver
