Out of the Dust

Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Middle Grade | Published in 1997

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Ma’s Piano and Apple Trees

Ma’s piano was a gift from Billie Jo’s father when they married; though the house had “gaps in the walls, / a rusty bed, no running water” (24), it also had the lovely Cramer piano on which Ma would play pieces beautiful and mesmerizing to Billie Jo and Bayard. Ma planted two apple trees at the start of the marriage as well, taking the time and care necessary with the trees to grow them into healthy, fruit-bearing trees. These elements from their early marriage symbolize the hope both brought to the union of a future filled with children, music, family moments, beauty, sustenance, and happiness. Billie Jo grows up associating the piano and the apple trees with Ma and happy, hopeful times.

After the accident, Billie Jo is unable due to her injuries to help defend the apple trees from the grasshopper swarm. Symbolically, the swarm destroys the apples on the same day that Ma dies. Late in the story, Louise brings apples to the farm in acknowledgment of their meaning to Billie Jo. Billie Jo accepts the apples as a gift from Louise and a sign of hope for the future.

In her dream after the accident, Billie Jo first breaks Ma’s piano: “I hit the keys with my fist, and the piano broke into / a hundred pieces” (64), symbolizing the guilt she feels for causing Ma’s burns. In her dream she then drags home the Eatons’ piano but cannot play it in Ma’s house. This element foreshadows the emotional challenges Billie Jo must surmount to play piano again: “Now I can’t hardly stay in the same room with one. / Especially Ma’s” (87). Hope for a fulfilling future that includes personal happiness returns as Billie Jo resumes practicing on Ma’s piano after her brief attempt to leave home. These objects and their representation in the novel support the theme of Finding Hope Amidst Tragedy.

The Pond

Billie Jo’s father never discusses his initial motivations for digging the pond: Guilt, pain, or penitence may prompt his decision to begin. Soon, though, the pond becomes a symbol of resilience that represents his inner strength, the farm’s ability to come back, and the new shared respect that he and Billie Jo gain for one another. As the idea of the pond was a solution Ma promoted, its existence also suggests resilience of her spirit, memory, and presence on the property. The construction of the task alone shows an element of physical resilience unlike any other in the narrative: “[…] my father spends his time out the side of the house, / digging a hole, / forty feet by sixty feet. Six feet deep” (77). The work proves a healing measure for Daddy, and soon the experience prompts him to take a power company job excavating for towers: “He said, / ‘I’m good at digging,’ / and everyone who knows about our hole / knows he’s telling the truth” (87).

Initially, Billie Jo refuses to support the idea: “I think he’s crazy too. / The water will seep back into the earth. It’ll never stay put in any old pond” (78) She assumes her father is looking for reconciliation for his role in the kerosene accident, and she has no intention of giving it to him: “[…] as long as I live, / no matter how big a hole he digs, / I can’t forgive him that pail of kerosene / left by the side of the stove” (78). In fact, Billie Jo takes a dark view of the pond by Summer 1935. When he refuses to show the doctor his skin cancer, she thinks of his work on the pond as “digging his own grave” (195), and she decides to leave him by running away before he can leave her by dying. It is notable that as soon as she opts to return, her father greets her at the station with the news that the pond is finished. His talk of flowers, swimming, and fish bolsters her own growing resilient spirit. The pond will be a life-giving, life-sustaining part of their farm moving forward, literally and figuratively supplying what Billie Jo needs to be able to “stay / in one place / and still grow” (226), like her father.

The Dust and Dust Storms

The dust is a constant irritation, a significant danger, and a consistent motif in the story. It gets everywhere: in one’s house, under one’s sheets, in one’s food, through one’s clothes. Dust jams the windmill, the engines, the pianos; most items with moving parts are breaking, broken, discordant, or unhelpful. Dust often makes one cough, tear up, blow mud from the nose. Dust makes some characters ill and it kills others. The dust motif provides an already-challenging backdrop against which Billie Jo must face the trauma of losing Ma and Franklin, but it also represents the struggle she faces with her own culpability: The fact is, the dust was avoidable; it came about because of poor farming choices in which desire for profit strongly factored. As such, the dust motif supports the theme of The Impact of Ignorance on Environment and Society.

Several bad dust storms occur in the narrative: the storm that comes overnight; the dust storm while testing; the dust storm after the Palace show when Billie Jo walks home blind, one foot on the road and one foot off to guide her path; the dust storm on the way to the funeral. That storm is the worst in Billie Jo’s narrative, both in terms of physical damage to crops, livestock, and machinery and regarding folks’ emotional trauma. After three lovely, clear days, the violence and destruction of that storm are especially painful. Billie Jo and Daddy wait out that duster in a stranger’s home with other trapped travelers: “If it hadn’t been for the company, / this storm would have broken us / completely, / broken us more thoroughly than / the plow had broken the Oklahoma sod” (165). The worst dust storm in the history of the Dust Bowl began on “Black Sunday,” April 14, 1935, a date that fits this storm in Billie Jo’s narrative.

When Billie Jo finds hope and resiliency after her train trip west, she returns home and revisits her thoughts on the human spirit, concluding that low or broken spirits contribute to one’s hardships just as impactfully as dust or drought.