Summary
Narrated in the first-person by Billie Jo Kelby, a thirteen-year-old girl, Out of the Dust is set on a family wheat farm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Billie Jo tells her story in a series of non-rhyming verse poems; she signs each with the month and year.
In January 1934, Billie Jo opens the novel by recounting how she was born in August 1920. Just as the summer wheat crop was ready, Billie Jo’s barefoot mother went into labor on the kitchen floor. Billie Jo’s father delivered the baby, who was birthed before the doctor could reach the house. Billie Jo says she received a boy’s name because her father had wanted a son. She describes herself as a long-legged redheaded girl with freckles and a wide mouth. She likes apples and playing “fierce piano.” She has always felt restless on the farm. She can handle any farm work her father asks her to do, even driving the tractor. After years of trying, her mother is finally pregnant with a second child. Billie Jo wonders if it will be a boy this time.
Billie Jo comments on how Mr. Noble and Mr. Romney, local farmers, have a bet between themselves over who can kill the most rabbits. They want revenge on the rabbits who eat their crops. It makes Billie Jo sick to her stomach to think about grown men clubbing bunnies to death. The men report back having each killed twenty, but Romney claims Noble cheated, so the contest isn’t over. Billie Jo says the men used to be friends but now they scowl when they pass on the street. Billie Jo says the rabbits weren’t eaten by the men; the rabbits at least went to “families that needed the meat.”
Livie Killian, a friend of Billie Jo’s, is moving to California and “out of the dust.” At the farewell party, Livie affectionately teases each of her friends for doing things like sleeping through class and making spelling errors. Billie Jo’s voice strains as she tries to tell her friend how much she’ll miss her. She ends her poem on the subject by admitting to her envy of Livie, whose place she wishes she could take on the journey west. Arley Wanderdale, the music teacher, asks Billie Jo to play a piano solo at the Palace Theatre on Wednesday night. She is happy to be asked and agrees, though she suspects Mad Dog Craddock was the first person Wanderdale thought to ask. She curses Mad Dog, a blue-eyed boy with a “fine face and … smooth voice.” However, Billie Jo’s mother is reluctant to let her daughter pursue her passion for piano. To get permission to play at the Palace, Billie Jo uses the strategy of asking her mother while she is busy in the kitchen. She receives a yes because she knows she can usually get what she wants if she annoys her mother “just enough to get an answer.”
On stage, Billie Jo feels as though the music is springing out of her. With the right hand she plays notes “sharp as tongues” while the left hand backs her up with “smooth buttery rhythms.” She comments that it’s heavenly to get the crowd responding to the music. She plays so well that Arley asks her to play at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “birthday ball.” The president won’t be there, but the money raised at the ball will go to the Warm Springs Foundation where FDR once stayed when he was ill. She wants to play for him in person, maybe at the White House, one day. In the meantime, she is happy Arley asked her to play again.
In February, Billie Jo says the family’s wheat crop hasn’t been good in three years, since the bountiful crop of 1931. She says she and her parents are “whittled down to the bone these days,” having gotten thin from lack of food. Despite their poverty and starvation, her mother recently donated to the “committee” some apple sauce, cured pork, and a nightie she sewed for the upcoming baby. On Daddy’s birthday, Ma sends Billie Jo to Joyce City to pick up some things from Mr. Hardly’s store. The stingy man glares at Billie Jo when she arrives. He has been in an especially bad mood since his attic filled with dust and collapsed, damaging some of his stock and requiring a costly repair. Mr. Hardly fills Billie Jo’s order in sacks. Upon returning home, Billie Jo realizes she didn’t pay attention when he counted out the change from her fifty cents. However, Ma does the math and realizes he gave them back four cents too much—not the usual situation where he shorts his customers several cents. Billie Jo walks back to the store to return the four cents. He doesn’t thank her.
Billie Jo comments on how she has heard that in Amarillo, fifty miles south of her, the wind got so strong it blew plate-glass windows in, ripped down electric signs, and pulled wheat straight out of the ground. Because of the dust in their own home, Ma gets Billie Jo to set the plates and glasses upside-down on the table. When it is time to eat, everyone shakes out their napkins and flips over their crockery, exposing circles beneath where the dust hasn’t got to the tablecloth. Billie Jo’s father jokes about the potatoes being well-peppered and the milk being chocolate; in reality, they are just dusty. Billie Jo has heard from Livie that her parents can’t find work in California, and her fifteen-year-old brother Reuben has left the family to find a way to live on his own. It scares Billie Jo to think about her family not having a place to live or work to do or anything to eat. Even if they have to chew their dust-thickened milk, at least they have it. Luckily, a little rain breaks the seventy-day drought, which has been nothing but wind, sun, sand, and dust.
Billie Jo comments that her mother is plain-looking and has bad teeth. However, her mother dazzles people—particularly Billie Jo’s father—when she plays the piano. Billie Jo’s father bought it for Polly as a wedding gift. On her fifth birthday, Billie Jo began to learn how to play from her mother. She isn’t as good as her mother yet, but Billie Jo figures she is good enough for Arley. Billie Jo comments that her father is considering taking a loan from the federal government for a new wheat crop. The government promises that he won’t have to repay the debt until the crop comes in. Billie Jo’s mother cautions him, reminding him it hasn’t rained enough for wheat in three years. He goes to the barn to avoid fighting with her. Ma tells Billie Jo that any farmer has to believe it’s going to rain; without that belief, there would be no hope.
Ma gets angry when she learns that Billie Jo will have to miss school twice next week to rehearse piano for the Sunny of Sunnyside show. Billie Jo sometimes thinks her mother is simply jealous that she is playing piano and Ma isn’t. She wonders if her mother worries that music will take her far away from home and she won’t return. However, Billie Jo obeys her mother’s wishes and tells Arley that she can’t do it. Billie Jo scowls at her mother while she does her chores and homework instead of playing piano. When Billie Jo informs her mother that her school did the best in the state on achievement tests and Billie Jo herself was ranked first in eighth grade, Ma simply says, “I knew you could.” Daddy tells Billie Jo that it isn’t her mother’s way to be overly praiseful. Billie Jo resents how it makes her feel like dry flannel being taken in from the drying line.
One night, Billie Jo is woken by the sound of the wind kicking up. She goes outside and sees lightning flash in the night sky. She hears, smells, and tastes the dust. It soon blows through, tearing up the fields of winter wheat that had been planted for a June harvest. She watches helplessly as the plants fry or flatten or blow away like rags. The dust turns toward the house and she seeks refuge inside. While Ma and Billie Jo moisten the clothes at the window cracks and doors, Daddy goes outside. He doesn’t return until hours later, at which point the temperature drops and snow falls—snow that is soon blown away, leaving only a sea of dust. Her father blows his nose and coughs, expelling muddy snot.
Analysis
In the first part of Out of the Dust, author Karen Hesse establishes the book’s distinct form as a “novel in verse”—a novel-length work comprising a series of unrhymed poems presented in chronological order. The fact that Billie Jo Kelby, the book’s protagonist and narrator, ends each poem with the month and year suggests that Billie Jo is writing the poems as diary entries. Although the story is written in the past tense, the diaristic quality means Billie Jo does not know what is to come later in the book; she only knows what has transpired up to the point of each entry. With this form, Hesse enhances the authenticity of Billie Jo’s narration and presents this historical novel as though it could be someone's first-person account of living through the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.
In the book’s first poems, Hesse introduces the reader to the environment in which Billie Jo was born. Because her father wanted a girl, Billie Jo is given a boy’s name. She grows up to become something of a tomboy, fulfilling both the role of farmer’s son and farmer’s daughter, with chores both in the fields and in the house. She also takes on traits of each parent, developing a love for piano and apples like her mother has, and a tendency to be stubborn and hot-headed like her father.
The first section of Out of the Dust also sees Hesse introduce several of the novel’s major themes: despair, escape, poverty, environmental crisis, and hope. While the fact of Ma’s pregnancy, after years of her parents trying to conceive, is a piece of welcome news, the Oklahoma Panhandle and the Great Plains region broadly have been under a pall of dust-induced despair and poverty. Billie Jo first hints at the widespread poverty in the region when she comments on how Noble and Romney have been aggressively hunting rabbits. Their competitive game contributes to solving both the issue of rabbits eating scarce crops and the issue of someone needing to feed the local families who are starving.
The theme of escape first arises when Livie Killian and her family leave Oklahoma to seek a new livelihood out west in California. Billie Jo’s commentary on this event includes her first use of the phrase “out of the dust,” a motif she will repeat throughout the novel. As much as Billie Jo will miss Livie, she admits to envying her friend so much that she wishes it were her own feet making the journey west in Livie’s place. With this confession, Hesse hints at Billie Jo’s unhappiness with life in the Dust Bowl and her desire to escape the despair that clouds her outlook like dust.
As a counterpoint to the despair Billie Jo feels, hope arrives in the form of Arley Wanderdale, the music teacher who recognizes Billie Jo’s talent and gives her an opportunity to hone her performance skills. Although her mother is reluctant to give her permission to perform, Billie Jo finds that the experience of losing herself in music for a crowd brings her joy and a sense of purpose. She feels even more hope when Arley asks her to play again, and she dreams of one day getting to play for the President at the White House.
But the good feelings don’t last for Billie Jo. Despair returns with the high winds that bury the wheat crops in eroded soil (the dust referred to in the book) and bring airborne soil into the Kelbys’ home. Developing the theme of despair further, Hesse depicts how people who lived through the real-life Dust Bowl years had to put up with soil seeping through every crack in their homes and getting into their food, making milk so thick they could chew it.
