Out of the Dust

The author’s language and vocabulary are simple and spare. By the end of Part I, the reader sees how the word choice and phrasing work to characterize Billie Jo and establish her character voice. She is straightforward, observant, unafraid, and accepting. She excels at her eighth grade studies and plays the piano so well that she is becoming a featured local performer. Billie Jo is just 13, but her given circumstances—the family’s meager possessions and unfruitful farm, the loss of her best friend, her mostly joyless parents, and of course the endless amounts of dust—leave her viewpoint with a tone older than her years. Some details, though, reveal that Billie Jo lacks the wisdom and maturity that come with growing up. For example, she is jealous that Arley asked Mad Dog to perform on the Palace stage along with her, and she can’t help but scowl at Ma behind her back when Ma refuses to permit her participation in Sunny of Sunnyside.

Billie Jo mentions school, classmates, neighbors, and locals, but with her best friend Livie gone and relatives either distant or dead, Billie Jo’s day-to-day with her parents evokes a somber isolation. Her parents keep emotion at arm’s length and there is little evidence of tenderness between them. For example, Billie Jo thinks Daddy wishes she was a boy: “he tried making me do” (4) is how she phrases Daddy’s “giving up” on having a son when she is nine. Even when Billie Jo voices a need for Ma’s kind words or loving pride, as she does when she brings home top marks at school, Ma cannot. Daddy tells Billie Jo, “That’s not your ma’s way” (30). These relationship barriers contribute to the atmosphere of loneliness and helplessness illustrated in the description of withering crops, parched, ruined land, and powerful dust storms that no man, woman, or child can effectively battle. They seek no help from neighbors, since in this harsh environment, it is every family for itself.

A little hope peeks through the narrative, though: Billie Jo feels alive and excited when she performs in public, and she allows herself to think about a someday in which she departs the Panhandle in search of success and happiness elsewhere. The strongest symbol of optimism, however, is the new baby on the way for the Kelbys. Despite minimal conversation with her father and the emotional distance she feels her mother keeps, Billie Jo is confidently and solidly a part of her family and eager for its fruitfulness and success; if the fields cannot yield wheat, at least the Kelbys will grow this year. She makes her connection to the family known when she refers multiple times in Part I to the infant as “our baby,” language that represents Billie Jo’s subtle hope that the child will bring them closer.