57 pages • 1 hour read
Julie DashDaughters of the Dust
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Parts 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary: “The Land”
The novel’s Prologue describes a chain of islands along the southeastern coast of America, collectively known as the Sea Islands. The landscape of these islands is hot and marshy, rich with flora and fauna that makes them attractive destinations for new settlers. As various ancient peoples occupy the islands, their names change many times, but they are collectively known as the Sea Islands.
Enslaved people from West Africa are eventually brought to the Sea Islands to work on rice and cotton plantations. The white enslavers stay away from the islands due to the heat and abundance of dangerous animals, preferring to live in nearby Charleston, South Carolina. Despite their adverse circumstances, the new residents of the Sea Islands learn to “survive and thrive […] raising their families, praying to their gods, [and] holding sacred the ways of the lands from which they had come” (3). Their resultant culture and language, a blend of many Indigenous and African influences, is known as Gullah or Geechee.
Part 2 Summary: “Dawtuh Island, 1912: Telling the Lie”
An elderly woman named Miz Emma Julia is awakened from a nap on her porch by the approach of four children: Elizabeth Peazant, her little brother Ben, her cousin Clarice, and their friend Pap. Clarice and Pap are wary of Miz Emma Julia due to the rumor that she practices folk magic. However, Elizabeth is undeterred and implores her to “tell us de lie,” (10), meaning to tell a story.
Miz Emma Julia tells the children a creation story. Long ago, when the Earth was all dry land, an old woman lived in the woods by herself, desperately lonely. One day, a passing elephant heard her crying and took pity on her. He taught her a ritual to create a family; she was to put five hickory nuts inside a ball of clay, then let the ball sit in the fire for three days. The old woman did as she was told, but no family appeared. Frustrated, she threw the clay ball at the wall, whereupon it broke open and a tiny child emerged from each hickory nut: sisters Oya, Yemoja, and Osun, and brothers Ogun and Elegba. Each child represented a distinct quality: Osun beauty, Oya music, Ogun strength, Elegba humor, and Yemoja “quickness of spirit” (13).
The old woman spends a few happy years with her new family, but their constant bickering begins to wear on her. The elephant instructs her to send each of her children to a different part of the earth. Once they are scattered, he stomps the ground until it cracks apart, separating each child onto their own piece of land. Devastated by this separation, the woman and her children cry so much that their tears fill the new gaps in the broken land, forming the oceans. The old woman never sees her children again; to this day, she waits for them to come home. Miz Emma Julia says that all of the Gullah people are her children.
Part 3 Summary: “Ibo Landing, Dawtuh Island: September 1926”
Elizabeth, now a young woman, awakes in the home of her late grandmother, Nana Peazant. The walls of the run-down house are covered in letters written by the many Peazants who have left the Sea Islands. Elizabeth herself left for a few years to obtain a finishing school education on the mainland. She has recently moved back to Dawtuh Island to restore Nana’s house, which lies across the water from her childhood home in Beaufort on Port Royal Island. Her father Eli worries about her living on her own, but her mother Eula Peazant celebrates “the renewal of the old ways” (22). She reassures Eli that the spirits of their ancestors will watch over Elizabeth.
Elizabeth works as the sole teacher at Dawtuh Island’s only school. In her spare time, she enjoys making folk-magic charms, a skill she learned from her grandmother. After Nana’s death, Miz Emma Julia finished Elizabeth’s education. Elizabeth was surprised to learn that many educated Black people and white people secretly employed Miz Emma Julia’s services, seeking help with their personal or love lives.
Part 4 Summary: “Harlem: September 1926”
In Harlem, Amelia Varnes prepares breakfast for her family. Amelia attends Brooklyn College, where she studies anthropology. She lives in an apartment above her family’s funeral home business, sharing the space with her mother Myown Varnes, her grandmother Haagar Peazant, and her unnamed father. Haagar is a domineering woman who orders Amelia and her reserved, sickly mother around.
One day, Amelia receives a letter from Professor Colby, summoning her to his office to talk about her thesis, “The Colored People of the Carolina Coast” (58). Arriving at the office, Amelia learns that Colby has found an anonymous benefactor for her thesis. Her next step is to visit the Sea Islands and begin her fieldwork, collecting knowledge from her relatives. Amelia is overjoyed but worries that Haagar will balk at her decision to return to the islands. Haagar left Dawtuh Island for Harlem 24 years ago, “determined to wash the Geechee stain from herself and her children” (32). Despite encountering discrimination and harassment in New York, Haagar fought to establish a respected position in her community.
Amelia recalls the only time Haagar ever returned to Dawtuh island, a trip in 1913 meant to show off the prosperity of life on the mainland and convince her family to join her. Amelia observed how island life brought out a happier, healthier side of Myown. To Haagar’s chagrin, Myown reconnected with her sister Iona. Haagar had long ago snubbed Iona for her choice to remain on Dawtuh Island and marry St. Julien Last Child, the island’s only remaining Cherokee man. Amelia knows that Haagar will not allow another one of her descendants to be “lost” to the islands.
Parts 1-4 Analysis
Daughters of the Dust begins with a vivid description of how the Gullah-Geechee culture arose among enslaved Africans on the Sea Islands as a “blending of old and new” (3). “The Land” celebrates the way the Gullah-Geechee people “[hold] sacred the ways of the land from which they had come” (3). This preservation of African traditions is a key characteristic of Gullah-Geechee culture and will become a recurrent theme throughout the novel. In these early chapters, Dash emphasizes the difference between Gullah-Geechee culture and urban Black culture in the North through the alternating narratives of Elizabeth and Amelia. Elizabeth lives on Dawtuh Island (also known as St. Simon’s Island, SC), while Amelia lives in Harlem, New York. Amelia’s family has taken part in the Great Migration, the large-scale movement of Black people from the rural South to cities in the North, a pattern that began in the 1910s and continued through the 1920s.
The people raised on Dawtuh Island speak Gullah, a distinctive creole that incorporates African syntactic structures and loanwords like “buckra” to refer to white people. Amelia speaks a dialect of English that most closely resembles the “standard” English spoken by white Americans. Dash portrays this linguistic contrast in great detail as the novel progresses, also taking care to craft the dialogue in such a way as to accurately portray the unique pronunciations of Gullah, such as the use of “d” sounds in words like “dey” and “dem.” Elizabeth’s dialogue is unique, for as a child, she speaks only Gullah, but as an adult and after spending several years in finishing school, she can switch fluently between Gullah and the so-called “Standard English” dialect taught on the mainland.
In this early section of the novel, Dash quickly establishes the dominant theme of Cultural Preservation Versus Assimilation, which is most immediately apparent in Haagar’s determination to bring her family North in search of better opportunities. Decades before the primary storyline of the novel, she brought her daughter Myown to Harlem, New York, leaving behind the rest of the Peazant family on Dawtuh Island. Daughters of the Dust is primarily set in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance, a “golden age” that saw the flourishing of Black arts and culture in New York. Amelia enjoys the fruits of this cultural progress firsthand, becoming the first person in her family to attend college. As material evidence of Haagar’s success on the mainland, the Varnes family owns their own funeral home and is able to pay rent on an apartment in Harlem.
The Gullah-Geechee community is perceived by outsiders as “ignorant” and “low-status.” Accordingly, Haagar also believes that her family’s sociocultural advancement can only be achieved by washing the “Geechee stain” out of their lineage. Her attitude makes it clear that she has internalized the prevailing view that Black people living in the low country are “inferior” to other cultural groups, and she extends this contempt to her own family. Haagar believes that her family is foolish for not seeking the improved economic and educational opportunities available to Black people in the American South. She sees any distance she can put between herself and her ancestors as progress toward a better future. By moving away from Dawtuh Island, she hopes to shed the vestiges of a culture she associates with the trauma of slavery and poverty.
The ongoing Great Migration adds tension to the narrative, for Haagar is not the first Peazant to leave the Sea Islands, nor will she be the last. In Part 3, for example, Elizabeth names a longer list of relatives who have left for the mainland. This pattern reflects the trend of younger Black Americans moving northward in search of better opportunities and relief from the discriminatory laws of the South. This ongoing migration establishes tension between the younger generation and the “old ways” practiced by older Gullah-Geechee people on the Sea Islands.
By contrasting Amelia and Elizabeth’s narratives, Dash establishes another key theme: The Importance of Family and Community. Haagar, Myown, and Amelia are not wealthy, but life in Harlem has afforded them access to opportunities that are simply unavailable to their Southern relatives. However, despite their many material comforts and advantages, the family is not happy. Amelia lives under the domineering influence of Haagar, who seeks to control her every move. Her father is distant at best, and her mother, Myown, is lonely and isolated since leaving the rest of her family behind on Dawtuh Island. Myown’s isolation also appears to be impacting her physical health. Amelia is drawn to learn about her relatives to fill in the gaps in her history left by Haagar’s refusal to speak about the past.
As Amelia begins her investigations on Dawtuh Island, Elizabeth’s character clearly serves as her foil. Born and raised on Dawtuh Island except for her relatively brief time at a mainland finishing school, Elizabeth incorporates “the old ways” (23) into her daily life. She practices a form of folk spiritualism that she learned from her grandmother, which includes the crafting of scented oils and charms to provide protection and luck. Elizabeth is deeply entrenched in her community through her close bonds to her family members and her role as a teacher on Dawtuh Island’s only school.
Finally, Dash begins to explore the intricate and intimate process of Building Identity Through History and Storytelling. In Gullah, storytelling is called “telling de lie” (7) and is an important ritual. In Chapter 2, for example, Miz Emma Julia tells a creation myth to a young Elizabeth and her friends. This instance of sharing is a microcosm of how the oral storytelling tradition is used to preserve and pass on cultural folktales. This practice helps the Gullah-Geechee people to preserve important beliefs and traditions, passing them down from one generation to the next. It is important to note that this rich storytelling tradition is sharply contrasted by Haagar’s refusal to speak about the past to her own family. Haagar’s silence is yet another rejection of an aspect of Gullah-Geechee culture, and thus, Amelia is left to seek out her own knowledge by returning to the very source of her family’s history and identity: Dawtuh Island.
