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

Part 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7: “Summer 1935”

Part 7, Poems 96-102 Summary

This section summarizes Poem 96: “The Dream,” Poem 97: “Midnight Truth,” Poem 98: “Out of the Dust,” Poem 99: “Gone West,” Poem 100: “Something Lost, Something Gained,” Poem 101: “Homeward Bound,” and Poem 102: “Met.”

Part 7 opens with a dream of Billie Jo’s in which she can touch and communicate with Ma’s piano: “Piano, my silent / mother, / I can touch you, / you are cool / and smooth / and willing / to stay with me / stay with me / talk to me” (193). In “Midnight Truth,” Billie Jo determines that her father’s emotional distance from her cannot be resolved. She decides to leave before he can allow himself to “rot […] away” from cancer and grief. She runs away in the dark and rides a boxcar west. Two days pass as she watches deserts and mountains, and she sees a young girl watching the train from a migrant camp.

A man boards the boxcar; he left his family in Kansas to ride the rails west in search of work. He and Billie Jo share stories of hardship. She offers him some of her biscuits. As Billie Jo talks about Ma and Daddy, she begins to feel that she left her father unfairly: “He had kept a home / until I broke it” (202). When Billie Jo falls asleep, the man steals the rest of her biscuits and deboards the train; he leaves a photo of his wife and family with his home address on the back. Billie Jo intends to mail it back to the wife and let her know the man is safe.

She gets off the train in Flagstaff, calls Mr. Hardly, and asks him to tell her father that she will return. She realizes that leaving is no better than staying, and in fact, is lonelier. Her father meets the train. Billie Jo tells him she wanted to be free of the dust, but that she “can’t get out of something / that’s inside” her (205). She tells him she is afraid he will die from cancer and he says he will go to the doctor. He tells her he finished the pond It is ready for filling, then swimming and fishing and he says she can plant flowers, too. They walk home and Billie Jo feels that she can forgive both her father and her for the accident now.

Part 7 Analysis

The dream that leads this section is instrumental in prompting Billie Jo’s climactic actions of running away and boarding the train. In the dream, the piano symbolizes Ma as Billie Jo yearns for Ma to exist: “cool / and smooth” instead of burned, touchable; instead of absent, able to listen talk with her instead of merely “haunt” her. Images of the pond appear in the dream, likened to a reflecting mirror that shows her “mother’s eyes” (194). The dream contains words and images that soothe and calm, but reality is just as harsh and difficult as ever when Billie Jo awakens—even more so now that her father shows signs of the skin cancer that killed his father. Her decision to leave in the night is paradoxical; she is mature and self-aware enough to sense that her present course in Joyce City will lead to a life filled with sadness and isolation, but her reactive choices are of a small child’s impulsive choice to run away. Her own reply to the possibility that Daddy might die of cancer and leave her alone suggest a child’s lack of wisdom that borders on petulance: “Well, I’m leaving first” (196).

Often middle grade and YA protagonists need a journey that takes them out of their ordinary world to make them wiser and more aware of life’s truths. Gaining perspective is possible only with distance, and once the perspective is clearer, the hero comes of age with new realizations and returns home (literally or figuratively). Billie Jo realizes the unfairness of her actions when she tells the migrant man on the train about her home and history. Hearing her own story aloud allows her to see her father for whom he really is: not a silent and cold man, but a man of steadiness and humility; someone flawed but strong. In her metaphor for her father as the sod, he has “reserves underneath / to sustain him” like the water deep under the surface that used to carry the prairie grasses through a drought. She sees that he cannot be torn up but will “stay rooted […] even with the double sorrow of / his grief and [her] own” (202).

Billie Jo’s breakthrough in understanding her father is the key to her coming-of age. Once she admits to herself that her decision to leave was a poor one, she turns for home. Intuitively now from a more mature mindset, she calmly though bluntly verbalizes her needs to her father. Her reward comes with his promise to see Doc Rice and the hopeful signs of what a future at home might look like: a pond, fish for dinner, flowers, even swimming. Finally, her changed outlook allows her to forgive him for the accident and herself for “all the rest” (206), implying that Billie Jo now sees how much burden of blame she laid on herself beyond the careless placement of the kerosene.