Daddy named me Billie Jo. He wanted a boy. Instead, he got a long-legged girl with a wide mouth and cheekbones like bicycle handles. … By the summer I turned nine Daddy had given up about having a boy. He tried making me do. I look just like him, I can handle myself most everywhere he puts me, even on the tractor, though I don’t like that much.
At the beginning of Out of the Dust, the narrator and protagonist, Billie Jo Kelby, explains that her father wanted his first child to be a boy. However, he compromised by raising Billie Jo with a boy's name and teaching her to do farm work that, in the 1930s, typically would have been reserved for males. In this passage, Hesse establishes the central antagonism between Bayard and Billie Jo, who grows up knowing that her gender means she will always be a disappointment to her father, even as she does her best to fulfill the role of a farmer's son.
Now Livie’s gone west, out of the dust, on her way to California, where the wind takes a rest sometimes. And I’m wondering what kind of friend I am, wanting my feet on that road to another place, instead of Livie’s.
Early in the novel, Billie Jo's friend Livie Killian and her family leave the Oklahoma Panhandle in the hopes of finding work in California. As the Killians leave their farm to become "Dust Bowl migrants"—the term for people who left the Great Plains in the early 1930s because the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl had made it too difficult to sustain a farming livelihood—Billie Jo feels guilty that she is jealous of Livie's opportunity to escape. In this passage, Billie Jo admits that she wishes she could take Livie's place on the journey west. It is a significant passage because it sees Hesse establish Billie Jo's fantasy about getting "out of the dust"—i.e. leaving Oklahoma for a better life further west.
We haven’t had a good crop in three years, not since the bounty of ’31, and we’re all whittled down to the bone these days, even Ma, with her new round belly, but still when the committee came asking, Ma donated: three jars of apple sauce and some cured pork, and a feed-sack nightie she’d sewn for our coming baby.
In this passage, Billie Jo comments on how the family is starving and malnourished ("whittled down to the bone") after three years without a profitable wheat crop. But despite their poverty, Ma gives food and clothing to a local committee that comes collecting donations for people even needier than themselves. The passage is significant because it shows how even when faced with personal hardship, the Kelbys maintain a sense of pride and duty by helping those in their community who also need assistance.
We shake out our napkins, spread them on our laps, and flip over our glasses and plates, exposing neat circles, round comments on what life would be without dust. Daddy says, “The potatoes are peppered plenty tonight, Polly,” and “Chocolate milk for dinner, aren’t we in clover!” when really all our pepper and chocolate, it’s nothing but dust. … At least we’ve got milk. Even if we have to chew it.
In this passage, Hesse depicts the depressing, frustrating reality of life for those who lived through the Dust Bowl years in the Great Plains. With massive wind storms often blowing eroded topsoil into the air, families like the Kelbys would routinely find their homes full of dirt and dust that gets through every crack and seam in their rudimentary, shack-like home. To limit the amount of dust that gets into their food, Billie Jo keeps the crockery upside down until it is time to eat. However, they still have dust in everything they eat, leading Billie Jo's father to lighten the mood with verbal irony—jokes in which he pretends the dust is pepper or cocoa. Despite the dust, Billie Jo reminds herself that they are fortunate enough to be able to eat at a time when many others in their community are so poor they are starving.
I ask Ma how, after all this time, Daddy still believes in rain. “Well, it rains enough,” Ma says, “now and again, to keep a person hoping. But even if it didn’t your daddy would have to believe. It’s coming on spring, and he’s a farmer.”
In March 1934, Bayard wants to take a New Deal loan from the Roosevelt government to plant a new wheat crop to replace the ruined winter crop. He won’t have to pay until the crops come in. However, Ma worries it won’t rain, leading the couple to feud over the risk of taking on more debt. After Bayard goes out to do chores, Billie Jo asks her mother how her father could possibly believe it will rain after three years of drought. In this passage, Ma suggests that part of being a farmer means Bayard must hope—beyond reason—that they will have a crop to sell. If he succumbs to despair, the family will no choice but to abandon the farm and become Dust Bowl migrants, a prospect that brings with it only more uncertainty.
And as the dust left, rain came. Rain that was no blessing. It came too hard, too fast, and washed the soil away, washed the wheat away with it. Now little remains of Daddy’s hard work. And the only choice he has is to give up or start all over again.
After more giant dust storms blow soil across the farm, burying the wheat stalks or tearing them from the ground, rain finally falls. However, Billie Jo highlights the irony of how much-needed rain, when it falls too fast, cannot be absorbed by the dried-up topsoil. Instead, the dusty soil washes away to wherever the rainwater pools, and the poorly rooted wheat goes with it. In this passage, Hesse depicts the complexity of the environmental issue Dust Bowl farmers were faced with. More than rain, they needed gentle, steady rain that could return the ruined topsoil to normal.
I tore after her, then, thinking of the burning pail left behind in the bone-dry kitchen, I flew back and grabbed it, throwing it out the door. I didn’t know. I didn’t know Ma was coming back. The flaming oil splashed onto her apron, and Ma, suddenly Ma, was a column of fire. I pushed her to the ground, desperate to save her, desperate to save the baby, I tried, beating out the flames with my hands. I did the best I could. But it was no good. Ma got burned bad.
At a time when the Kelby family is already full of despair over their failing wheat crop, tragedy strikes. After Bayard leaves a pail of kerosene next to the wood-burning stove and Ma mistakenly pours it too close to the flame, Billie Jo tries to save the house from burning by chucking the burning pail outside. However, the fuel, used as lamp oil, starts a fire on Ma's apron. The accident leaves both Ma and Billie Jo badly burned. For Billie Jo, the burns are only on her hands, but Ma is severely burned all over her body and is left in intolerable pain and dehydration.
The women talked as they scrubbed death from our house. I stayed in my room silent on the iron bed, listening to their voices. “Billie Jo threw the pail,” they said. “An accident,” they said. Under their words a finger pointed. They didn’t talk about my father leaving kerosene by the stove. They didn’t say a word about my father drinking himself into a stupor while Ma writhed, begging for water. They only said, Billie Jo threw the pail of kerosene.
Following Ma's death in childbirth, local women clean the Kelbys' home. Billie Jo overhears them tacitly blaming her for Ma's death because she threw the pail of kerosene out the door without realizing that Ma had turned back inside after running out the door. In this passage, Billie Jo points out the injustice of her receiving all the blame when it was her father who left the kerosene in a dangerous place and he who hastened Ma's death by disappearing on a drinking binge when she needed his care. With this passage, Hesse shows how Billie Jo's and Bayard's dual complicity in Ma's death drives a wedge between them at a time when they only have each other to rely on for emotional support.
My father is waiting at the station and I call him Daddy for the first time since Ma died, and we walk home, together, talking. I tell him about getting out of the dust and how I can’t get out of something that’s inside me. I tell him he is like the sod, and I am like the wheat, and I can’t grow everywhere, but I can grow here, with a little rain, with a little care, with a little luck.
Following Ma's death, Billie Jo becomes fed up with her taciturn father and the pall of guilt hanging over the house. She finally fulfills her fantasy of getting "out of the dust" by riding a boxcar west. However, she turns around in Arizona after several days of travel, having realized she misses her father. After getting word to him of her return, Billie Jo finds her father waiting at the train station. In this passage, she comments on how she is finally able to overcome her emotional repression and tell him about her desire to get away. Having had an epiphany while away, she commits herself to the place she has always known and re-approaches her life with a more optimistic outlook.
And I know now that all the time I was trying to get out of the dust, the fact is, what I am, I am because of the dust. And what I am is good enough. Even for me.
Toward the end of the novel, Billie Jo is at peace with herself and her life. In this passage, she comments that she was eager to get away from the life she had always known, but she couldn't escape her identity. She says, "What I am, I am because of the dust," a line that acknowledges she couldn't escape the dust because the dust—a symbol for despair—has shaped her identity. By confronting her despair and persevering through hardship, she has become the person she is. Having come to this realization, she can accept herself.
