Out of the Dust

 Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse

One of the things I continually picked up on as I was reading this book was the idea of hope. Each character seemed to have their own symbol of hope. For Ma it was the apples. She nurtures her true apple trees, urging them to grow even in the dust and lack of water (43). They also connect her to Billie Jo. The entry on page 43 talks about when Ma planted the apple trees before Billie Jo was born "that she and they might bring forth fruit/into our home,/together." (43). Billie Jo looks forward to the apples and we find out that she also loves apples. Two entries later we see her again connect Ma and the trees to one another when she says that the apples will be ready to eat around the time when the baby is born (45).
Bayard's symbol of hope is the rain as well as water in general. His connection is to the land. He is a farmer, and in Billie Jo's eyes he is even a part of the land. She says, "I tell him he is like the sod,/ and I am like the wheat" (205). Pa keeps waiting for rain, and when it comes he tries again to plant his wheat, but the dust keeps coming back, taking away his hope. He finally decides to dig his pond. This, again, is him finding hope in water. If the pond fills then the drought will be done which will mean things will grow again and he can go back to farming. If the pond doesn't fill then it will be just like Billie Jo says, he will have dug his own grave. In the end he must compromise with the earth. The rain comes and it will grow things for him, but he must learn to care for it better.
Billie Jo's symbol of hope is the piano. When she can play the piano she is hopeful. She finds hope through playing the piano in the beginning because she sees it as a way of getting out of Oklahoma. It's her big break! She can go play on the radio or play concerts. She plays local concerts to help better herself and make the path that she hopes will lead her out. When her hands no longer play and when her Ma and the baby have died we see that she has lost hope. Not only does she not have much hope of her and her father being able to carry on without her Ma, but she no longer has the hope of her music to carry her away because her hands won't play anymore. Her hands become a symbol along with the piano. They "scream with pain", fighting against her hope, but she tries anyway for a while (135). She veers away from the piano at times, letting the state of her hands and the tragedy of what has happened take away her hope. The images of her hands kept coming to my mind as I was reading this. They were always really vivid in her entries, "The doctor cut away the skin on my hands, it hung in/crested strips./ He cut my skin away with scissors,/then poked my hands with pins to see what I could/feel" (62). This image made my stomach turn. Again and again she describes the "lumps of flesh" that once were her hands (73). She becomes really worried not only about how she uses her hands and what she can and can't do now, but about what other people think and say about them. The hands that once provided her hope and happiness are now a source of pain and remembrance of the blame that she puts on herself and her father.

I read this book for the first time when I was in third grade, and I read it at least three or four times after that throughout my elementary, junior high, and high school years. Reading it again now that I'm through college, I found that I read it through a different lens. I still picked up on some of the same elements, but I feel like the images were stronger, and I feel like I picked up on the themes a lot better. As a child I read the book wanting the enjoyment and entertainment out of it. I was interested in the time period and I loved talking to my grandparents and finding out what they had to say about the time period and what happened during the dust bowl for what they remember. This time when I read it, I found that I read it as a teacher, looking for the connections I could help my students make if they were to read it in class. I think that this is definitely a good book to use when making connections between the literature and history. It would work with many different age groups, because the level of the text makes it very accessible, but a teacher could very easily up the level of the reading through the questions they posed to the students and the discussions they led in connection with the book.