Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of the Dust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, Survival, and the Dust Bowl
Poverty, Charity, and Community
Coming of Age
Family and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Billie Jo walks past the Crystal Hotel and sees a man on his knees, scraping mud. She thinks about how her mother also scraped up mud around the house to ensure everything stayed as clean as possible. Now that her mother is gone, the task of scraping mud falls to Billie Jo because her father will not do it. Billie Jo wouldn’t mind scraping the mud except that it hurts her hands. However, she knows she needs to do it because her mother would haunt her if she didn’t.
Without her mother in the picture, Billie Jo has more duties than before even though she is less capable of carrying them out because of her injured hands. Despite the pain certain tasks cause, Billie Jo completes them as a way of honoring her mother’s memory and attempting to find normalcy in her desperate situation.
Themes
