The emotional center of Out of the Dust is Billie Jo’s relationship with her parents. In the beginning of the novel, her relationship with her mother and father is relatively straightforward. She loves her mother but wishes she would be more affectionate. Meanwhile, she and her father are a lot alike because her father raised Billie Jo like she was his son. However, these relationships get thrown into disarray after Billie Jo’s mother dies suddenly from an accident for which Billie Jo and her father are partially responsible. After the accident, Billie Jo forgives her mother for her faults, but it takes her a long time to forgive herself and her father for the role they played in her death. By illustrating the difficult journey Billie Jo and her father take to forgiving themselves, each other, and Billie Jo’s mother, the novel emphasizes the importance of forgiveness to a person’s relationships. Forgiving someone for their faults or actions, Out of the Dust suggests, allows people to move on, connect, and support one’s family members, while the novel links refusing to forgive with refusing to heal.
Following his wife’s death, Billie Jo’s father becomes reserved and stops acting like a father for some time. Like Billie Jo, he blames himself for the death of Billie Jo’s mother and, for a long time, he does not want to live. Similarly, Billie Jo barely speaks to her father for the first year after her mother dies, and she explicitly says that she blames him for her mother’s death. However, Billie Jo and her father repair their relationship after Billie Jo runs away from home. While she is away, she realizes she still loves her father and would rather be with a broken version of him than on her own. Once Billie Jo and her father are willing and able to speak to each other about what happened, they’re able to begin to repair their relationship. And although things never go back to the way they were before the accident, they manage to make peace with what happened and move on with their lives. It’s significant that following Billie Jo’s return home, she and her father both seek help for chronic medical issues—Billie Jo’s burnt hands and her father’s cancerous skin spots—as this represents their promise to continue to be there for each other. Forgiving one’s family members, the novel suggests, opens people up to being able to give and accept much-needed support.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family and Forgiveness ThemeTracker
Family and Forgiveness Quotes in Out of the Dust
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.
He got a redheaded, freckle-faced, narrow-hipped girl
with a fondness for apples
and a hunger for playing fierce piano.
I wish she’d give me a little more to hold on to than
“I knew you could.”
Instead she makes me feel like she’s just
taking me in like I was
so much flannel dry on the line.
But Ma says, “Can’t you see
what’s happening, Bayard?
The wheat’s not meant to be here.”
And Daddy says,
“What about those apple trees of yours, Pol?
You think they are?
Nothing needs more to drink than those two.
But you wouldn’t hear of leveling your apples,
would you?
Daddy was just seventeen
when he fought in the
Great War off in France.
There’s not much he’s willing to say about those days, except about the poppies.
He remembers the poppies,
red on the graves of the dead.
I looked at Ma
so pregnant with one baby.
“Can you imagine five?” I said.
Ma lowered herself into a chair.
Tears dropping on her tight stretched belly,
she wept
just to think of it.
Daddy called to me. He asked me to bring water,
Ma was thirsty.
I brought up a pail of fire and Ma drank it. She had
given birth to a baby of flames. The baby
burned at her side.
But the grasshoppers ate every leaf,
they ate every piece of fruit.
Nothing left but a couple apple cores,
hanging from Ma’s trees.
I couldn’t tell her,
couldn’t bring myself to say
her apples were gone.
I never had a chance.
Ma died that day
giving birth to my brother.
“Billie Jo threw the pail,”
they said. “An accident.”
they said.
Under their words a finger pointed.
My father will stay, no matter what,
he’s stubborn as sod.
He and the land have a hold on each other.
But what about me?
My father used to say, why not put those hands to good use?
He doesn’t say anything about “those hands”
anymore.
Only Arley Wanderdale talks about them,
and how they could play piano again,
if I would only try.
I think about Ma
and how that birth went.
I keep the kids out and listen behind me,
praying for the sound of a baby
crying into this world,
and not the silence
my brother brought with him.
And the cry comes
and I have to go away for a little while
and just walk off the feelings.
My father and I,
we can’t soothe each other.
I’m too young,
he’s too old,
and we don’t know how to talk anymore
if we ever did.
My father has a raised spot
on the side of his nose
that never was there before
and won't go away.
And there’s another on his cheek and two more on his neck,
and I wonder
why the heck is he fooling around.
He knows what it is.
His father had those spots too.
I thought maybe if my father ever went to Doc Rice
to do something about the spots on his skin,
Doc could check my hand too,
tell me what to do about them.
But my father isn’t going to Doc Rice,
and now
I think we’re both turning to dust.
My father’s digging his own grave,
he calls it a pond,
but I know what he’s up to.
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.
We both stared in wonder
at the pond my daddy made
and she said,
a hole like that says a lot about a man.
Sometimes, while I’m at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play.
