Out of the Dust

This section summarizes Poem 1: “Beginning: August 1920,” Poem 2: “Rabbit Battles,” Poem 3: “Losing Livie,” Poem 4: “Me and Mad Dog,” Poem 5: “Permission to Play,” Poem 6: “On Stage,” and Poem 7: “Birthday for FDR.”

Thirteen-year-old protagonist Billie Jo describes her birth on the bare kitchen floor in the first poem, “Beginning: August 1920.” Her earliest memories concern her long limbs and “restless” activity getting in the way of her parents in their small home in the Oklahoma Panhandle’s Cimarron County. Ma and Pa tried for more children as Billie Jo grew, but had none; now, though, Ma is pregnant. An addition to their small family is exciting, especially because no relatives figure prominently in their lives. Aunt Ellis, Daddy’s sister, lives in Lubbock; Daddy’s father is dead from skin cancer; and Ma’s only relative is a great-uncle “rotting away in that room down in Dallas” (5). Billie Jo thinks Daddy wanted a boy when she was born and wonders if the new baby will be a boy.

Billie Jo offers details about her daily life in the next several poems. In “Rabbit Battles,” she thinks two neighbor men “ought to just shut up” (6) about their rabbit-killing competition; the rabbits are only after crops because humans destroy so much prairie vegetation.