Where It All Goes Down
The Oklahoma Panhandle, 1934-1935
If you've been following our coverage of Out of the Dust to this point, you've probably picked up that this book is the ultimate Based on a True Story Novel. While Karen Hesse could have written a decent novel about a girl who faces poverty and the loss of her mother in the early 2000s, the choice of the Dust Bowl during the 1930s as the book's setting is pretty crucial to the book's message.
Here's why: When Miss Freeland says "there are a thousand steps to take" before you get to major hardship that's been coming down the pike a long time, she's not joking.
The Dust Bowl was the worst man-made disaster the U.S. has ever experienced because it was rooted in making farming a business practice rather than strategically caring for the land. People overplanted crops, raised animals who ate up all the vegetation, and ploughed away the grass and topsoil that naturally retains water. So when the drought and winds came, the ground literally shriveled up and blew away—but getting to this point was a long time in the making.
What's this got to do with Billie Jo? If you look at the broader setting of the Dust Bowl and line it up with her life, it's easy to see that Ma's death is also a man-made disaster. It's a series of mistakes that turns fatal, and just as Depression-era farmers had to cope with the consequences of their poor farming practices, Billie Jo and Daddy must try to recover from their own mistakes.
In other words, this story wouldn't work as well set in another time period because the historical circumstances perfectly mirror what the characters themselves are going through.
In terms of place, the book's set in Cimarron County, located on the extreme western end of the Oklahoma Panhandle, so called because it really does look like the handle of a stove pot. Going with this metaphor, Billie Jo therefore lives on the very end of the handle, maybe where that little dangling metal thing sometimes is that lets you hang it up on a rack.
This is why Aunt Ellis, Arley, and Mad Dog talk about going over to Texas like it's no big deal, and why Mad Dog can visit so often after he goes to Amarillo—in reality, he's actually only going about one hundred and thirty miles from home.
But why the Oklahoma Panhandle? Why not some other state or part of Oklahoma? If you look at a map of the Dust Bowl, you'll see that the region Billie Jo's from is pretty much smack in the middle of the area most affected. The Oklahoma Historical Society reports that Cimarron and Beaver counties experienced the most devastation, and that 1935 was the worst year for dust storms in the area.
Hesse's choice in setting the story amidst some of the most destructive dust action Oklahoma saw in the Depression creates a metaphorical parallel with Billie Jo's own life—as the worst storms rage, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Billie Jo brings her world crashing down.
While no specific name is given for the town Billie Jo lives in, we know that it's somewhere close to a farming community called Joyce City. In Chapter 9, Ma sends Billie Jo to Mr. Hardly's store, telling her, "Don't go to Joyce City" (9.1). Although the community the Kelbys are part of is small yet self-sufficient, Joyce City is the place to be for all entertainment and social events. It's home to the Palace Theater, where Billie Jo plays multiple shows throughout the book, as well as the annual President Roosevelt birthday party and the hardware store.
Just as Hesse discovered in her research, the hardship of the dust storms wasn't the only aspect of people's lives. Having the story take place in the Kelbys' small town as well as a larger town like Joyce City gives us a larger view of the culture of the times.