Weaving colors into a white landscape: unpacking the silences in Karen Hesse's children's novel Out of the Dust.(Critical essay)

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The children's novel Out of the Dust (Hesse, 1997) is an evocative portrayal of the drought and dust storms that devastated Midwestern farms in the 1930s. Through the voice of her 13-year-old narrator, Hesse intertwines history and free verse poetry to create what many readers, including myself, find to be a moving depiction of the Oklahoma Dustbowl experience. The novel's power has been widely recognized, winning a number of prestigious honors, including the Newberry medal.

In addition to its critical success, Out of the Dust is a valuable text in the classroom (King & Nisbet, 2002; Simon & Johnson, 2003). With the same setting as the opening of The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck, 1939) and with a writing style and vocabulary that make it immensely readable, Out of the Dust helps build background knowledge for students' understanding of Steinbeck's novel (Wilhelm, Baker, & Hackett, 2001).

Moreover, Hesse's novel offers readers historical context and complex characters that flesh out the stories Steinbeck tells about the Okie experiences, as well as those presented in other iconic Dustbowl texts like Dorothea Lange's photographs or Woody Guthrie's music. By using Out of the Dust, teachers offer students not only an engaging text, but one that can provide academic scaffolds to other historical and literary texts.

As a result of all that this celebrated children's text offers, it is much more likely to be singled out for acclamation than critique. It is my stance in this article, however, that using Hesse's novel in the classroom is problematic without a critical literacy framework (Janks, 2000; McDaniel, 2004). That novel, like many current and classic texts, depicts the 1930s Dustbowl exclusively in relation to White experiences. Using that novel without questioning the limitations of those representations serves to privilege White experiences and to marginalize the experiences of Oklahomans of color as well as significant aspects of Oklahoma and U.S. history. The process of uncovering those marginalized stories with the goal of problematizing the dominant depiction of the Dustbowl is the focus of this article.

The Position of the Narrator

Stories are always framed and limited by their narrators' positions in the world. My focus on the histories of Oklahoma, a state I have never visited, is influenced by my positionality as are my accounts of the stories I present. In recognition of this influence, I preface my narration of these histories with an account of my positionality in relation to this article's focus.