Out of the Dust
Name: ___________________________________________________ Date: ______________________
Section 6: Blame through The Path of Our Sorrow
1. Why didn’t Billie Jo’s Aunt Ellis take the newborn baby back to
2. What does Billie Jo hear the women saying about her after her mother’s death?
3. Why does Billie Jo sit alone behind Arley Wanderdale’s house?
4. What advice does President Roosevelt give the farmers in Roots?
5. What are the empty spaces Billie Jo and her father are trying to fill?
6. Why is Billie Jo’s father digging a hole in their yard?
7. What does Billie Jo say she will never be able to forgive her father for as long as she lives?
8. When Billie Jo hears about
9. In Boxes, what does Billie Jo talk about that she keeps in her closet?
10. What did Mrs. Brown’s cereus plant do at
11. What does Miss Freeland say the world needed from
12. How big does Billie Jo say the sorrow is that is upon wheat farmers like her father?
Section 6 Part I: Using Prior Knowledge and Contextual Clues
Below are the sentences in which the vocabulary words appear in the text. Read the sentence. Use any clues you can find in the sentence combined with your prior knowledge, and write what you think the words in bold mean.
1. My father, hunched over, said nothing.
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2. They didn’t say a word about my father drinking himself into a stupor while Ma writhed, begging for
water.
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3. My father stares out across his land, empty but for a few withered stalks like the tufts on an old man’s
head.
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4. We squeezed more cattle, more sheep, onto less land, and they grazed down the stubble till they
reached root.
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Part II: Determining the Meaning: Match the vocabulary words to their dictionary definitions.
___27. hunched A. short stiff stalks that remain after harvesting
___28. stupor B. bent
___29. tufts C. short cluster of strands, as of hair or grass
___30. stubble D. a state of reduced sensibility; a daze