Treasures in the Dust (Avenues) - Softcover

Porter, Tracey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0064407705 ISBN 13: 9780064407700

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

Annie May Weightman and Violet Cobble are best friends and neighbors. They live in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression. This is their story, told in two voices. Annie is happiest on the ground, sifting through the dust for traces of the past. But Violet is a dreamer always playing make believe to escape, to fly away from the dusty land. In this beautifully crafted first novel, poet Tracey Porter joins together two unique voices to tell a larger story of America, its hopes and dreams, during a time when thousands fled their prairie homes in search of work, food, and shelter.

Annie and Violet's story is one of friendship and courage--treasures shining through in the face of hardship.

About this title

About the Author:

Tracey Porter is the author of Treasures in the Dust and A Dance of Sisters. Her most recent novel, Billy Creekmore, was named to Oprah.com's Kids' Reading List, compiled by the American Library Association. For the past twenty years she has taught middle school at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

Mama says the first storm came the day I learned to walk. I've heard the story so many times I know it by heart. I was fixed on her apron, fussing to be picked up while she kneaded dough. Something outside took my interest, and as if I had known how all along, I let go. Before I could fall down the stairs, Mama scooped me up in her arms. She danced me across the porch when a strange sight stopped her.

Our yard was full of a mismatched flock of birds. Mourning doves and sparrows, blackbirds and starlings circled themselves and squawked. Some were nervous and agitated. Others were so weak they dragged their wings on the dry, hard earth that was once our vegetable garden. Off in the distance, a black cloud rolled over the land. Big as a mountain, it looked like it could cover all of Cimarron County. Lightning scattered the birds across the sky. Holding me tightly against her chest, Mama ran to the field calling for Pa.

For the rest of the day and through the night, my family huddled together under the kitchen table. Pa turned it into a tent by hanging blankets over it and weighting them down with jars of Mama's canned fruit. Mama held me under her apron to keep the dust out of my lungs. My big brother, Liam, says the wind was so strong the dust sounded like sand rattling against the windows.

That was the first storm my family faced. By the time I was talking, we had struggled through dozens. Dust is as much a part of my life as sunlight and air. Sometimes it is invisible, mostly it is silent, but it is always with us. It drifts through our house like a ghost, partially filling a teacup left out on the counter, smudging the tops of picture frames and the blue willow platter hanging on the wall. It scrapes the key when Pa winds the clock. It seeps through cracks in the windows and fills the grooves in the floorboards. We hear it grinding into the wood when we walk. It covers my pillow when I sleep. In the morning the only white space is where I've laid my head. Days after a storm, the ceiling sags with the weight of the dust collecting in the attic. Pa shovels it out through the ventilation window, and it becomes a waterfall of dust.

Mama says the look of the land makes her heartsick. Maybe because it's all I've ever known of home, I think it is pretty here. Dunes shift and change every day. They curve around the barn like arms and change a fence clogged with tumbleweeds into a dinosaur spine.

Sometimes the winds expose Indian campgrounds that time buried long ago. After a storm I go out searching for arrowheads. I keep a shoe box of treasures hidden under my bed. There are spearheads carved from flint, and tiny arrowheads no longer than my thumbnail carved from obsidian. I look at them at night before I turn down the lamp, imagining what life was like when the Plains Indians lived here, and there was nothing but prairie grass and buffalo as far as the eye could see.

When Mama looks sad, I climb into her lap and hold her. She worries that a spell of hard times is surrounding my childhood. She wants me to know what it's like to play hide-and-seek in a cornfield. She wants to see me skipping through a spring shower, mouth open, drinking drops of rain. Sometimes she worries we'll have to move west and work the fields like so many other families in our county, but Pa says this won't happen to us.

The old rocking chair creaks on the porch. Cicadas rustle their wings. I want to tell her what the storms have taught me. I want to tell her how I want to be an archaeologist and travel the world digging for the past. But she seems too sad for me to talk of when I will leave the family. My name is Annie May Weightman. I am eleven, watching the sunset from my mother's lap.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0064407705
• ISBN 13: 9780064407700
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160