Traveling the Heroine’s Journey in Hard Times
In many ways, Ruby Lee Becker, the main character in Unspoken, is a heroine on the classic hero’s journey — with modifications for her gender. To follow the Heroine’s Journey in the United States circa 1930s, she’ll need to establish her own agency, confront her own internal obstacles, and push back on society’s limitations on women.
The historical novel opens in 1935 when the massive Black Sunday dust storm strikes the small Texas Panhandle town that’s home to Ruby Lee Becker and her farming family, and it spans the next 15 years through hard times, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II, as she tries to recover what’s she’s lost, both emotionally and financially.
As a ten-year-old at Unspoken’s start, Ruby is desperate to make sense of an upside-down world where you can’t reliably breathe clean air — which is especially deadly for the young, the elderly, and the sickly. They’d contract dust pneumonia, as it was known to doctors. To Ruby Lee, it was a plague. “This brown plague was different,” she thinks. “Nobody knew how you could fix air that wasn’t fit to breathe.”
This is the world she’s inherited, has known since she was able to walk, and now its conditions threaten to claim her. She, too, is prone to coughing up dirt. To survive, she’s sent east where the air isn’t dust-filled. It’s an agonizing decision her mother, Willa Mae, will forever regret. But Ruby doesn’t understand that. She rebels at her circumstances, and she grows up longing for the one thing she cannot have: the home she knew with her momma’s love and her family. Despite how miserly their Depression-era home was, it was still home. Except their home came with air too toxic for her to survive.
We know now, with the hindsight of history, how and when the drought and blowing dust storms finally came to an end, and when those who lived there could breathe freely again. But nobody living in those times could know that. So Ruby can’t return, and has to make the most of the new home she’s landed in. It’s not the home she wants. But often, she feels it’s the home she deserves, as she (mistakenly) blames herself for what got her sent there: “From somewheres deep a shameful feeling stirred. I pushed it back in place, buried where it could not be exhumed.”
This is her wound, one she’ll carry deep, no matter her considerable successes and achievements as an adult.
Even as she grows up, Ruby is certain her mother abandoned her, and she’s certain she knows why. In her child’s mind, she’s sure a profound power she possesses caused deaths she didn’t intend, and she’ll hide it to shield herself from discovery.
While Ruby doesn’t lack for shelter, clothing, and food during the six years she spends in her newfound home, she does lack for emotional connections with the adults who supervise her. Ironically, she’s exposed to so much more there — different kinds of people, kids from circumstances like hers and not, better education, varying situations to navigate — than she’d ever have experienced back home. As she develops a hard shell to prevent more hurt, she’s quick to learn and picks up crafty survival skills many adults would envy.
In 1939, when Ruby’s 13 going on 14 and trapped at the State Home for Neglected and Dependent Children, she sets out for home on her own:
Minus my twenty dollars, I had only one way home. I pulled on my overalls, jammed on a cap I’d found near the boys’ dormitory—my hair newly cut and short enough to stay under it—and lifted my sack.
It was early on Sunday in March, and the campus was still quiet. The only activity beyond the gate was a messenger boy on a bicycle. He pedaled onto the campus to the administration building and hopped off his bike. He was a half-pint, maybe eight or nine, his Western Union cap sunk low enough to cover half his ears. His baggy uniform was belted tight and patched in a few spots.
“Who ya looking for?” I asked. “Main office is closed.”
He read the superintendent’s name from his Western Union envelope.
“Then you want the auditorium, there, go to the office backstage. He sets up early for church service.” I pointed out the route through the trees. “Easier to run over.”
“Thanks. I’m in a hurry—first day on the job.”
When the double doors of the auditorium swallowed him up, I pedaled his bicycle lickety-split to the highway.
Some readers have found Ruby to be “a little Oliver Twist-y,” since she tackles and surmounts obstacles left and right, on her journey back home across Texas.
As Ruby Lee matures, and endures, she’s surrounded by found family, if only she could accept them. But that hard shell does not crack easily, which robs her of connections she’ll eventually realize she craves. Until then, as she says of herself, “I put myself up high, on a shelf, in a dusty corner, where nobody looked. Where nuthin could touch me.”
Over the course of her time away, longing for a home she’s conjured into a magical near-castle, Ruby develops the tenacity, the quick-witted thinking, and the street savvy to make her way back. She’s determined to stake her claim there, no matter the desolate conditions she finds. As a resourceful adult who has long dreamed of a home and family that can’t ever be, she will inevitably recognize what’s she longed for can’t exist.
By then, she’ll be ready to face what’s gone unspoken, and fashion something new.
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