This Tender Land (53 page)

Because of his time with the Cardinals and because his teams at Lincoln School did so well, Mose acquired a national reputation, his image once gracing the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
. He parlayed his fame into an advocacy for Native American rights, particularly the welfare of children. The Lincoln Indian Training School closed in 1958. Shortly after that, Gallaudet University hired Mose as a coach and he moved his family to Washington, D.C., and was a not infrequent
visitor to legislators’ offices, where, with the words that flowed from his eloquent hands, he worked at raising the consciousness of the nation’s lawmakers. I visited him and his family many times across the years and was always happy to see that Mose’s journey had brought him to a place of understanding and of peace. He died of leukemia in 1986, with his wife and children at his bedside. Donna told me later that the final words Mose signed to her were these:
Not alone.

As I told you in the beginning, this is all ancient history. There are not many left who remember these things. But I believe if you tell a story, it’s like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.

MY GREAT-GRANDCHILDREN, WHEN
they visit, beg for stories about the four Vagabonds and their battle against the Black Witch. The tale I like telling best is the love story of the imp with his magic harmonica and the princess with the unlikely name of Maybeth Schofield, and how, after a long separation and many trials, they married and lived happily ever after on the banks of a river called the Gilead. Because that beautiful princess passed away quietly long before any of them were born, to these children she’s just part of a lovely fairy tale.

When they’ve gone away, back to their home in Saint Paul, I often rest in the shadow of the sycamore. I’m not alone in the house I built here. My sisterly companion is a woman to whom I made a promise under this same tree seven decades ago, a promise to return to the place where, for a moment on our odyssey in that distant summer, we’d been at peace. She is near the end of her own remarkable journey, which she foresaw long before anyone else. She’s still subject to fits, which she calls episodes of the divine, but has had to accept that some things—like the circumstances of her mother’s death and Albert’s—are far beyond her reach and ability. Even so, she has dramatically changed the lives of many. In the pale evening light, she walks from the house and sits with me beside the Gilead and takes
my hand. Our skin is blotched and wrinkled, but the love that binds us is eternally young. Brother and sister in spirit though not in blood, we are the last of the Vagabonds.

In every good tale there is a seed of truth, and from that seed a lovely story grows. Some of what I’ve told you is true and some . . . well, let’s just call it the bloom on the rosebush. A woman who can heal the afflicted? A girl who looks into the future and wrestles with what she sees there? Yet are these things more difficult to accept than that all of existence came out of a single, random moment when cosmic gases exploded? Our eyes perceive so dimly, and our brains are so easily confused. Far better, I believe, to be like children and open ourselves to every beautiful possibility, for there is nothing our hearts can imagine that is not so.

I AM INDEBTED,
as always, to my agent, Danielle Egan-Miller, and her team at Browne and Miller Literary Associates for their editorial comments, their business acumen, their enthusiasm, their support, and their friendship across so many years. I’ve been blessed.

I owe so much to my editors at Atria Books, Peter Borland and Sean deLone, who opened their arms to a pretty rough manuscript and generously applied their expertise. Thanks for helping to shape that early draft into the story I believe it was always meant to be.

For assistance with the historical backdrop of this tale, I owe thanks to the Blue Earth County Historical Society and the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center. Also a big thank-you goes out to Clare Pavelka of Red Wing Shoes for her dogged efforts to track down boot facts long ago buried in the dust of time.

Sadly, the stories of the ill-treatment of Native American children forced into government boarding schools are as numerous as the blades of grass on the prairies. For the story I’ve told, I am particularly grateful to the account of his own experience offered by Adam Fortunate Eagle in his fine memoir,
Pipestone.

Finally, to the baristas at Caribou Coffee and the Underground Music Café, where this story was written: Thanks for your smiles in the dark hours of every morning, the caffeine you supplied to start my engine, and your patience as I occupied a chair and table way beyond any reasonable time limit. I couldn’t have done it without you.

THE RIVER VOYAGE
upon which Odie O’Banion and his fellow Vagabonds embark in the summer of 1932 is a mythic journey. The reality of the Great Depression landscape that serves as its backdrop, however, was etched into the memory of my parents and the parents of those children who, like me, were born in a time of plenty following World War II. My father was a native of Oklahoma. I grew up listening to his stories of the Dust Bowl years, of foraging for wild greens to supplement meals, of watching mud rain from the skies. My mother was born in Ellendale, North Dakota, to a struggling family who could not afford to feed another mouth. At the age of four, she was sent to live with relatives in Wyoming, who eventually adopted and raised her.

The Great Depression was hard on almost everyone, but it was particularly devastating to families. In 1932, the United States Children’s Bureau reported that there were at least 25,000 families wandering the country. During the height of the Great Depression, an estimated 250,000 teenagers had left home, willingly or not, and had become itinerant.

When I began to consider the story I wanted to write, which, quite honestly, I envisioned as an update of
Huckleberry Finn
, the Great Depression appealed to me as the perfect, challenging setting. It was a time of desperation in our nation, with the best and the worst of human nature broadly on display. To create this setting as realistically as possible, I read countless first-person narratives, pored over reams of microfilmed newspapers from the day, and studied the vast photographic records of the time. As much as possible, I tried to hold to the economic and social truths of the period.

Particularly important to both that historic era and the story I created were the shantytowns that sprang up in cities across the nation. They were called Hoovervilles, a derisive jab at Herbert Hoover, president in the early years of the Depression. (A Hoover shoe was one with a hole in its sole; Hoover leather was the cardboard inserted to cover that hole.) These makeshift communities were built of scraps and were populated by those dispossessed as a result of the worldwide financial collapse. The people who lived there were the objects not only of charitable relief efforts but also of concerted efforts at eradication. The Hooverville in Saint Louis, which I included in the story, was the largest in the country, with a population of more than 5,000. The federal government cleared out this encampment in 1936, but small clusters of shacks endured until well into the 1960s.

I love the works of Charles Dickens, and in part, my decision to open
This Tender Land
in a fictional institution called the Lincoln Indian Training School was a nod to his powerful novels of social inequity. The history of our nation’s treatment of Native Americans is one of the saddest litanies of human cruelty imaginable. Among the many attempts at cultural genocide was a horribly ill-conceived program of off-reservation boarding schools initiated by Richard Henry Pratt, who famously declared that its purpose was to “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Beginning in the 1870s and continuing until the mid-twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Native children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to live in boarding schools far from their reservation homes. In 1925, more than 60,000 children were being housed in 357 of these institutions in thirty states. Life in an Indian boarding school wasn’t just harsh, it was soul-crushing. Children were stripped of their native clothing, hair, and personal belongings. They were punished for speaking their native language. They were emotionally, physically, and sexually abused. Although touted as a way to assimilate children into the white culture and teach them a productive trade, in truth, many of these schools
functioned as a pipeline for free labor, offering up the children as field hands or domestic help for local citizens.

For
This Tender Land
, I read dozens of personal narratives of life in these institutions, but I relied heavily on
Pipestone: My Life in an Indian Boarding School
, a memoir by Adam Fortunate Eagle, which recounts his days as a resident of the Pipestone Indian Training School in southwestern Minnesota. For some, Adam Fortunate Eagle may be a familiar name. He was one of the leaders of the Indian occupation of Alacatraz, which began in November 1969 and lasted for nineteen months, galvanizing Native activism across the nation.

In the early part of the twentieth century, a wave of Protestant revivalism swept the country, promulgated by the likes of William J. Seymour and the Azusa Street Revival, the evangelist Billy Sunday, and the charismatic faith healer Amy Semple McPherson. Although by the 1930s, much of the religious fervor had died down, revival tent crusades, like the Sword of Gideon Healing Crusade in my story, continued to be popular in the South and Midwest. In truth, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Sinclair Lewis and his novel
Elmer Gantry
, a scathing look at the religious hypocrisy he saw in his day. I have always been fascinated by Sharon Falconer, the story’s tent evangelist, a woman of deep and honest religious passion but also of worldly experience. My own Sister Eve is largely constructed on the framework of Lewis’s intriguing character.

Though much of my research was conducted in libraries and museums—hours in the Gale Family Library at the Minnesota History Center and in the Blue Earth County Historical Society’s History Center and Museum—I spent a great deal of time personally exploring the actual landscape of the story. I kayaked and canoed the waterways that Odie and his companions follow in the novel, and I walked much of the same ground they would have walked. I stood at the confluence of the Blue Earth and Minnesota Rivers, where the citizens of the fictional Hopersville erect their makeshift shelters, and I sat on the rock where Odie and Maybeth Scofield share a kiss.
I roamed the streets of the West Side Flats in Saint Paul, and despite all the remarkable changes in the landscape since the days in which the Vagabonds sought respite there, I was still able to see in my mind’s eye just where Gertie’s restaurant would have been and the boat works and the home where John Kelly’s baby brother might have been born.

In the end, here’s the truth behind the writing of my novel: Although I tried to be true to the spirit of the time and to use as much as possible the factual guideposts from my research,
This Tender Land
is simply a story. As the narrator, Odie O’Banion, freely admits near the novel’s end, “Some of what I’ve told you is true. The rest . . . well, let’s just call it the bloom on the rosebush.”

This reading group guide for
This Tender Land
includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

In Minnesota, in the summer of 1932, on the banks of the Gilead River, the Lincoln Indian Training School is a pitiless place where Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to Odie O’Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school.

After committing a terrible crime, Odie and Albert are forced to flee for their lives along with their best friend, Mose, a mute young man of Sioux heritage. Out of pity, they also take with them a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy. Together, they steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi in search of a place to call home. Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphan vagabonds journey into the unknown, crossing paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds.

1. Although Odie and Albert find themselves in a boarding school for Native American children, most of the Native children don’t actually speak in the story. The Native character whom readers get to know best is Mose, and he is mute and “speaks” only through sign language. Why do you think the author chose silence as a way of depicting the children at the school?

2. Trying to understand the nature of God is one of the many struggles for Odie during his experiences in the summer of 1932. Is Odie the only one struggling with this issue? What sense do you have concerning the way the other vagabonds feel about the nature of God? What about the people they meet on their travels? How does Odie’s relationship with God change over the course of his journey?

3. When Odie and Albert attempt to buy boots, the clerk is skeptical that Albert and Odie would be able to afford the $5 price tag. After Odie lies about getting the money from their father, a second clerk remarks, “If he got a job these days, he’s one of the lucky ones.” This is Odie and Albert’s first experience of life outside of the Lincoln School. What sense of the current state of the world do you get from this encounter?

4. When Odie is working for Jack in his orchard, Jack explain his religious philosophy, saying, “God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so.” Where does Jack think God is really to be found? What is it in Odie’s experience that makes him disagree with Jack’s outlook?