I loved this book so much that I want to convince as many people as possible to read it immediately. Not only because I believe it to be appropriate for us all in this time of turmoil in our world where fear rules and in turn breeds hypocrisy, tribalism and othering, but because it is simply a mesmerising experience and a masterpiece of writing and storytelling. At once an escape and a rude awakening about the inequalities of our collective past.
With a tad of the mystical thrown into his narrative, Krueger has a gentle and enticing way of coaxing the reader along, in this case on an adventurous journey down the Mississippi River during the great depression on a canoe with four ‘vagabonds.’
Whilst reading this book I was once again reminded that nations all over the world carry shared guilt regarding the historical ill treatment of fellow earth dwellers. The atrocities against Native Americans are some of the saddest examples of these cruelties, and the off-reservation boarding schools where Indians (Native Americans) kids were sent after they were kidnapped from their families, often the scenes of many of these crimes.
One such school is the Lincoln Indian Training School where Odie O’Banion and his brother Albert are orphans and the only two white boys. It’s a pitiless place with its only purpose: “To kill the Indian and to save the man”. The children are used for slave labour on the neighbouring farms, starved and Odie is often singled out for ruthless punishment.
Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime (Odie was defending himself against a brutal attack by Vincent de Marco, an abusive overseer), he and his brother, their best friend, Mose (an Indian boy whose tongue was cut out as a baby) and a little girl named Emmy, who lost her mother in a tornado that summer of 1932, steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi to take Odie and Albert to their only relative, an aunt in Saint Louis.
Their journey of adventure is an odyssey of sorts as they grow and transform while crossing paths with all that typified the period during the Great Depression: hunger, shantytowns (Hoovervilles), bootlegging, prostitution, faith healers, crooks, murderers, losers, displaced families and lost souls of all kinds.
This Tender Land is an epic vividly depicted with a wonderful cast of characters, all carrying their own losses, hopes, dreams, guilt and love.
I’ll conclude with a quote from one of Krueger’s colourful characters and his view on fear: “…people are most afraid of things they don’t understand, and if something frightens you, you should get closer to it. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t still be an awful thing, but the awful you knew is easier to handle than the awful you imagined.”
