I am a storyteller. I live in a house in the shade of a sycamore tree on the banks of the Gilead River. My great-grandchildren, when they visit me here, call me old.
In the Prologue, before Chapter One, the protagonist and first-person narrator Odie O’Banion introduces himself to the reader. He is clearly writing from a point well into the future as he mentions having great-grandchildren whereas the narrative is mostly a single summer when he was a child. It is an interesting choice by the author to have his narrator kick off things in this way. For one, the term “storyteller” carries with it certain connotations associated with fiction, tall tales, and a level of deception. An intuitive reader might well wonder whether everything that the narrator tells from this point going to be entirely truthful. Another interesting aspect of opening the story in this way is that it immediately undercuts any dramatic tension over whether Odie makes it out of his situation since, clearly, he enjoys a long period of existence between the events of the story and the point from which he is remembering them.
I wanted to get him back on track, thinking about Saint Louis as our ultimate destination and our real family there as the true purpose of our journey. I planned to segue into memories of Aunt Julia and our mother and father, and tug at Albert’s heartstrings until the resonant music of longing brought him to his senses.
Odie and his brother Albert are joined by two friends from tribal reservation school they all attend in running away following a connected string of problematic events. The two brothers are the only white students in the entire school. The adults in charge of the school terrorize the students with overzealous corporal punishment among other things and the four kids take off because of that underlying horror as well as the recent events which have put them in jeopardy. They are at the school as a result of being orphaned with the only known relative being Aunt Julia who has been sending them money regularly. Except that money has never been getting to the two boys. Aunt Julia thus represents a sort of dreamworld where all their miseries will come to an end if only they can get there.
The newspaper was the Mankato Daily Free Press, published in the city to the east, the direction the Gilead was taking us. This was the headline: THEFT AND KIDNAPPING! NOW MURDER?
Complicating the issue of whether Aunt Julia will represent safe harbor and escape from oppressive brutality is the fact that the four runaways have become infamous across the country. One of the four is vagabonds is a younger girl named Emmy whom the three boys are being accuse do kidnapping. In addition to that crime, they also face suspicions of being the masked assailants who allegedly beat up the assistant superintendent, robbed the school safe, and murdered the abusive groundskeeper whose more important job was delivering the sadistic corporal punishment to the boys though, of course, that part of the murder victim’s life is not part of the newspaper coverage.
