“We’re haunted by settlers and their descendants.”

“Think how white people believe their houses or yards or scenic overlooks are haunted by Indians, when it’s really the opposite,” the historian says. One of Tookie’s co-workers, a historian, tells her stories of 19th-century white doctors who robbed Indian graves. After Tookie’s sentence is commuted and she finds a job working at a bookstore specializing in Native literature, she finds that white people keep rushing up to her and her co-workers to tell them the story of the time they found an Indian skeleton on their land and kept it under their beds.

As Erdrich is quick to make clear, in America, that’s traditionally the province of white people. Tookie is not, though, the only one who fails to offer the dead their due in this book. And later, when she’s haunted by a ghost, she suspects she might have it coming because of what she did before.Īfter all, wouldn’t a ghost, Tookie asks her husband, want to visit “people like me? … People who dishonor the dead.” Tookie didn’t know that, but she’s still sentenced to 60 years in jail when she’s caught.

Tookie’s crush set her up: She didn’t want Tookie to steal a body out of pure sentiment, but as a way to smuggle drugs across state lines. The scene is appealingly screwball, like a heist movie by way of Edward Gorey, but it carries weight. She wraps a dead man up in a tarpaulin, ties his jaw with a silk scarf, and sticks him in a refrigerated produce truck to steal him away from his lover, all at the behest of her own crush. But what strikes me the most about The Sentence, here as we prepare to enter the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, surrounded by loss, is how much time it devotes to the question of what we owe the dead, and whether we have failed to deliver.įor our protagonist Tookie, desecrating a body is her original sin. It’s about a lot of other things, too: the pandemic, and being a Native person in America, and the carceral state, and perhaps especially books. Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, the Vox Book Club’s pick for February, is a novel about how we treat our dead. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.

Louise erdrich the sentence