This Tender Land

“In the beginning, after he labored over the heavens and the earth, the light and the dark, the land and sea and all living things that dwell therein, after he created man and woman and before he rested, I believe God gave us one final gift. Lest we forget the divine source of all that beauty, he gave us stories.” 

The narrator’s opening comments both suggest his purpose and draw attention to his technique as a storyteller. He presents storytelling as a means of appreciating beauty. His function as a storyteller differs from that of a historian, who tries to objectively recount what has happened. Instead, the narrator intends to move and inspire.

“The stories you hear now are the ones I tell you. And they mean just what I say they mean.” 

Not all the violence practiced at Lincoln School is physical. Here, Mrs. Brickman expresses her intent to select stories for her students and to impose her interpretations upon them. These stories include not only the fables she tells them after dinner but also the broader narratives about the treatment of Indigenous peoples in the United States.

“You tell stories but they’re real. There are monsters and they eat the hearts of children.”

As Mose observes, the stories Odie tells have real-world counterparts. By reshaping his life experiences into stories, Odie processes those events, connects with others, and enjoys a degree of control that he lacks in real life. The “monsters” rarely, if ever, come out ahead in his stories.