When Fiction and Fact Blur

I was taken by Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence from the start, lingering over the epigraph,

“From the time of birth to the time of death, every word you utter is part of one long sentence.”

–Sun Yung Shin, Unbearable Splendor

Getting past the opening paragraph took longer, the word ‘sentence’ taking on a different meaning.

“While in prison, I received a dictionary….The first word I looked up was the word ‘sentence.’ I had received an impossible sentence of sixty years from the lips of a judge who believed in an afterlife. So the word with its yawning c, belligerent little e’s, with its hissing sibilants and double n’s, this repetitive bummer of a word made of slyly stabbing letters that surrounded an isolate t, this word was in my thoughts every moment of every day.”

The Sentence is narrated mostly by Tookie, a Native woman in her thirties living in Minnesota when her prison sentence begins. Raised mostly by neighbors and teachers – her mother “was there but not there” – Tookie learned to fend for herself as a child. She doesn’t know how she got the name Tookie, or even remember her real name. Tempted by $26,000, a teacher’s annual salary, Tookie agrees to retrieve the body of her distraught girlfriend’s ex-lover – her girlfriend doesn’t trust funeral homes. It’s a costly favor – Tookie forgot to check the armpits and learns transporting drugs taped to a dead body is a serious crime. In prison, the gifted dictionary, the prison library and the “library” in her head – books she’d read as a child and young adult – keep Tookie mostly sane. After ten years, Tookie is stunned when her sentence is commuted – the lawyer she thought was incompetent had actually been tirelessly fighting on her behalf. Free, excited and terrified, Tookie needs a job.

“Though now I could operate an industrial sewing machine and work a printing press, the most important skill I’d gained in prison was how to read with murderous attention. The prison libraries had been deep in crafting books. At first I read everything, even knitting instructions…everything, every single Great Books of the World, Philippa Gregory and Louis L’Amour. Jackie Kettle sent a book, faithful, every month. But I dreamed of choosing a book from a library or a bookshop.”

Jackie, the teacher who gifted Tookie the dictionary, manages a small bookstore in Minneapolis specializing in Native American books. Over the next few years, Tookie works hard selling books and running the bookstore. After work, she roams Minneapolis by bus; she’d lived in the city with her mother as a child, but it had changed much since the 1980s.

“It was thrilling to be carried along the streets, scant notion where I was going, into neighborhoods inhabited by surprising people. Women in billowing fuchsia robes and purple head scarves roamed the sidewalks. I saw Hmong people, Eritrean people. Mexican. Vietnamese. Ecuadorian. Somali. Laotian. And a gratifying number of Black American people and my fellow Indigenes.”

On one of her outings, Pollux, the Tribal Police officer who had arrested her (and Tookie’s on-again off-again crush back then) sees her and, after confirming she hasn’t escaped from prison, proposes. They marry and, finally, Tookie is leading a “regular” life with a job, a house, a backyard and a husband. Her life is “heaven.” Until the ghost of Flora, an annoying customer, starts visiting the bookstore.

“The first time this happened…I heard her murmuring, then rustling about on the other side of the tall bookshelves in Fiction, her favorite section…There was a gliding shuffle. Her light-heeled, quiet step. The material she’d worn was always of the sort that made slight noises—silk or nylon jackets, quilted at this time of year. There was also the barely perceptible tap-clink of earrings in her double-pierced lobes, and the muted clatter of her many interesting bracelets.”

Though Tookie had enjoyed discussing and arguing over books with Flora, an avid reader with excellent taste, what made her annoying was that Flora had been a ‘wannabe’ Indigenous person – someone who is certain they were Indian or had always wanted to be Indian. Flora had invented a complete (but vague) Native persona. Hearing Flora go on and on when she was alive was irritating enough, now Tookie just wants Flora to leave. Why, asks Tookie, what does Flora want with her? Maybe it’s because Tookie stole that dead body long ago? Maybe to read the book Flora ordered before dying? Maybe it was the mix-up at the morgue – Flora wasn’t actually cremated upon death, which might irritate anyone who dies.

Tookie is given a notebook Flora was reading when she died, a story entitled “The Sentence, An Indian Captivity 1862-1883,” a Native woman’s account of being kidnapped. Tookie is freaked out by the notebook, certain Flora died because of something on the last page she was reading. When she holds the notebook, Tookie hears Flora’s voice and even has a near-death experience when reading that page.She hides the notebook, tries to burn it, to hack it to pieces – nothing works so she buries the notebook in her backyard.

In addition to Pollux and Jackie (and now, Flora), Tookie’s extended family consists of Louise, the bookstore’s owner and an author ,and bookstore staff – Penstemon, the artist and writer, falling in love often and in love with books, “a true “Indigerati,” Asema, an Ojibwe-Norwegian-Irish college student; the bookstore’s customers and Hetta, Pollux’s daughter. Hetta is a “monster.” Sarcastic, sullen, critical. Hetta arrives for a visit with (surprise!) a baby and is (shockingly) warm and friendly with Tookie. Tookie, to her wonder, bonds with the baby. Hetta is secretive about the baby’s father; Tookie learns about being a parent and boundaries.

It’s early 2020 and there are rumors of a virus spreading across the US; by mid-March masks and bottles of hand sanitizers are everywhere. Business at the bookstore slows but Flora keeps visiting – she is angry now and more real, more physical. Tookie feels Flora’s touch, falls when Flora trips her, picks up after Flora when she throws books around the store. When everything shuts down due to the coronavirus, so does the bookstore. Its last customer is Tookie’s most challenging, she calls him Dissatisfaction. For the lockdown he needs a long read but generally preferred ‘short perfect novels.’

“These are books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between the covers there exists a complete world. The story is unforgettably peopled and nothing is extraneous. Reading one of these books only takes an hour or two but leaves a lifetime imprint.”

Tookie is relieved when the bookstore is deemed an essential service and she can go back in to process and deliver book orders. Flora comes and goes and then, Minneapolis explodes. George Floyd, a Black man, is killed by the knee of a white police officer pressed on his neck. Protests against police killings spread across the city.

“We stayed up watching familiar places burn. Every so often one of us would murmur as we recognized a box store, grocery store, restaurant, liquor store, pawnshop. There was scene after scene of people silhouetted against flames…There were all sorts of people out there now. Black white brown. Ordinary. Sorrowful and infuriated.”

While most of The Sentence is told by Tookie, in this section we hear from Pollux – a former police officer, Hetta, his “Abolish the police” daughter and Asema, caught up in the protests and the violence inflicted by riot police who ‘made themselves look inhuman, invulnerable, faces behind shields, anonymous armor.”

I don’t remember why I started reading The Sentence almost four months ago. Maybe it was the haunted bookstore, but, I’m not into ghosts, especially ones who kick piles of books around. The title? I did like all the variations such as, a prison sentence, Flora’s notebook with a…’deadly’ sentence, the story by a Native woman sentenced to be white for life. That Erdrich is the author, yes – I knew the story would probably be set in familiar territory, the Dakotas or Minnesota. I didn’t expect it to be set in Minneapolis, my second hometown. I lived in the city and rode the buses in the 1980s, when its complexion was starting to change; seeing 2019 Minneapolis through Tookie was a lovely surprise. I wasn’t prepared, however, to turn a page and be back in the pandemic lockdown. Too soon. I had to stop reading. When I started reading again, it was “May 25” 2020, when George Floyd was killed; it was also January 2026, when Renee Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis. Fiction and the real world began to blur and I stopped reading again.

“Everything seemed to be cracking: windows, windshields, hearts, lungs, skulls. We may be a striver city of blue progressives in a sea of red, but we are also a city of historically sequestered neighborhoods and old hatreds that die hard or leave a residue that is invisible to the well and wealthy, but chokingly present to the ill and exploited. Nothing good would come of it…”

Two months later, though I wanted closure on the whole Flora-ghost thing, I finished The Sentence because Erdrich skillfully weaves into her stories, history and statistics – in this case, about Native prison sentences, racial tensions in Minneapolis, the Dakota people – killed by the government or put in prison where “Minnesotans now hike and cross-country ski.” I also liked the characters, or found them interesting. Not one rubbed me the wrong way or seemed extraneous. The story was very plausible also (except the ghost-thing). Hetta’s story, with her knight in shining armor, is one of the sweeter parts in The Sentence; so is Tookie and Pollux’s relationship, especially when tested by the lockdown and the ghost. The entire book is an ode to bookstores and book readers, with so many sentences about books to linger over, like this one by Tookie,

“Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”

I had a reminder to make a list of all the books mentioned in The Sentence but, thankfully, Erdrich, after the story’s last sentence, provides a “Totally Biased List of Tookie’s Favorite Books,” grouped in categories such as, “Ghost-Managing Book List,” “Indigenous Lives” and “Sublime Books.”

For another take on this book, see Lisa’s review

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