Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at 6:30 at Guilford Free Library.

It's 1932, a time of hardship, adversity, and despair. Especially at the Lincoln Indian Training School, formerly a military outpost called Fort Sibley. It's a place where Indian children who have been taken from their families are sent so they can be educated in the ways of the white world. But it's really a place meant to obliterate every trace of their Indianness, by force if necessary.

Odie O'Banion and his older brother Albert, orphans, are the only two white boys in the school. The opening pages describe their time in the school's quiet room, what used to be the military's solitary confinement cell.

Odie tells the story from the viewpoint of his younger self:

"The night was moonless, the tiny cell as black as pitch, our bed a thin matting of straw laid on the dirt floor, the door a great rectangle of rusted iron with a slot at the bottom for the delivery of a food plate that never held more than one hard biscuit. I was scared to death. . . ."

In the morning, the boys are removed from the quiet room and sent to work on a local farm. It is grueling dirty work mucking out cattle yards, slopping hogs, detassling corn, cutting out jimson weed, all of it under an unrelenting sun. Haying was the absolute worst:

"You spent the whole day bucking those big bales, sweating bullets, covered in hay dust that made you itch like you were being chewed on a million fleas."

The school calls this the training part of the curriculum, but it's really free labor for the surrounding farms. Strappings and abuse appear to be part of the curriculum, too, especially the kind rendered by a teacher named Vincent DiMarco.

After years of such mistreatment, Vincent DiMarco meets a sudden demise at the hands of one of the children. Odie and Albert, along with a speechless Sioux Indian boy named Mose Washington, and six-year old Emmy Frost are forced to go on the run pursued by the police.

Thus their journey begins—harsh, perilous, frightening. They are confronted along the way by a dissimilitude of good and evil

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