Hardcover
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
***Finalist for the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize***
Sins of Our Fathers follows small-town banker J.W., who has been caught embezzling funds to support his gambling addiction. J.W. is on the verge of losing everything when his boss offers him a scoundrel's path to redemption: sabotage a competing, Native banker named Johnny Eagle.
A single father, Eagle recently returned to the reservation, leaving a high-powered job in the hope of simultaneously empowering his community and saving his troubled son.
When J.W. moves onto the reservation and begins to work his way close to Eagle, hundreds of years of racial animosities rise to the surface, inexorably driving the characters toward a Shakespearean and shattering conclusion.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781571311092 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Milkweed Editions |
| Publication date: | 11/25/2014 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Shawn Lawrence Otto is the writer and co-producer of the Oscar-nominated film House of Sand and Fog. He also writes for top studios like DreamWorks and Lions Gate. His nonfiction has appeared in Rolling Stone, Science, and Salon, among other publications. He lives in Minneapolis, MN.
Read an Excerpt
Sins of Our Fathers
A Novel
By Shawn Lawrence Otto
Milkweed Editions
Copyright © 2014 Shawn Lawrence OttoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57131-109-2
CHAPTER 1
The first thing JW noticed when he walked into the Hiawatha room was how different it was from what he had expected. Its low-rise tiers of seating resembled an upscale college lecture hall more than a hotel conference room. And it was surprisingly full. The air was rich with the colognes and perfumes of suited bankers. They moved up the floral-swirled tiers like a herd of mountain sheep. Clumps of them murmured in side eddies, and others sat to open laptops or check cell phones. A pretty brown-haired woman in the front row smiled encouragingly at him. He thought he might remember her from the Bemidji branch.
The setting was actually quite good, he decided, as he navigated between the long front table and the whiteboard. He was here to teach, after all, though his subject was a little different than the usual product introductions and regulatory claptrap people dozed through at these conferences: crashing on donut frosting and waiting for the next coffee break, then cordial and chummy at the lunch buffets before finally coming alive with free-flowing alcohol and the grind music of the last decade in the evenings. Unlike their more-buttoned-up CPA brethren, bankers tended to be party animals—not like the crazy excesses of the investment community, of course; no cocaine-tinged threesomes, no strippers—but edgy enough to be shocking to their customers nonetheless, were they to see them in the evenings at one of these conferences.
In many ways, JW's presentation appealed to this racier side of banking, because it dealt with danger, and not danger in the traditional sense, but existential danger, and its dramatic companion—opportunity. Instead of delivering the usual boring drone on the security features of the new hundred-dollar bill, he was here to talk about crime—specifically, redlining, and how to avoid being accused of it while still maximizing returns.
The room was packed and abuzz with an expectant air. Bankers stole glances at him and then went back to their huddled conversations, their leaned-in, best-new-friends-since-last-night joke-telling, their texts and e-mails about how boring it all was to their honeys back home.
He found a limp dongle of black cords emerging from a hole in the center of the table. He opened his briefcase and pulled out his laptop, unspooled and connected its cables. At forty, he was still in decent shape. He still had his hair, and it was still brown. He wore it swept back and a little to the side, though a few boyish sprigs always seemed to flop over the left edge of his forehead. He had a slight scar above his right eyebrow: a reminder of his teenage years training horses. It gave him a rugged air of adventure that contrasted nicely with his well-tailored banker's suit and his crisp white shirt. An air of mystery, his wife Carol called it, which was appropriate for talking about crime and its avoidance, something she found sexy. He was quite presentable, all things considered, and to the extent that being a leader creates charisma, he had a special magic about him when he was on the circuit doing presentations. He stuck a USB clicker into the slot on his laptop, touched the room control screen to light the hotel projector, and brought up his presentation:
BANKING IN INDIAN COUNTRY
Presented by John White
North Lake Bank, North Lake, Minnesota
Midwest Community Banking Conference
Dakota Grand Hotel, Minneapolis
He glanced at the clock. It was still a minute early, and more bankers were shuffling in. He had forty minutes. He pulled out his cell phone and checked his e-mail, but his inbox held nothing new apart from the usual junk mail for online gaming sites and reduced-rate mortgages. He set the phone down and cast his blue-gray eyes—Finnish eyes, his mother had called them—out over the audience, waiting patiently and silently as the stragglers found the few remaining seats. It was a full house.
He noted the bankers' suits from last season. Their briefcases' pale worn edges. Their creased shoes. How some of the women—late thirties (mojito-drinking karaoke singers, no doubt)—unexpectedly carried needlepoint handbags against their polyester skirts, done in Norwegian or German designs. They were mostly small-town bankers, these clues told him. Rotarians. Lions. Deacons. Community leaders. He saw Charlie Weston from New Ulm, and Bill Heimlich from Redwood Falls, and Ann Wilson from Detroit Lakes, all presidents of small-town community banks. He had once capsized a fishing boat on Rainy Lake with Ken Iverson and his boss, Frank Jorgenson. The three of them were drunk silly on vodka gimlets, and laughed as they found their footing in chest-deep water next to the dock. But those days were long past. He waited until the last of the bankers settled into their seats before he began to speak.
"When I first started in community banking, the only reason for people to visit an Indian reservation was to buy moccasins and blankets. Now, people flock to their casinos in droves, and they make money hand over fist. The playing field has changed, and we community bankers need to up our game. I know many of you have banks in communities near Indian reservations, so today I will show you some tools to help you up that game, while avoiding some of the most common legal pitfalls. But I'm also going to warn you: things are not always as they seem."
Over the years, JW had honed the drama of this opening with the air of a magician. When he did it well, it grabbed his audience's attention from the first sentence. He sometimes felt he should have been a teacher, or perhaps a stage actor. He enjoyed playing an audience: reading them and molding the shape and rise of their emotions—these things came to him naturally, as if he were conducting a symphony. He walked along the whiteboard, stepping in and out of the Powerpoint with the confidence of a showman, one hand in his pocket as he changed it to a new slide:
MANAGING RISK ON A RESERVATION
He turned up the front lights enough to bathe himself in a milky wash, highlighting the whiteness of his shirt, his close shave, his shining eyes. The sun was brilliant outside, and it seeped in through the dark vertical blinds. With the audience in shadow, he felt as if he were a thespian under stage lights.
"So who can tell me the biggest risk banks have when lending to Native Americans on a reservation?" As he waited for an answer he took a Styrofoam cup from a stack and poured coffee. Audiences always took their time with this one, which was an important part of his build. For all their raucous private partying, bankers were terrified of the discussion he was proposing, because it was public. They were happy to talk about race—guardedly, with known entities, and in small groups—but they didn't know how to deal with it in a public forum. He tipped in some creamer and stirred, the black of his coffee going tan. He sipped and watched them adjust to the unnerving idea of discussing it in the open.
One of the bankers in the second row finally shifted and looked around with a sort of cocksure grin. He had reddish tanned skin, gold chains, spiky hair, and a party-ready attitude. He reminded JW of a former high-school football star who had faded to pudge. His demeanor seemed to say "what the hell": a monkey who found the cage door standing open and decided to plunge through.
"They're deadbeats?" he volunteered. He grinned and bobbed his head as he looked around for supporters. JW imagined him leading a conga line later, Hawaiian shirt open, his drink raised like a baton. A few of the bankers chuckled noncommittally as they glanced at JW to see how far he would let them go. This was code, a way of asking whether this sort of good-old-boy racism would be tolerated. The woman in the front row shot him an angry glare for even letting it get this far, then rolled her eyes and shook her head to signal her displeasure at the inappropriate remark.
He set his coffee down. It always amazed him how this one question touched things off. Race was still a powder keg, and its frank discussion divided audiences with powerful, emotional reactions, which is of course why he used it. He had once read, when researching for a discussion with his daughter, Julie, who loved science, that much like humans, primates ostracize one another and commit violence and murder, particularly against other tribes. Exploring that impulse was his intent: to stir up these primal feelings and to present people with their own racism (for they all had it), and then to dig deeper and get past it. People didn't know how to talk about race; there was no safe territory. It was buried under political correctness, as untouchable as a dead pharaoh, its brains pulled out and its body wrapped in cloth and then gold and then stone. Buried away. Long gone and desiccated under a pyramid of laws and regulations and social mores, brick by brick, that now generally forbade its discussion. But it lived still, underground, in small-group conversations, and even more openly now in Tea Party politics. Truth be told, many laws and regulations did go too far, and they created resentments, he thought, because they gave unfair advantages that could sometimes be dangerous to businesses, and to banks in particular. That's why they were all here today. To work through all that. To separate race from business. To get their heads straight and to clarify intent, a word that contained a universe. He gestured toward the man and began to unwind the mummy.
"That," he told the audience, "is exactly the kind of thinking they use to outsmart us."
No one moved. The air conditioning came on, and the window blinds began to shift and clatter, letting in streaks of light that shot over him, then faded like an old movie. "We can no longer afford to underestimate these people," he said. "They're making way too much money. Let me give you an example." He walked around to the front of the table. "I had this customer, a builder, who said to the Potawatomi band in Wisconsin, a hundred and fifty miles away, he said, 'I will build you a bingo hall, for free. You don't have to pay me a red cent. You just pay me out of cash flow when you get it up and running. I will finance it for ten percent annually on the outstanding balance and give you a ten-year loan. I will take all the risk. All of it.' Well, we lent him the money to do it, and we lent it to him at eight percent. Going rate for commercial loans was six. So everybody's set up to make good money. Right?" He surveyed the room. "Potawatomi win, builder wins, bank wins."
He studied them, a hand in his pocket, and went on to describe how hard the builder had to fight to get the permit because the local community was up in arms over the idea of Indians and gambling. There were political battles at the planning commission over a variance they needed for a new access road. The builder went through real heartache—expensive delays, his windshield damaged, his tires slashed—but the resort owners came to the rescue after JW visited the town. He simply made the point that the band wasn't building a hotel, just a bingo hall, and people would need places to stay.
JW pushed off the desk and watched his audience's reaction. "So a year later, he finally got it built. Band had a grand opening, and you know how long it took them to pay it off? Three months. Three months to pay off the entire construction loan. Potawatomi won on that one. Now they got a hundred-and-forty room hotel."
He stood silently, watching them. Sipped his coffee. "Do they sound like deadbeats?" He paused and looked at the pudgy playboy, who shrugged. "Please avoid all the old chestnuts about race. I'm not interested in grinding whatever prejudices or opinions people may have about Native Americans, however valid or invalid they may be. This is about business. I'm strictly looking at banking risk, specific to lending to Native Americans living on a reservation."
He walked back to his laptop, where he underlined the words risk and on a reservation with his forefinger. Two yellow streaks arched across the projected slide behind him. He waited, but no one else seemed ready to engage.
"The risk," he said, "is the reservation itself. Let me give you another example." He began walking, and then he looked up at his audience. "About a year ago, a fellow walked into my bank in North Lake, a Native fellow, Ojibwe, named Johnny Eagle. Tall, thin guy, good shape. Clean, well put together. Italian shoes, thousand-dollar suit. Turns out he'd been in there before to see my loan officer, Sam Schmeaker. Sam had turned him down for a loan, so he asked to see me. Ordinarily I don't second-guess my loan officers' decisions, you know how that goes, but he was Native. So it's a riskier situation. Right? You know this."
Several bankers nodded and some shifted. Many of them managed banks near Indian reservations, and they knew the risks he was describing. EEOC risk. Compliance risk. The story was beginning to work its magic.
"Receptionist showed him in, we shook hands, he sat down, and right off the bat, as I open the file, he says, 'It's a creditworthy application.' So I knew he had some sort of banking knowledge, right? I found his credit report, high seven hundreds. He had good credit. This was starting to look like a problem for us. Then he told me, 'I happen to know that my band has several million dollars on deposit with your bank, and yet you barely make any loans to us. Why is that?' He was watching me closely, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chess game. This was getting dangerous from a regulatory point of view, I thought, and this guy could be setting me up, so I had to be careful. He might be accusing me of a crime."
"I looked him straight in the eye and I told him we love to make loans to his band. Love them. That's how a bank makes money, I said, is on the spread between loan interest and deposit interest. He held up a hand and sat back in his chair. He told me I didn't need to educate him about banking. He was talking about loans to his people, he said, not the band."
JW walked back along the front of the table. He leaned back against the desk.
"He said to me, 'Look, Mr. White, I'll give it to you straight. Have you ever heard of an Indian car competition?' And so I'll ask you now. Have you?" JW paused and watched the audience, the sudden silence a sound all its own. No one raised a hand. "Come on, you people bank in Indian country!" He looked at the woman in front. "You?" She shook her head and looked down.
He launched off the soapstone counter and walked back around the desk, clicking the slide advancer. "I hadn't either," he said. Towering over him was a slide of a jalopy cobbled together from different cars of different sizes, makes, and colors. Its front fender was blue, a door was red, and the hood green. A supercharger emerged through a hole in the hood, its air scoop made out of an old tuba. It had a spoked wheel in front and a truck wheel in back, and a rear spoiler made out of two-by-sixes. An Indian in glasses was grinning from the driver's seat and waving a trophy out the window. The overall effect was comical, and some of the audience laughed. Others sat back in their chairs, two fingers on their cheeks or their arms folded, unsure what was permitted or expected of them. Fifteen minutes in and he had them.
"This is the winner of an Indian car competition." He said this with a straight face, but his wry tone carried an expectation of mirth, and more people laughed. Even the woman in front was smiling up at the grin on the Native American's face. "Johnny Eagle told me they have them at powwows and on some of the reservations," he said. "An Indian car is a car that's been pieced together from the parts of other junked cars, and sometimes other stuff. They have competitions to see who can have the craziest, silliest-looking one that still runs. This guy obviously has a creative flair." The audience laughed again.
"So Eagle described some of them, smiling the whole time, but as soon as I laughed like you are he slapped his hand on my desk!" JW slapped his hand on the table loudly. Half of the audience jumped. He was scowling, feigning anger.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sins of Our Fathers by Shawn Lawrence Otto. Copyright © 2014 Shawn Lawrence Otto. Excerpted by permission of Milkweed Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.