As coronavirus rages through South Dakota, a newspaper editor blasts the Republican governor’s hands-off approach while forming an ethically dubious alliance with a Democratic mayor. When the editor’s son joins a potential state champion football team and militia members attack the mayor’s policies, the editor is caught in the crossfire, exploring how far he can go before his own freedom is in doubt. THE COVID CHRONICLES, a debut novel by award-winning journalist Stu Whitney, examines political partisanship and pandemic fatigue, probing the question of whether America returning to normal is as appealing as it seems.
As coronavirus rages through South Dakota, a newspaper editor blasts the Republican governor’s hands-off approach while forming an ethically dubious alliance with a Democratic mayor. When the editor’s son joins a potential state champion football team and militia members attack the mayor’s policies, the editor is caught in the crossfire, exploring how far he can go before his own freedom is in doubt. THE COVID CHRONICLES, a debut novel by award-winning journalist Stu Whitney, examines political partisanship and pandemic fatigue, probing the question of whether America returning to normal is as appealing as it seems.
I used to think prison letters were hard to read. They would arrive at my newspaper office with institutional markings and surprisingly fluid handwriting, full of back stories and rationalizations. For all their forced familiarity, there was an undertow of desperation, natural under the circumstances, and a misguided notion that reaching outside the walls with carefully worded pleas could make guilty men free. In my present condition, as a 53-year-old inmate at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls, I know that prison letters are hard to write. Scratching words on lined paper, hoping someone takes them to heart, seems an inadequate way to explain how I went from respected journalist and devoted family man to convicted felon and shamed citizen, a sinking of fortunes uniquely suited to the soul-crushing year of 2020. My dedication to mask-wearing, the subject of dozens of self-important columns and fatherly lectures during the rise of the Covid pandemic in the Upper Midwest, has become as negligent as the guards will allow. The virus has raged through prison populations, and they tell us vaccines will be here soon, but I don’t think much about it. The odds of finding contentment when I’m released are as unthinkable as the crime I committed, which resulted in the loss of a life, the ruination of my family and career and the realization that my words, once respected, are viewed as desolate overtures from the opposite side of the wall.
 The penitentiary sits on a hill in the northern end of South Dakota’s largest city, a former meatpacking town that has made strides to become part of the modern world. The fastest way for that to happen was to relax the state’s usury laws in the 1980s, allowing banks to charge exorbitant interest rates to customers whose financial background was so bleak that they were desperate or stupid enough to accept such terms, and a credit card empire was born. Soon prominent banks were hanging a shingle in Sioux Falls, with some of their executives becoming billionaires by forming spin-off subprime lending ventures. That wealth seeped into other aspects of the community, which saw a pair of regional hospitals evolve into sprawling non-profit health systems with billions of dollars in revenue and a penchant for new construction. One of them took the name of a prominent credit card magnate in exchange for momentous donations, leaving little doubt that the city’s thrust for relevance was tied to gouging unfortunate or reckless souls with interest rates as high as 79.9% on lines of credit they could not sustain, with no safety net in sight. In 1992, around the time I moved to town, a prominent national magazine ranked Sioux Falls as the best place to live in America.
The state prison owes its architecture to an era when Sioux Falls was part of the Dakota Territory and existed in the shadow of Yankton, the territorial capital. In 1876, a court in Yankton presided over the trial of Jack McCall, a 24-year-old drifter accused of ensuring “Wild Bill” Hickok’s legend by shooting him in the back of the head during a poker game at Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, on the edge of the Black Hills. Found guilty, McCall was sentenced by a federal judge to hang before a large and curious crowd of onlookers, becoming the first prisoner to face the death penalty in what is now South Dakota. Determined to get a piece of the action, Sioux Falls legislators lobbied to be the site of a new penitentiary. Their arguments proved persuasive, with a rising population and plenty of stone quarries offering proximity to building materials. Visible from the Big Sioux River, the prison opened in 1881 – eight years before South Dakota achieved statehood – with inmates shipped in from Detroit, many of whom worked in the quarry and spent their days hauling blocks of rocks for the wall that kept them enclosed.
I suppose there’s irony in the fact that I hail from suburban Detroit and now find myself with the same vantage point as those early inmates, with less arduous prison labor. But they are not the ones I associate with this place. My mind instead drifts to Henry Eagle Bull, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe from the Pine Ridge Reservation, brought to my attention at the Daily Gazette by a source who served as a prison counselor. She told me that Eagle Bull faced life without parole for manslaughter after beating a man to death during a drunken altercation in a reservation town when he was 24 years old. Four decades later, after letting his wild side subside with prodding from the warden, he was described by most at the prison as a model inmate, teaching classes on Lakota culture and artwork and organizing powwows on special weekends. After sending him a letter and getting on his guest list, I went up to the penitentiary on a summer morning, driving past pink quartzite walls and twisted barbed wire to the annex in which he was housed.
Eagle Bull wore a tan jumpsuit and sat with his knees raised at a child-sized desk in a room that seemed set up for our interview, with no other inmates around. He had strains of gray in his long black hair, and he gestured to some of his charcoal drawings on the table as a guard stood nearby. Not allowed a tape recorder, I scribbled notes on a sheet of paper the prison provided, a glimpse of my future literary endeavors. Eagle Bull told me in a quiet voice about his struggles growing up in the Pass Creek district of Pine Ridge, where the alcoholism rate hovers as high as 80 percent amid poverty and cultural erosion. He told me he studied art with his grandfather but learned drinking from his parents, particularly his mother, Lenora. Even when he moved to Wisconsin and became a common-law husband and father to three kids, working odd jobs to pay the bills, he found himself drawn back to the surroundings of Pine Ridge, where trouble was easy to find. Leading up to the evening in 1983 that sealed his fate, he drank all day and snorted heroin before meeting up with his mother at a bar near the reservation. They ended up at the home of a white rancher they both knew, asking for a drink of water and a few minutes of warmth on a chilly night. The rancher asked Lenora to stay and for Henry to leave, which led to a heated argument and, as Lenora later testified, a steady pummeling from Henry that left the old man dead on the floor.
When I looked up from my notetaking, Eagle Bull was regarding me carefully. He asked me what sort of article I planned to write, and I said something about wanting to tell his story as truthfully as possible. He then told me that he blacked out that night and didn’t remember killing anyone. That was different from denying it happened. He said he remembered waking up the next morning in an abandoned car in the backyard of his grandmother’s house, with blood on his clothes and dogs barking. He heard sirens in the distance, growing louder. He was assigned a public defender and agreed to plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter if prosecutors reduced charges against his mother, who had been at the scene of the crime. Lenora didn’t display the same compassion for her son. She testified that she recalled seeing Henry punching and kicking the elderly rancher until he stopped moving, and that her son later tried unsuccessfully to set the house on fire.
When the judge sentenced him to life without parole, an unusually harsh penalty for manslaughter but permissible under South Dakota law, Eagle Bull looked back at his wife and children in the courtroom and saw them grow blurry and then vanish. “I knew that my life in the world that I once knew had ended,” he told me. He continued to do drugs and pick fights in prison before finding a spiritual connection with some fellow inmates and turning the corner, using his artwork and experience to persuade others that daylight existed beyond those quartzite walls. Eagle Bull’s own sense of hope wavered, even after I wrote a profile in the Gazette that raised the possibility his sentence could be commuted. He had lived in South Dakota long enough to understand the political implications for a Republican governor who showed leniency to an Indian who bludgeoned a white man, blackout or no blackout. He embraced spirituality but no longer believed in miracles. I received a few more letters from him over the years and heard from sources when he died. Tribal members held a gathering in Pine Ridge and recited a poem he had written as a message to fellow inmates: “Watch and wait for the full moon. Be inspired by great leaders. Let the rain and thunder teach you lessons. Study pictures. Be strong spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically. Find a way out of prison every day.”
Those words were meant for lifers, not me, but I use them as motivation. I want to tell my story, as anguished as it is, with the same clarity and conviction of Henry Eagle Bull, whether anyone reads it or not. The best time for writing is after returning from chow in the morning, when my cellmate, a domestic abuser who reserves his violence for women, goes back to sleep. The scrawl of my pencil irritated him at first, but he now says he finds it comforting, and wants to read what I write. I try to keep it from him, one of the last vestiges of privacy, but prison letters are meant to be read. They speak of pain and isolation and missed warnings, of moments where lives could have been lifted but instead teetered and splintered, their pieces a mere hint of the whole.
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Stu Whitney has accomplished what most novelists dream of - a great novel, written and published at the right moment. The Covid Chronicles tackles tough issues that we have all struggled with over the past year. The fear and uncertainty that swept into our lives with the COVID-19 pandemic are illuminated through a father's hopes for his son's future. The novel paints an intimate view of a man's personal and professional conflicts, and the harsh reality that can follow when we make the wrong choices. A patchwork of realistic characters and situations brings insight and validation of what we've all experienced in the past 16 months. Through a fictional story set in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the truth of just how divided Americans are is brought to life. Everyone will see shadows of their own reality in the pages of this book.Â
Early in the pandemic, when people are feeling vulnerable and afraid, they watch from the sidelines as public health and disease mitigation become politicized. The editor of a South Dakota newspaper becomes intertwined with people from both factions: a radical right-wing group that opposes any government intervention regarding COVID-19, and a Democratic mayor who tries to comply with local health officials.
The main character's son, Nathan, is recruited to play for the Edison High School football team. It is his senior year and they're in the running for the school's first-ever state championship. Nathan wants this, bad. Like many fathers, Nate's dad seeks personal redemption for his past failures, if only his son can accomplish this one thing.
As COVID numbers increase, there is a political back and forth between the Trump-following Governor of South Dakota and the mayor of Sioux Falls. It is an election year, and there is no way that the Governor, a Republican clearly based on Kristi Noem in word and deed, is going to allow mask mandates and risk alienating Trump's base. During the chaos post-election, with Trump refusing to concede and the anti-mask movement becoming volatile, the mayor of Sioux Falls finally decides to take action on the eve of the state championship game.
This may be a debut novel but it is clear that Whitney has been writing for a long time. I expect this to be one of the firsts in what will be a long line of novels that tell our stories of the COVID-19 pandemic. Books like this serve a purpose greater than simple entertainment; they help bring understanding to our personal struggles in times of uncertainty. Brava, Mr. Whitney. Five Stars.