Home of The Compromise

The California Compromise: Holding the Union Together

A sequel now in progress, The California Compromise begins in June 1846. War with Mexico has been declared, yet news of that declaration has not reached the West Coast. Four years later, California will enter the Union as a free state. Its constitution will prohibit slavery, which holds the balance between the states admitting and opposing slavery. In my story, a clipper ship called the Blue Witch hauls precious cargo to Alta California, women and men whose dreams and ambitions shape the nation’s uncertain future.

Readers will meet an American diplomat with plans for California statehood, a Californio intent on an independent California Republic, a Russian spiritualist on her way to Japan, a Marxist poet dreaming of a new secular utopia, and young missionaries from the Midwest.

Among the characters are disembodied spirits who haunt the former slave ship. The ghosts are omniscient, take an interest in human affairs, know the seas, and have a hand in human destiny.

The great vessel holds aloft her sleeping passengers. They sway from hammocks in the nodding hull. Only spirits know the true contents of their dreams, and of disembodied spirits, the Blue Witch entertains several. Having stowed away since the end of the slave trade, the ghost called Ginger d’Akani takes pride in bedeviling the crew and unnerving the passengers.

The California Compromise, “The Blue Witch”

These spirits, tethered to the ship by traumas of their past, find themselves entangled in the destinies of the living–sometimes guiding, sometimes hindering, but always watching. Through the eyes of dreamers, spies, and spirits, The California Compromise offers an unflinching look at a pivotal moment in history. Considering the drama is my fictionalized great-great grandmother who actually arrived in California about that time. In her quiet and insightful ways, unrecognized by historical record, she too has powerful effects.

Come back to learn about progress on the California Compromise. For a deeper dive, read the blog post Finding the California Compromise. In these blog posts, I explore my influences and reflect on my creative process.

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The Compromise: An American Novel

What if your enslavers are also your family, living and loving across the deepest divides?

The Compromise is a novel of literary fiction set during westward expansion, twenty years before the American Civil War. This story is told from three perspectives as the characters come of age amidst the wonders and tragedies of 19th century America.

Three siblings with different mothers, Black, white, and indigenous, come into adulthood. They leave their homestead in the hills of Missouri to enter their father’s world. They work together as domestics at a female academy run by secret abolitionists. A great library at the academy is a center of transcendentalist culture and abolitionism, which breaks Missouri law.

The sibling’s union is fragile. The younger sister, who expects to inherit her enslaved brother, vows to raise her status through fashion and musical talent. The older brother, sworn to save his people from slavery, pledges himself to the Sons of Liberty, a radical Black abolitionist brotherhood. The older sister navigates her bi-cultural identity as she becomes literate and then she must sacrifice her roots to save her ancestral land. 

The Compromise won first prize in the Donna Gillespie Novel Excerpt, Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition 2020. Please feel free to use the contact page.

     "Goat whiskers tickled my face. The wood creaked under heavy boots on the front porch.  “Who goes there?” I threw off my blankets. This woke my sister and sent our nanny goat skittering. I took two steps in the pitch dark to the front door and drew the hunting knife I always kept there."

Coming of Age in Antebellum America

The blogposts explore interpretations of the novel’s themes and influences as I write. Most include audio recordings of scenes from The Compromise. Many cover events in the news. My research into anti-slavery organizations are described in Radical Abolitionist. Literary and philosophical influences on me as a writer are found in Paths to Cold Mountain. How theories of learning and literacy inform the reading of literature are described in Echoes Return. Coming of Age: In the Mirror shows how the half-sisters handle cultural expectations as they take new roles. The post called The Births of Story describes women in labor, their endurance, heartbreak, and joy. The dark night of the soul is the subject of Beginning the End. My goal was to write a teachable novel that would accomplish a great deal. It would satisfy our need for story, strengthen awareness of themes in American lives, and reveal moral dilemmas. This blog has recorded my progress as a white American who researches the past in order to write fiction with integrity.

Exploration of my Ancestry

The Compromise began as an exploration of my ancestry, not with historical facts or DNA, but with curiosity about how knowledge could be handed down in a family. What my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother gave to me is stored, literally, as dishes, lace, buttons, sheet music, and books, yet my inheritance is known psychologically through reflection on my obligations, proclivities, and values. I am a teacher following three generations of teachers. My cultural and biological ancestors worked for me as I am working for those who come after me. This continuity is among my strengths, but so is my obligation to learn as my society changes and write with integrity across the situations of my life.

Fiction lets me follow the thread five generations back to Missouri. Like their descendants in California, my foremothers must have discovered meaning in the tasks of daily life and the changing bonds of kinship and friendship. Those common tasks took place in a formative and contentious period of our history. My personal imagination leads me to tell one story, while the demands of research and writing require me to take a wider view than my parents’ generation.

Inspiration from Research

“As a result of their precarious circumstances they began to search for a more secure and enduring reality. They turned away from the structures and values of their material world, on which they could not depend, and started to give greater weight to their spiritual visions and passions of the heart, thereby initiating the process of self transformation that would ultimately converge in their identities as Radical Abolitionists.”

John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men (2002)

“All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.”

Edmund Burke, 1775

“Our past was slavery. We cannot recur to it with any sense of complacency or composure. The history of it is a record of stripes, a revolution of agony. It is written in characters of blood. Its breath is a sigh, its voice a groan, and we turn from it with a shudder. The duty of to-day is to meet the questions that confront us with intelligence and courage.”

Frederick Douglass “The Nation’s Problem”

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustable voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writers’s duty is to write about these things.”

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

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