Black History Month has slipped by and I have not posted on this topic even though The Compromise is fundamentally influenced by this history. Most of what I’ve learned through research has strengthened the novel’s concept and approach, and this posting will express gratitude to many sources. Our capacities for warmth and creativity surpass any cruelties and injustice we are shown.
Bottomland is the rich farmland subject to the Missouri River’s floodwater.
My research has also positioned me as a learner who needed to seek more information and to question assumptions. But is this about acquiring knowledge or redirecting the novel’s purpose? Sometimes I feel like a swimmer who is too far under the water to see the land. It bobs in and out of view. I have faith the land is there. I am writing to build a world with words, hoping it has enough proximity to the real world to give people sympathy and hope. I swim on.
Time alone will not give us the nation we want. Words alone will not do it. The law made commerce in human lives a political game of degradation that would endure.
The Boyhood of Otis Roche
Beautiful Arrogance
My central characters are interracial half-siblings with different mothers. In the beginning, they are a small group of young adults similar to those I see in school and on Berkeley streets. I remember being one of them. They walk shoulder-to-shoulder and believe that through improved dedication and friendship they will solve the world’s problems though previous generations have failed. This may be form of youthful modernism seems particularly American, and the beautiful arrogance of youth that we diminish at our peril. And yet, they will make compromises, spread themselves too thin, aim too high or give up too soon, betray others, and learn to see themselves as flawed.
In the first chapter, the novel establishes the siblings’ bond that will be tested and airs the internal voices of their upbringing. Often these are the voices of Inola, the mother who raised them. But as the novel opens, the parents are gone; adulthood begins. Contemporary readers will build theories abut who they are and lies ahead.
... We all joked about how much Otis could eat. A smokehouse of bacon, a mountain of flapjacks, a river of syrup, a moon of cheese reeled in with a fishing line.
We played the old game of piling up or hands like flapjacks saying as we moved our hands, “Strawberry cream. Coffee with milk. Bottomland. Strawberry cream. Coffee with milk. Bottomland.”
My eyes, they told me, were coal black like bottomland. Otis had light brown eyes and his nickname was “Coffee with Milk.” Eliza had blue eyes and her freckled cheeks made her “Strawberry Cream.” When we played flapjacks all we could, Otis pretended to eat our fingers which made us squeal.
Years back I had asked for an explanation for why Otis was darker than us. Mother said, “Your pa and I call him our son. Otis is your brother. You listen to him and not others. These are Cherokee ways and will not change for less.” She narrowed her black eyes at me, but I asked around and was sorry I did.
I asked Ben Nyle who said, “They got stained with shoe polish.”
“Sounds pure wrong,” I said. “That’s why we call you Bent Nail?”
“Cursed by God,” said Betty Crumb. We knew her for the limits of her righteousness.
Then I went home and helped Otis shuck corn. I asked him, “Your ma, you know a thing about her?”
Otis shook his head with a furrow in his brow. “Only what I see in the glass.” Of course, there was more than he was letting on.
The Compromise, “Stoneville 1839”
Legally Bound
That is how the story begins, but each chapter thereafter works with historically situated issues, including racism and the struggles against it. Otis, a young man more worldly and literate than his sisters, must explain the facts to them. Otis teaches his sisters about laboring free Blacks. Together the siblings listen to work songs drifting up from the river below. They consider the long-term effects of bondage on the soul, they call it a “drained-out soul,” and they determine the path to renewal. They learn about mob violence and Otis’s vulnerablity as a Black man legally bound to thier father.
Their father Jebediah is an enigma, but it is clear that he controls their lives. Often I am unsure of the relationship between a young man and his slaveowner-father. How does the human heart navigate this particular incongruity? Would it change fundamentally his relationship to authority? I ask metaphors, the best tools I have, to hint at answers. Family and society’s dysfunctionalality, possibly the effects of incongruity, could lead to tragedy. Families are complex, and fortunately this one I’m making will prevail.
Fictional Memoir
I have considered opening the novel with a scene from the point of view of Otis as a 13-year old boy in 1826. It introduces “The Boyhood of Otis Roche,” a fictional memoir with parts adapted from Douglass’s “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave” (1845). It is clear that many readers identify with Otis more than Mariah. Maybe they have adapted to reading male points of view and respond to particularly-gendered fiction. In young adulthood, Otis writes his story.
I believe but I do not know with certainty that I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in the year 1812. That was two years before the capital fell to the hands of usurpers, but I was safe in my ignorance of that. My mother was a slave, as was her mother who, I believe was brought from Africa to build this country. According to the custom on plantations, I would have parted from her after a year. I have no memory of my mother, and she would not know me today under any circumstances. I believe she sang to me because I have always been touched by music. I believe she was strong of limb and fierce in disposition. As a small boy, I imagined her living in the Great Dismal Swamp where she lived free with the maroons and fight alligators.
There is no record of my ancestry I ever saw, but men write their own histories, mapped out by facts and propelled by ambition. I believe all this because I can dream it true.
The brother’s story lets me show more of what my readers expect, harsh treatment on a plantation, violence, prejudice, and exploitation. I am trying to sculpt these experiences to avoid polorizing exaggeration and stereotypes. For example, Master Gregg is not a sadist; he’s a businessperson using the law and plotting his profits from across the social gulf of slavery. In my story, enslaved workers find ways to control aspects of their lives, learn from one another, and educate the young. Otis crosses between two ways of life, literal and metaphorical poles, and either side could help him or brutalize him. Otis begins his storywhen he begins to recover from physical brutality and the brutality to his faith in humanity.
The old man unwound the bandages and I began to see light. First, I took in his face, dark and brooding, but I knew his voice and his salty tobacco smell. He was like a leafless old tree in winter that you could hardly see for the brightness of the light behind it. I looked at his old hands, older than the old stones you had to dig for.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche, 1825”
Then Otis’s story moves forward more than a decade. Otis is a man and he has left behind his cruel and competitive upbringing that might have given him power and a since of belonging. He joins a family, has a complicated relationship with his father, a relationship which is denied to his sisters. In one early scene, Otis tells his sisters that their father supports slavery as part of a national agenda of growth and prosperity. Mariah can hear the sarcasm and the pain.
He says they have the God-given right...” he swallowed hard, “the right to be ‘masters reclining’ and to tell others to make the land prosper. They have to rule others who would otherwise do nothing at all. There are natural and heavenly states to consider..."
The Compromise, “Little Dixie, 1839”
The siblings continue to explore inconsistencies in their new society. They visit the new site of the University of Missouri, dedicated to the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and embodying his hypocrisy about race and equal rights. Good intentions guide the school directors who educate and protect the siblings. Mrs. Starr believes in racial improvement and African colonization, and Miss Ada is an antislavery assimilationist who believes in “uplift suasion.” Otis becomes an abolitionist like several others who are dedicated to intellectual development and moral improvement. He might even believe, as I have, that the great ideas give us superhuman and uncompromising powers. Mariah, finds her way on the path of Transcendentalism, thanks to her young tutor, Margaret Mott who works beside her in the garden. Hester, Scarlett, Mariah, and Eliza love Otis, as a partner, as an object of fascination, and as a brother. Each finds her own way to face or fight oppression.
He might even believe, as I have, that great ideas give us superhuman powers.
Black History in a Novel
But this is a novel, not a history, so these various ideas are revealed in dialogue, the language of the body, and reflection. They come out in what consciousness reveals in the physical world and in the natural daily tensions of our differences. This would be long to describe fully, so I will limit this post to the first half of the book. Two wealthy patrons argue in the parlor about the rights of women, interpretation of scripture, and the ethics of slavery. Hester and Mariah disagree about whether equality must be earned. Hester wins the argument. Otis reads The Liberator aloud to his elderly mistress and later challenges a powerful man from South Carolina. They argue openly using the words of Frederick Douglass and John C. Calhoun, the historical figures on which their characters are based.
Otis takes the teenaged Thomas Starr King to see the evils of slavery for himself, but Otis returns shaken and more aware of the missing parts of his emotional education. He confides in his sister who was learning the same lesson another way. They all learn best when they are embraced by love and not othered by strangeness. This love, the greatest counter discourse ever known, is repeatedly traced back to the love of a mother for her child.
“She was somewhere keeping vigil, blessing her child with a flame in her eyes.”
....If you didn’t listen to us talk to each other, catch the ease of it, you would not believe we were kin. Of course, Otis and I had different mothers and they gave us different blood. His mother must have been tall and dark-skinned. She was somewhere keeping vigil, blessing her child with a flame in her eyes.
But his mother’s blood had made Otis a slave under the law. Their bodies were not theirs, not sanctioned to give to another or to hold for themselves. So in my heart, I defied the law that could be twisted away from, from- what we knew was right.
We might sleep, but we could not rest. We had to keep our heads up and our legs working so our rivers would carry us. His was the muddy Mississippi, so big you could not see across it. Mine was the Missouri, sometimes bubbling red with anger, but cold and strong from head to toe. He was bigger, smarter, and more loved, but there might be a day when he needed my strength.
The Compromise, “Awakening the Nation, 1841” Everyone should hear echoes of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes.
They all learn best when they are embraced by love and not othered by strangeness.
When asked which character I could perform in costume, it has to be one the white lady school directors. A shocklingly straight line can be drawn from the New England transendentalists and abolitionists to my own class upbringing in California. I might also wish to play the parts of Margaret the intellectual, Scarlett the activist, or Hester the truth-telling realist. Yet, looked at in another way, I’m a white woman writing histories that are not mine. Comments suggesting I was either ignorant or overly optimistic gave me more than pause. I’ve been temporarily shaken by doubt, and I must rely on my voice to return. One of my solutions is to invite others to write the stories that are still too hard for me to tell.
A shocklingly straight line can be drawn from the New England transendentalists and abolitionists to my education in California.
Gratitude
I am grateful to my fellow writers at the Berkeley Writers Circle and the California Writers Club. Novelist Francine Thomas Howard has encouraged me to keep developing characters of mixed race and to stretch the limitations of my knowledge. My gratitude includes Taj Johns, who educates me about internalized racism when she speaks or writes on this topic and for her kind reading of my chapters. This precious task she shares with several others who help me believe in my novel’s potential.
Special thanks go to California Writers Club boardmember, Linda Brown who invited me to speak with her friends still living in Missouri and to borrow rare history books from her library. One of her friends, Ellen Dolan has inspired me with images and first-hand accounts. Another friend, Larry McCollum taught me that the most precious resource then and now is bottomland, the rich farmland subject to the Missouri River’s floodwaters. I am inspired by his research on the history of slavery in his hometown. I have given the color of Missouri bottomland to the eyes of my protagonist, Mariah and used it as the central metaphor of this post. I also thank Linda’s friend Rex Burress who writes about the Missouri River with such tenderness.
Concerning the history of ideas, I have learned a lot from a book by Ibram X. Kendi titled Stamped From The Beginning: The Difinitive History of Racist Ideas in America, a National Book Award winner published in 2016. Thanks go to the Berkeley Public Library for generosity and leniency. I am grateful to University of Missouri Professor Mark Carroll. He has shared his recent research on the history of Saint Louis, and I look forward to Unfreedom’s Progress: Market Revolution and the Legalities of Slavery and Racial Exclusion in Americanizing St. Louis, 1804-1860
Countless internet resources have informed me, from Wikipedia to archives of letters and periodicals like The Liberator. There are dozens of people who created these resources and who have shared their photographs on UnSplash. These are generous artists who help me see.