Writers find ways to enter new subjectivities. What semed difficult proves an adventure. We cross out of one gender to another, cross race, age, historical periods, and consciouness. We may be daring, but we also want to anchor our imaginations in our truth.
Last night, my writer friend Phil held up his newly published book and said, “I’m most delighted by the courage it took to do this.” This seventy-six-year-old lit up the dark hallway of the Sawtooth Building.
Where there is an opening through which to see, there is creativity and a sort of personal power.
Writing “The Boyhood of Otis Roche” has been an adventure requiring courage. This enriched secondary story began as a question. How do my brother and sister characters perceive their father when they are morally opposed to his position? Their mother opposes slavery, and their father is a slave owner who preaches the righteousness of the institution. The siblings have to find the balance to keep the peace just as we all do in a democracy.
I intended this part of the story to be a first-person account told from the point of view of Otis, a young man’s narrative about growing up enslaved on a plantation in Virginia. It began as a written genre, a fictionalized memoir, read by my protagonist Mariah inside the dramatic action. I decided to give Otis’s narrative more voice by alternating the two narratives through the novel. A few male readers have advised me to let the story of Otis carry the novel’s theme.
They make their own rules inside and around the rules of others, a timeless aspect of childhood that demands freedom.
As if preparing for a cross-country trek, I’ve poured over books and watched videos. I’ve applied my experience as a mature woman, my imagination, and that capacity of the human mind to integrate abstraction, embodied knowledge, and observation. I turn down my white female subjectivity to inhabit an in-between racial and hopefully masculine space. I’ve observed Black men in the cafe until they felt my gaze. I have inlisted Eric, a young Black male beta reader to read it aloud and comment.
My characters do this watching, comparing, and wondering. Mariah watches from the shadows of the kitchen or the hall, and the child Otis crosses the log separating the spaces of enslavers and enslaved workers. He watches the Grieg family through the dining room window to compare and wonder where he belongs. He wants the privledge of their father’s attention, not the restrictions and discomfort of his social class.
The boy compares and notices differences and assigns value in ways that are different from those assigned to him.
Informed Imagination
I’ve been preparing to write about American slavery, to interpret it from the point of view of a boy who was subject to it and who also emerged to write about it. The writings of Frederick Douglass and related scholarship provide my best resources. Tomothy and Christina Sandefur’s Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man (2018) has been very useful. Soon, I will study the acclaimed biography by David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018).
But of course I am writing an historical novel, a work of informed imagination. I have several mandates within which I can write with some liberty. These include finding the path towards “ineradicable humanity” accomplished through “self-possessive individualism,” to borrow the words of Douglass. I am not writing to stun anyone into inaction. These are not grizzly details for voyerists. However, to the extent of my powers to do so, I would let readers see up close a system that threatened to remove personhood from hundreds of thousands of Americans, and to help readers see that threats of inhumanity continue in their variations now. We need to oppose the threat, first when it is discovered in our own habits. Again when those habits sustain institutions and ideologies. Hopefully, writing gives us a medium for change and reading the works of brave souls gives us courage to learn. My conscious purpose as a storyteller is to disclose and nurture the core principle of responsibility, the basis of both private compassion and civic duty.
Stories in the Firelight
How did Otis learn to read when it was forbidden? I give the leading roles to children who transgress or simply forget the rules, not to the dictums of teachers. His education is much more than learning to read, of course. Otis sneaks off to the slave cottages at night when the newcomers tell stories.
Then there was scar-showing time, and we crowded into the firelight to see. They raised their shirts or rolled up their pant legs and told the stories about what had been done to them, or the accidents that happened, the broken bones, the cuts, and the burns. And there were scary stories that made you think the land would open up and swallow you, and some about dying in the water with chains pulling you down. Mostly they sang those sorrow songs that showed us pain where no rubbing would take it away. Then they told us to get religion and to be good.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
Like any strong learner, he finds marginal spaces. He compares and notices differences and assigns value in ways that are different from those assigned to him. This freedom is unalienable. Ironically, formal education can require tactics like theft and disruption. Douglass relates the sentiments in his Narrative.
“[Mr. Auld] forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master… Now,” said he, “if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave….” These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought…. the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ch. VI
The boy Otis learns his letters and numbers looking through the window of the schoolhouse. He sees a long-faced teacher use a ruler to keep children’s attention. He is impressed but has no wish to be caught inside. It’s better to be outside where there are things to be done. More education requires risks to his social world and to his selfhood. When the new governess comes, Otis and some of the enslaved children are subject to new categories and strictures. He accepts the risks, driven by curiosity and perhaps drawn to appropriate the symbols of power.
The Governess
The children are subject to new categories and strictures.
One day a new lady came out on the veranda. She was called a governess. The older children stopped going to school. Her job was to educate the Grieg girls getting ready for marriage and sons preparing for college.
But then she turned her gaze on us, the colored children in the yard who could read the stars and the seasons better than books. She lined us up, not by height, but by skin color, light to dark. She drew a line with her finger and the boys with darker skin were sent off to play with sticks and stones. The leftovers were told to sit in the order she told us on the log facing the grass.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
Under the new governess, the white children dramatize scenes from The Columbian Orator.
Under the new governess, the white children dramatize scenes from The Columbian Orator. They do this outside in the yard where the new boys can watch from the log. The demarcation is repurposed as a theater.
I was impressed by how grand it was. Pocky repeated these lines until we had all memorized them and could say them in our sleep. “Thus to irradiate the benighted mind with the cheering beams of truth.”
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
It is well-known that Douglass had a copy of The Columbian Orator, and I have made good use of this fact. Language of heroism may touch a child deeply, and words, adaptive and strong, become a tool to manage life.
“I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The Columbian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ch VII
The elocution exercises foster their imaginations of heroic civic duty. They are senators and presidents claiming national greatness. They plea for their causes with passion. Otis is intrigued by the drama. The symbols of leadership, one could argue, are for racial dominance. Transgressing, one can learn that what is constructed can be deconstructed. Where there is an opening, there is creativity and a sort of personal power.
Transgression
“The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ch. V11
Children forget their differences and begin to play together. Otis finds he can be one of the boys, especially when girls are around. He takes the small openings he finds. He makes a new friend, a white boy named Jeremy, who does not care that the governess sent him to sit with the colored boys as a punishment. They make their own rules inside and around the rules of others, a timeless aspect of childhood that demands freedom.
I brought Jeremy little things to pay for my lessons, old coins and arrowheads, stuff I found in the ground, and he showed me how to read. He met me at the edge of the grass back where no one could see us. I stayed behind a tree a few inches from where he sat. If anyone looked they would think Jeremy Grieg was reading to himself. In the book, we found a dialogue between a slave and a slave owner.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
Leaping between worlds, the risks increase.
Secret Ability
Leaping between worlds, the risks from both sides increase. Otis is beaten nearly to death and is traumatized. He spends several months recuperating under the care of an old blind man who can borrow books that he can’t see. He brings Milton’s Paraside Lost and Dant’s Inferno. Otis is told that he must keep his reading ability a secret. Changing the direction of the boy’s education, the old man gets copies of the Daily National Intelligencer. Otis reads aloud, asks questions, and makes outlandish but insightful connections among the texts.
Writing in the Spaces Left
"Remember, when you go beyond where you can see me, you gotta be quiet about reading and writing.”
“Writing?” I remembered seeing the teacher write on a chalkboard and the children had white chalk for writing on slates. “Can I do that?”
The next morning he asked me to help him bring up an old desk and make it stand flat. Then he brought a slate with a stick of chalk. I didn’t care that the slate was broken. A few days later I got a notebook with a page showing letters. Then he found a stubby pencil with a little knife to sharpen it. That’s all it took.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
“By this time, my little Master Thomas had gone to school, and learned how to write, and had written over a number of copy-books. These had been brought home… I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copy-book, copying what he had written. I continued to do this until I could write a hand very similar to that of Master Thomas. Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ch VII