Bad news on Easter is hard. I walk out my door under scented blossoms in the warm air. Let’s hope that beauty does not give us amnesia. We need wisdom to hold the contradictions. The gorgeous spring may hide the wrongs of the past, but hope does not rise out of anything else.
Photo by Banter Snaps on Unsplash
Black Cherry Hill
Fellow writers have asked me to look again at the end of the chapter called “Boone’s Lick Trail.” My young characters pass through Little Dixie, Missouri’s agricultural region that used slave labor. In fact, the majority population was enslaved in 1839. It is April and the girls twirl in their brighly colored frocks in an orchard of old trees in full bloom. They come upon a man hanging in a cherry tree. Vigilantism is indicated though lynchings were not common until after the Civil War. The teenagers want an explanation. Their older brother explains that the place is called “Black Cherry Hill.”
“It’s supposed to scare us to mind the laws, not steal what's not ours, to stay low and keep quiet. This place is called Black Cherry Hill on account of the dark fruit you saw.”
“Who’s going to help him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “He’s not suffering anymore. His kin will cut him down after nightfall. He’ll be buried in the mud of these old rivers and return to the earth like any other living thing. But the Lord knows what happened to him, and so do we.”
Eliza said, “He’s not taking one step closer to God hanging in the air like that.”
I asked, “What would Pa say?”
“‘Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.’ And the old man would add that we do not know enough about justice. It’s only 1839.”
Otis helped us mount the horses and we started to leave Black Cherry Hill. But I was unable to move my eyes from the place where a cherry tree in bloom was made to kill a man.
I was unable to move my eyes from the place where a cherry tree in bloom was made to kill a man.
No doubt, this is a primary metaphor of the novel. The hanging tree returns in a dream. The family returns to Black Cherry Hill a few years later to gather flowers for a wedding. They remember what they saw, and they grieve with a song amid the spleandor. The name of the place becomes a code word for death without justice.
It was early April, so Cherry Hill looked as it did on our ride out of Stoneville five years earlier. That day Eliza and I had seen a man hanging by a rope from a blossoming cherry tree.
“Black Cherry Hill,” said Otis. “Remember?”
“Mm-mm.” I said. “That lynching shook my soul, dark fruit hanging in the tree of life,”
“Only the Almighty may uncouple life and death,” said Otis.
“And must my trembling spirit fly to see the flaming skies?” Eliza spoke part of Idumea, a song we learned in Stoneville. Then we sang the old song with more feeling than I had ever heard:
Am I born to die?
To lay my body down?
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?
The girls added their voices, bewitching a spring morning to gather blossoms:
A land of deepest shade
Unpierced by human thought
The dreary regions of the dead,
Where all things are forgot.
Religious Metaphors
The mandate to bring American history to life in fiction leads me down this path.
Yesterday at a craft meeting for members of the California Writer’s Club, Henry asked us to write about the influence of religion and spirituality on our writing. The answers helped us address themes as well as content. Some answered simply; it’s about good and evil. My answer would fill hours. On every page, my fiction relies on metaphors to heighten daily life. For authentic content, many excerpts come from the Bible and from well-known spirituals. I even use symbols in the chapter called “The Camp Meeting” to indicate allegories from the Book of Revelations. Many in that period wanted spiritual salvation before the end of the world. The possibilities are endless, but my knowledge of Christianity is relatively sparse. The mandate to bring American history to life in fiction leads me down this path.
Following a disclaimer, I spoke about my character, Old Man Moses. This mysterious figure transitions people from one state of being to another: death to life and slavery to freedom. The story of Moses is there in American spirituals and always represents the yearning for freedom. In the novel’s linear chronology, he first comes as a healer when Otis is injured and close to death. The bandages are taken off the boy’s eyes, and he sees the old man who has been tending him.
I squinted to see. He looked like a leafless old tree in winter that you can hardly see for the brightness of the light behind it. His hands on his knees looked older than tree roots. His face was dark and brooding under white fluff on his head. Then I could see that he was blind. The cream filled his eyes and they looked at nothing I could see.
...
Remembering, the tears came down my cheeks and I felt that pain of the wrongdoer. I wondered if that was why they wanted me to feel pain everywhere. The old man patted my knee. I blew my nose and asked, “Are you free?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve been free a long time.”
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche, 1826”
The story of Moses is there in American spirituals and always represents the yearning for freedom.
Otherworldliness
Again the old man comes in “The Good River.” Mariah and Hester follow the sound of voices, “Down in the River to Pray” . They come to a baptism. The men in the water are dressed in white and their overseer is on the opposite shore.
One man in the river stood on a stone above the others. His face was dark as night and his hair was foamy white. His eyes had the pale color of blindness. He looked in our direction but not at us. He extended his arms saying, “The old life has passed away and the new life has begun. We share His death in order that we may rise and live that new life.”
He was reaching for a white-clad choir moving up behind us through the sugar maple grove. Like spirits out of the trees, they walked with the angel Gabriel, or so it seemed to me.
The Compromise, “The Good River, 1844”
The words are very close to those still spoken at baptisms. For this depiction, I’m indebted to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the 2000 film set in Mississippi. In my story, there are no river nymphs, but like the film, there is a dose of magical realism. The blind man is the seer, a very old trope for otherworldliness. This character sees between worlds and helps others find their way across. The old man shows up again as Mariah leaves the camp meeting alone. She had met the family devastated by cholera and later sees them burying their baby, too weakened by the disease to survive.
Then I heard a man’s voice saying words I knew well.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Following the voice, I saw some people standing on a hillside. One was lowering a bundle into the earth. A mother with two children leaning on her was kneeling in prayer. I knew this scene from the year fever tore through Stoneville, and I’d seen it in the churchyard. Illness took the small and weak before it humbled the strong.
The old man raised his hands. His wooly white hair was caught by sunlight. He was calling out scripture, and I said it with him. “Truly, I tell you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom.”
The Compromise, “The Valley of the Shadow, 1844”
Foreshadowing
This famous line of scripture about entering the kingdom of heaven as little children does more than one thing. It reframes the pompous religiousity of the camp meeting, and it foreshadows the story of Sweetie, the young pregnant runaway following the North Star. She is living on berries, has made herself a grass skirt to cover her large belly, and tied flowers in the mane of a wild horse. Mariah takes her to the cabin knowing that helping her is against the law. Life has unforseen outcomes. Mariah is not able to help Sweetie, but she is able to help Nathan Ebenezer, her surviving infant son.
These are my roots, and I am not inclined to back away from mysteries.
People may see the excerpts in this blog post and think that The Compromise is a religious story. It applies religious symbolism, scripture, and practices. One can argue that the basic structure of any story is an iteration of a grand myth. I know that my own ancestors were Christians, but I don’t have sure knowledge of their beliefs five generations back. It is not for me to sort out the many roles of religious belief in American history, but I respect the scholarship in this field. I have to write without knowing. I reach for tools in the semi-darkness and hope my hands know what to do. These are my roots, and I am not inclined to back away from mysteries.
