The beasts of conflict do not exist in time. They exist in us, modified by each generation. Though we have reasons to worship evolution, progress, and efficiency, we have to start with what is, here and now, already full of the events of the past. Slavery is iconic of all markets of human flesh: human trafficing, forced marriages, the unlivable wage, and more.
Slavery is iconic of all markets of human flesh.
Siblings argue. Society’s hatreds emerge in family life and we try to change what is bigger than ourselves. Otis and Mariah project onto each other the battles in society they are fighting. Mariah blames her father for her subjugation, which Otis refuses to do. Otis blames Mariah for serving those he believes are the wealthy perpetrators of his opression. Each sibling rejects the others’ reasoning and an argument ensues.
My voice was low and angry. “Gol-dang him to perdition!”
“You curse him? You haven’t seen Pa all these years. What do you know about perdition anyway? Think about it, Mariah, while you wash those peas!”
“Stay out of my garden. These peas are not for you! And you can go wherever he’s going.”
He started smashing my peas under his boots. “These peas are for some little rich girl’s pot! Frivolous, selfish, hypocritical, all of ‘em!” He smashed more peas. “Can’t you see through their lies?”
“Don’t, Otis.” I cried. “There’s no reason to smash these dumb peas.”
He pointed to the academy behind me where most the ladies were still sleeping. “Would they feed you, Mariah, if you were hungry?”
I shook my head.
“They would send us to the ends of the earth, me to the shores of Liberia and you to the rocks of Oklahoma.”
In the excerpt above, Otis tries to explain how vulnerable they are. Liberia was an American colony for African Americans. Many abolitionists saw expatriation as a realistic solution to the problem of slavery. Oklahoma was the place where Native Americans were relocated by the US government irrespective of tribal affiliations and sacred lands. Otis’s reasoning diminishes the conflict when he recognizes that they are both vulnerable yet in different ways. I propose a way of thinking about the issues. The evils under slavery did not take place in polarized society in which whites were free and blacks were enslaved. This may be easy to grasp, but real social change is massive, interminable, and slow.
Women were subordinants and this was a paternalistic, Victorian world.
We all hope to be wrong less than we are. We pick our battles and save our commrades. True love brings our conflicts down to size, but the peace is forsaken when a union is forced under threat or through trickery. “The Proposals 1842” lays bare the political in the personal. During her long wait for her fiancé to return, Mariah discovers how her handicap was evaluated on the marriage market. A dowery was an incentive, “a carrot for a mule.”
“Foolish girls, “ she said. “These agreements between men cannot be changed.” Mrs. Starr looked at the stove and Otis looked out the kitchen window. She said to me, “We think the Stoneville property was intended as a dowry for you, Mariah, to give George an incentive to tie the knot.”
“Incentive?” I asked. “What does that mean?” Avoiding me, Otis left out the back door.
“A carrot,” she said.
I felt my heat rising. “A carrot for a mule?”
“Yes, basically, a carrot to compel George to take you. I’m sorry Mariah. That’s the way things work. No law lets a woman own land, not yet, so you have to marry to have anything of value.”
True love brings our conflicts down to size, but the peace is forsaken when a union is forced under threat or through trickery.
Eliza’s refusal of Richard’s proposal was a disaster for Mariah. The dowery is withdrawn, which forces Eliza to capitulate, sacrificing her ambition to marry well. Their father’s letter calls them fickle, ungrateful, and capricious. Women were subordinants and this was a paternalistic, Victorian world. No doubt school mistresses were expected to enforce the habits of mind to maintain its rules: ridgidity for some and exclusion for others. Jebediah tells Mrs. Starr that it is her responsibility to fulfill his demands.
You spoil them as you spare the rod. Be forewarned. Miscreant females unimproved by your authority will face husbands with less discretion.
The ultimate mark of strength is lawful subjugation.
This chapter comments on American society in its not-so-distant rural past. Families, even good ones and those that spare the rod, pay it forward as they humiliate and restrict their members. Good intentions can silence negotiation and stop adaptations. When misogyny is lurking, conflict seems like a way out.
The ultimate mark of strength is lawful subjugation. Eliza made a compromise to help her sister get a husband and to keep the Stoneville land in the family. Mariah wants to fight when she discovers how she and her sister were bartered and used against one another. Otis is her father’s slave, doing his bidding, while he sees the the harm it does. He asks her to accept the very dehumanizing conditions that enslave him.
“Stop, Mariah. Stop right there. Everyone has a price on the auction block. You think you are excluded from that?” He grabbed my arm that was getting ready to swing, and he pushed me backwards into the stable wall. But he let me go when I twisted my face away.
At the same instant we both gave in and felt sorry. An argument between us would change nothing. He said, “Remember when we sang about freedom together?”
I said, “Riding to Columbia. Yes, I do. The three of us had hope for the future. How blind we were to what was coming.”
“We can have hope,” he said, “but we have to compromise on what that looks like."
The Compromise, “The Proposals 1842”
“Everyone has a price on the auction block.”
I hope my readers see the irony when Eliza dresses up and agrees to an ill-fated marriage. There is precious little space for love to grow. Mrs. Starr, coarse yet well-meaning, tells the sisters to plan a future without any husbands at all.
“Have you considered that husbands are mortal? They can die or disappear in any number of ways, and this happens to wives of every sort, young and old. Second husbands and second wives get the leftovers. It stands to reason, what’s been left in the heart is the smaller portion.”
What are the effects of Mrs. Starr candid remarks? My beta readers give clues. The line above about the deaths of husbands received unexpected laughter from men. It can be read as a recommendation for murder, not a warning of mortality. The remark about second wives and husbands getting leftovers received bemused looks from women. Pioneer women like Mrs. Starr had no reason to be delicate and obscure in their references. My mother spoke these ways in unguarded moments. I too was told to learn a trade. She recommended dental hygiene or musical instrument repair. These remarks sound like either fatalism or realism, but that depends on the reader’s interpretation, or in my case, the judgements of history.
"Nothing these girls do will change their destiny, no matter what they learn here. Eliza will marry that drunk, Richard Fowler, and accept her fate.”
I sighed and she let me speak. “Otis says Richard can clean up to be a proper man for Eliza.”
“Well, that may come to pass. But mark my words, prepare yourselves to earn a living.” Mrs. Starr stood to leave the parlor. She added, “That’s alongside the work of running a household of hungry children and cleaning up the man who made them.”
The Compromise, “The Proposals 1842”
For young people everywhere, romance and self-determination are not easily compromised and not easily balanced. No wonder the ancients believed our destinies were in the stars.
"There were trials we could not win because of our prideful will to determine our own lives. I made myself watch as the night sky sharpened my sadness. Cutting deep and scarring pain, my tears came as the last light disappeared.
“There were trials we could not win because of our prideful will to determine our own lives.”
In anguish, Mariah accepts her humiliation as natural, and I hope some modern readers cry out to stop her. However, the next day Mariah discovers that Eliza already has a plan to outwit her husband in order to make money on her own. She must have learned this strategy among the wealthy young women upstairs.
“Try to understand. I don’t do anyone’s bidding upstairs. I do what’s needed when I’m paid. I’m engaged to marry that Richard Fowler, but I’m engaged in commerce for myself....
"Sometimes what has to be done is snake-like, under things and such. Hiding behind a man is like a snake hiding in the woodpile.
The Compromise, “The Proposals 1842”
Mariah is swept up in the feeling of providence, faith in her abilities, and the joy of productivity.
It would be wonderful to discern readers’ affinity with my characters. Is Eliza independent and clever? Is Otis idealistic or realistic? Mariah is my girl, but she won’t please everyone. At first she blushes at her sister’s brazen deceit, but then Mariah is swept up in the feeling of providence, faith in her abilities, and the joy of productivity. These feelings will prevail even though her trials are far from over. Somewhere in these fictional lives I find the source of my family’s work ethic.