If we write and teach well, there are echoes. The useful phrase is used again. The fertile image is reimagined. The play of light on rings and the echo of sound on stone are rarely spoken of, so they find their places in art. Few things in writing The Compromise give me as much pleasure as hearing voices return in the text, and in writing this blog post, I reflect on how it works as literature. Because it is discovered more frequently than designed, it reminds me of nature’s convergent evolution. In human communication, the circle makes a spiral when the message carries to another who gives it new meaning across time and space. Teachers work for this and are almost entirely unrecognized as creators. Augmented by a written text, the art of language is one of the mysteries of human experience. It is so common in our lives that we forget what it is.
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”
“It felt like I was talking nonsense to the moonrise.”
One of the most stunning discoveries mapped out in the novel is how a memory from childhood influences the future. For me, early reading in archetypal literary criticism (Northrop Frye), structuralism, and later reading in semiotics and post-structuralism are major influences. In the novel’s fictional 1820s, Otis learned to read the Columbian Orator on the sly. He was allowed to watch the white children prepare their orations. A girl nicknamed Chubby performed The Plea of Thomas Muir by the Scottish radical reformer (1765-1799).
Chubby changed her oration to the Plea of Thomas Muir. It’s what he said during his trial for treason. She started on her knees and folded her hands under her chin.
I may be condemned to languish in the recesses of a dungeon. I may be doomed to ascend the scaffold. Nothing can deprive me of the recollection of the past; nothing can destroy my inward peace of mind, arising from the remembrance of having discharged my duty.
We boys riled against what we saw as the arrogance of a girl, but her rendition of Thomas Muir was good. I made all the boys quiet down to let her do it again.
The Compromise “The Governess” 1825
When Otis is arrested in 1844, he is bound and forced to go down the steps on his knees. By reciting the famous Scottish Plea on the steps of the University, Otis claims his right of free speech. Ironically, his arrest fulfills the accusation that he was inciting a riot. I am gearing up to write this scene.
The tools are language and image made evocative by their intertextuality.
It does not stop there. Years earlier Otis had taught the Plea to the girls he helped raise, Mariah and Eliza. Upon learning that Otis recited it while forced to kneel, his half-sister Mariah realizes that the arrest was a plan to speak against slavery. Using his kneeling body and the exhaulted setting, it is no longer child’s play. The oration is a speech act. The basic constitutional protections of free speech and assembly had been suppressed by Misouri law. As in Muir’s case, the apparent effect of piety and bravery was sedition. Otis is also on a path of martyrdom.
Mariah gets news of the arrest from school director, Mrs. Starr, but only Mariah can decode it.
“I knew it. He did his duty. He wants a public trial because he will have a chance to speak, to make his case before the judge and jury.”
“Mariah, are you saying Otis set this up and wants to die?”
I nodded. “And to incite rebellion if he can. He knows the law. He knows that running north makes it worse for those who stay. And he saw what was happening to freemen around him, exiled or imprisoned, but he stayed. Why else?”
“Heaven help us!”
The Compromise, “Inciting Rebellion 1844”
Mariah and her friends may have to manage his escape from the Columbia jailhouse against the martyr’s will. His jailors are looking for a spectacle of a different sort. Strange bedfellows. Who will succeed? Will that little brown notebook that passes from hand to hand let Otis live? He might do what his sister would do, live on without the grand myth and let the story continue with its contemporary echoes.
Is this going to work? I’m making it up, of course, but I’m trying to use proven tools designed by others. If I do it well, language and image will evoke through their intertextuality. The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva and was influenced by Bakhtin’s Dialogic Imagination.
“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”
~ Mikhail Bakhtin
Balance
This aspect of the plot reminds me that I must continually work to keep my narratives in balance. Otherwise, Otis will become a singular male protagonist on a heroic quest. Mariah could be relegated to feminine observation, domentic drugery, and pain. Similarly, Otis might languish as a victim, internalize racism as self-hatred, or identify with his bullying and paternalistic captors. Mariah could drown in feeling while trying to save everyone else. Indeed, Otis and Mariah pass through these positions. I have cut many passages that seemed to prattle on in self-doubt.
I have two lead characters, but psychologically, they could be aspects of one consciousness. One can be strong and the other flexible. One can seek depth and the other height. I can let them dance in the mind, upstage one another, and go off stage in different directions. I hope they enliven their archetypes with equal heroism in the reader’s mind.
“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.”
“Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.”
Pierre Bourdieu
Come Back
There are many more echoes in the novel. One is literally and figuratively an echo across the echo chamber of the stone quarry. On her way to Stoneville, Mariah discovers Sweetie, a pregnant teenager eating berries atop a wild horse she tamed. The girl is heading north to escape cruel slavery. Mariah tries to help with food and shelter, but the girl runs away again.
I called for Sweetie, but it felt like I was talking nonsense to the moonrise. The hill gave me a view of the red-stone quarry below and the road to town. I called “Come back!” and heard the echoes from the quarry. Come back. Come back. Sweetie had been enslaved all her fourteen years, so she might be hiding from me, afraid that I’d tie her up and sell her or divide her from her newborn child. She had no reason to think otherwise. As bad as my life was, I did not have those fears of another human being.
The Compromise, “Come Back 1844”
I don’t want to give away the story of Sweetie, but sometimes no amount of work is enough. We are human and we are mortal. We cannot hold on, whatever our intention. In a strange way, calling Sweetie brings both Sweetie and Otis back to Mariah. The cliff becomes a place of hearing the answer in the question.
Reading and writing, we find the spiral and the echo. On the cliff above the quarry, Eliza waits for their mother to come back. Years later, Mariah calls for Sweetie to return, and during the blizzard, there Mariah is turned away from death by those she loves and fears. Then these structures are like learning. We reconstruct our internal polarities each time a little differently. We might cry out at the cliff of our unknowing, hear the ragged report, and pull back to keep on living.