I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything–other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned….
Mary Oliver, Upstream, 2019 New Yorker article
The Compromise begins in fragile equilibrium. Many American families have step-children and half-siblings. In my half-brother’s big family, all but one child was adopted. Now they are far-flung. In the first chapter of The Compromise, the half-siblings don’t look like family, but they feel like family. They had strong parenting in the ways of a matrilineal clan, but now Mother is gone, stolen from them. Father’s plan takes over.
This parallels what was happening in the country, urbanization and the rapid growth of institutions. Laws were dividing communities on the basis of color and other discriminatory classifications that seemed necessary while allocating resources. Agrarian culture was giving way. Families were changing, on the move, spreading into territory and making claims.
”People think we’re strangers to one another.”
Unions can be fragile. Why would the different colors of their eyes and skin divide them? The half-siblings discuss the problem on their first and last cross-country ride together. Little Eliza, age 14, realizes that the perceptions of others could weaken their bond.
"’Cause we don’t look like kin,” I said. “People think we’re strangers to one another.”
Otis nodded and said, “Pa let it happen to keep the peace. Mother made him call me his son because she would not have him or me in the house otherwise. I helped raise you while folks in Stoneville looked the other way. They whispered plenty.”
Eliza started in. “We know one thing, and others know something else. It’s always like that.” Her voice became shrill. “I have a sister and a brother, and no one is going to take you away from me, least of all yourselves!..."
The Compromise, “Jebediah Roche 1829”
Confrontations and Tailwinds
The race to adulthood begins. It is up to them to respond to the winds of change in their time in history. It’s the first trial I give them. They will confront discriminatory laws and customs which limit their rights and weaken their union. They will also find tailwinds to push them on: friendship, education, purpose, and opportunities. (This novel has no hero to fight against an evil empire, though I enjoy that story too.) The bond of family is there if they can keep it. It means risk and endurance for Mariah. Eliza proves to be more adaptable, enters a different cast more readily, but suffers no less.
They each find a course of action between compliance and rebellion.
Otis is more familiar with this family conflict. As a lone domentic slave of mixed race, enslaved to his father, in love with his young mistress, he navigates the paradox alone. He has seen the patriarchy in action, has used its power and been subject to it. Writing this aspect of the story has given me grief because Otis’s conflict builds slowly. It look me time to find the family romance. His sisters innocently believed he was among them as a good brother, an emissary of their parents, but he was divided, in love with Mother, holding on for her sake while rebelling quietly against his father. Then he is a man with a head for freedom and a body in bondage.
“The crack between devotion and bitterness”
I felt her tears, but Otis looked at me and rolled his eyes. He said to me, “We find a way out between a rock and a hard place.”
I saw his situation for the first time. Otis was old enough to want to be his own man and start a family, but he was ruled by a man who kept him down. He loved and hated our pa, loved him as a father and hated him as his master. Staying in the family, Otis had to find a way to live in the cracks, like the crack between devotion and bitterness. Maybe that’s the way it was for grownups, but who would not want to find a way out?
The Compromise, “Jebediah Roche 1839”
Mariah is sixteen and still thinks she can run faster than any threat. I hope readers expect her to make a compromise on this point. In this scene, Mariah is learning about their differences and adapting to their intersectionality. This term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. Managing our complex emotions and social oppressions, we grow up.
Walking Upstream
“Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot,” writes the American poet Mary Oliver in her collection of essays, Upstream. Walking upstream was one of her ways out of unchanging circumstances. I’ve taken that path frequently, but it is not the only one that I travel. Some of us test limits; some stage uprisings; some walk upstream, and some read books. Some sing to God. If you are reading this, I suspect you know how to walk upstream.
“The second world–the world of literature–offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything–other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: the the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness–the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books–can redignify the worst-stung heart (14-15).
It seems like growing up is often a harrowing adventure that passes us back and forth between deadening routine and bloody rebellion. School keeps youth in bondage, and then wonders at rebellion and disengaged compliance. The artist steps in. There are many characters and approaches to agency within structure. Literature traditionally helps us find more of them–from flame-throwers to river-walkers.
Negative Capability
Authors give their characters pain and ask them to lean in. We give them “uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts.” British Romantic poet John Keats called it negative capability. In Zen, we practice stoically, but it is Romantic to find ourselves in the midst of creation with all Others–“the characters of everything” to echo the late Mary Oliver. Uncertainty keeps us leaning in. Then there is nowhere to lean.
The horses galloped to the top of a hill and then to another until we stopped laughing and crying at the same time. We found a stream that was too fast moving to ford. We rode beside it near a grove of cottonwoods on trails of new grass. We watched as the stream disappeared into a cave under stones. Our strength was going down where we could not see it, and it would come out again where we did not expect it. A family of deer looked at us, moss still hanging from the doe’s lips. And right there a rafter of turkey came out of the bush and crossed a field of buttercups. The Toms fanned their tails and tossed their blue and red wattles, indifferent to us.
The Compriomise, “History Lesson, 1839”