Common Duties

How is The Compromise teachable? A recent article in Edutopia gives advice on how to teach novels like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and 1984. Dystopian novels are very common in the high school curriculum. Historical fiction, on the other hand, is grounded as much in actual history as in speculation. Why isn’t historical fiction in this teachable line-up? It is, arguably, more difficult to write and more useful to read. Aren’t these genres equally good to teach?

Image: Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

This way is through the emotional intimacy and speculative possibilities of fiction.

For Edutopia Benjamin Barbour writes “Using Dystopian Novels to Teach the Bill of Rights”: “After reviewing the amendments, ask the students to identify certain freedoms that characters they are studying have been denied. Questions can steer students in the right direction.

• Can the characters speak or protest freely?
• Is there a free press in this imagined world? 
• If they are accused of a crime, does the law afford the characters due process?
• Do the characters have the right to privacy?”

The key is to compare the freedoms denied to characters in the novel to those protected in the Bill of Rights. Yes, despite the interesting passive voice. This is not necessarily how one should teach literature, but it is an excellent way to teach basic rights within American culture. This way is through the emotional intimacy and speculative possibilities of fiction.

These happen to be excellent questions for The Compromise, set in the 1840s before full rights were granted to women and people of color. The laws in the Bill of Rights were not only applied with stark inequity, but new local laws were actively separating Americans based on race and gender. The interactions among family dynamics, personal belief, social customs, law making, and law inforcement provide a rich field of inquiry. This is also the ground of injustice where the gaps open up between our rights as written in the Constitution and our rights as practiced by society. Readers of fiction might feel the issues touching lives more profoundly than a point-by-point comparison. English teachers also help learners explore interpersonal dilemmas where we all function.

Love could make people desperate and selfish, or strong and self-sacrificing.  Which was it going to be?

In this scene, I want to show the complicated feelings among three women who love a man in jail. The women are on their way to the courthouse. They need to collaborate across racial and social divides.

     “He knows he’s not safe in Missouri,” I said. “They were coming for him any day,” I hesitated, “due to transporting so many--”
     Scarlett raised one finger of her gloved hand and moved it towards me. This was to silence me. Hester nodded but did not take her eyes off Scarlett, who gazed tensely out the window.  Scarlett lifted her delicate chin and straightened her dove-grey shawl. 
     Hester looked into the distance and said, “Otis’s my man, always and forever. Not a man to work for the nation. I want us to get old together.” 
     “We all want him to live, “ I said. 
     Scarlett sighed, turned to me, and because she could not touch Hester, she took my bare hand in her two gloves saying, “If a Negro man lives to a fair trial, this is not the town I know. You need to take money to pay for more time.” She let my hands go. Hester cried then. I took her hand in mine because I could. 
     “Bribe the jailor?” I asked Scarlett. 
     “Pay for food.” She handed me a small leather purse.

The Compromise, “Scarlett, 1844”

Injustice also means that there is a gap between what is legal and what is ethical.

Freedom of Speech

Free speech becomes a problem when Mariah speaks her mind. It causes friction in the parlor and risks damaging relationships. But good prevails when it leads to the donation of the Gamble Library. The library helps the characters hold secret abolitionist meetings and quietly display abolitionist newspapers beside works of philosophy. The women of the academy maintain their ideological unity as abolitionists, with one exception, a spy. (Read the book to discover her motivation.)

Reading is a space to think critically and design action freely.

Injustice also means that there is a gap between what is legal and what is ethical. Privacy cannot be assured. Is this not the space of heroic action, troubling and proud? When Otis confronts a pro-slavery politician in the same parlor, violence is averted. There is short-term peace, but in the long run the story is tragic. It is a turning point, first, because it is polarizing. Hostilities go underground. Otis changes, becomes sullen and angry. He stops communicating with his family, friends at the school, and employer. He separates himself in part to protect them but also to work independently. He violates an unjust law. He begins transporting fugitives on the Underground Railroad. If he is caught, the punishment is re-enslavement.

Freedom of Assembly

Reading is a space to think critically and design action freely, individually or collectively. In 2019, Catholics were arrested in Washington D.C. for their protest against ICE policy of separating families for the purpose of intimidation. Learn more in the newsletter called America: The Jesuit Review.

Seeing that his arrest is imminent, Otis shoots the moon. He stages a protest, which involves attending a college class. His protest leads to an arrest, which was called an uprising and punishable by death. He is denied due process, which is perhaps the greatest injustice. Its denial is attended by corruption, vigilantism, greed, and hatred.

 One scene on the college campus is based on true events as reported by Louis Menandi in The Metaphysical Club. In 1850, Martin Robinson Delany with two other black men and one white woman were admitted to the Harvard Medical School. Within months, sixty students signed a letter saying they would transfer out if they had to be seated in the presence of Negroes or a woman. College president Oliver Wendell Holmes capitulated in the face of economic pressure. The new students were forced to leave.

Common Duty

Efforts to revive justice are also collective, each part fitting the other so we rarely see the whole pattern. Each old woman praying on the steps of the courthouse is staging her own insurrection. Handing over an empty brown notebook, cutting a rope, cleaning the hall, unlocking a door, each is a tile in the pattern of the common people’s duty.

Mariah goes to the courthouse to help free her half-brother. She has food money donated by Scarlett and blank notebooks provided by local Quakers. The men who clean the courthouse see an opportunity to enlist Mariah.

     The older cleaning man walked towards the office. He kept his eyes lowered when he said, “I’ll give you a hand, Mistress.” He unlocked the office door. “Don’t take no time to sweep up in here.”
     “You a friend of Otis?”
     “Only one thing needs doing.” He closed the door behind him, and I was relieved he didn’t lock me inside. My hands felt cold when I opened the drawer. I wanted to be sure, so I unrolled the parchment, Otis’s manumission. “...liberate, manumit, and set free, MY NEGRO MAN named OTIS GRIEG ROCHE...."

The Compromise, “The Courthouse, 1844”

Today I work on this pattern in the chapter called “The Courthouse.” Otis does not want freedom for one man alone. Building on the pattern to advance justice is our common duty. Likewise, I do not write for my self-expression. But then, it is hard to know how a story ends.

Building on the pattern to advance justice is our common duty.