Solemnity and Joy

How solemn is The Compromise? I don’t expect it to be a tome or a tomb, but there are stories that involve death. Often elderly people, like my mother, keep their sense of humor to the end, and so does this novel. Love and humor might help me find the secular balance I need. Let’s call it solemnity and joy.

Learning what matters is precicely how we “come of age.” I am laboring faithfully to craft heroic fictional characters whose moral education can be shared by readers. Heroes, however humble and scared, epically return when their stories live beyond them. Looking at The Compromise, I see patterns that relate directly to my life. Parents agree, children’s survival is the fundamental work of adulthood, but children represent much more, new worlds and ways of being in them. Welcoming them welcomes ourselves.

My characters are clearly heroic when they battle against death. Otis fords a swollen river during a thunderstorm and keeps the baby in his arms. Years later, he faces death for his cause. That cause is to liberate others. Mariah helps deliver babies. Each birth puts her on the side of life in mortal combat. This teaches her the depth of failure when it comes. Eliza overcomes her desire for wealth and beauty to join the father of her children. She does this through heart-wrenching betrayal and against overwhelming odds. Of course their lives are not easy! If you want to be on the edge of your seat as you read The Compromise, be forewarned. There are spoilers here.

Humor fuels the novel’s take off and softens its landing.

Otis: Stories in Childhood

Otis tells the first story of death remembered years later when he writes “The Boyhood of Otis Roche.” As a young child, he learned the rules for mourning from his enslaved caregiver.

When yellow fever came, children on both sides of the log fell sick and some were buried. Mourning those white babies, the big house was shuttered and the family stayed quiet. We wondered why a little child’s death could stop Master Grieg, the man who could do anything. Old Ned made us stay quiet for three days out of respect when any child died. He said, “Grief and misfortune are things all folks share, no matter who.” 

The enslaved people are taught to mourn the death of the master’s white child, but who mourns for theirs? This question is not answered explicitly from the boy’s point of view. This is a small event of internalized oppression. Some deaths count more than others. Death is not an equalizer to the living.

Otis listens to stories in the slave quarters. One story is told by a grave digger and interpreted by a child.

One big man with a hunch in his back said he put down the railroad tracks himself with one hand tied behind his back, and that was the reason he got the twist. After that he dug graves in the Negro cemetery and planted enough men and women, he said, to grow a city as big as Richmond. 

In fact there was a large cemetary in Richmond dedicated to Black residents of the region. The image of planting the dead for future growth seems like an ancient archetype, one that feeds the boy’s imagination. He kept the image alive. He plays with the imaginations of his young adult friends.

     For entertainment I improved on the Ozark Caves. “You walk down into them for days. You go down where old bones planted in Richmond come up glistening like newborns. Pearly wet fog of the Great Dismal Swamp comes dripping down in the Bridal Cave in Missouri.” 
     “Same water?”
     “You bet, same water. Same taste.”

I really have fun writing when elements disappear and reappear out of the “half-known world” as it is elegantly described by Robert Boswell. They might arise from el duende, a term I learned from the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca. Back in his childhood, Otis hears stories of suffering that anchor him in his community. They also blur fact and fiction as stories do.

And there were scary stories that made you think the land would open up and swallow you, about the Mississippi River going backwards, and some about dying in the water with chains pulling you down. Mostly they sang those sorrow songs that put pain where no rubbing would take it away.  

Otis: Visions

I hope that Otis’s stories resonate authentically with one another and with the past. There is a Christian theme among them. Years later, still a child, he enjoys stories of retribution. At age fourteen, when he fears death in the river, Otis has a vision. It is based on the prophet Ezekiel’s Vision of Dry Bones. The bones join into bodies, come up to breathe, and to be delivered back into life. It shapes the visionary Otis is becoming.

Her black eyes, each a dark star in a white sky, were looking straight into me and spoke without words. She said that these men and women were all coming up to find life again, to make me remember them. She lifted her face to look at the child. And she told me to keep this baby close, that every child was her child.

Is there a glimmer of humor in these stories? No, not really. They may be surrounded by and balanced by humor, but these scenes heighten the transition between life and death to hold the reader’s attention on the miraculous and the real as long as we dare.

Mariah: A Bridge for Miss Ada

Mariah learns about death in a variety of ways, but her education is less whimsical. Her mother was a trapper who sold pelts to the French, so Mariah knows about killing animals. I expect it is chilling when she takes up her knife to save her sister. However, her able wit helps them all avoid violent confrontation.

We learn solemnities despite the jests we make.

Mariah learns about gothic romantic love when Miss Ada calls for a recitation of Edgar Alan Poe’s Anabell Lee “in a spinster’s quavering voice.” Love might transcend death. Readers may take what they wish, but to me, this scene of reading the gothic love poem is funny while it is also beautiful. It is described in the post, Love in Four Parts.

This theme returns. Years later, Mariah helps care for the ailing old woman. I thread wit into the design. The love between two older women might do what the gothic romance professed, reach for the eternal. Their vigil brings the household staff together to do the work of the living on behalf of the dying. But the scene has a tinge of humor when the girls stay at the edge of their seats, at the edge of sleep.

“We stayed that way all night and day until we could feel the bridge sway under the weight of her soul.”

     We saw the signs. It was time to keep vigil. We lined up the chairs and had to balance ourselves on the edge of sleep. We stayed that way all night and day until we could feel the bridge sway under the weight of her soul. 
     Miss Ada slipped away. Mrs. Starr knelt by the bed, held her old hands, and said, “I love thee with the breath, smiles and tears of all my life, and now we wait for the choice of God.” 

The lover says the words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to inform the last moments with the beloved. These characters have served the story as jesters but here they are mortals subject to the divine. Maybe humor does not negate solemnities. Maybe we learn despite the jests we make, not because of them. This is about the tone of the novel, which could be hard to define.

Mariah: Delivering Babies

In the 19th century, certainly, and today in some cases, childbirth is a mortal threat. Mariah assists at the deliveries of babies into both healthy families and dysfunctional families that cannot care for their young. Francine is a young white mother who refuses to touch her healthy dark-skinned baby. “There is no place for us,” she says as she turns away. The mixed-race child proves that the mescegenation law had been broken. My job is to help the reader feel the injustice of that law. In fact, young single mothers and their babies are still among the poorest and most uncared for in the world. That is a mortal threat we should feel.

Midwife Mary

Birth and death come together in the stories that rush to my core. Before she leaves for Canada, Midwife Mary gives Mariah lessons that prepare her for inevitable losses.

“But remember, you can’t stop childbirth from coming as hard as it does.”

The Compromise, “The Pull West”

     But remember, you can’t stop childbirth from coming as hard as it does. The pain cracks open the sky to let the light come down. It’s God’s lesson and God’s alone. You can look at the sun, the moon, and the stars, but you cannot save their lives.”
     “Yes, Midwife.” I was twisting my apron to keep from crying. I was losing her, and I was too green to catch babies without her.

I gave Midwife Mary simple lines, simple images of divine powers, but not a simple understanding of human experience. Before the age of pain relief, the lessons in human fraility must have been sharp.

Paying Respects

Alone, Mariah tends towards melancholia and magical thinking, but her future husband gives her new possibilities. On their last day in Stoneville, they pay their respects at the graves on the hillside.

     When the horses were hitched to the loaded wagon, I took leave of the orchard and Stone Creek. Then I took my last hike to the burial mound where old snow and brambles covered the stone markers I had worked so hard to plant. This time I had a warm-blooded man at my side. 
     I said to Riche, “You know, I saw Otis’s spirit here a few years back.”
     “That so? He must'a got here by Morse Code.” 
     “I reckon he was looking for his resting place, but I’m not sure he found it here. It’s hard not knowing if he’s alive or dead.” 
     Richie nodded, but he had a bad case of hiccups which made solemnities difficult. I smiled and let a good part my love pass down into the ground with the babies we lost and the child-mother they called Sweetie. 
     The other part of me went into this man they called Richie who had more than his share of funny bones. We laughed all the way down the hill to where our two brown nags were hitched and wagon loaded.

They solemnly walk up the hill, but they run down laughing, much as she did when she was a child. Mariah takes the advice given in Robert Herrick’s poem from the 17th century, to gather her rosebuds and to make much of time. Mariah has the skill to know the past, feel the future, and live in the present moment.

“Richie nodded, but he had a bad case of hiccups which made solemnities difficult.”

Humor fuels the novel’s take off and softens its landing. In the end, solemnities open up and make way for the joyous future. Come to think of it, this is just as the phantoms of the old books, the tomes in the library, make way for the women who study there.