The global pandemic will forever define 2020. Through change and loss, people everywhere have learned how physically reliant we are on labor and infrastructure that were previously invisible. At the same time, people moved to reclaim what matters at the tragic end of a single life, George Floyd, who was caught in the disaster of unchecked power and flung into the awareness of the world.

Photo above by Evi Radauscher on Unsplash

The images speak clearly because they are not singular: a single man whose life was taken as one man willfully took it. They fit a pattern of police brutality at the tipping point. The message of their different races has traveled in every direction. The message asks us to reform US institutions and to revise our moral fabric to reduce racism. That fabric includes us all, and each of us is responding because we live in a society that is alive and despite it all, will change and begin again.

Applying the core concept of The Compromise, this is still a family. Even when estranged, siblings remember their common source but select from it differently. And it will heal and move on as best it can, largely from within– e pluribus unum.

“Our nation is a family.”

Listen to Hadarah BatYah sing “Hold On!”

Secret Societies

In my little world, The Compromise looms large and requires greater responsibility. Through the month of June 2020, I revised “Moral Freedom.” It describes a protest in front of the courthouse, Columbia, Missouri, 1845. The potential for collaboration interests me more than violence, so I listened to various sources and found my path. News stories and conversations with activists who participated in the Black Lives Matter protests influenced my revision. I was called on to increase the verbal passion and threat of violence. I learned about pro-slavery and anti-slavery demonstrations during the period which sometimes turned into riots in northern cities. I work with the facts of the Black Code in Missouri which prohibited Blacks from carrying weapons, and which listed whipping as the punishments for seditious speeches and the death penalty for conspiracy and rebellion. There are many stories here waiting to be written.

Rather than a riot, I wrote the protest in front of the courthouse into an opportunity for public speech, which could have been seen as seditious in a space that was contested by many. The speech is accomplished through the coordination of several secret anti-slavery societies, including, I imagine, the Order of Twelve. This was an African-American organization, the 1846 precursor to the International Order of the Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor.

History is still issuing its challenge. The challenges speak to choices to share or withhold knowledge and resources and how to represent the conditions around us. There is always more to learn about the brave cooperative activities and the intellectual work of abolitionists. Though secret societies provide a compelling area of future inquiry, I turn to cultural roots closer to my experience where I can inquire and learn.

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me.”

Frederick Douglass 1952

Self-Reliance

“I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

By holding a dual consciousness to celebrate and critique, I hope to engage my intellectual and cultural roots. I turn to American Transendentalism, an intellectual and literary movement of the 19th century. I am interested in Ralph Waldo Emerson, how some of his dichotomies reveal particular gifts and handicaps. A masculine, white history calls on my duty to understand, beside my duty of care to the white men in my life. A few of the essay’s intricate dichotomies might show me what I can learn or unlearn about white privilege.

This phrase is deemed quintessentially Emersonian: “I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.” To understand, I must loosen the bond between the individual and society, and explore the central dichotomy, the private and the infinite. I am a writer. To explore, I follow these words into new territory.

According to Teaching Tolerance, white privlege is both the legacy and a cause of racism. But does the legacy of the private individual’s infinitude cause the “power of normal” that is hegemonic?

In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson writes, “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” I might not divide the terms this way, opposing conformity and self-reliance. What about conformity and freedom instead? We cherish freedom in the American experiment, but that is often the freedom to take from others more value than we give and then defend what we have taken as our “private” possessions. If this is freedom, it is also conformity to a “private” rule, and it defends its rights with or without responsibility to others.

Character

Is this behind the impulse to stop another’s breath?

Emerson frequently describes what makes a person great or virtuous in the face of challenges. One’s character is improved by steering through the unique vicissitudes of life, not by treading on the well-worn path. Emerson writes of nonconformity: “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.” This sounds like socially engaged self-improvement. Virtue is proven when one maintains a course of integrity to achieve goals. It moves, not by identifying with ancestors in name or custom. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson speaks of the “upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man… [who] is the centre of things.… He measures you and all men, and all events. You are constrained to accept his standard.… and posterity seem to follow his steps as a processional.”

Here I will play the child and stop reading the fuller context of these incendiary passages.

“You are constrained to accept his standard.”

Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 1841

Is the state of character Emerson espouses, self-reliant nonconformity, not the very image of white privilege? It exalts itself. It observes no power greater than itself. Its personal achievement proves a personal greatness of character. Okay. Where does this go in social life? Is this the source of income inequality? Is this the aggressive power to silence the civic voices of others deemed less valuable? Is this the unquestioned power to exploit? Is this behind the impulse to stop another’s breath? If so, self-reliant nonconformity sounds like a philosophy for sociopaths.

“Economic inequality, whether measured through the gaps in income or wealth between richer and poorer households, continues to widen.”

Pew Research Center, 2020

It may be that our responsibility to society demands an aggregated conformity, to vote, for example? Democracy requires conformity to sets of ideas that we share. Some of those are about democratic processes and some are principles, such as to equality and fairness. Those sets of ideas can also be special interests that cluster around private goals. Pursuing private goals believed to justify one’s worth, even virtue, could be the path of privilege. If those goals undermine collective processes, as do concealing, corruption, or cronyism, and weaken democratic principles, as does racism, I have probably found a path to white privilege and a lot of white-collar crime.

Emerson’s self-reliant nonconformity is the place from which to acknowledge and protect the cultures and liberties of all, not only itself. 

On the other hand, maybe Emerson’s self-reliant nonconformity is the place from which to acknowledge and protect the cultures and liberties of all, not only itself. Self-reliant nonconformity might seem contrary to our interdependence and mutuality, but we might also prize its intellectual maturity and emotional strength. Those features of character can critique a situation, engage in dialectics, and offer solutions. Isn’t Emerson’s self-reliance a critical and creative impulse?

“Not with money, but with honor.”

Reading “Self-Reliance” further, I find that Emerson is advising his fellows to find personal strength in the use of reason, not unbridled selfishness or thoughtless conformity. Those habits of mind seem to be holdovers from pre-enlightment monarchies. As persons, those with privileged are no more than equal to the common person who pays for rights, “not with money, but with honor.” There is no reason to be in deference to rank, says Emerson. The source of independent thought is the source and cause of everything else, that which has many names, incluiding the infinitude and Nature. Access is universally free, at least in theory. But where did Emerson draw lines of distinction in the practical social world?

Even though Emerson was an abolitionist actively arguing against slavery, he refused to join anti-slavery groups because of his suspicion of conformity. (I see my legacy here.) He railed against their hypocrisies but later joined them.

Looking again at the violence suffered by George Floyd and many more who died at the hands of brutality, I think the Transcendendalist would ask, “Cannot individual actors temper themselves even while they are members of rampaging or insidious groups? Why can’t they step out of conformity to destructive urges to see and feel another’s life?” My society provides examples and counterexamples. Some keep us alive to make a future beyond the pandemic. I see countless acts of courage and generosity, from health-care professionals and essential worker to non-violent demonstrators and employers who pay their workforce to stay home. Workers are faced with the choice to save themselves or their companies. So do we live with “the power of accumulated power,” a sign of white privilege, or do we live with the power of millions of individuals serving their whole society? Reality is a swirl of entities and possibilities, not just two positions (as in racist/anti-racist, haves/havenots) pitted against each other, seemingly held in place by mental habit. I want to understand more of what is called white privilege, ponder how it is rooted in history, and make my way back to the novel.

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 1841

I don’t hear the voice of a sociopath writing “Self-Reliance.” He is neither caught in hysteria nor isolated in abstraction. I hear maturity. Who would not want that sweetness of independent thought? Independence lets me see more than one thing and offer novel solutions. It lets me stand against totalizing agendas while standing inside reason. But if solitude for the many is a thing of the past, few people in our time will practice that Emersonian ideal from which to see uneasy, inconvenient truths. They may be unable to stand at all and can only go with the flow.

Critique

“Society is a joint-stock company in which members agree for the better securring of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 1841

Emerson critiques capitalism as well as hypocrisy and conformity. It may be a critique of white privilege, with its cronyism and insidious conformity. When a group earns bread for its members only, many more will hunger. The tendency to survive by recreating inequities has been called “the power of accumulated power.” Capitalists in the United States have had many years to refine this approach to survival.

Social movements are trying to change this. Apparently, in our times, the only effective political voice speaks anonymously and en masse. There is a tendency to dumb the public discourse down to two opposing terms, and defending one for any reason is taken to be an argument against the other. We are asked to take sides before we have applied reason and dialogue. Simply acknowledging elements of the culture that can be identified with white privilege may be seen as racist. That could sink any tradition, system, or brand. So the Bard was right. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

Nineteenth century abolitionists interpreted religious texts which guided their fervent attempts to bring rightiousness (back) into their own social world. The Second Great Awakening was a religious revival. We should not be blind to how our contemporary social movements have the same roots.

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Ephesians 6:12, JKV

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”

Hillel the Elder, “The Golden Rule”

The Voice is Mightier

In The Compromise, Otia and Mariah confront overwhelming power in very different ways. Otis seeks a swift, strong, public encounter that puts his life at risk. His character is heroic in standard ways. He defies an unjust law and defies death. Mariah is his counterbalance, on a different path, and heroic in a less familiar way. In one scene there is a conversation between them, but because brother and sister are estranged, she can only imagine the exchange. Mariah tells Otis to hide his words to save himself.

     I felt stupid when I tried to write. It looked like chickens walked in my book, but I was struck by tears I didn't see coming, so true feelings were in it. I wiped those tears away and whispered what I wanted to write.
     “After today, I fear for you, Otis.” I held the edge of the table as if I was holding my brother’s big hand. In my mind, he heard me, so I put some honey in my words. “You’re brilliant and passionate about what’s right and just. And you have a silver tongue while mine is tin.

The abolitionists were working with a principle, that God’s law was above goverment’s law. (The words “under God” did not appear in the US Pledge of Allegience until the 1950s.) From that principle, they used the power of the pulpit, social networks, and texpanding literacy and the press to promote their cause. Otis indulges his masculinity and continues to flaunt the law. But for a Black man, punishment for civil disobedience would be much worse than Thoreau’s night in jail. Mariah asks him to backdown.

     In this here Missouri adhering to the light is sedition, and if someone thinks you are inciting rebellion, it brings the death penalty. That’s the law they planted here, and it took. Folks, like the blind fools they are, have been watering the weeds!”
     Otis nodded slowly with a fierce expression. His eyes directed mine to another, better place and a time beyond ours. Here I was in the library where old ghosts came down the centuries, where history whispered in the darkness. My brother reached out his arm.  Extended in his hand, that pencil had sparks to burn a hole in the air. 

The Compromise, “Written Words 1844”

“Moses and the African Methodists are behind this.”

For a time Otis helps fugatives from slavery, and that requires hiding. But he changes course. He does not hide himself. He uses the Black Code to speak against it. Like Emerson, he overcomes his criticism of the anti-slavery societies. To gain his audience, he works with them and they succeed. Through careful management of the public space, the abolitionists arrange for Otis to speak to the crowd.

      Two more men walked beside Otis, Mr. Kerney and Mr. Meriwether. They were his friends from the university. Behind them, the two cleaning men stood guard at the courthouse door, which they locked from the outside. 
     “Old Leon and Thomas,” said Hester. “They got the keys and the Order behind them.”
     “The Order?”
     “You know nothing and never heard that, Milk-Thistle. Moses and the African Methodists are behind this.”
     The two lawmen, Otis, and two university men moved down the green to the wagon. The crowd closed in behind them and folks were getting pushed around. I was scared a fight would break out and cause a stampede, but the churchgoing women and some from the female academies filled in and linked their arms at the elbows. They faced the lawmen and pushed back the circle with Otis and the four men in the center. Meriwether and Kerney walked backwards facing the lawmen and then forwards facing the crowd. 
     Surprised, I said, “The lawmen are letting this happen. This was planned--”
     “Hush,” said Hester. “‘Course it was. The Order, I told you.”
     Otis lifted his voice. “We cannot be shut out for all ages from the aspirations of the human soul.” There was applause. 

The Compromise, “Moral Freedom 1845”

Learning about the “Order” was a sea change for me. This is my best knowledge to date. International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor was a secret African American antislavery organization founded by Moses Dickson, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, in 1846. It was based in Independence, Missouri. He also founded the Knights of Liberty, which served the Underground Railroad, based in St. Louis. The Knights of Liberty amassed arms to lead a slave revolt, but it did not come to pass. 

The lawmen in The Compromise deserve separate discussion. In this scene, the US Marshals from the state capital were recruited to let the abolitionists exercise the right of assembly. Otis has the vision to lead but must manufacture through protest a provisional civic power. Denied legitimate power, he and his friends must take it.

Hold On

Listen to CheckDEMout sing “Hold On!“

She hears their voices and their silences.

A riot breaks out in front of the courthouse before Otis gets in the wagon. The ring of women holding back the crowd is broken. Some people throw rocks. Mariah takes spit, but she digs in to help the lovers and to stand witness. She hears their voices and their silences.

     Another cheer went up, but it quieted as Otis grabbed the doorway of the wagon. The Methodists started singing. “Keep on climbin’ an’ don't you tire. Hold on. Hold on. Keep your hand on that plough on. Hold on.” A lawman climbed into the wagon behind him. The second lawman locked the door with a heavy chain. The men from the university and many women from the female academies stood like sentinels to keep the peace. Most of the crowd fell back thinking that the show was over. 
     But Hester held the side of the wagon. I heard her slapping the wood and singing to Otis, “Keep your hand on that plow. Hold on.” He was probably singing back from inside, but I couldn’t hear. 

The Compromise, “Moral Freedom 1845”

It will not hold on for long because his protest has not accumulated its own power to endure.

These alternative forms of firm friendship, devoted affection, and community solidarity let Otis speak publicly and for a few moments, lead his fellow abolitionists. It will not hold on for long because his protest has not accumulated its own power to endure.

Accumulated Power

This power is not raw and physical, but it takes the breath just the same.

Mariah always shows the work of women, physical work, intellectual work, and emotional work. She works to gain the names and customs that Emerson derides as conformity. She is touched by small praise. When she faces the worst, the loss of home, family, friends, work, and earnings, she looks at the accumulated power that has taken it all. This power is not raw and physical, but it takes the breath just the same. It is clean, calculated, systemic, and self-satisfied.

     George and the other deputies were standing in the middle of the parlor speaking to the sheriff in low tones and glancing our way. The sheriff was seated on Mrs. Starr's big chair with his boots up on the red velvet ottoman. He looked away like there was nothing important for him to do. The finery was gone, the gold-leaf frames and the clock. The piano was closed and the drapes were partly drawn. 

To the sheriff, the center of power, the housekeeper is nothing. The most privileged expend very little energy on those beneath them. The men leave her alone without a clue to what she endures. Her fiancé quickly takes control of her possessions and her earnings. She is reduced to chattle.

     The men came out the backdoor and three saddled up. George untied the key from the trunk and put it in his pocket. He emptied the coins from the metal box into his saddle bags and tossed the box into the yard. He whistled and used his whip to catch up with the others already down the lane. 
     I walked after him and watched him go. This was the man who owned me and everything I had been and could be. It looked like I had no choice but to claw my way out of a trade that did not recognize me as more than a horse. If that was true, my soul was lost while my body lived to tell it.  

The Compromise, “The Foyer 1845”

By writing this novel, I say that power does not claim another’s soverenity, not permanently.

By attaching accumulated power to race, we might miss something about privilege. Abused power empties people of social meaning. It defies shared humanity. It drains the soul. Many men and women of every race or creed have walked through this desert. A woman is made into an image, a projection to which she does not aspire, and must crawl out of it as she matures. The end of The Compromise gives Mariah a voice, the voice that flowers later as this story is told. By writing this novel, I say that power does not claim another’s soverenity, not permanently. It frightens, isolates, breaks the heart, and makes people crawl, but where there is breath, there is life. That life is inately free and knows itself through the infinitude of the solitary (enlightened) mind. We are not constrained to accept any standard but our own!

Privilege

“Who built that system? Who keeps it going?“

Teaching Tolerance “What is White Privilege, Really?”

One way writers support the claim of universality is to find evidence of coherence across cultures. Our privilege lets us explore and travel. Our multicultural society, libraries, the Internet, and school systems welcome us to learn as freely as we can. Emerson must have had access though public systems were still formative. The 19th century was a tide of increasing access for some. This access and its associated comfort and coherence with the past flow from privlege, yet it was and is maintained by systems trailing beyond view, or disappeared from attention, silenced. Are those systems of exploitation or some twisted idea of natural order? Listening to the voices of culture, privlege and racism are like tunnels that go in circles, obnoxiously repetitive and without exit.

Reading “Self-Reliance” again, I recognize that Emerson’s ideal is concerned with virtue and vice and authenticity and integrity in ways that are very like my own. He thinks his evolving experience is special and universal; he speaks to encourage others and he listens. He is willing to apply reason and adapt. His language reveals both vision and blindness, but Emerson engages in the small and immediate world around him more than those who do not question their right to exploit it.

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he [he?] carries in his bill into my web also. … Men [men?] imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt action and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 1841

Likewise, Emerson’s dialogic engagement in the world does not indicate that he is either the subject or the object of exploitation. Does observing the web of life around us require access to wealth or privilege or simply a minimum standard of living? Can we pay for our rights, not with money, but with honor?

As I write, I consider the names and customs around me and how they adapt and change. We create reality together or not at all. I try to elicit words in patterns from the humanity I stand for, now, as best I can, and to create my fiction to approach reality. It is universal or situated, both in unknown measure. And what I do not know with certainty mounts ever higher as I mature. I must even tolerate myself.

Teaching tolerance requires us to take stock of systemic privileges and racism. Again, it asks, “Who built that system? Who keeps it going?” My answer is simple, “I.” And I have two hands always at work, one to build and one to change.

I have two hands always at work, one to build and one to change.

I must have read “Self-Reliance” the first time for a high school or college class. A young women leaned into her book and listened for echoes in her own life. She heard them while her mother did the dishes and paid the tuition bills. The young woman read and played the paino while unknown others harvested the wheat and baked the bread on which she relied. Like Emerson, she enjoyed the physical security and the emotional support necessary to contemplate the coherence within her culture and the literary cannon. The message was…

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Not one note we all sing, this is a vibration sounded within the instrument and within the air that are both already full of living things. Trust not what is kind, but what is true.

The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me.

Frederisk Douglass