That was me at age 22, reading and thinking white, and feeling fellowship in brown skin. These lines of thought were like bridges that jutted out on different sides but didn’t cross the stream. Jebediah was to blame. He put me where I couldn’t pass from either side.
Photo above by William Rouse on Unsplash. Text from The Compromise, “The Crossroads 1833”
Revision requires a sharp delete key. Like sculpting, the act of removing is the creative act. William Faulkner’s phrase “kill your darlings” is well known among writers. I’ve cut plenty of darlings in The Compromise — characters, settings, and scenes. However, I’m not ready to put my main characters on death row for my own capital crimes. Cutting Otis’s narrative has meant cutting 20,000 words of my best writing and a male protagonist’s voice. Otis Roche remains a central character, but his scenes are now among the 100,000 words told from his half-sister’s point of view. Her power, or powerlessness, to rescue her brother is one of her challenges, and one of mine as a writer. Here I explore my processes of decision making and explicate a scene in which Otis is also at a crossroads.
Integrating my narratives requires more skill, courage, and imagination.
Narrative Arc
My primary writing difficulty is how to integrate the two narrators’ arcs, their storylines. The two stories, each told in first person, take place in different decades. It has been suggested that The Boyhood of Otis Roche is a different novel, but do I have the psychological and literary skill to write it? Now it is framed as a written “slave narrative” of a man remembering his youth and it ends with his young adulthood. It was written in a naive and intelligent voice and a mostly standard dialect. It applies moral sensibilities for the readers I have known, mostly young and inexperienced with the issues of the historical period.
There is a disjunction in my knowledge rather like the bridges that jut over a chasm but do not meet in the middle. My rolemodels for him may be too few: Barack Obama, Frederick Douglass, Djbrine, a former student who had worked as a health educator for the WHO, and a young, talented teaching colleague whose tender heart and flair for language took me on a ride every time we talked. His thoughts about his identity as a Black man and an educator and writer made me feel that I could understand him. Along these lines, I’ve given Otis some qualities without a good enough plan for how he developed and tested these traits in one story arc. Then more recently, I followed Ibram X. Kendi and his work on teaching anti-racist ideas. I was moved by his writing and his public lecture. His bridge to my world seemed strong and dependble enough for us both to cross. I tried to draw on these incredible men as I wrote one fictional man living in the 19th century.
Fiction is where personal power dialogues with systemic power.
Point of View and Voice
Maybe revising to third person is a solution. First person calls for code-switching in Otis’s dialects, which I lack the skill to write and many lack the skill to read. Can I alternate their stories in the same novel, which was the original plan, if I change Otis’s narrative to third person? It solves some problems and makes others. I am still at the crossroads as a novelist.
There is a possible solution. I could weave the narratives together in Otis’s voice. He could comment on the action involving other characters, all women. Honestly, would my character, an enslaved Black man, reflect on the stories of his younger white and mixed-race half-sisters? Like him, they are caught in domestic servitude but with different risks. My original prologue was Otis’s POV and he actually said that he put his pen down to let his sisters speak, but I have not fulfilled that promise. This man of keen language sensibilities would have to carry his sisters’ oppression as dearly as his own. With my hands waiting over the keyboard, my unkind answer has been no. Integrating my narratives requires more skill, courage, and imagination.
Putting the issue into historical perspective, it was the choice of abolitionist groups to focus on ending slavery, not on rights for women. They wanted to address the most pressing issue first. There was disagreement, and organizations excluded women from decision making. Notably, Frederick Douglass kept the rights of women in his awareness and public speech. He attended the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Research could provide an opening for me to include women in Otis’s narrative spanning the same years as Mariah’s narrative. Nevertheless, so far, this has not proven to be fruitful.
There is more to it. People have openly questioned my right as a white woman to write a first person POV of a Black man, enslaved to his father. Would I know if I were whitewashing? I can only use the psychological and intellectual tools I have. I am using the King’s English, a colonial language embedded with and sometimes equated with white supremacy. This institutional language is where I have been educated and employed. This language also flows on tongues, trails across text boxes, lies hidden in computer code, explodes on social media, and connects lives all over the world. Institutions like schools, economic policy, and American economic might make the English language dominant, yet institutions and ideologies emerge to keep this dominance in check. Educators and writers (so many women!) are asked to check for inequities in our practices and representations. This should be a good learning and community-building activity, not a silencing one. This is a cultural dilemma and a crossroard for my project.
I invited advice and comments from my generous fellow writer and friend, Sandy Bliss:
I think there’s (at least) one more consideration about the Boyhood of Otis Roche narrative. This is from a contemporary race analysis perspective, and I invite others to amplify this thought, because I don’t know that I’m doing it justice. Because the history of African Americans on this continent is one of white people exerting sovereignty over Black bodies, the prospect of a white person writing an African American character’s voice in the first person is seen by some as a continuation of that process: you as a white woman are inhabiting a black body. As you know, for Black women who were raped by their white enslavers, the exertion of sovereignty was brutal, physical, and intergenerational. In light of this, one question is whether and how you can write Otis’s first person narrative while avoiding that dynamic. Here, a sensitivity reader may help. Or there may be other options.
I return to the personal where fiction keeps a messy house. Our complicated lives provide the ground for various human struggles, sticky affiliations and repulsive alienations. This is where defenses become lies and lies are swept under the rug. Writers bring them to conscious awareness through the medium of language, potentially in a collective rising. Has social media replaced fiction in this role? Each of us has a particular way of enacting consciousness, and that particularity needs to come into proximity for meaning and the suspension of disbelief to take place. All my interactions on this subject are terribley interesting. Becoming proximal ideologically might be the same as joining a corporate brand– Stamped with a barcode. For me, this is where personal power dialogues with systemic power, on thresholds of fiction. Like Otis, I stop, unsure where to turn.
Fiction is where personal power dialogues with systemic power.
On the Borders of Bondage
The scene that follows, “The Crossroads,” comes near the end of Otis’s boyhood. In Missouri, most slaveholders had only one enslaved worker, typically a mother’s helper or manservant. Historian, Diane Mutti Burke writes that such enslaved workers had relative freedom to come and go. Carlie and Otis are such characters with complex internal struggles about their identities as men in bondage. They could have had relative intimacy with their enslavers and their enslaver’s children. Inola, whom Otis loves, is the young woman living with his father in common-law. She is part of his enslavement. Mariah and Eliza are his half-siblings with a hold on Otis’s heart.
My young heart strained against Carlie looking for his girl in the slave ads.
The year is 1833 on the outskirts of a rural town. Otis has been to visit his friend Carlie, an enslaved man who dreams of finding his woman. Carlie wants to join her when his bad leg heals. He knows the trail to get out of town, but he lacks the physical ability to run, and he has no realistic way to find her. In the meantime, he gets Otis to read scraps of newspapers and together they interpret where they stand in their America.
I said, “We've got new gravel roads that let the water drain off.”
“Not good for us’n bare feet,” said Carlie.
“They’re called improvements, so the land’s worth more. Taxes’re paying for it, you know.”
“Men I knowd die breakin’ rock fo’ de roads. Read ‘bout something else,” he said. “Somethin’ dramatical.”
“Okay. Here’s why folks should settle in Missouri.” I stood in the firelight and started with a big breath.
"Here the skies of Missouri are not clouded by despotic power.
"Not clouded by despotic power," that’s good, I laughed.
It says, "The people of Missouri have arrived at the highest grade civilization can attain."
"Listen to dat!" shouted Carlie.
I read, "Science holds her head erect and bids her sons …"
"Where did it go? Oh, here."
"… bids her sons into the vestal fire where goes the fate of nations."
We crushed the old paper and watched it spark.... We burned those pages, toasting our fingertips and laughed feeling crazy.
“Skies of Missouri” adapted from the Missouri Gazette prospectus printed in 1808.
In other parts of the narrative, Otis loved the heightened rhetoric of American progress, but in this scene, he must wonder if he is one of the sons who will determine the fate of the nation. What does his laughter sound like? Ideologically, he is at the crossroads, as I imagine it, questioning his idealism and his identity as an American.
“We burned those pages, toasted our fingertips, and laughed feeling crazy.“
The Compromise “Missouri Gazette 1833”
Carlie has an answer. He tells Otis to turn left at the crossroads and look for safehouses on the road to Springfield.
“What ailing my ol’ Carlie?”
“Yo' gotta go, my friend.”
“What'da ya' mean. You want me to go home?” I asked.
“Yo' gotta life as a lettered man, but not here in Missouri, not now. You gotta go. Go far az yo can wid dos’ goo’ legs you got unda' ya. Git, ri'now, why not?”
“You want me to take off north?”
“At‘da cross, turn left, dis way, an' look fo’ yella lady aprons on da lines for dos safehouse. Got dat?”
“Not rightly, Carlie.” I stood to go.
“Go, go an’ don’ look back.”
Carlie thinks critically as an outsider, one who can reason from the position of the oppressed. He’s ready to sacrifice his friendship even if Otis isn’t ready to go. There is a heroic impulse in Otis that will emerge years later. This is the wish that I sense in the lives of many young men, to make a difference, to do what is right, to achieve. This hero would rather die than destroy the greater and more profound hope of his country.
Both and Neither
Otis heads home in the twilight and feels the strain of being both and neither, both white and Black, and neither. The strain is what holds him together as a person of mixed race.
I walked home as the sun set. My young heart strained against Carlie looking for his girl in the slave ads. And it strained against the new roads that let us travel fast and far, but broke men’s backs to make them. And it strained against the westward march of slavery and everything going with it, good and bad, and against those Latter Day Saints getting run out for reading the US Constitution and writing their own story. But I was not ready to put words to my anxiety.
Here I should consider contemporary discourse on race, which has an intense vortex of its own.
As a young man, Otis is drawn by unconscious desires. He does not feel fixed in his identity, which is common in young adulthood. Identity must be intense for a young man of mixed race who has lived on the borders of slaveholding. Much greater than his sisters, the law places him at terrible risk whether he stays or goes. I write fiction, but here I should consider contemporary discourse on race, which has an intense vortex of its own. I need to enter this as well.
My character naturally wonders who is to blame for these conflicts. There is an easy answer. His father, of course, the white man who has stolen his basic sovereignty.
That was me at age 22, reading and thinking white, and feeling fellowship in brown skin. These lines of thought were like bridges that jutted out on different sides but didn’t cross the stream. Jebediah was to blame. He put me where I couldn’t pass from either side.
Otis feels like he can’t pass to the other side of the imagined river. He can’t go in the direction of progress because he’s not clear what progress means to him. Likewise, he can’t pass as a Black man or as a white man. Literacy, which he associates with whiteness, has given him unattainable dreams, ideals of “natural” beauty and order. These are schemas embedded with social hierarchies. (Mariah meets similar challenges when she learns to read.) The words are his to speak, but is their power his to wield?
I stopped at the crossroads in the blue evening light. I looked up at the stars and remembered lines from the Columbian Orator I learned years ago.
This sun, with all attendant planets, is but a very little part of the grand machine of the universe. And every star is a mighty globe, not a world but the center of a magnificent system with a retinue of worlds. All are lost to our sight across immeasurable wilds of ether.
This passage is adapted from The Columbian Orator (1810) “On the Starry Heavens” p. 45.
The words are his to speak, but is their power his to wield?
Maybe there were too many choices in the “immeasurable wilds of ether,” but that’s if I was white and the world was a mighty globe and I was a colossus. I stood in my bare feet on one of those worlds believing that my life was too small and too hard.
“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”
Frantz Fanon
Fateful Crossroads
Here are the ancient crossroads, and this is also the thematic dilemma. Otis cannot stop redefining himself. We humans pursue our lives despite the very short way we see down the path. Is the freedom to do this a political freedom?
To the left was the path that joined the main road to Illinois. That’s where Carlie said he’d go to look for his girl when his bum foot healed. There were safehouses we heard about all the way to Springfield.
Our cabin was down the trail to the right. I could smell the log fire. Pretty Inola would save food for me, smiling and touching my hands as I took it from her. Mariah would be in her Sycamore tree watching the road. Eliza would be playing with dolls. Jebediah, if he got home, would be smoking his pipe on the porch and preparing mean things to say when I got back after dark.
Sometimes one’s own liberation conflicts with a different yearning to be alive.
Okay, okay. I am now walking on thin ice. I am using Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex. Famously, at a crossroads, Oedipus unknowingly murdered his biological father and later took his father’s crown by marrying, unknowingly, his mother. This ancient Greek tragedy affirmed the power of the oracle and became the basis of Freud’s theory of the family romance. It is shocking and archetypal for good reason. It explains a deeply-rooted antipathy that grows between father and son as they compete for the mother’s attention. As the young man fights for his manhood, this is the drama that often turns to tragedy.
Rutting in the Underbrush
When threatened in the dark woods, Otis isn’t sure which way to go.
I wonder how different readers anticipate his decision. Otis knows how to leave Stoneville and his enslavement, but he is already caught up in unsteady affiliations and attractions that set his course. In his youth, he circled a log that divided his affiliations, enslavers and enslaved. Otis was nearly killed for making the choice to serve his white master. He cannot leave one for the other even years later. There are strange reasons people stay in abusive situations. Sometimes one’s own liberation conflicts with a different yearning to be alive.
A sound in the woods made me jump. A 500-pound black bear? A mountain lion coming to eat me? I had no gun if it was. I could back away slowly, but which way, I didn’t know. A doe raised her head and looked at me from the brambles. In the trees behind me, a rutting buck scraped and bellowed. Then another buck thrashed in the brush on the other side. The doe stepped on her delicate legs into the clearing. She was smooth, dun-colored, her tail high and shaking. Two bucks were rutting in the underbrush, crashing into each other to be the first to feel that doe under him. I turned right and ran home fast, thinking of the warm flames and the little lights in her eyes. Then I'd show Jebediah who the real man was.
When threatened in the dark woods, Otis isn’t sure which way to go. When confronted by animal instinct, he takes the path to Inola and inevitable violent confrontation with Jebediah. Maybe Freud helped me make this decision, and/or I have unswept a secret of what it feels like to be alive as a man. The truth of that is in the reader, not the writer. I can change his course and mine, right here and right now!
Spiritual Bonds
Behind the story of Otis’s enslavement is a belief about human freedom, which is deeply held in American culture. God, not Cesar, is the source of liberation. Brutality in many forms threatens to weaken that spiritual bond, threatens to replace it with hatred. Hatred, amalgamated with fear, hardens our identities and weakens empathy. If hatred is the order we find ourselves in, it takes collective work and personal devotion to rebuild and protect our collective good.
I question whether brutality could be the steady state for any society or community. Rebuilding is possible because, in the culture of which I speak, there is an eternal bond from which to take refreshment and guidance. I can give Otis that standing in American culture, that direct knowledge of the divine that was soaring on Transcendentalism into the 19th century American psyche. It may cut across the current public discourse on race. It may let my story be told even if not heard.
