The neighbor’s apples are turning red. The oak trees are dense with leaves. I’m not compelled to prove that I descended from Druids, but I do have a photo of me taken in the 1970s dancing sprite-like around the apple tree in the backyard. The 1980s could have found me cooking apples to freeze and arguing against original sin, and by the 1990s, I looked more Buddhist sitting under its downward-turning branches. These memories help me address issues of cultural appropriation, social privilege, and the white savior trope as I write The Compromise.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
It was not more than a stick in a bag of soil, the day we bought the Gordon apple tree from the back yard of Mr. Gordon, local Whittier man who developed the seed. This memory leaves a trail to my character Mariah, who helped plant the orchard with seeds carried from her mother’s tribe, that her Cherokee grandmother planted there. I have no more knowledge of the Cherokee people than Wikipedia and a few more internet sources provide, but I have known trees.
We helped her plant the orchard, and it was now in the third year to bloom and bear. She had brought the peach pits from North Carolina, from the trees her mother planted there. I said to our tallest tree, “Tell Mother if she ever comes back, we wintered fine. Tell her Otis came to take us elsewhere. Pa wanted it this way.”
Cultural Appropriation
There are issues related to my choice to make my protagonist Mariah biologically and culturally related to native people. Is this cultural appropriation? I ask readers if they feel disrespected as a group by this fiction. Some action in the fiction could be related to the protagonist’s grandmother’s matriarchal culture, or my own that is not named—her prayers, her interests in healing plants, orchards, waterways, wood especially her bird totem, and leatherwork. These are among the skills that help her thrive, but kinship is even more important. I have woven elements together imaginatively, and I hope with sensitivity. Following are my research notes:
Cherokee Religion: Deistic but anchored in the physical world, apparently less dualistic and transcendent, divine retribution for sinfulness, water ceremonies, plants for healing, some see spirits after death, ghosts are not evil. They became Christian very quickly because of strong parallels: monotheism, trinity, heaven and hell, creation myths. Literacy: syllabary from 1810s. Written language was considered powerful for the priestly class. Trade with Scotts began in 18th C., deerskin, pelts, Intermarriage with Euro-Americans, who also traveled the Trail or Tears. Family: Matrilineal- Children were part of mother's clan. Wife’s family provided and raised children. Polygamy, intermarriage, and mesegenation were common. Non-married unions common. Women could divorce freely. People of different races were accepted into the clan. Americanization: By 1835, gender roles changed to favor male domination. Cherokee people were both slave-owners and subject to Jim Crow laws and were classified as colored. I think this sounds like Mariah's Cherokee background.
These facts help me imagine a woman who is born in the South around 1810. She could have a Scottish father but was a child of her mother’s clan. This is Jutah, Mariah’s mother. She enters a domestic union with a red-headed ne’er-do-well and story-teller. She follows Jebediah into Christian patriarchy growing in dominance, but she uses her personal strength and financial independence to shape her family according to customs she knows. Each daily interaction with her daughter and step-children is embedded in her traditional and newly negotiated values. All this happens before Mariah comes of age in the period of the novel, but it is absolutely key to understanding.
These values, I claim, move forward through generations like the seeds of trees. Families and histories are like the constantly changing conditions of the air and soil. My novel aspires to describe this for one mostly fictional family. I’m not sure how trends in identity and culture will shape the novel’s interpretation, but my little life is one of those generations. Mariah’s third daughter Mary Otis Fowler was my great grandmother.
Womenfolk handed down useful objects with stories about the family members who had come before. Family history gave things value.
My mother and aunts handed things down with stories, like the wedding dress, the pendant, the Masonic and college pins, and the military insignia. The stories were about how some dishes were broken in a rage or how the coat wore out but we still have the buttons. I smile to think of a reader who said those types of details were meaningless to him, yet the values handed down through women inspired the story and their objects are the materials of daily life. In my family, men and women told their stories differently. No doubt, women’s voices in fiction are different as well.
There was scar-showing time.
The same concern about cultural appropriation exists for my character Otis. I tell his story without having heard slave narratives spoken in my family. I have not faced the same systems that institutionalize oppression, nor did I hear the stories of overcoming them. I learned that for me, those systems generally work and they might even employ me and let me build a useful identity within them. I discuss my research on plantation life and my literary goals further in the post “Boyhood.”
When my extended family came together, people sat around telling stories that made the tellers laugh though their tears and made the rest of us a little surprised to be alive at all: shot-gun weddings, freezing cold before electricity, no gas when there were no telephones on the road, rescues from mountain tops, and the uncle lost in the war. My father had a buddy from the war, a pilot who few missions over Europe and showed his scars to prove it. This type of story telling got into the novel, remembered from Otis’s fictional childhood.
There was scar-showing time, and we crowded into the firelight to see. They raised their shirts or rolled up their pant legs and told stories telling what had been done to them, the accidents that happened, the broken bones, the cuts, and the burns. 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.
When Israel was in Egypt land
Let my people go!
Oppressed so hard they could not stand
Let my people go!
We sang and I felt my skin rise up like bubbles.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
In the 1960s, multiple families sang together around the campfire in the national parks. There were Spirituals among the cowboy songs. We sang in school and at home during the holidays. Singing held a special place among in the cultural lives of enslaved people and through our history, those songs have contributed to American culture and continue to heal us. The representations of people and things in my writing are adapted from multiple memories and cultural elements, from history, science, and the arts. My subconscious mind mixes them and freely gives them up for adoption by the reader. Our cherished First Amendment protects this. I seek to represent people and their artifacts with care and intelligence, and without blame or sensationalism. If the story is incomplete, anyone should feel welcome to tell more.
Social Privilege
Here I must reflect because I am a member of some social groups associated with privilege. Blindness to one’s own social groups could be targeted obliviousness to social privilege—“an invisible package of unearned assets,” as defined by anti-racism activist Peggy Macintosh. Of course each of us is embedded in a matrix of overlapping categories and contexts. Race, sex, industry affiliation, and political persuasion are more durable or more transitory. Those categories animated by a story enable unique perceptions and merge with collective change. The arts often show us what is possible before we see it in social life.
Like trees, our seeds are both cultural and biological. We had an old peach tree that only produced a couple of peaches a year, but it was good for climbing, as were the avocado trees that produced enough fruit to pay the taxes. There was a fig tree with long flexible bows you could bend in your hands to collect the fruit. Trees have so many stories. The Gordon apple was an invisible package of controled possibilities. Olive and date trees could help teach the history of civilization, but one can cut down in a day what it took centuries to grow.
Matrix of overlapping categories
They are siblings, yet they are divided by the legal status of their classifications.
In The Compromise, I tell stories that explore the lines between racial identities and legal status. They are siblings, yet they are divided by the legal status of their classifications– enslaved and free, man and woman, literate and illiterate. Of course each of us is embedded in a matrix of overlapping categories and contexts. In this novel, I tease out the tensions between kinship and race. For example, the strongest early influence on the half-siblings was Mother’s attitude towards racial difference.
Years back I had asked why Otis was darker than us. Mother said, “Otis is a mulatto. He had a dark-skinned ma and a light-skinned pa. Jebediah and I call him our son. Otis is your brother, so you listen to him and not others. These are Cherokee ways, and I will not change for less.”
Mariah is heroic because of how she values her mother’s words and continues to manage those tensions between kinship and race. She follows Hester to the safe house and then takes the travelers there after the tornado; she delivers babies to women whose family unity determines their survival.
"Now use your forearms to help her push down.”
I nodded. This was a wagon wheel that had to rock out of the mud. “So help me God.”
After time, the woman’s agony gushed out as long as a river, and a dark red baby girl was born.
“That’s it,” said Midwife. “Well done!”
The infant was quiet at first but she announced herself. We heard the whooping and cheering outside. “Praise the Lord!” a man cried out. “Born into freedom, praise the Lord!”
The Compromise, “First Birth”
“Born into freedom, praise the Lord!”
White Savior Trope
Warnings against the white savior trope are often on my mind as I write. One Hollywood commentator recently said it might be better to have stories with no white people at all. Examples of the trope spliced together certainly do look foolish. I have a mixed-race protagonist who passes for white, and I want her to act responsibly if not heroically. Maybe a white savior complex is hard to avoid. I’m a white woman and a teacher who has spent decades helping others, and if it’s any consolation, it did not add up to much. The white savior trope could be a conceptual issue, and my current personal take is influenced by a different concept of causality. In fact, there are many of us [would-be savior-types], generally unaware of each other, working not collectively but in parallel, not as independent and certifiable “saviors” but as dependent members of complex causal chains.
In Buddhist terminology this understanding is dependent co-arising or cyclical links of dependant co-arising. Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh explains:
“The general or universal definition of pratityasamutpada (or “dependent origination” or “dependent arising” or “interdependent co-arising”) is that everything arises in dependence upon multiple causes and conditions; nothing exists as a singular, independent entity.”
Buddhist cosmology and psychology present many more layers of complexity. Good deeds might go to our heads if we ignore the links beyond ourselves: before us, among us, after us. Arrogance is a problem; awareness is a solution. The massive connections that make up reality would foil an honest novelist. They also indicate different capacities of mind.
As a novelist and as an American, I don’t want to look through one lens.
Dilemma and Paradox
I did not intend to write a novel about race or slavery, but slavery was there and the time and place cannot be recalled without it. An honest look at the history told me that my own education was lacking. The learner, the teacher, the storyteller, and yes the citizen in me had to engage. As a novelist and as an American, I don’t want to look through one lens. The dilemmas and paradoxes capture the mind, make it work and make it listen.
The New York Times Magazine launched The 1619 Project to reframe America’s history through the lens of slavery. I hear the both-and paradox in a recent Newshour interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones, how this nation was built on contradictions.
“So this [slavery] is a truly national enterprise but we prefer to think that it was just some backward Southerners, because that is the way that we can kind of deal with our fundamental paradox that at our beginning that we were a nation built on both the inalienable rights of man and also a nation built on bondage.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones on the Newshour
I put slavery in the family to feel it more deeply.
Some say those first men and women came in the bellies of slave ships as beasts, sent to mine the evils of the human soul. I believe my grandmother was among them, agonizing in hell to deliver my mother and then me into the New World. Yes, we go down into the hell of slavery but in faith and goodness to rise again. If the living truth is the greater ornament to our 19th century America, both stories may be true.
The Compromise, “The Boyhood of Otis Roche”
In The Compromise, the classification of race is placed first and foremost in the context of family. Love is there to feel its depths, not to distract from its pain. We would never set out to lose our precious mothers to the Trail of Tears or the crimes of slavery, but it happened to all of us in our collective national experience. The loss continues if we do not take stock of what is really here.
My own river carried my thoughts. “My people,” he said. Did this mean that his people were not mine? Everything we did depended on those two words, how they pulled us apart and pulled us together. Mother would say that we are of water and anything that pulls us apart is temporary. Being water, we learn the shapes of things from the inside.
The Compromise, “Awakening the Nation”