“Sometimes things that have only the barest of associative connections will pay off in the end.”
Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World
This approach recently payed off. Tentatively, I began The Compromise with an assessment of Otis’s injuries. He was attacked the day he started working as an overseer, a role he was too immature to question and powerless to change. Following the attack, Otis is cared for by a grandfatherly old man who gives Otis great stories and opportunities to learn. His injuries heal, but not completely. Otis is subject to reinjury and inflammation, providing a turning point in his story many years later. So it is with injuries and gifts, they come looping back like stories, like the Wheel of Karma always turning.
Lately, it seems like teachers show up in fiction or popular culture as petty and mean. Their incompetence as human beings explains people’s unhappiness. There are wonderful exceptions that tell a different story. Anne Sullivan taught Helen Keller to communicate despite her deafness and blindness. Jaime Escalente taught thousands of youth to excell in calculus. Sal Kahn brings free education nearly any place in the world. We all know, teachers, great or humble, open our eyes to what is possible, to language, to numbers, to the Internet. Many acts of kindness shape The Compromise, most significantly when education is offered after has it been denied.
An expanded mind in a body enslaved
Independence of mind has its consequences. The possibilities crafted in the spaces of written language frequently exceed the possibilities granted to us by others. I have lived with this, so I give this problem to Otis, an enslaved man who learns to read, write, and think, and who has to inhabit the incongruity of an expanded mind and a body enslaved.
I stopped at the crossroads in the blue evening light. I looked up 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.
Maybe there were too many choices in the immeasurable wilds of ether, but that’s if I was free and the world was a mighty globe. I stood in my bare feet on one of those worlds believing that my life was too small and not of my choosing. The bigger the world, the worse it was to be tied down.
Teachers
Otis trespasses at the local school to feed his hunger for reading.
How do we respond when education and opportunity are denied? Who steps up? There are many scenes in which teachers play the starring role. Otis learns his letters and numbers by peeking in the schoolhouse window. The long-faced teacher appears not to notice. The boy Jeremy teaches Otis to read in exchange for old coins and arrowheads. Their childs’ play dusts away the clouds of prohibition. Old Man Easy encourages Otis to read the classics and national newspapers. Years later, Inola, who cannot read herself, sees him scratching words in wood and instructs him to make paper. As a young man, Otis reads newspapers found in the rubbish and trespasses at the local school to feed his hunger for reading.
We burned those pages, toasted our fingertips, and laughed feeling crazy.
The desire to read the news was an illness. The more you did it, the easier it was to feel worried sick.
Book-learning
It weakens authority over those who should be humble and obedient.
To Jebediah, book-learning is a symbol of superiority. It weakens authority over those who should be humble and obedient. This setting is only a hundred years before my paternal grandfather would not let his daughters, my aunts, go to college or have careers. The patriarch, Jebediah punishes Otis harshly for reading. After being whipped, Otis falls into depression, but a man who never spoke to him comes up the hill. It’s the teacher from the one-room schoolhouse. He quietly brings a book and paper for Otis.
“I put my hand on them to feel the power and love that this gift meant to me.”
Pa split one more piece of wood, tossed it, and gave up. Mother came back to my shed, took the goat away, and pushed in a packet wrapped in leather.
That made me sit up. It was The Columbian Orator dated 1822 and a few sheets of writing paper. I put my hand on them to feel the power and love that this gift meant to me. I thought it was from that teacher who saw me in the school yard, asking the children to let me look in their books like a giant hungering for what they had.
Of course, Otis has contradictory feelings about Jebediah, his father and owner. The story is often about this love-hate relationship made more complex by the slave law. Maybe Otis wins, but the family loses. They are broken apart before the daughters reach maturity.
Photo by David Gylland on Unsplash
Change of Heart
After the whipping and the teacher’s gift, Jebediah has a change of heart. He stops chopping the wood. He lets the book and sheets of paper be delivered to Otis in the goat shed. Otis has carved a hole in the plaster between the goat shed and the cabin. This enables him to eavesdrop on Jebediah and Mother.
“Of course I could sell him in St. Louis, but who’d want him. He’s not worth the food he eats.”
Mother cried like it gave her pain. I’d heard this before. Pa talked without meaning what he said. He liked to torment Mother with all the contrariness of man. Misery seemed like our habitual state.
The Compromise, “The Cornerstone, 1834”
Soon everything changes for the family in response to economic pressure. Otis is hired out to a girl’s school in Columbia where he does not hide his abilities and his passion from the school directors. I see now that they are not his teachers, but they enable him to explore and push boundaries. Through Mariah’s narrative, we learn that Otis has become a man of letters contributing his story to the abolitionist cause.
From the kitchen, I could see the light in my brother’s window. In my mind’s eye, Otis was scribbling words with fire and anger. He was writing, that’s for sure. He had a little table near the window and a row of notebooks on the shelf. The light seemed brighter than a single lamp, more illumination than was natural.
Concealment
By then, Otis is in trouble with the law and has pulled away from his family and friends. He no longer agrees with the integrationists around him. Mariah and Otis are estranged, so she imagines the conversation they would have. She gives advice that he will not take.
“You was asking for legislation, not rebellion. But those men, they fear the power of your words. Panic becomes a tool in their hands faster than they can frame an argument or load a gun. Don’t give it to them. Conceal what you write and whisper what you say.”
“Panic becomes a tool in their hands faster than they can frame an argument or load a gun.”
The Compromise, “Written Words 1844”
Otis doesn’t take anyone’s advice. He doesn’t run when he is warned. He takes a stand. His sister doesn’t see, though the reader does, that Otis has been concealing himself for a long time, being obedient and servile with an independent mind.
... I saw my pathway out of an enslaved mind and into manhood at the same time. It was to hide from Jebediah the scope of myself and carve a place in words where I could think and be free.
His protectors’ lives unravel. This has been a very difficult part of the novel to write. I may have to reveal what is in that row of notebooks in Otis’s room, but I don’t know yet what it is. Is he advocating war and martyrdom, more like John Brown? Is it nonviolent protest like Henry David Thoreau? Is that why he willingly goes to jail? Those notebooks are his wealth and his private life. He certainly came a long way from writing on a broken slate and scratching on wood. But now, I hesitate to speak for him, and this could be a problem. He is my character, and I need to find a way in, or maybe a way out. I’ve left him stewing in a jail cell, which is safer than being hung by vigilantes or locked in a chaingang.
Half-Known World
I’m writing about the relationships among men and boys, so there are psychological dimensions I don’t fully understand. That may be a good place from which to write, according to writer and educator Robert Boswell. I admire his book, The Half-Known World: On Writing Fiction (2008).
The discoveries you make about your characters work best if they involve searching that makes you uncomfortable, that forces you to face something you don’t want to face, something that makes you want to flee– or at least shut off your laptop and go for a walk. Your job, of course, is to strap yourself in and keep writing.”
Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World, p.23
People say there are stories an author has no right to tell.
Otis’s part of the story requires me to look at the ways I am frightened by writing. After all, Otis gets in trouble for speaking up where it was believed he had no right to speak. Novelist Salman Rushdie spent nearly ten years in hiding. In 1989, I witnessed a protest on US soil against his free speech. Currently, Jeanine Cummins, the author of American Dirt (2020) faces agressive reviews and was threatened for writing her work of fiction. The controversy was well covered by Latino USA, Digging into American Dirt. People say that there are stories an author has no right to tell. My humor could be transgressive in ways I don’t anticipate. I am slowed by anxiety. I wonder how the publishing industry will respond and how that will affect me. No doubt it will.
There are particular dangers in writing Otis’s story. I want to write historical fiction that is honest and not exploitative. Otis is not the only one to receive threats to his safety or be imprisoned, but he is the only one to receive physical violence. I hold readers attention in traditional ways, and hope I do not cross into fetishizing. Writers face these social issues, and they do feel dangerous to me.
My answer is to write as well as I can. I’m always reaching into the historical context for psychological nuance and hope that by going deeper into my own mind I will give life to my characters. I contemplate and invite my beginner’s mind.
I have grown to understand narrtive as a form of contemplation, a complex and seemingly incongruous way of thinking. I come to know my stories by writing my way into them… I work from a kind of half-knowledge.
Robert Boswell. The Half-Known World, p. 4
“You’re stepping onto terrain you only half-know.“
Like Boswell, I want my writing to resonate with the unknown, because that is the space into which writer and reader grow together. Boswell says, “You’ve reached the point in the story where you have the opportunity to create something real. You’re stepping onto terrain you only half-know. This is where you need to be.” In fact, he may have intended this advice for the writer of contemporary literary fiction or memoir, not historical fiction. I’m taking the half-known world to heart and trust that I find readers who will grant me, for a few hours of their attention, the right to enter this American terrain.
