Land of Compromises

Siblings ride out of their childhoods hoping that big open spaces and new towns mean opportunities: employment, education, and family.  The terrain through which they ride is beautiful and inspiring, but uneven and treacherous. 

Log Cabin, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Photo by Daderot [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons 

Eliza and I had never been away from this cabin more than a half-day’s walk. We’d heard stories of cities, railroads, and steamboats, and we wanted to become women, as everyone told us we would. I was bursting because those things I wanted were not easy to balance in two hands. 

The Compromise, “Stoneville 1839”

The siblings soon realize that civil rights and economic opportunities were not granted to them. They might carry ideas for equality and freedom in their hearts, but harsher realities will restrict them. To some, America was expanding. The young nation gave free land, growing markets, and access to education. At the same time, the nation was contracting by forcing exile and bondage. Missouri was growing and ideas about freedom and opportunity were flowing, but its slave code was tightening.

The United States is and was a land of compromises, a place where social control and human aspiration interact and swirl around us. The way forward will require adapting to what is possible and skirting around the obstacles, including laws that many Americans know were unjust. For the siblings, race and gender threaten to separate them. They will lose control, suffer consequences, and learn to participate meaningfully in the narrow spaces left for them. 

I  felt a jolt. You could move a single boulder and a river changed its course. I had not known until that moment what it meant to be a woman in the nineteenth century. In common with every other woman I had ever met, rich or poor, my rights were not equal and might become equal. That meant owning our land, schooling our girls, and making laws more just.

Will the siblings be sufficiently free, strong, and unified in purpose to expand their lives in a time of spinning national priorities? The answer is in my characters and the solution I offer is, I hope, novel, but within my readers, the real story should be even better.

The Compromise, “The Pulitzer Library 1841”