Today Google posted a Google Doodle to celebrate Native American woodcarver Amanda Crowe, a Cherokee woman. She carved fine art wooden bears and taught others to whittle and carve. The way of the knife includes this.
The Compromise describes two small wooden birds that the sisters wear as totems. They were carved by their Cherokee-raised mother and left as gifts when the mother is “removed” from Missouri. The bird totems come into Mariah’s story at various times even after she gives hers away in exchange for her sister’s wedding quilt. At every turn I see adaptation to loss and the human spirit making its own way.
Mother left after the first snow five months before, and we did not see her again. She had sent us girls to fetch the last gooseberries on a particular hillside. We returned to find the cabin cold and two small wooden carvings of birds side by side on the table. Little totems, they were shaped like birds with open wings. We wore those birds from cords around our necks, and Eliza kissed hers before sleep.... I stayed awake clutching the little wooden bird and watching the darkness hoping my sight would open to a vision of her walking somewhere.
The Compromise “Stoneville 1839”
Birds represent sight and spiritual freedom in The Compromise. The shape of a bird in flight can activate shared cultural knowledge. The design made in the text by these carved birds would be a subject for analysis. The analysis would tell an alternative story of how material things garner meaning in our lives. Handing down objects in a family, such as from mother to daughter and father to son, is a significant counter-discourse to the evaluation practices of the marketplace and the dehumanization of a police state. Literary forms, as do other art forms, let us practice alternatives but don’t ask us look away for the sake of entertainment.
Knives
In The Compromise, elk-horn knives are used to kill snakes and a mountain lion, skin animals, and as an object of strength to be hidden and revealed, if not a weapon to be used in self defense. It is important for me to have the elk-horn knives reenter the story as tools, not weapons, and carving is a way to do this. My father whittled small objects for me in my childhood. The novelty came from adapting to the material and the moment. I whittled bamboo ladles when I was in Japan. It is what we did when it rained and temple cleaning had to wait. There was movement among the material, the tool, our strength, and the will to make something. In that case, the pattern was nothing new, but repeated for hundreds of years. For many of us, the will to make is the will to give.
Thresholds
I wrote a scene in which the deputies question Mariah, and she assumes it is about her brother, Otis. Again, she is clever enough to assess harm and evade violence. She tells the sculpted truth; the damning parts removed. Mariah is capable of violence, ready and skilled with her knife, but she manages terrible conflict at the threshold and does not use it to kill or be killed.
The deputy in the bowler hat continued: “That horse over there has been used to transport fugitives.” “That horse is mine. Her name is Molly.” “I don’t care what name it is.” Then the deputy in the bowler got off his horse with a grunt. He walked toward me, his spurs raking the ground. “You’re protecting someone. Who?” “I’m protecting myself.” I backed away from them to the doorway behind me. I stood my ground where Mother, Eliza, and I had prayed hundreds of times. Inside the doorway near my right hand was the hunting knife. I had the speed and cunning to kill one animal up close, but not two.
The Compromise “The Valley of the Shadow 1844”
That threshold, which looks both ways and sees compromises, is where people survive. Janus, is the ancient God beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings. Janus is depicted as having two faces looking forward and backward. Wikipedia states: “Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace.”
In addition to these ancient conceptual roots, which I readily claim as mine, I found parallels in the teaching of Zen, sometimes called the Way of the Sword. The mind cultivated by the awareness of death is calm and alert. It embodies and transcends any duality and contains the mind of any opponent. It follows rules of engagement, butsudo in Japanese. I am called to write with this discipline.
Removal
Removal is a curious term. It includes the delete key, wood chips, and genocide. It is hard for the mind to contain all that a single word can carry. A woodcarver like Amanda Crowe might say that removing wood reveals the wood. Maybe a literary style requires selecting words according to a pattern to raise to foreground and lower to background in the reader’s attention at any moment. That is like selective focus in photography and the layers of color in painting. Intratextual designs are like stitches of various lengths and colors. They are analyzed from under the text or behind the curtain.
As I return to my work, I am humbled; writing requires perspective on what is seen up close, the faith to find a pattern where it was not seen before, adding and removing accordingly. To do this, I wish I had the eyes of a bird to see the pattern of living things with sharpness from distance.
History gives us distance. Let the patterns of my novel rise meaningfully to foreground while shaped by the background. Let the patterns of history, however deeply they cut, reveal that humanity prevails regardless of the heights of valor and the lows of defeat.