Are the limbs and flourishes of wit tedious? Then brevity is the soul of wit as Shakespeare’s Polonius observed. But I’m not so sure. Flourishes may raise the expectation of comedy but also conceal the growing tragedy. Shakespeare wrote, “Present mirth hath present laughter. What’s to come is still unsure.” Is humor doing my story credit? Polonius was lurking behind the curtain and Hamlet turned into a tragedy.
Above: Procession of Characters (1840), Yale Center for British Art [Public domain]
…humor cannot do credit to itself without a good background of gravity & of earnestness.
Mark Twain, 1873
I want humor to work against a background of gravity and earnestness, but it may actually work differently. I am revising chapter 1, “Soneville 1839,” the most important chapter of the book. The opening needs to call the reader into its pages in order to root them inwardly. The story and backstory are serious: Indian Removal and slavery, vigilante law, abandoned children, lies and silences. But that is not all there is to the stones in Stoneville.
Here I will take a look at its funny bits. Humor often turns on a phrase and that turn delights the mind. This makes knowledge fun, usually, though it can conceal something lurking.
My sister piped in: “Why’d you come in the dark of night, Otis? You scared us. All I can see is the whites of your eyes and the buttons on your coat.”
“Sorry, Lizzie. I’ve been riding by moonlight and leading a second horse."
My readers thought this was a curious line from Eliza, but only one man, the only one in the room with dark skin, saw into my line. “Is Otis dark skinned?” he asked. I showed a dark-skinned man entering a dark room with two girls sleeping in it. They recognize their brother’s voice and welcome him home. Racism could be hiding here like Amos and Andy comedies though it was meant to be playful. Even so, the drama is layered with seriousness. The buttons on Otis’s coat come into the story again as a (false) foreshadowing of tragedy. And the question about why he comes in the dark of night is a good one. It is dangerous for him to travel alone in the light.
Joking Around
The next morning in Stoneville, the three half-siblings joke about the food they want to eat. Eliza uses food metaphors to ask a question about her family. Eliza is often funny because, the baby of the family, she is imaginative and spontaneous. She does not foresee the effects of what she says.
Then Eliza, out of breath with laughter, asked, “Otis, why do we look so different, from each other I mean? The Hank kids in town look just the same, spirit images they say. I’m strawberries and cream like Pa. You have skin like coffee with milk, and your hair looks like somebody pulled it out of a stove. Mariah has skin like custard, eyes green as lizards, and a jaw made for cracking nuts. I don't mean any offense, I'm just saying.”
Otis looked away and said, “Jebediah the Scotsman begat us, but different we are. Eliza, don’t you know that we all have different mothers?”
The novel’s plot hinges on this fact. Because of their upbringing, the sisters did not learn to distance themselves from their brother. A family is often an unstable union, as is a nation. Their relationships and the shared experience it brings, give the stories of their differences more intimacy and internal conflict. Mariah sees her brother’s advantages in life. Otis has received their father’s attention while the sisters have not, and though he is enslaved, he has received a good education thanks to the good offices of white female teachers and others who see his potential to represent Negroes for the abolitionist cause. But these things happen much later in the story.
Eliza said, “Otis will you teach me something I don’t know?”
“That gives me a lot to choose from,” he said laughing.
On the ride out of Stoneville, readers meet the most accessible humor yet, which may actually be wit. Otis has told his sisters about their arranged marriages to white men.
Eliza was moaning about her future husband and for the pain in her legs.
“Don’t go on so,” said Otis. “That Richard’s smart. They call him Spider-hands.”
“Eww!” cried Eliza.
“What name do they have for his brother George?” I asked.
“King George, on account of his size. Big like a bear!”
We had no idea who King George was. Eliza stopped moaning. There are worse things than spiders.
So far “spider-hands” is the only line to get a real laugh. Mariah guesses that Otis is teasing them. But after that, she decides to watch the trail in case she has to find her way home. The arranged marriages and the return home are also key plot elements.
Serious Undertone
It is more difficult to mix humor with something like human sacrifice, but I do that when the siblings see an ancient mound. Mariah gets to speak the sarcasm and this time the joke is on Otis.
A distant hill was shaped like the lid of a kettle. I said, “What’s that?”
“That’s a mound,” said Otis. “That’s where the red men buried their dead years ago, a long time before the white men came. They say some men were buried alive while other men danced for rain.”
Eliza whispered, “Buried alive whilst others danced for rain? Lord protect us.”
“And no women at all, from the sound of it,” I said.
We circled around the mound not knowing if our horses’ hooves would defile it or the other way around.
Human sacrifice comes into the chapter again when the sisters see a lynching from a distance. Through history, gruesome human sacrifices were believed to have positive collective outcomes, such as to ensure rain or abundant crops. (I wish this aspect of human psychology would give up the ghost.) Though it is not proven, there are theories that the ancient tribes used the mounds for the same purpose as the Aztec pyramids, for ritual human sacrifice.
My beta readers have not been able to follow the patterns of the buttons, the rain, and death, but the motifs are there lurking in the humor.