Where Will We Stand?

In September, I had the good fortune to see the brilliant Shaw Theatre Festival production of The House That Will Not Stand by Marcus Gardley in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada. It was marvelously staged in the round and acted with intensity by a superb cast of women playing New Orleans Créoles de couleur, Creoles of color, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a destiny changing moment in American history.

The April 30, 1803 acquisition of 828,000 square miles by the United States from France for $15 million doubled the country’s size by adding territory that, in addition to Louisiana, would eventually become the states of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and parts of Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

But, even as the transaction expanded the young nation’s prospects for the future, it also shook the foundation of everything the mixed-race characters in Gardley’s play had ever known, and it shriveled their dreams for the future. Under French rule they had enjoyed a privileged position in society—more restricted than their white counterparts, to be sure, but vastly more advantaged than that of enslaved Black people, including the ones they themselves owned. Under the French, they knew where they stood. With the Americans, they could not be sure. The uncertainty tore them apart.

I have been thinking a lot about the dynamic explored by the play in these final days before the November 5 Presidential election. Everything we have known as Americans, could be changed. With our votes, we will select the path we wish the country to take—a nation governed by laws, as it has been for two and a half centuries, or one led by autocratic caprice.

Will the journey on that path begin with a peaceful transition from one administration to the next? Or, will it, as many fear, begin as a January 6, 2021 redux?

In The House That Will Not Stand, a family is destroyed by tensions that arrive with new laws and cultural traditions. Let us hope that when the election is over, the United States does not become a country that will not stand. The last time Americans reached that point was at Fort Sumter in South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, and the reverberations—for good and for ill—are still being felt.