Meg’s hand held the slate pieces wrapped in a kerchief, and she was standing in her teaching tent in the sweltering heat of a summer day in 1863, but it might as well have been a summer day years before. The wealthy girl held Meg’s naked hands in hers, the fingerless lace gloves she wore prickly and damp with sweat.
“He’s going to marry me, Meg,” she’d said, her whole face pink with excitement. “I knew he would, aren’t you envious?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Meg had answered, because by now she knew that the girl only understood congratulations that mingled with sadness. Good news was only good news if it didn’t apply to everyone. “Will it be a long engagement? Will you live here?”
The wealthy girl was pleased with Meg’s questions, but only because she didn’t know her captive as well as she presumed. In the cabins near the fields, a girl Meg’s age had gotten married already. The wealthy girl’s father didn’t know, of course, but that didn’t make it any less true. Meg had been surprised at the news, but Jo had told her that of course she wouldn’t have known. She spent all of her time in the house with the wealthy girl, while young folk near the fields were stealing moments to spend together. She’d be lucky if they weren’t all paired off by the time her wealthy girl was finally married and sent away, Jo thought—and soon Meg thought the same. She’d begun to worry, and so her enthusiasm about the wealthy girl’s engagement had been genuine. It was months before the war would destabilize the area and the March family would take an opportunity none knew to suspect yet, months before they would steal away to real freedom—but Meg felt certain that she was soon to be free of her most suffocating captor. The wealthy girl was going to be married, and Meg was finally going to be free to do the same.
“But don’t you worry, Meg,” the girl had told her then, binding Meg’s hands one on top of the other and then nearly crushing them both in her own. “You’re my dearest family, and I haven’t forgotten you.”
The girl bit her lip and took a deep breath as though she could not sense that Meg held hers.
“What’ve you done?” Meg asked quietly, when she could wait no longer to have her fate sealed.
“You spoilsport, you have to be surprised!” The girl slapped Meg’s face playfully, the way she often did. The sting didn’t make Meg jump anymore, because it was meant to be a loving gesture, or so the wealthy girl said through tears when Meg’s pained reaction hurt her feelings.
“I will be,” Meg said sweetly, “but I can hardly stand the wait.”
“I knew you’d be excited, Meg—we mean so much more to each other than people rightly know! I told Father you’d prefer to come with me, because we’re family, and…” The wealthy Southern child bounced the way young Amy did so often by then. “You’re mine!”
Meg stood stunned now, as though the girl had struck her face again.
“You’re properly mine, on paper, as you should’ve been all along, Meg, and you shall come with me when I marry!”
She couldn’t bring herself to move, let alone smile, though she knew there was a danger in not doing so. But Meg could not perform, not just then. Not in the moment when she was being delivered the most terrible news as though it was a dream come true.
“And I’ve done something wonderful for you, Meg, even though Father doesn’t think I should. And I won’t tell you what until you ask.”
When she tried to speak, Meg’s voice croaked as though she’d been parched. She had to clear her throat before she could try again.
“Please tell me what you’ve done for me,” and Meg said the girl’s name then, though she had not done so since, and intended never to again.
“I know that you have sisters,” she said, and Meg culled her own breath sharply. “And don’t get your hopes up—I’ve no use for gossiping ninnies who’ll mind each other better than my home. But I’ve asked Father to let us take the mute one. Aren’t I generous, Meg? Aren’t you pleased?”
“You are. Generous.” Meg pulled the corners of her lips up, though it felt like her skin might tear. “I’m so grateful, and pleased.”
The girl had thrown her arms around Meg’s neck then, and it had taken a heroic measure of strength to hug the girl back.
In her teaching tent, Meg still held the broken chalkboard in her hands.
She hadn’t thought of that day in quite some time, and she hadn’t meant to just now, either. Sometimes the old life intruded into her new one in a way she was beginning to suspect it always might, while she had to be so close to white people. While she still had to ask them for things, or depend on what they considered their generosity.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, to find a young teacher so deep in her thoughts.” Joseph Williams’s voice snatched Meg back into the present, and when she turned to see him standing just inside the tent flaps, her chest rose despite where she’d been. “You must know a great many things worth devoting a quiet moment to.”
“It’s lovely to see you again,” Meg said, and she was almost pleased with the way her painful memory made her steady and calm. After all, this was perhaps the first time in the day since he’d joined the March women for supper that she hadn’t been thinking of Joseph.
He took a step deeper into the tent, his chin dipping as though asking for permission.
“Please,” she said, extending her hand momentarily. “Come inside. If you can stand to be inside in this offensive heat.”
“It is taking some getting used to,” he confessed, and took a handkerchief from his pocket to dab the back of his neck. “I can’t say I wasn’t warned, but I don’t think one can fully prepare for North Carolina’s summer.”
“Is the weather in Pennsylvania very pleasant?” Meg asked, sitting on a crude bench where the most punctual of her students perched during lessons. Joseph joined her, though he minded a respectable distance.
“By comparison, I must say. Although I doubt very much that your winters are quite as bitter.”
The two fell into silence after that. Meg hoped he’d tell her more—of Pennsylvania, and how else it differed from North Carolina, and of the people he’d left there. There must be people. He wasn’t married, of course, but even Northern folk were said to love their families, and having been born free, she thought it mustn’t be a blessed miracle for him to know both his mother and his father. Of course, she wouldn’t ask. Her wealthy Southern girl had received all manner of instruction on courting language and how best a lady should inspire conversation, which often was simply with an inviting openness that did not demand divulging.
Perhaps it was not unlike her role as polite plaything, though not nearly as stifling, and certainly not painful. She had learned to be available, though not insistent, and perhaps that patience would serve her well in getting to know Joseph Williams.
“I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Miss Meg,” he said, turning his chin to look at her. He turned at the waist as well, as though he were opening up to her.
“I’m so glad,” she replied, turning at the waist as well. She wanted to say more. That she’d worried, even after stealing free, that courtship and marriage had already passed her by. That she’d worried the chance had been stolen from her, even though she never moved away with her wealthy girl and the fiancé. She didn’t even know whether the two ever got married. Perhaps the fiancé took up the Confederate uniform and went to fight instead. Maybe he’d fallen in battle already, and married or not, the wealthy girl’s beautiful, certain life was already done. She didn’t dare hope those things, she only wondered. She needn’t, though, she realized, now that Joseph Williams was sitting next to her, saying that he’d enjoyed meeting her. Nothing had been taken, she was finding, she’d only needed to wait.
“I’ve come to ask if I might write to you,” Joseph said. “When I leave.”
Meg was still smiling, because he’d spoken too quickly, and it took another moment before she realized what he’d said.
“When you leave?” she asked.
“I’ll be continuing my recruitmen
t with General Wild,” he said, and clearly he was still pleased at the prospect.
“You’ve only just arrived,” Meg said, trying to hide the extent of her bewilderment. “Would you move on so soon?”
“War waits for no man, I’m afraid.” As though he’d intended the words to land more lightly against her than they did, Joseph carried on. “But I’ll remember Roanoke so fondly, Miss Meg. And yaupon tea.”
She was meant to smile then, so she did.
“And I’d like to write to you, if you’ll allow it,” he said.
I’m being impossible , Meg chided herself. He wanted to write to her while he was away; she could at least take heart in that. It wasn’t as though she could honestly have expected him to ask anything else just yet. And he was recruiting men for battle—he wasn’t yet fighting in one himself. She wouldn’t be a war widow, if Joseph Williams was the man she was meant to marry. He would be away, like Papa was, she thought to comfort herself. Distant, but not in danger, no more than they’d all always been.
“I’d like that very much, Mr. Williams,” she said, and this time, her smile was sincere.
“Please, Miss Meg,” he said, one of his hands falling over hers. “You must call me Joseph.”
V
August 1863
Bethlehem March was generous, or so others said of her. It would have seemed to disprove the claim if she made it about herself, she thought. If anything, generosity was simply a by-product of being considerate—something Beth was much more comfortable attributing to herself because, she thought, that quality was a by-product of being part of a family. Most had it, if they loved the people around them.
Yes, she was currently the only one who knew how to operate the sewing machine that had been abandoned at the big house, but that didn’t mean she had to keep it so. When several still living there asked why she didn’t take the thing to the colony where she could access it more readily, she said she wouldn’t dare. Instead, when she wasn’t doing the paid work of darning soldiers’ uniforms, or doing the passionate work of repurposing extravagant material or clothing from the family who’d lived there before, she gave lessons to anyone who wanted to learn.
“How thick-headed. What if the Union hires them once you’ve taught them everything you know?” Amy asked while ripping seams at her sister’s feet one day in the sewing room.
“Then my friends will be paid, and I will be pleased.”
“Yes, but you wouldn’t be. They would do all the work before you had the chance, since the machine is here, with them.”
“What would you have me do instead? Take the machine where only I can reach it, or refuse a skill to someone who wants to learn?”
“You’ve made both options seem selfish.”
“Well, say them back to me, then, in a way that doesn’t.”
Beth kept at her task but glanced at her younger sister occasionally enough to see the skin between her brows furrow and fold. While quick to criticize, it seemed many of Amy’s opinions were cobbled together from the opinions of others—though she was either too young to realize it or else too young to at least express the adopted convictions mildly until fully considered. Anyone else might have told her so, but Bethlehem had faith that Amy would wisen with time. She was too smart not to.
“Do what you like then,” the young girl said with a small huff and a sharp rip.
“Careful,” Beth told her. “I’d like to salvage the thread, if I can.”
“But it goes so much faster this way.”
“That’s enough for now anyway.”
At that, Amy hopped to her feet, the pile of garments she’d been charged with disassembling allowed to carelessly tumble to the bedroom floor.
“I’m going to help with the new baby,” she said, twirling a time or two in the middle of the spacious room. It required a different technique to spin properly against the friction of the ingrain carpet, and Amy had a mind to master it, if only because of how outlandish it seemed to dance—or do anything really—in the big house. But she pressed her toe down hard against the rose color that covered the floor of the sewing room. Elsewhere in the house, the carpet was an ostentatious red, and many of the wide, high walls wore velvet wallpaper with damask patterns of equally obnoxious coloring. Whoever had lived here—and anyone unlucky enough to work inside the house—might well have gone blind.
“What new baby?” Beth asked her. “Did someone give birth?”
“No one here,” Amy answered, pointing her toes and prancing toward the hall. In the doorway, she wrapped her hand around the frame, the rest of her tiptoeing into the hall, waiting to be released. When she was at the big house with Bethlehem, she’d promised Mammy to mind her, and that meant she required Beth’s permission to wander the grounds. “New freedpeople passed through on their way to the colony, and one of them had an orphan baby. No one knows where the mother and father went. I heard someone say that one died before they could be free, and the other died getting here.”
“But why leave the baby here?” Beth asked, without bothering to inquire how Amy always knew the details of things before any of the others knew there was a thing at all. Her sister had a skill for eavesdropping and, besides that, a sweet face that made older folks think her innocent and aloof. They always spoke freely around the girl, and she never forgot a word.
“They’re afraid our colony is like the contraband camps,” Amy said. She gave a convincingly knowing roll of her eyes, but then she added, “whatever that means.”
Beth couldn’t decide what to say.
She knew what it meant, or much of it anyway. She knew what it meant to fold a baby or small child into one’s family and heart, because that was precisely what the Marches had done with Amethyst. Separately, she knew what it meant that most places where formerly enslaved people traveled and then gathered were ramshackle. People unwilling to stay on or near the grounds where they’d been brutalized gravitated toward Union encampments, for good and obvious reason, but in most places, there was rarely if ever any attention or resources given to making their conditions livable. Some had wagons or tents, and perhaps an animal or two, but most had nothing.
Beth knew what it meant when in those camps that sprouted up around the Union posts anything at all was offered, that it was for the benefit of the soldiers, not the freedpeople. It was to keep the army from falling ill or being otherwise encumbered by the freedpeople’s presence. If they were given shelter, it was so that their tents and makeshift dwellings didn’t litter the ground around the barracks, creating obstacles that might impact the soldiers’ readiness.
The word contraband meant that even the soldiers and officers whose recent victories had won their freedom did not view them as people. Black folk were spoils of war, if they were more than a nuisance, and their greatest value was in not being available to serve the Confederacy. Jo said they had been confiscated, not liberated, and in those camps it felt palpably true. Anyone could guess it, by the shabby treatment many endured, being so near the soldiers, and by the fact that those who could be were made to do labor on the Union’s behalf almost immediately. It wasn’t slavery, the Union must have reasoned, if the people were promised pay. But in most camps, the coin never came, once all the rations and clothing were deducted, as well as the keep for those who could not work at all.
Beth was two years older than Amy, and a young woman. Those years hadn’t meant much in the old life, when much the same could be expected of both of them. In that life, Amethyst had to know and understand a great many things more awful than the reality of contraband camps and the complicated allegiance any freedperson must feel to the Union—but this was not the old life.
In this life, Beth carried a heavy bundle and kicked along a second rather than ask her baby sister to help. In this life, her eldest sister, Meg, treated both girls preciously, touching them often, because a gentle touch was like a salve that might erase all the harsh ones that came before it.
In this life, Amy was allowed the privileg
e of boredom, of wiling away at least a few hours a day, because she was the youngest, and at least one of them should experience having been a child.
If she hadn’t eavesdropped on enough conversations to understand everything a contraband camp meant, Beth would cherish not telling her.
“Perhaps we should take the baby to the colony,” Amy exclaimed, bringing her sister out of her thoughts.
“The baby?”
“The orphan baby! Does no one listen to me?”
“We hardly have a choice,” Beth was saying when she stood from the sewing table and collapsed down beside it.
“Beth!” Amy was beside her sister before Bethlehem could open her eyes. “Beth, what’s happened? Why have you fainted? Are you pregnant?”
Bethlehem could hear her sister’s absurd question, and would have laughed, if she had the energy. As it was, it seemed to have drained out of her feet as soon as she’d stood, funneling in a rush from her head and clear through her body so that she couldn’t help but fall. Now before her eyes, colorful dots swelled and shrank, making it difficult at first even to tell that her vision was blurry.
“Beth, please!” Amy was crying now, which was not absurd at all. Were their positions reversed, Beth would have done the same. When she had the strength, she put her hand on Amy’s arm and, eyes closed, nodded her head.
It was enough to quiet her sister, and the two stayed that way on the floor beside the sewing machine until Beth had her strength back.
“What happened?” Amy asked, silent tears still dangling from her eyelashes.
“I don’t know,” she answered, and if it frightened Amy, it frightened Beth more. “It’s gone now,” she said, trying to enliven her voice despite feeling thoroughly exhausted. “And you haven’t introduced me to the new baby.”
“Next time,” Amy told her, helping her sister to her feet, and watching her fearfully. “Now I just want to get you home.”
* * *
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 4