It was unlike Meg to storm into the house, but there had been no door on her tent to slam, and so the one at home needed to be. Having walked away, she returned and reopened it, so that she could slam it once more. She unpinned her straw bonnet and yanked it from her head, lacing the pin through the straw again with practiced ease before tossing the thing onto the table, and paced the naked wood floor in a straight line that she retraced on her way back. She’d always appreciated that the room was sparsely furnished, and now it easily accommodated her frustration. When she realized that anyone walking down Lincoln Avenue could see her, Meg slammed the window shutters, too.
“I am permitted a moment out of character,” she informed the nonexistent detractors with gusto, though they might’ve clucked their tongues at this outburst just as readily as at the first.
A moment later she had returned to her senses and dropped into a chair. By the time Joanna came home, Meg had been biting her lip for several moments, and as soon as her sister closed the door, Meg demanded, “Will they always assume they know better than we do, what we need?”
Jo stood just inside the front room and searched it with her eyes as though expecting to find the intended recipient of her sister’s abrupt question, or, Meg worried, as though where she’d paced she might have left a tread that everyone could see.
“And am I a horrible teacher for thinking there’s nothing I might learn?” she asked, to call her sister’s attention back, and because she honestly wanted to know.
“I’m going to have to insist you start at the beginning,” Jo said. Instead of proceeding to the backyard and the pump to freshen up, she dropped down in the seat next to her sister. “You’ll pardon the odor, if I have one.”
“Oh, Jo, if?” Meg asked in alarm. “You might have set yourself down more delicately at the very least.”
“Is it that bad?” Jo sniffed at herself, as though genuinely surprised. “It’s hardly my fault that it’s only gotten hotter this summer. The air’s so thick and muggy, I can sit on a pine log and still feel as though I’m swimming. But I’m surrounded by men all day, and they smell so much worse.”
“There’s only you and I now, and you smell positively awful.”
“Fine.” Jo slapped her hands onto her knees and stood.
“No, no,” Meg whined, grabbing her sister by the arm with both hands. “Stay with me.”
“Women are so fickle,” she concluded with a sigh, and did not wince when Meg swatted her for the remark. “What is there you might learn, so that you don’t think yourself a horrible teacher?”
“To take the missionary teacher’s instruction with good humor, and without judging every white person’s motives.”
“Given everything we’ve experienced at their hand, why wouldn’t you judge them? It’s a matter of survival, if you ask me.”
“Some would still say it isn’t Christian. Especially when there are so many fighting to undo what we’ve suffered, and to ensure it won’t happen to anyone else.”
“Fine, if you think it’s too much like judging their hearts. Don’t judge their motives. Judge their actions at least, and those of their neighbors, and how long they appeased the latter before taking action against them. Though please don’t be so foolish as to think it’s all on our behalf.” Jo glanced at her sister and nodded in apology. “Continue.”
“I was speaking with Miss Constance Evergreen this morning, before the afternoon lessons—”
“Which of the missionary teachers is she? Does it matter?”
“Not especially. She’s kind, I think, and genuine. She gets very excited seeing freedpeople take to their lessons, especially the older ones. She’s one of the missionary teachers who lead lessons at night, as well, for the adults who couldn’t otherwise come, so I can’t question her passion or her delight in doing what she does.”
“And yet?”
“And yet,” Meg repeated, reclaiming her earlier frustration, her fingers splayed, hands raised as though she might conjure something between them. “For all her confessions of honest abolitionism, of believing that negroes must be given equal status once the stain of slavery is really and truly purged from the fabric of this country—”
“Did she say precisely that?” Jo interjected through a snort.
“Of course she did! To me , as though I might need informing! And it shouldn’t annoy me, except that we are so often surrounded by white folks with wrongheaded beliefs that when one stumbles upon sense and an honest adherence to scripture, they pause to be congratulated!”
Jo tossed back her head to laugh. She loved to hear her sister talk this way. She didn’t mind that Meg was so mild, that she was prone to follow the prescribed route in life from a deep want of its structure and rewards. Her older sister had been pretending to be Mammy—or someone’s mammy, at least—since she was a little girl. It was clear she would live a simple and quiet life given the chance, and Jo would be happy for it. Still, praise God, her sister wasn’t mindless. Meg wanted what she wanted, not for lack of thought, but because having considered it, she approved. Jo could be forgiven for taking immense pleasure in the fact that Meg considered a great many other things and rejected them.
“Go on, go on,” Jo prodded.
“Yes, I don’t mean to be so passionate,” Meg said, and took a calming breath. “Despite all her fervency on the matter of equality, she very clearly does not think the freedpeople can equip themselves. They admire that our own Martha Culling began our schools before the Union permitted missionary teachers to come, and applaud our self-determination. Yet now they expect us to adopt their style of teaching. They want to remake the South in the image of the Yankee, so that we do not persist in the ways of the slovenly slave master, as we so unfortunately have done.”
“Another Constance Evergreen quote, I presume?”
“Not only hers, I’m afraid. Apparently it’s the talk of the American Missionary , which all of those stationed here read. Have I mentioned that, according to it, we have not attained the status of freedpeople?”
“Oh?”
“We are presently ‘colored refugees.’”
“But they’ll inform us when we ascend, I hope.”
“How else would we know?” Meg settled into her seat with a huff and made a muted shriek by screaming without opening her mouth.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Jo said in response to the sound.
“I’m so conflicted all the time,” Meg continued, and the strain in her voice confirmed it. “Even though considering us refugees is meant to indict their countrymen and remind them there is work to do to ensure our freedom. So why does it enrage me?”
“Because,” Jo told her. “They’re only ever speaking for us, and about us. Rarely with us. Even when they have our best interest in mind, how could they know it without our input? The person who believes they know best, still, in some small way and in some interior place they’ve yet to interrogate, does not truly comprehend equality. Yet they mean to deliver us to it.”
Now when Meg sighed, her shoulders relaxed in a way they hadn’t despite her many attempts. “Yes,” she said. “That’s why.”
She turned to look at her sister in the seat beside her, noticing for the first time that their hands were clasped together on the arm rest.
“You see? Your words are an immediate refuge. Joanna, tell me you’ve been writing them down.”
“Oh,” Jo groaned.
“Jo!”
“I know! I’m trying to get accustomed to it. It still seems like such a needlessly complicated step when I can offer them immediately to you this way.”
“But there are people outside this house who would benefit, Joanna. I know it.”
That stilled Jo, and a gleam lit the dew in her eyes.
“Thank you, Meg,” she said, placing her free hand atop the ones joined. “It’s always pleasant to be believed in.”
When Mammy came through the front door, she was warmed by the sight before her.
“Wha
t lovely little women,” she said, collecting their smiles and waving at them to keep their seats. “Stay. I never tire of seeing my daughters adore each other. Your whole life, it’ll be its own reward—but today I’ve got something for each of you.”
“A letter for me?” Meg’s eyes were impossibly bright.
“A letter for Meg,” Mammy confirmed, even more happily when she placed the envelope in her eldest daughter’s hand. “From Joseph Williams, of course.”
“He hasn’t forgotten me.”
“Of course he hasn’t.”
Meg couldn’t help holding it to her chest for a moment.
“It’s the third, and it must mean something that he continues to write,” she said, almost whimsically. “I’ll bet he’ll tell me more about his family in Pennsylvania, now that we’ve corresponded so many times.”
“I’ll bet the letter would tell you sooner, were it opened,” Jo replied, and with a smile and sigh, Meg carefully began unsealing it.
While Jo watched her sister’s progress, Mammy furnished her with a Boston newspaper. The wide publication covered her lap, the thick, black scrolling typeface of the title and headlines looking back at her. It wouldn’t have mattered what it said; it was a gorgeous sight, Jo had to admit. Even the smell was pleasant, but she’d always thought so of ink.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“You might’ve heard a reporter came to Roanoke this past June. I thought you might like to read what he had to say about our colony,” Mammy answered, with an almost intentional innocence in her voice that made Joanna raise her eyebrow.
“Just me?” she asked, taking the newspaper in hand. With the whirlwind that had accompanied Joseph Williams’s visit to their home, and the way her daily work building houses often consumed any energy not reserved for her family, Jo had all but forgotten the summer’s other visitor of note. She’d never met or seen the fellow, to be fair, but now her interest was piqued anew, especially because Mammy seemed to have a purpose in showing it to her in particular. Still, her mother didn’t stay to observe her, instead moving toward the kitchen to open the back door.
“One of you open the front window so we can pray for a cross breeze.”
Both the girls were poring over what they’d been given, but Jo stood, her eyes scanning line by line. Her lips occasionally moved as she made her way to the window and, with one hand, unlatched the shutters before absently leaning against the wooden opening while she continued reading. The further she progressed, the straighter she stood, slowly shaking her head.
Meg might have asked what had been reported, were she not enthralled in letters of her own. “He talks of Roanoke Island so fondly,” she murmured. “Yet he almost never mentions me.”
“Didn’t you think that must be his way of complimenting you, Meg?” Mammy asked. She’d returned from the kitchen to rest against the back of her daughter’s chair.
“I had,” Meg answered, and then let the pages fall against her lap. “Only I’m tired of supposing. If he can speak poetically about the brigade and the hundred-and-fifteen able-bodied men he charmed away from our colony alone, and how they’re now in Charleston—as though I should be pleased despite that most of Jo’s builders went with him and construction has come almost to a halt … If he can think to say all that, I think he could at least spare a plain word for me.”
It wasn’t unreasonable, Meg decided, without her mother or sister having to tell her so. She’d thought Joseph modest when at first he spoke of the island to speak of her, but now he spoke so much of so much else, she found that it had lost its charm.
“Wouldn’t he want his intentions to be clear, if he had any?”
“Perhaps.” Mammy didn’t want to seem discouraged, and quickly added, “But he’s from the North, and perhaps they express things differently there. Or take longer to broach them.”
“I don’t know.” Meg didn’t want to be discouraged, either, but she couldn’t help it. “I don’t know how he’d expect me to know why he can do one and not the other. He’s told me nothing about Northern life and customs. I don’t know why he’d bother writing, just to tell me military things, or what he misses of this place.”
“Letters from the battlefield are more for the soldier than the receiver,” Mammy said, more assuredly, because this she did understand. “Your father writes to me to remind himself we’re here, that he built a home someplace and we’re still safe in it. It’s a kind of therapy, I think.”
“That’s different, Mammy. You’re man and wife, and I’m sure on top of all the business he recounts to you, he still speaks of you .” Mammy always read his letters aloud to the girls after she’d had a chance to read them once by herself, so Meg already knew it to be true. “Joseph and I are still perfect strangers, and he tells me nothing that would change that. He asks nothing but to write to him, not to tell him anything about me, but how the colony fares and how many men arrive each week, as though General Wild couldn’t learn that from his fellow officers. I could probably have you write him back with the news, and it might suit him just the same.”
She refolded the letter and placed it back inside its envelope. Many letters from the field hosted drawings of landscapes or flowers, the men dedicating time and attention to every inch of paper. Joseph’s envelope was unembellished except to identify it as a soldier’s letter, but she’d already given so many examples of her disappointment that she kept that one to herself. Recalling the lofty hopes she’d harbored the day Joseph Williams came to her teaching tent to ask if he might write to her, she only permitted herself one final thing in conclusion, and it was honest. “I enjoy his correspondence less and less.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” her mother said. Mammy had no sons, and no way of knowing how she would comfort one whose heart was so visibly sore, but with daughters, there was always their hair. She’d begun gently detangling a quarter of Meg’s hair with her fingers, and having worked through it with a mindful amount of tension and release, she began the same ritual on the next. “Will you still write to him? Perhaps if you do, he’ll come back to the colony and something will have changed.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” Meg told her, looking out the open shutters at the still-bright sky of early evening while Mammy lulled her with hair-tending. “My heart leapt at the sight of his letter, so I suppose I haven’t stopped hoping. I’m worried I don’t know how.”
“Running out of hope isn’t a lesson I’d ever wish my children to learn,” Mammy said softly as she began to braid. She wove her fingers slowly through her daughter’s softened hair, knowing that the rhythm was a comfort that might not reach Meg’s heart. “But I pray I haven’t inspired you to link your hope to him. I spoke too highly of him too soon—I take the blame for that, but not because Joseph Williams is the prize. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t say plainly that the prize, Meg, is you.”
She didn’t reply, but let her mother’s words fall over her. Eyes still on the powder-blue sky, only Meg’s hand moved to wipe away a tear.
“Whatever you choose to do about Joseph … someday soon you’ll be rich in the possession of a good man’s heart. That I know for certain.”
Mammy kissed her head, close to tears herself at the ache she could sense in her child. Meg was the oldest, and the hurt she felt now that she was a young woman, a mother could not always heal. Papa couldn’t, either, but it was still made more difficult by his absence, if only because he could’ve held his wife.
“It is no simple thing,” Mammy said as quietly as if aware now that perhaps the conversation should have been a private one. Joanna was nearby but absorbed in her own reading, but Mammy took measures in case Meg wished it to stay between the two of them, which—even in a lovely family—was allowed. “It’s no simple thing, I mean, to parent a child old enough to want her own.”
“I’m sorry, Mammy.”
“No! No, no.” She held her daughter’s hair in her hands so that nothing would distract Meg from her reassurance. �
��That wasn’t a chiding, dear one. I meant to acknowledge that you have a desire on your heart, and I’m not as useful as I once was. You’re right to want what you want, Meg, and to want it purely, without blemish or need of settling. It’s only difficult because now you have a desire I want for you, too, and when and how you get it isn’t up to me.”
Meg let her head tilt to one side so that Mammy opened her hand to cradle her eldest daughter’s face, and while she did, Mammy said a quick prayer to all of their Heavenly Father before she carried on braiding.
As though the front room had somehow been divided into two stages on which very different productions were playing out, before the window, Jo whirled around to face her kin.
“The audacity!” Her hand closed, cinching the newspaper, which became a wide fan on either side of Jo’s fist. “It’s just as you said, Meg. They ceaselessly exchange glowing reports about the welfare and the progress of the Roanoke Island Freedpeople Colony without ever interviewing a freedperson!”
Meg was quite sure she’d said no such thing, but she simply nodded, wide-eyed, when her sister unclenched the paper and held it up, leaning toward her mother and sister so that they knew she was going to read aloud from it.
“The Roanoke Colony is one of the most important and one of the best managed experiments undertaken in behalf of the negroes.”
Jo snatched the paper shut, crushing it in her hand again, her mouth and eyes wide with incredulity as though awaiting her family’s reply, despite that they awaited hers.
“Experiment!” she finally exclaimed, and Mammy and Meg nodded vigorously. “Undertaken on our behalf! What’s worse, I never once saw this so-called reporter speak to one of us, and he only calls by name members of the Union or the missionary teachers! As though mere observation is consideration enough of our opinions—as though the overseer never witnessed something he did not fully understand! They speak for us, and it never occurs to them that we might have something to say!”
When she’d reached the end of her outburst, Jo stood wide-legged in front of the open shutters, the day bright behind her, a Northern newspaper with a national readership crumpled in her grasp, and her chest heaving.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 5