On their silent circuit around the library, Jo wondered what Lorie might be thinking, and whether his thoughts matched or explained hers. When she turned slightly, she couldn’t read his mind, but she saw that he held his hands behind his back just as she did, and she found that she was unsurprised. She bit back a smile, turning again and unlacing her fingers. She crossed her arms in front of her and walked past the closed door without opening it. If Lorie felt their silent constitutional drawing to an end, he must’ve hoped it wouldn’t, because he followed her when she cut across the room and returned to the windows.
There were more in this one room than in her entire home, and these were not merely openings with shutters to close out the weather. These had glass, and panes, and some still had drapes. Above one window, there were framed silhouettes, and when she stood beneath them, her chin tilted high, Lorie did the same. To her quiet amusement, his arms had somehow entangled at his chest the way hers were.
Lorie was either very strange, or he’d been telling the truth that they two were remarkably alike, in a way Jo had never experienced. She found that she didn’t mind which was the case; how could she when it felt so still to stand beside him? It was like standing next to a mirror, and though the theory needed no further testing, she let one of her arms fall forward without uncrossing the other. It wasn’t exactly a natural pose, and she didn’t expect the young man to match it precisely, but after a moment he did straighten one arm, placing the hand in the pocket of his trousers.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” she asked him while he studied the silhouettes.
“No. I always wished I did.” He looked down at her. “Have you?”
“Three sisters,” she said.
“Who are they?” he asked, and she found the question pleasing because he hadn’t merely asked after their names. He sounded as though he very honestly wanted to know them, as anyone with the opportunity should.
“There’s Meg, the eldest, and she’s nineteen.”
“So am I,” Lorie interrupted, his voice a bit excited with recognition.
“Yes, well, she’s much older at heart, I must say,” Jo said quickly. “She’s a teacher, and if she has her way, by morning she’ll be a wife and mother.”
“I see.” His eyes had widened a bit, but they recovered. “She’ll be proposed to soon enough, if the young man who asked her to dance and the others who didn’t get the chance have anything to say about it.”
“Were you watching her, too?” Jo asked, and then smiled to hide the sharpness in her tone.
“Only because she was beside you.” He nodded when she did, though the gesture had been involuntary. “And the other girls?”
“Bethlehem,” she said. “And Amethyst. Sixteen and fourteen. One is an angel, and the other is mischief, and they adore each other. Beth is an artist with a needle and thread, and Amy cannot be contained, so she dances.”
“The way they do downstairs?”
“No, no. She needs no music, and no partner. She makes the melody.”
Jo had been looking wistfully out the window while she listed her sisters, and when she glanced back at the boy beside her, he was looking down at her as though she’d told him much more than a brief summary.
“And which are you?” he asked with a still expression that she matched without meaning to.
“I’m Joanna. Jo.”
“Jo,” he repeated. “The sister who makes her melodies with words.”
“That’s right,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment she would ever have given herself, but acknowledging it didn’t feel too proud. She hadn’t told him she wrote them down, or that they mattered dearly to her. If he knew, it was because he was meant to. “Where did you come from?”
“You came,” he said. “I was here.”
“Fine,” she said, waving away his intentionally literal reply. “But this is strange, isn’t it? How did you know we were alike?”
“I saw you.” Now he shrugged a little, his eyes arching over her head as though he had to look slightly away to think. “The way you responded to the room and the people, and your sister’s admirer—”
“The way I moved away? My unfriendliness and my disinterest?”
“The way you know what you want for yourself, and you still want for your sister what she wants, too,” he said, quieting her. “You aren’t unfriendly, Jo. I knew that right away, and well enough to know I should speak.”
“How could you see all that? Who observes that well?”
He shrugged again, and smiled.
“I don’t think I felt alone,” she began slowly, but not out of caution. “Not with my sisters in the world. But I must’ve felt strange. Because I feel less so right now.”
“I’m glad you do,” he told her, and she smiled, too.
“So am I.”
* * *
The newlyweds were headed for Corinth. The Roanoke Colony was there, almost in their backyard, but the wife had family among the freedpeople in Mississippi, or so she’d heard, and Corinth after all was the model whose likeness many in Roanoke hoped to emulate.
“You’ll be well,” Mammy assured them when they were making their last rounds through the party and receiving well wishes both from folks they knew and folks they’d never seen. “My husband was there, not long ago, and the colony is thriving. It’s a wonderful place to start a life together.”
“And if my people aren’t there?” the bride said, somewhat quietly, though her groom squeezed her to his side so that Mammy knew it wasn’t a sudden or unweighted concern.
“It might take some time to find them,” she acknowledged.
There was no use or comfort in denying what many Black folk already knew. There was a lasting impact to the forcible separations they’d endured, and some cruelties would take longer to heal from than others. Skin closed, though scarred, and even amputations numbed. The familial severing that enslaved people had suffered was a different kind of wound, and Margaret March did not know of a salve potent enough to stop its ache. She did know that if it existed, it must be very much like hope, with which she was intimately familiar.
“There’s such a thing as family you’re not born to,” she told the bride. “There’s family you find. When you lose the ones you know, you praise God that you still don’t have to be alone. And, if you need to, you come right back to Roanoke.”
The two women stood with hands clasped together, close enough for their foreheads to almost touch. They hadn’t known each other before tonight. Mammy had followed the boys who took her pot, and made herself useful with the others organizing the food before making first plates for the bride and groom, and making their acquaintance.
It was her mother the bride was searching for, Mammy knew. It had to be. A heaping plate had been all the incentive the young woman required to roll her shoulders forward as though to burrow at the slightest invitation into Mammy’s chest, and when welcomed, the young woman had asked a half dozen questions about marriage and children while Mammy pressed her to eat.
Mammy recognized the girl’s nervous energy. She remembered it. Even in the old life, where there would be nothing to follow the celebration but the same toil that filled every day, even when there would be no house, and no new life, deciding to take Alcott as her husband still felt like an exciting and uncertain new undertaking. Despite the circumstances, it felt like it could change everything, and it made everything new—even when there were very few choices to make, and they’d only had a ceremony to begin with because the man who enslaved them thought it good for the moral community to allow folks to marry.
She couldn’t imagine everything marriage must mean now. What she had learned was difficult enough, and it was that white men still found a way to tear Black families apart, though now it was out of obligation. The Roanoke Colony spoke of caring for a Black soldier’s family while they were away fighting for the Union, but elsewhere, in places still more like contraband camps, a man’s labor wasn’t paid in full as long as he had a
family or children. Deductions were taken until some realized they were still performing slave labor. They would never be paid as long as Black families stayed together. And so, many left. The women and children were still given rations and clothing, though now it was the women working with a promise of pay that rarely came, and the untethered men were not only paid but mobile, which must have felt truly free.
She didn’t speak any of this to the young bride and her husband, nor did she voice her worry that after slavery, all their people—the very idea of their families—would still be under attack. Perhaps it wasn’t true, after all. Mammy was a woman and a mother, and she survived sometimes by her intuition, but she wasn’t the Lord. Sometimes a worry was just a worry, woman or not, and she was a woman with four daughters. She would choose hope as long as she lived, if it meant that everything hideous—like slavery, like family destruction, like torture and torment and watching helplessly while someone with the same color skin was made to bleed—might end. She chose to believe it would end first for this young bride, and for everyone who came after.
When Mammy and the couple finally parted ways, they were on the landing. The two proceeded farther up in search of the attic room that the big house’s inhabitants had agreed should be specially theirs the night before they departed, and Mammy leaned against the banister a moment to look around.
So many people lingered, though the music had ended an hour ago. The dancing in the foyer was done, and folks huddled together in couples or groups, reclining on the staircase, or letting the wall hold them up as they sat on the hardwood floor. Their conversations were soft now with the late hour, and the satisfaction that came with having full stomachs and having exerted themselves in activities that pleased them.
The hushed voices rose up to Mammy, meeting her at the top of the staircase like the comforting sound of a sleeping child’s gentle breathing, and, as always, she wished to find her children. It was the same at the end of every long day, but tonight, it was to see that they were full and satisfied and happily exerted, too—and perhaps a little because the bride had reminded her that now Black folk would be free to come and go as they pleased. She had to squeeze her daughters while she could.
She turned at the sound of a door opening and saw Jo and a tall young man emerge, exchanging places with people on their way in.
“Mammy!” Jo exclaimed, as though she hadn’t noticed the quiet. “Where have you been?”
“Where have I been? All over. It’s a party, isn’t it?” She glanced around again. “Or it was, not long ago.”
“Did you dance?” Jo asked, still not introducing her companion, who stood just behind her left shoulder rather patiently.
“A bit. And I ate, and I talked, and I found your sisters and lost them again,” Mammy said, then opened her mouth again to ask for an introduction but didn’t get the chance.
“Mammy, can we stay the night?” Amy said, trudging up the staircase toward them with Bethlehem in tow. “My feet hurt.”
“I think her boots are pinching, but she refuses to take them off,” Beth said with a yawn. Each of her loved ones managed to look her way without their gazes lingering too long. Her illness had passed. It was natural to be tired after such an extravagant night, and each of them was as well.
“My boots are perfect,” Amy replied before she realized the person standing close by wasn’t passing. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jo’s Lorie,” the handsome young man told her, and offered her the palm of his hand while he bowed slightly.
“Jo’s Lorie?” Amy asked, but she gave him her hand anyway, because he was handsome and tall, and he didn’t have a mustache like so many attending the party had.
“He belongs to me,” Joanna said, laughing over her shoulder with him. “I’ve laid claim. It’s been decided.”
Between Mammy, Beth, and Amy, the youngest seemed the only one capable of a reply.
“Have you two had too much to drink?”
“Amethyst, hush. We haven’t had anything. We haven’t eaten at all, in fact—we passed the entire night in the library, talking.”
“You didn’t see Yannick, then, and the rest of your boys?” Beth asked.
“There are others?” Lorie said quietly, and he and Jo giggled again.
Beth could’ve hidden her face in her hands at the insinuation. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Jo said, taking her sister in her arms and kissing her cheek. “You never would. Lorie knows all about my sisters, and he knows only to take offense at the things Amy has to say.”
When the youngest sucked her teeth, annoyed that she would be so disgraced in front of a man who—despite his and Jo’s ridiculous claims—was in fact a stranger, she was ignored.
“How are you?” Jo asked Beth. “Did you eat?”
“I did. I had the crawfish you caught, and greens, and a bit of anything that wasn’t too sweet.”
“On top of everything, she doesn’t even have the decency to indulge a sweet tooth?” Lorie asked, as though insisting on maintaining a private exchange with Joanna despite the presence of company.
“I told you,” Jo said with a broad smile that she turned from Lorie and shone on Beth. “She’s our saint, perfect because she is, not because she tries to be.”
“You’re embarrassing her,” Mammy said, reaching between the two to save Beth from the directness of their attention. “Come on, girls. Let’s find Meg and our pot and start home.”
“I can’t, unless one of you carries me,” Amy said, alert again at the prospect of walking the distance even back to the sound, now that the excitement would be behind and not before her. “Have your Lorie carry me, Jo!”
“He isn’t a mule, Amy,” Jo said, taking him by the wrist and heading down the staircase. “And he lives here on the mainland, he isn’t coming to Roanoke.”
At the sound of Amy’s disappointment, and careful not to trip while being dragged down the steps, Lorie spun around to catch her gaze.
“I do have a cart, though,” he said, pretending to whisper. “And I promise I’ll take you to the ferry.” He winked at her, and all was forgiven.
“Mammy, you rest here,” Jo called from the foyer, disturbing those who’d begun to fall asleep along the walls and in the corners, some with their legs outstretched so that others could rest their heads on them. “We’ll find our pot, and our Meg, and his cart, and then we shall be whisked away home!”
With that, the two disappeared out the front door, leaving more than a bit of confusion.
“My word,” Mammy said at last, slowly lowering herself down upon the top step. Her two youngest folded down beside her.
“That was rather interesting,” Beth agreed.
“I suppose this means Jo’s fallen in love.” Mammy had to pause, despite that she’d spoken the words and shouldn’t be surprised at them. “I wasn’t sure I’d see the day.”
“For my part, I’m not sure I like it,” Amy said through a yawn.
“Joanna’s the only one who must, I suppose.” Mammy petted her youngest daughter’s hair, and then pulled her toward her chest, coaxing her to rest. “But I do wonder how Meg might feel.”
“Why only Meg, and not me?” Amy asked, sitting erect again, before Mammy repeated the gesture and had her back inside the hold of one arm.
“You’re too young to understand.”
“I’m as hurt as Meg will be!”
“All right, darling. There, there, you poor dear.”
Beth covered her smile, leaning against Mammy’s other shoulder while her eyes drooped, closing longer and longer each time she blinked. “I love him for Joanna, if only because he has a cart,” she said. “But I won’t assume she’s in love until she tells me so.”
“That’s much more reasonable than I’ve been,” Mammy agreed. “I could learn to be more careful from you, Beth. I’d hate to incite another daughter to trust in something that might not be.”
She didn’t have to say that she meant
Joseph Williams and Meg, and she wouldn’t have, when her eldest daughter came through the front door and smiled up at her family.
“Wasn’t tonight the loveliest night?” Meg asked, coming to lay both hands over the decorative finial atop the post at the base of the staircase. It was extravagant, as so many things in the big house were, shaved into the shape of a pineapple or something similarly kingly when painted bronze. Meg’s fingers held it as though the thing were as delicate as she, and it looked more regal in her hands. In the gown repaired by Bethlehem, and with her thick hair in dozens of soft twists and then wrapped around and around each other, she looked like this house might be hers if they all lived long enough for a third life.
“You danced as much as I did,” Amy said. “And with twice as many partners.”
“I did no such thing,” Meg replied, her brown skin flushing around her eyes.
“I danced with Beth, which is one partner, and you danced with two young men. Isn’t two twice as many as one?”
“It’s too late to bicker,” Mammy interjected, and hushed Amethyst until she laid against her a third time.
“And I only danced with Honor Carter because he asked.”
“But you danced with Wisdom first,” Beth said, eyes closed but not out of disinterest.
“I danced with Wisdom because I wanted to,” Meg answered with a smile. She bit her lip as though to keep from saying more, and laid her cheek against the pineapple finial with a sigh.
“You see, Mammy?” Amy said. “Meg won’t even be as hurt as I am that Jo’s in love with Lorie, now that she’s danced with a Carter boy.”
The whimsical expression Meg wore settled.
“How can Jo be in love?” she asked, straightening and letting her hands slide down the post until they were at her side. “And who is Lorie?”
As though conjured by her interest, the door opened and the two in question stood in its frame together. They looked winded, but more amused and far more awake than anyone who’d come to the party. Behind them, folks trudged either to a nearby encampment, or else toward the cabins none had been willing to use until the big house itself was sufficiently crowded. The cabins had been for the enslaved of the estate, and there were people who would sleep beneath the stars before they’d huddle inside. Tonight, fatigue won some over, and at least a few would find things felt quite different when done by choice.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 9