He gestured wildly in reply, and it might have been comical if it made any sense at all.
“What?”
“This!” Lorie finally collapsed into a small boat that had been pulled ashore without being properly moored or stowed. “I wanted to show you this! It’s ours!”
“Ours?”
It wasn’t long enough to accommodate his size in recline, and Lorie threw his legs back over the side of the vessel and sat up, slapping his hands against the wood.
“For Beth to come and go as she pleases, without bartering with fishermen or ferries, and without waiting on soldiers who’ll only take her across if they need her sewing machine. And so that I can travel freely as well. Or take new work, on the water, I don’t know!”
Lorie watched a series of expressions travel across Jo’s face.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” he almost demanded.
“Yes. Yes, Lorie, it’s … Beth won’t know how to thank you. And Mammy. It’ll mean so much, and that you thought of her at all.”
“But?” Lorie’s shoulders sank, but his mouth curved as though to smirk.
“But nothing!”
“Except?”
“I don’t know,” she hesitated, drawing out the words. “It means you’ve spent valuable coin or something else on a boat to cross the sound when you could very well cross the sound for good.”
“Or you could.”
“What?”
“You see, it’s that confusion that confuses me. You think nothing of asking me to come to the colony, but you’ve never considered coming back with me.”
Jo’s forehead was a landscape of wrinkles and folds, and she could not keep her head from shaking.
“Why would I go backward?” she asked, though it was more a statement than a question.
“Why would returning to the big house be going backward, if I’m there? Is this colony the only way forward, then?”
Jo shook her head intentionally now. There were too many paths and diversions for one conversation. The life she was crafting in the colony and through her pen was evidence enough that progress was always a precarious and temperamental thing. Lately, in trying to communicate with her Lorie, at least about this, it seemed impossible.
“I’m not used to feeling like you and I are at cross purposes, Lorie,” she said, looking earnestly enough at him that the young man rose to his feet. “I can’t figure out why we suddenly are. And only since I asked if you’d come to Roanoke for good.”
Lorie pulled Jo into his arms. They were almost always in contact, arms brushing or lying against each other, one of them leaning their full weight on the other, but their fingers only ever laced together when one was dragging the other somewhere in a hurry. There was no discomfort in proximity or touch, but rarely was it as intentional as an embrace. Still, Jo was relieved. Her face against Lorie’s thin shirt, his vest grazing her nose before she pressed it against his chest and kept her hand there.
“We’re never at cross purposes, Jo. And I don’t think I could ever be cross at you, at all.”
“Then what is it?” she said, not wanting to draw away but needing to see his face.
“We think differently of this place, and I haven’t wanted to say so.” His hand moved slowly up and down her back, as though to console her before he’d said the offending words.
“Of what place? Of Roanoke?”
“Of the Freedpeople Colony,” he said, and there was a criticizing emphasis on the word much like the one she’d used for Honor’s name.
Now she drew back more completely, the arm that had curved around his back falling limp, her eyes narrowed.
Lorie noticed all of it and let his arms loosen as well, so that she could disconnect entirely if need be.
“I knew you wouldn’t want to hear it,” he said, “when you yourself write eloquent missives about the necessity and the gravity of this place, when by your own talent it thrives.”
“There were others at the colony before my family arrived,” Jo replied. “It thrived by their work before mine. I only want to do my part to keep us free.”
At the word, Lorie all but grimaced. He rolled his head high so as to keep Jo from seeing it, but the gesture came too late.
“Whatever you have to say, Loren, say it,” Jo demanded.
He hesitated.
“Am I Loren now?”
“Am I fragile?” she retorted. “Am I unfamiliar with opposition? Am I not a Black woman in this country, every day? Don’t treat me as though I’ve ever been accustomed to coddling, and I won’t treat you like a stranger.”
“Pardon me if I don’t want to be the thing opposing you, Joanna.”
They were both quiet then, and the water lapped at the shore and at the tail of the boat still within its reach.
Finally, Jo took a deep, acknowledging breath and nodded for Lorie to proceed.
“If you insist that I speak my mind, then I’ll do it plainly,” he said, but then seesawed his shoulders so that his discomfort was obvious. “I’m sorry, Jo. But life in the Union’s shadow does not feel free. Congregating around their encampments feels too much like cowering to be that. Being despised by them, or at the very most tolerated, is more than I am willing to endure. And why would I? To be picked off and set to their tasks or to their front lines? It feels like slavery, and I know that life too well to say so lightly. I didn’t steal away with my mother, and with dogs at my heels, to settle for half measures, and that’s how your colony feels to me. I am sorry, Jo,” he repeated. “If it’s up to me, I’ll never spend a night there, in the barracks, or the village. I’ll never accept anything for which white men can demand my gratitude, when they owe me more than can ever be repaid.”
She took it all in without speaking. Though he tried, Lorie couldn’t divine her reaction by counting the space between or the length of her breaths, nor by watching the course her eyes traveled when they drifted away from him and meandered before coming back.
When she did speak, as on the day at the build, she couldn’t seem to say what she meant to. She could only make matters worse.
“I don’t know what’s more upsetting … That you believe that, or that you kept it from me.”
“Come now, Joanna,” he said, more gently than carefully, though it was both. “Is my position so difficult to understand? I’d think it just radical enough to be yours, if I’m telling the truth.”
“I suppose I can’t argue with that,” she said, but she still stepped away and turned toward the water, and toward Manns Harbor on the other side. “I’m the last person to feel indebted to the Union, or prone to its defense. I live alongside them, for heaven’s sake. I know what they’re like, and why they’re here.”
“And yet?” Lorie tried to peek around her shoulder, but he didn’t reach for her, to turn her or embrace her again.
“And yet,” she said, turning back to face him. “I’m angry to hear you say it. I feel something in me rile up that you would speak that way, about a place my sisters call home.”
His eyes fell. “That’s the real offense, then,” he said knowingly. “Isn’t it?”
“I could carve a path of wrath and fire across this entire country, and know that it was just and deserved, believe me. But where would Meg raise her children? Where would Amy dance? Where would we wear Beth’s masterpieces, if we refuse freedom except on the purest terms? If I believe the way you do, Lorie, there is no place for us, and no hope. Nothing can be salvaged. No reparations could satisfy the debt we’re owed. And after everything you’ve said, that must sound like grace to you. Mercy, for them. It isn’t. It’s for my sisters.”
“I know that.”
“I can be demanding, Lorie—anyone who’s read my newsletters knows that. I can be relentless in pursuing what we deserve, and I will be. But I’ve come to decide that nothing is slavery, except slavery. Otherwise we will never be free.”
“That’s fair enough, Jo.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she said, smirking so a
s to lighten the exchange. “It’s worse than coddling. You don’t have to agree with me, but you must know that what’s a half measure to you is a first step to me. It is only failure if you stop there.”
The sun was already low, and now it rested on the water. Though it was red and orange, it didn’t burn—it glowed. It cast a soft pink across Jo’s face, and Lorie admired it, content as much with the words they’d finally exchanged as with the silence that followed it. The tension was released. He knew by the way his breath came easily again. They’d disagreed, but they hadn’t detached, and now things were as they were before. Better still, the two of them might find the courage to leap from the cusp on which they’d been teetering.
“The world is bigger than North Carolina,” Lorie said, stepping close to Jo again. “We have more to choose from than the big house and the colony, someday.”
“Someday,” Jo replied, through a relieved breath of her own, and turned her face toward the setting sun.
“For today,” Lorie said, turning her chin back toward him, his own dropping low. “It’s enough that my whole world is you.”
His lips fell gently toward hers, and Jo only turned away in time for them to kiss her cheek.
She didn’t close her eyes. If anything, they widened. While Lorie’s mouth pressed into her skin, Jo’s mind raced, and she needed the distraction of the Croatan Sound, otherwise all her thoughts and questions might have tumbled out. She might have vacillated between disappointment and anger, and said something that she’d regret by the end of the night. She felt the warring reactions swelling up inside her, competing for a chance to be expressed and heard, but each time, she told herself, Wait.
Please wait , she thought, her heart pounding, the hand that Lorie rubbed against her back as heavy as stone, applying a pressure she hadn’t felt til now.
Wait , she pleaded with her tempestuous self, when she felt him retract that hand.
When finally he pulled back, Jo’s eyes flicked up to find his. Perhaps Lorie would speak first, explain what he’d done and what he’d tried to do, and what it meant. Whether he’d wanted to all along, and whether or not he thought she wanted it, too. Whether there was only one way for a young woman and a young man to be connected, when they weren’t born as kin, and what she’d thought they mutually understood, they hadn’t.
She could cry.
Everything would be different now. It had to be. If he meant what he’d done, then he’d never forgive her not wanting it back. If he was only just realizing that she hadn’t meant to claim him that way, then he’d have to revisit all the things they’d said and done, and decide if they were still enough. Perhaps he hadn’t known her the way he claimed to, and perhaps he wouldn’t want to know her anymore.
She was trembling, and there was a breeze coming low across the water. It might be mist soon, and even though it was a very short trip to the other side, it might make it difficult to see.
“Jo,” Lorie said, and if there were lines in his dark skin, she couldn’t make them out now.
“Yes, Lorie?”
“I am lucky to have you for a friend.”
She did cry now. She hoped he couldn’t see it, though she’d never thought to keep something like that from him before, but there was no masking the way her shoulders relaxed and her head fell forward.
“I’m in awe of you, Jo, that’s all,” he said, and though she couldn’t understand it, she could hear that he smiled.
She wanted to lay her hands against him, but didn’t. Where she’d been totally free with Lorie before, now she was aware. She would worry from here on, over what she did, and how he might take it. It was her objective now, never to hurt him.
“I adore you, Lorie,” she said quietly, and he lifted his chin so she could see the boyish smirk on his lips. He couldn’t help the melancholy that stained it, and she couldn’t take it away.
“I adore you, too.”
* * *
Lorie crossed the sound and Jo did not return immediately home. She meant to, but she left the shore to the melody of his boat parting the water and walked back toward the barracks, which she should have passed to get to the colony’s village on the other side.
She didn’t.
She hadn’t intentionally decided to reflect on what Lorie had said before the kiss, nor did she intentionally look upon the overflowing barracks and the various other buildings closed for the night, but when she caught sight of them, she couldn’t help it. It was a safer harbor for her thoughts than recalling Lorie’s lips against her cheek, or speculating on what it meant—or what it might require of her to keep the boy she’d claimed.
Jo went where she felt safest and strongest: into her thoughts and among her words.
She was standing just outside two posts that perhaps had been intended as a frame, only there was nothing at the top to connect them. A Union flag had been affixed to one, and it was limp and unenergetic without an evening breeze to set it waving.
The Union’s banner should be an unequivocal comfort, many a Northerner will say. Freed Blacks, or those of us still confined who pray freedom stretches far enough to meet us—we should swell with gratitude and bend our knees as though before the cross from whence comes our salvation.
When she recalled the words she’d written in her latest newsletter, Jo still felt as strong a disdain as when she’d woven them together. It took an academic’s concentration—a committed study of the world in which she found herself—and a poet’s fantasy to put such things to words. She was certain the only reason anyone read them was because they were at first completely incredulous that she could. She hadn’t obscured her identity by taking on a man’s name before sending her work out, as she might’ve done were she seeking to be published in some existing journal. Instead, she’d asked that her own letter be included in a single edition of a few progressive papers, and the inquiries had trickled in on their own, each reader aware that she was not just a woman, but a Black woman.
Perhaps it was a kind of sideshow to some, or a screed, but those who held that opinion were not her concern. Others had read and responded, and others after them, so her piercing prose found its audience.
Only the white in America can believe that those of us who’ve lived terrible injustices can or do make a distinction between the kind of white American who would put us in chains and the kind who would only stand idly by. It is too great a request that Blacks, emancipated or otherwise, look upon the Union flag and feel anything more than skeptical relief. Yes, it is a welcome symbol, but that is because there is an alternative, and that is a truth they would do well to remember before asking one who has spent a single day enslaved to offer gratitude or trust.
A woman wandered out of the dark entry of the barracks and into the evening, a sleeping child in her arms. The little boy was older than Baby Fanny, but still young enough that his arms and legs were soft and round, and he was only heavy because of how deeply he slept. The mother was tired, Jo could tell, but the woman’s head fell back a bit while she drank in a full, deep breath, and Jo knew she’d needed the air and the space more than slumber. It was likely pitch black and impossibly cramped inside, and it might have been painstaking and slow just to escape it without stepping on another person, especially while carrying a child she hadn’t felt comfortable leaving there, even just for a moment, so that she could breathe.
Jo felt the pressure in her expression, her written words still playing in her mind, and though the woman hadn’t seemed to notice her, Jo forced her features to relax, lest the woman think her grimace due to the odor.
There was one, and it could be detected even from where she stood outside the posts. There always was, when many people were kept in close proximity. There had been one at the big house, too, in the library where she and Lorie had passed most of their first night together. She might’ve told him if he’d stayed with her tonight, and were at her side. Besides that, she’d tell him, the smell wasn’t as bad here as it was said to be in so many other places
. In contraband camps, and makeshift towns fashioned in a hurry and just as quickly disassembled if the Confederates returned. Here, it had never been unpleasant to Jo, and in any case, it was usually masked by the smell of cooked or cooking food, or of animals, horses owned or confiscated by the officers, though some had come with the freedpeople. Animals were expected to have a smell, Lorie, she might say, and you couldn’t mind it. Most importantly, the smell of food meant there was something to eat and safety in lighting a cooking fire.
If there were only barracks, if people poured in by the hundreds and mothers had nothing to look forward to but nights spent traversing wayward bodies just to steal a few breaths of untainted air, Lorie might’ve been right. If there was nowhere to go in this colony but the barracks, before overflowing into the woods that the soldiers had already cut down, Jo, too, might only have seen the colony’s faults. But there were homes. They were building more every day, and there were dozens more now than there’d been a matter of months ago. Each home was not exactly like the one her father’d built for their family, Jo didn’t deny that. How could she, when she put her own hands to the building? The swift progress of the village was accomplished by forgoing the luxury of room divisions, so that each new home was a single spacious square with a roof, but it didn’t change the fact that Black folk had supposedly belonged to people not long ago, and now there were things that belonged to them.
Jo clucked her tongue, crossing her arms over her chest as though Lorie were right beside her and might see her consternation.
They were only in the shadow of the Union right now , but the war would end. When the fighting was over, the soldiers and the officers and the missionary teachers, praise God, would go home. The white folks would return from whence they came, and the barracks and the buildings at the front of the camp could be repurposed. It wouldn’t be so cramped, and the odor, faint as it nearly was, would dissipate. The Black schoolteachers like Meg could move their lessons from the tents into these buildings, and then … who knew what else.
The mother had retired back inside the barracks while Jo’s attention was elsewhere, and Jo began to walk, finally passing between the posts and into the colony.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 13