So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics)

by Morrow, Bethany C.

  “I think I’m just glad to know what the matter’s been,” Joanna answered. “But I’m so confused. You have not one but two attentive young men—”

  “Oh, Jo. I think we all know that Joseph Williams never had such an interest in me.”

  “Did he say so in his letter?” Jo asked, her voice tinged with a budding anger.

  “Not in so many words. But he apologized if he hasn’t made clear his dedicated interest in my friendship. And he isn’t a villain because we all decided something must be between us before he ever arrived for supper that night.” She looked down at their joined hands, and then at Jo. “And I only wanted to impress him because he so impressed you.”

  Joanna tried to subdue it, but a smile tugged at her lips.

  “But we’re not the same person, Jo. You charm everyone, and I can only charm a select few.” She looked back into her own lap. “You despise the Carter boys as dullards, and I…”

  Jo smiled completely now and let her forehead rest against her sister’s hair.

  “And you like the dullard Wisdom,” she said, nudging Meg with her head until the older girl smiled, too, but shyly. “Who is not nearly as smart as you, but who could be. He’s handsome, and helpful, and looks adoringly at you, as he ought to.”

  “He looks so adoringly,” Meg said, almost whispering it, when she leaned into her sister’s head. “But how can I adore someone who does not live up to my brilliant sister’s standards?”

  “You must allow me to be wrong sometimes, Meg. Especially when it’s your own heart’s concern.” She bit her lip before saying, “And especially when something may be wrong with mine.”

  Meg pulled back so that both girls had to sit straighter, and when they had, she searched her sister’s eyes.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Jo said, dragging out the words. “That I haven’t fallen in love with Lorie. At least not the way everyone thinks. Not the way the world expects.”

  “How do you know?” Meg asked, because she didn’t know what else to say.

  “Because he tried to kiss me, and I turned away.” Jo tried not to take offense at the way her sister gasped. “And the fact that it had never occurred to me to kiss him must mean … something.”

  Perhaps the greatest sign that Meg was no longer a child was the good sense she had to let her lips rest together at unexpected news. She and Jo both fell quiet the way they had several times that night, thinking instead of speaking, because they understood the gravity of what they’d heard.

  “Are you not in love with Lorie, or do you simply love differently than some of us?” Meg asked at last. “Or have you only thought of love as it’s been presented to you? It would be no fault of your own, if you haven’t known how.”

  “I know that I love Lorie,” Jo said, her brow furrowed in earnestness. “Because I cannot do without him. I speak to him when he isn’t there. But I wouldn’t ever have thought to kiss him. Or … anything else I suppose follows love. But I want him with me, anywhere I go. I’m excited to go to Boston because he’s coming, too.”

  “Has Lorie changed at all, since you declined his kiss?”

  “No. He’s taken no leave of me, though I worried he would. He is himself, even when I can’t think how to be. Even when I worry it’s upsetting to stay so close.”

  “You must let him decide, Jo.”

  “But I could make it easier for him, I thought.”

  “How?”

  “The Union pays for hair…”

  Meg squinted at her sister. “What?”

  “I thought,” Jo said, rolling her eyes because it sounded as silly as she’d imagined it would. She’d wanted to ask Meg’s opinion in case it was a completely daft idea, and clearly it was. “I thought it’d help if I sold it. Not all of my hair,” she said, touching her neck because her hair was neatly braided and pinned away. “Just the length of it. I’ve heard short hair is unbecoming to men.”

  “And you think Lorie would be so easily discouraged?” Meg asked with a laugh. “He’s yours, Joanna. No matter how you maim yourself. But he won’t impose on you, will he?”

  “No,” Jo said. “He wouldn’t.”

  “Then maybe that’s enough for now?” Meg asked, stroking Jo’s arm with her free hand.

  “I hope so,” Jo answered, and the sisters rested their heads together again, and passed most of the night there, in relieved silence.

  XI

  The white men credited with Corinth, and indeed my own Freedpeople Colony at Roanoke, are said to have been driven to do so by grander hopes. They are soldiers and reverends, and sometimes they are both. They are spoken of in their absence, and cast noble shadows even when they are never seen. They may never materialize beyond names on a ledger or in a report, yet I am certain they are promised space in the annals of history. They will be legends no matter how these colonies turn out, because it is not difficult to imagine heroes who look like all the ones christened before.

  I must be plain: I am not puzzled by Americans’ persistent lionizing of those they’ve been taught to lionize. What I find curious is the persistent omission of those who by our identity, and because of our heinous oppression, have far grander hopes.

  Who hopes more for Blacks than we ourselves?

  Whose homes were in Corinth, and still are in the Freedpeople Colony?

  Ours.

  We have no other homes to return to, if the grand hope of a colony comes to nothing. We have no citizenship that permits us even to move freely throughout the Union to seek a new homestead. Permission must be asked, emancipated or not, and transportation papers supplied. It is not too much to say that, in fact, we are kept—by the grand hope of the white men whose names will be etched in stone at the base of statues crafted in their likeness—in a state of dependency. We are forced to align ourselves and our hopes with those who can see their passion atrophy or transfer and still be merry.

  And now Corinth has fallen. Despite hopes and victories, its people have been relocated to other camps and colonies in which they will never find rest, knowing as they now do that such places are impermanent. That such grand hopes are replaceable, when they are held by those whose lives do not depend on them.

  To save Roanoke, I must leave it. I must try my hand at buttressing it from the outside. I must appeal to yet another population of Americans that, though Black, might feel no stake or compulsion toward my colony.

  And yet, from Corinth I have learned that I must consider the impermanence of Roanoke, despite myself. I must, at the back of my mind and to the depth of my spirit, be prepared to have grander hopes than these.

  —Joanna March

  P ART II

  XII

  February 1866

  Amethyst March had at first been overwhelmed at the prospect of ever navigating the city on her own, and now she was racing through a network of pedestrian alleys to make her lesson on time. It was a remarkable turn of events for two reasons, the first being that she’d worried over the shadows buildings cast when they were fitted so close together, and her imagination had been helped along by the newspapers and the cautions she received from her fellow dancers, and from Hortense Evergreen herself.

  Three years ago, she couldn’t have imagined rushing up and down alleys without a concern, when she’d lived all of her life before in what turned out to be wide open spaces. Dangers didn’t lurk where Amy was from. They were right out in the open, all the time, and one knew just what they looked like. In the North, one was warned that danger lingered in shadows and waited for perfect opportunities, of which there were many more in the city, because there were so many people everywhere.

  The second reason her hasty travel was remarkable was that, until a few years ago, she’d never seen snow, or at least not what they considered snow in New England. And if she had been unaccustomed to the rapid accumulation and hardening of the stuff—which on major avenues was piled knee-high, and by April would be higher still—she certainly could not have foreseen bec
oming so familiar with the harsh winter weather that she could half run, half skate to reach her destination.

  If she fell and broke her neck, it’d be her own fault, given her particular talents. It was those talents she was being paid to pass on, and regardless of the neighborhood or race, folks in Boston were very unforgiving over punctuality compared to North Carolina. She had no desire to lose her clients, which, thank heavens, was rather unlikely since she was one of very few Black dancers with her training. Still, Meg would think her a grave disappointment to find out that Amy was being paid to teach—as her eldest sister had only rarely been while the Union was stationed on Roanoke Island—and that Amy could not be bothered to arrive on time.

  “Careful!”

  Amy skidded around a corner and directly into Lorie’s arms.

  “You know, if you managed your time better, you might not have to run on ice-covered paths, Amy,” he said.

  “I’m hardly ever behind schedule, Lorie, and you know it. Now let me go before the girls come down to find me!” she said, yanking away, though he was only trying to keep her upright. “And what’s Jo still doing here? She’ll be late, too!”

  “I’m not permitted inside when Mr. Babcock, Esq., is out of the house, or I’d be telling her the very same thing!”

  Just as Amy reached the flat face of the Babcocks’ brick home, Joanna opened the door and hustled out.

  “Amy, you should’ve been here by now,” she said, as they kissed each other roughly because there wasn’t time to be delicate or to linger.

  “And you should’ve left,” Amy clucked back as they traded places.

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Babcock is out, but”—she turned and jutted out her gloved finger, her other hand closing her scarf around her neck while Lorie struggled to keep a second March sister from falling—“do not make this a habit, young lady. You’ll only get lucky with Mrs. Babcock’s errands so many times.”

  “I’m not a child anymore, Joanna, I don’t require your rearing.”

  “You’re not even seventeen, Amy,” Jo threw back as she was pulled away.

  “Which is still almost as old as you were when we left the island, so old enough, I’d say!”

  “Ladies, please!” Lorie finally interjected. “Can we stop yelling down the walkway at each other and go our separate ways at last?”

  Amy stuck out her tongue at him before closing the Babcocks’ door, and Joanna poked him playfully, though she very nearly lost her balance.

  “She’ll still be not even seventeen and in need of your rearing when your salon is finished and we meet at the skating rink,” he said.

  “Writing salons can wait while I discipline my hardheaded sister, Lorie.”

  “Is that what you were doing? Disciplining?”

  “Someone has to. She’s a disaster!”

  “Joanna March.”

  “Well, it’s gone to her head anyway.”

  “What has?” he asked as he directed her around a corner and nodded hello to a passing couple.

  Jo should have known by now how to get from her rented room on the first floor of the Babcocks’ home to her salon, which gathered in an equally lovely home on Pinckney Street, but as it happened, Jo was awful with directions. It isn’t something they could have known when the only places they ever traveled back home were the colony, the big house, and the space between—most of which was water—but Lorie had no idea how Jo would have managed in a city on her own. She needed someone to mind the road while she went on her tangents or mentally composed new work, or read aloud from a newspaper as though she needn’t watch where she was going or into whom she nearly collided.

  “Is it the dancing school that’s spoiled Amy,” he continued, “or the fact that she’s better at it than even we imagined? Or maybe it’s the way she can support herself in just three short years by her talent, whether in private recitals, or in teaching the daughters of wealthy Boston professionals?”

  “I am not being unreasonable, Lorie.”

  “Of course you aren’t. Why would you be? When have you ever?”

  “All right, that’s enough.”

  “Why, I can’t think of a single occasion on which I thought—” And they stopped abruptly to avoid being trampled by a carriage before proceeding across the street. “On which I thought, ‘Joanna March is being unreasonable.’”

  “If you think for a moment that I’m skating with you now, you’re sorely mistaken,” she said as he deposited her outside her destination.

  “Should I be punished because I think you entirely reasonable?”

  Jo did as her youngest sister had done and stuck out her tongue at Lorie, though any of the women sitting in the drawing room could see them through the window, and then she went inside to attend her salon.

  “We must forgive her her lackadaisical Southern ways, ladies,” Madeleine Plender crooned in an obvious attempt to sound as though it were part of an ongoing conversation about Jo’s tardiness. “I’m sure she means no disrespect.”

  “I’m perfectly capable of voicing any slights I intend, as you well know,” Joanna said, rounding the corner from the entryway into the finely decorated drawing room. It was well into winter and still the heavy, velvety drapes that reached floor to ceiling were bound back to show off several layers of sheer lace before the window. What heat was lost for the aesthetic was made up for by the fire crackling in the hearth.

  It was the greatest revelation uncovered in Boston, that such things belonged to Black people. More than the houses lined up against each other, or the fact that there were entire neighborhoods of them without porches or personal space or acreage. More than the fact that there were such things as neighborhoods. Funnily, the close quarters in Boston’s Beacon Hill weren’t so unlike back home, if one meant the rows of cabin shacks where folks lived when they were enslaved, and not the grand plantation houses, or the small but spread-out homes of the white Southerners without much more than Blacks.

  But here, she rented a room from a Black family whose patriarch studied and represented the law, if she understood correctly, and even after almost three years among them, she sometimes felt sure that she didn’t. She’d been certain the North was not some other world of equality and “good white folks,” but sometimes the difference in the way Black people moved through the world was undeniably awe-inspiring.

  Even this salon was more than her imagination could have devised. It was Madeleine Plender’s home, and she was wife to a dentist and a doctor. They were the same man, but that was no less fantastic than if she’d really taken two husbands. Madeleine did no work of her own, not with her hands, the way Mammy and Meg and every other woman Jo knew back home had. Madeleine was an advocate, as everyone seemed to call Jo as well, and she had the fortunate position of being a mentor, and a sponsor, and a host of other words that meant that she gave her name and her financial support to those she wanted to see succeed. She’d begun this writing salon in her home and, despite that she did not personally write, she’d been able to attract the bright minds of women who did. It was only for Black women, and by invitation only, though, once invited, each member was allowed to invite one woman of her choosing, if she was thought to have something to contribute.

  Jo had received an invitation because despite not attending, Mrs. Babcock, her landlord, was well respected among the group, and she was very pleased to have a Southern writer and freedpeople advocate staying with her.

  “It is in fact your Southern heritage we’d like to discuss today, Joanna,” Madeleine proceeded, as women finished their milling and tea making, and sat on her dimpled sofa or in plush armchairs.

  “Oh?” Jo received a cup of tea from someone who smiled too excessively for her taste. It made her suspicious that perhaps she had been the topic of the conversation before her arrival. “Shall I regale you with yet more stories of the colony? I assure you, I did in fact wield a hammer myself in building homes for my community.”

  “Yes, we know all about that,” Madeleine sai
d with a nod. “You’re not at all what we imagined of Southern women and their delicate natures.”

  “I think because you can’t imagine what it is to have been enslaved,” Jo replied. She’d meant it to be just another sharp but playful retort traded between the two, but she could tell by the way the room hushed that it had seemed like more than that. She couldn’t think how to remedy it without going on, speaking of how the image of the delicate Southern woman was reserved for white women. One had to have the luxury of leisure, and the stomach for tradition, of which Jo had neither.

  Madeleine pressed her lips together and looked into her teacup. Just as Jo worried she might be asked to leave, the woman lifted her chin and smiled softly.

  “You’re right, of course,” Madeleine said. “Which is why we hoped you’d consider writing about it.”

  “Oh,” Jo said, relieved enough to sigh and sip her honeyed tea. “I sometimes feel it’s all I write about. First in my newsletter, and now in the journal you publish.”

  “You’ve written wonderfully about your love of the Freedpeople Colony at Roanoke, Joanna, and brilliantly on the predicament that faces the Black Southerner, and the miseducation of the white Northerner on not only the institution of slavery, but their role in it.”

  “Except that…?”

  “It’s not an exception,” Madeleine said, sitting up a bit to politely insist. “Never that.” She looked around the room, and the other women quickly agreed, lending their own assurances to Jo. “It’s just that there is so much more you have to say, and to give. Insights that few but you could, as your talent is a rarity.”

  There was no way to reply without agreeing with her own praise, so Jo waited for Madeleine Plender to reach her conclusion.

  “I know it seems an indelicate time, with the colony you so love and have worked so faithfully to improve facing so uncertain a future, in addition to all its other trials,” she said, and Joanna steadied herself against the way she might bristle. She knew from her family’s letters that Roanoke had its share of concerns, but her natural response to such talk—particularly from someone who, Black or not, had never set a foot inside or a finger to its care—was not at all mild or polite enough for present company. And besides, she’d heard that just a few months ago, Roanoke’s colony had seen a significant influx of freedpeople. Its fate was not at all decided. It would not go the way of Corinth.