Jo had to decide quickly whether or not to hold it against him, as he and his rapacious friends were awaiting news. In the end, she could find no intentional fault. It was true, Meg had been heartsore a time or two on his account, but Jo supposed he hadn’t done much more than be a few years behind her sister’s ambitions. Perhaps it was because of her own experience of disappointing someone she adored, but she decided Joseph Williams should not be villainized for that.
“Beth and Meg are still on Roanoke,” she told him gently. “Only Amethyst and I came, for her to study dance.”
Despite the presence of his friends, Joseph and Joanna held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, and she watched his recognition settle. It must really have been years since he’d written her sister, and all the while on the assumption that she’d left the colony.
“I suppose a better friend would’ve known that,” he said after a deep breath, and Jo’s only response was to dip her chin. “Perhaps I should write—”
“I’ll send along your greetings,” Jo interrupted before he could say any more, and Joseph closed his mouth in understanding, nodding once and resuming his smile. “Come and see Amy. Or help me back to the sleigh, anyway.” She laughed, and Joseph and his friends did as well.
XIII
Winters in Boston looked absolutely otherworldly to Beth, and she wondered if perhaps the picture painted on what Amy informed her was a postcard was the result of artistic license.
It wasn’t that North Carolina didn’t have mountains, on top of which Papa said there was snow—it was just that Beth had never seen them herself. She lived in the Outer Banks, and despite that she knew she’d lived somewhere farther inland before that, it seemed she uniquely could not recall the old life. Uniquely because, despite that it was not often the subject of conversation, Beth knew her family recalled it. She could sometimes sense when they did, or see it in a faraway look. The memories seemed sometimes to transport her family members, such that they were unaware they were being watched, as though they’d somehow forgotten they were visible at all. It was not very unlike the look Papa took on whenever he spoke of the war, since his return home. That was how she came to understand that what they’d lived through was as terrible and devastating as battle. And it had lasted so much longer.
She didn’t remember deciding not to, but before the big house, where she’d lived just before coming to their home in the Freedpeople Colony, she remembered most things in still pictures. Like the postcards Amy sent.
She remembered Papa and Mammy, though she’d seen them so infrequently during the day, and she remembered her sisters, though mostly she remembered asking Jo where Meg had gone, and why their eldest sister often wore such grand-looking clothes. She couldn’t remember when Amy had come to join their family, and so she’d had to be reminded years later that such a thing had taken place. They said of course Mammy hadn’t borne Amy in her belly, but Beth wasn’t sure she would have known one way or the other.
There had been a very old woman, or at least a woman who to Beth’s young eye seemed quite old. She didn’t remember the elder’s name, but she knew that any work the woman did had to be brought to the stool outside her shack, and that Beth had been in her care during the workday when she was very young. She remembered turning, beneath the heat of a morning sun, and she couldn’t remember the year or the season, but she recalled the way the old woman’s eyes softened when they lifted from her sorting something between two wicker baskets and found young Bethlehem.
Beth didn’t lament what she couldn’t recall. She wouldn’t have even if it were her way. There must have been a reason memories from the old life faded as easily as they did, and it didn’t upset her. It had worried her when Jo and Amy left for Boston that it might happen again, in their absence. She’d worried that the memories of their new life would fade and now that she had so many, and had spent so much time in the unbroken company of her mother and her sisters, she thought this time, forgetting would be torture. She was overwhelmed with gratitude when the forgetting did not happen again, though it meant that she ached so often for them.
“It feels as though we exchanged Jo and Amy when we got Papa back,” Beth told Ella. She’d let her hands collapse into her lap, and the garment she darned with it. “The old life is over, they say, but it’s still impossible to keep a family whole when our opportunities are always far away.”
“I know how you miss them,” her friend answered, watching her daughter play near the water. Fanny was no longer a baby, and she had no need of their hands in order to walk or climb. They’d carried her down the incline, into the shade of the creek bed, canopied on both banks by treetops. It was too cold to play in the water, but the earth nearby was soft and pliable, and the little girl enjoyed patting it between her hands. “I’d never had the privilege of missing anyone until Daddy passed. It makes the heartache a little easier, knowing it means I got to know someone in my family that well.” Ella looked up at Beth, whose brow creased gently at the memory of Orange. “Only a little easier, though.”
“I miss him, too,” Beth said. “I’m so glad I got to know him, Ella. Your father was so kind, and I don’t think I would ever have known what to make of my condition, or where it comes from, without him.”
“I only wish he’d gotten to die where he hoped. I wish he were buried in Liberian soil, the way we planned.”
“You tried your best to see him sponsored, Ella.” She did not say what both young women already intimately knew, that their previous status as enslaved Blacks meant that even organizations supporting the American Colonization Society and its campaign to send Black people to the new nation often refused sponsorship to the emancipated. They did not want to be seen as taking a side, which was a terribly strange privilege the nation retained. Having fought a war supposedly toward the goal of abolition, and then being more concerned with mending relations between themselves than with those who’d suffered slavery in the first place.
“You have been my witness,” Ella told Beth. “But he still went to his rest here.”
Beth only nodded, because there was nothing to say. There was no way to express the grief of burying the dead in earth they’d been forced to toil, on land that did not belong to them, and might never.
“When the enslavers win back their land, and the colony is gone, I won’t even be able to visit his bones,” Ella went on, watching her daughter play.
If Beth were either of her parents, or Meg, or even Jo so far away in Boston, she might have resisted Ella’s conclusion. She might have felt it imperative to defend the permanence of the colony—but part of having a memory that faded was accepting that things passed. She felt that must be part of why she’d come to accept what so few wanted to consider, both about the colony and about Liberia.
“I want no ties to this country, Beth,” Ella told her. “I have none by blood, since they rended me from kin, and I have none in my heart. I’m ready to go home.”
Bethlehem nodded, her eyes studying the creek and the incline on the opposite side, and the way the wind moved the trees and their shadows.
“Nothing is forever,” she said, and when she did, it was about a great many things.
* * *
To Freedomsville we soon shall go,
And there still let the people know
That we have minds that do expand
Beyond the scope of “Contraband.”
Meg was glad for Lorie’s boat, now that work was so much farther away. She had her students in the colony, but with the end of the war, rations and pay had dwindled from the Union, and she, like so many others, needed to travel to the mainland to make ends meet.
Lorie’s mother had taken the cart when she left the big house for New Bern, but when Meg could not accompany someone else heading to a nearby town, she was willing to walk. It was better her than Mammy or Papa.
As she crossed the sound, Meg hummed the song her mainland students had sung for days now. It had made its way all the way from Arlington
, Virginia, and Freedmen’s Village, which had been established on the abandoned estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. She didn’t know why her students should take up singing it now, except that there had been no anthem composed for Roanoke. Now as their own colony was rumored to be in decline and folks had to pin their hopes to somewhere new, perhaps they reasoned that Freedmen’s Village’s song meant it would last.
“We have minds that do expand,” Meg sang, as she passed between the flag posts that marked the entrance home. “Beyond the scope of ‘Contraband.’”
She stopped amongst a scattered crowd outside her mother’s office. There were no officers there anymore, except in passing, or when they came to survey the colony’s status, and Mammy had become the administrator. She would be the one the freedpeople asked questions, and voiced laments and concerns and criticisms. She would be the one to answer for the coffins.
Leaning against the building, or stacked in twos side by side, they were impossible to ignore.
The coffins had drawn this smattering of people and accounted for the vacant look in some of their eyes, the soft crying Meg could hear, though she couldn’t see who made the sound. There was the ever-present undercurrent of coughing behind all of the hushed conversation, as there had been in the colony for some time, and the sight before them made it all very despairing.
Mammy emerged from the building, opening her arms as though to embrace them all, and then addressed them, turning one way and then the other while she spoke.
“Don’t mind them,” she said of the coffins, and despite the hitch in her voice, she stepped to one small cluster of colonists and touched an arm gently before moving on to another. “A doctor is coming, too, and a hospital steward. Soon. Hold on a little while longer. We’ll see this season pass.”
Slowly the gathering dispersed, and only then did Mammy see her daughter standing farther behind. Meg let her shoulders settle so that her mother would do the same, and then she went to her, took the woman’s hand, and led her back inside the office.
Mammy slumped in what had been an officer’s seat.
“What happened?” Meg asked.
“I asked for a surgeon, and medical assistance.” She laid her forehead against the desk. “There are so many ill already, and the sickly season has only just begun.”
It was not that Meg wasn’t aware of the number of deaths in the colony, and that the overflowing barracks and the village were beginning to look ramshackle because of the way the population had outgrown the land. She knew also that family crops were not enough to make up for the lack of rations since the war’s end.
“I hadn’t let myself accept the reality of it all,” she said aloud.
“I have had little choice,” Mammy said into the desk. “But this … How are people meant to survive when their deaths are presupposed by those given authority to maintain us from afar?” She sat upright, as though her will and strength had returned. “I asked to hire some of our own back from the mainland, if burying and managing the dead were necessary, and they send us coffins instead. No matter what Horace James says, more and more it is clear that the reverend is the only white man who desires that the colony continue.”
Mammy let her head fall back this time, and looked up as though communing directly with her Heavenly Father.
“Coffins before the doctor. How much can our beleaguered hearts stand?”
“Look, Mammy,” Meg said, picking up an envelope from the desk. “A letter from Jo and Amy.”
Of course her mother would have received the mail delivery and set the letter aside herself. She hadn’t opened it. She never read them without Meg and Beth, and Meg supposed it was like having all four of her girls together for a time.
“Come on,” she said, taking her mother beneath one of her arms and hoisting her to her feet. There was nothing they could do to conceal the coffins or repair the wounds caused by the sight of them, and Meg knew little would give her mother a peaceful reprieve, except perhaps hearing how well the two in Boston were faring. “The sooner we find Bethlehem, the sooner we can hear their voices.”
It did wonders, just getting Mammy home. Papa was standing with Wisdom out front, and the two were guarding Fanny while she wandered about, Beth and Ella visible inside the open window shutters, setting the table.
“Good day, wife,” Alcott March said, reaching for her when Mammy was still more than an arm’s length away. It made her smile that he was still impatient after all this time, and it made Meg blush under Wisdom’s waiting gaze.
Both pairs embraced before Wisdom scooped Fanny into his arms, and they came inside for supper.
After their meal, the family read Jo’s letter together as though it were a dessert, and it did serve to sweeten the evening.
“Can you imagine?” Beth said, sitting on the floor with Meg, Wisdom in a chair beside her. “Joanna will be published, with a book of her own, telling the world a story of our enslavement from our words.”
“I should like to teach from my own sister’s work,” Meg said, as though to Wisdom, who had taken to smoking after supper as Alcott did. “I’ve taught so many how to read with Uncle Tom’s Cabin over the past few years, but soon Jo’s narrative will take its place.”
“I’m just in awe that there can be so much brilliance in one family,” Wisdom said, arranging his pipe on the other side of his mouth as though he hoped it might distract the Marches from appraising his intelligence in comparison.
“Five ravens, my five girls,” Alcott said, resting back in his chair, holding his pipe with one hand and his wife’s hand with the other.
“Ravens?” Wisdom asked, looking to Meg as he often did when he was unsure of something.
“Black birds are the most intelligent,” she answered, her cheeks glowing from her father’s familiar praise.
“Intelligent and lovely, like all of you,” Mammy added. “And Amy, look how she’s grown. I’m afraid we’ll scarcely recognize her when we see her next. Offering to send us money, the dear girl.”
“If she ever did send something, we’d only set it aside and then give it back,” Alcott said, and Mammy nodded in confirmation.
“Have you heard from Honor lately?” Meg asked Wisdom when the matter with Amy had been settled. “How does he like Beaufort?”
“I’m not sure,” he answered, his eyes flitting across the faces of her family, knowing they were aware of his troubles. His eyes fell into his lap, and he pulled the pipe from his mouth. In a moment, Fanny was standing at his knee, staring up at Wisdom, and he couldn’t help but smile and clip her chin between finger and thumb.
“I don’t like to see brothers draw away from each other,” Alcott said. “Especially not in the strange state this world is in.”
“I think he still thinks I betrayed him by choosing to stay.”
“Did the colony not deserve to keep any able-bodied men?” Mammy asked, though she did not expect an answer.
“But I didn’t stay for the colony’s sake,” Wisdom said, as though in confession, and Alcott and Margaret, and Meg and Beth, and even Ella met him with broad and genuine smiles.
“We know that, son,” Alcott answered, and clicked his teeth back into place on his pipe. “We know.”
* * *
It was another day or so before new mail came, and by then Mammy had received the doctor and the hospital steward from New Bern and directed them to a working space, where they would keep their belongings and provisions when they weren’t visiting people at home in the village. It was one thing off her mind, and it must have been why she paid more than a glance’s attention to the letters addressed to Bethlehem, and from where.
“What am I to make of Beth receiving correspondences from Liberia now?” she asked Alcott in a hushed tone. They’d reclaimed their bedroom after Orange’s passing, having slept in the front room together when Alcott returned home from war. Now Ella and her daughter shared Amy and Beth’s old bed, and Beth joined Meg in hers, or some variation of that, depending o
n the day. The point was that Papa and Mammy had privacy again, but she was still unaccustomed to it, and so when she snuck Beth’s letter into their room without delivering it to her daughter, she spoke in a whisper.
“Margaret,” her husband said through a sigh. “You’ll only work yourself up. Ask the girl, and let her tell you. I’m sure writing to settlers in Liberia is perfectly normal these days.”
“What about these days would make that normal?” Mammy asked, crossing her arms over her chest and turning away.
“What is normal these days at all?”
“No, Alcott. None of your playfulness or charm. Our daughter is eyeing a dangerous path, and I would like some support on the matter.”
“And you have it. But I can’t make up my mind about what she’s doing without asking her.”
“Perhaps I should read the letter first.”
“Margaret!” He very nearly stumbled back now. “What have you done with my measured and reasonable wife? I’ve never heard you suggest such a thing. Bethlehem is nineteen now, darling. You couldn’t do that to her. What’s gotten into you to even consider it?”
At that, Mammy sat on the chest at the foot of their bed and tossed her hands in the air.
“What’s gotten into me? I’m a wife and mother and administrator who has known enslavement and emancipation, and who is still waiting on freedom, and who has had to love and release those dearest to me in turn these past several years!”
Her husband crouched down in front of her, though she knew his knees were not fully recovered from the buckshot he’d taken that had not been entirely removed. He hadn’t lost the use of his legs, and that was blessing enough for both of them, but she would always mind his comfort closely now.
So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix: 2 (Remixed Classics) Page 19