Marmee & Louisa (23 page)

Suffering from “soul-sickness” in March, Abigail struggled to seem cheerful to her girls.
⁵⁹³
She vowed to “take up the daily cross and work on, isolated and poor, awhile longer. We will economize still further, and reduce our wants to the lowest possible scale.” In April she moved the
family to a small house in a nearby hamlet, Still River, where she was heartened to see Bronson starting to labor “unremittedly in his garden, producing rapid and beautiful changes,” turning “stone and rubble, a rude rough chaos,” into “neat regular beds and borders.”
⁵⁹⁴

But Bronson still mourned “my Paradise at Fruitlands.”
⁵⁹⁵
Without Charles Lane he felt “all alone again,” he wrote in June. In a letter he begged his brother Junius to rejoin his family: “You seem the sole person in the wide world, designed as a faithful coadjutor [to me] . . . with the constancy of a true lover.”
⁵⁹⁶

In late June Bronson left again for an extended visit with his brothers and several utopian communities in New York state. For the first time, though, he took a child with him, thirteen-year-old Anna. As the two of them departed, Abigail told her husband earnestly, “I wish you success.”
⁵⁹⁷
Whatever anger at him she may have felt she apparently kept to herself, like Marmee in
Little Women,
who admits, “I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it.”
⁵⁹⁸

Anna and Louisa promised to write each other often while Anna was away. Louisa missed her older sister “so much,” she soon discovered, that she “made two verses for her,” which read in part:

Sister, when you are lonely

Longing for your distant home,

And the images of loved ones

Warmly to your heart shall come . . .
⁵⁹⁹

“Ever when your heart is heavy,

Anna, dear, think of me.”

Think how we two have together

Journeyed onward day by day,

Joys and sorrows ever sharing,

While the swift years roll away. . . .

Bronson and Anna stopped for about a week in Syracuse, New York, to visit the Mays. Samuel Joseph, Lucretia, who was pregnant, and their children, aged fourteen, eleven, and eight, had recently settled in that bustling city on the Erie Canal, “the great thoroughfare through which the immense travel from the East and the West, and to and from the
Canadas, must almost entirely pass.”
⁶⁰⁰
On Samuel Joseph and Lucretia’s trip to Niagara Falls the previous year, he had been invited to preach at the lovely new Church of the Messiah near the canal in central Syracuse. Soon afterward the church’s pastor had died and the congregation had called the Reverend May. The Mays occupied a sprawling Federal-style frame house about half a mile from his church.
⁶⁰¹
It had a screened-in wraparound porch, several acres of land, vast gardens, a raspberry patch, hens, and a barn for their horses and carriages, as Lucretia continued to keep her own horse-drawn chaise.
⁶⁰²
The Mays employed several servants, and in September 1844 they would have a new baby, George, called “Bonnie” after the ballad “Bonnie George Campbell.”
⁶⁰³
In this rapidly growing city on the canal that was America’s first efficient highway to the West, the families of bankers, engineers, and inventors had welcomed the minister and his family.
⁶⁰⁴

Upstate New York was now home to the reformers Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass and the site of active lines on the Underground Railroad, enabling fugitive slaves traveling from Kentucky and Virginia through Ohio and New York to reach Canada.
⁶⁰⁵
New York state, which in 1800 had had more slaves than any other northern state, had abolished slavery in 1827. Syracuse, “an island of radical dreams” located only forty miles from Lake Ontario, was now a “convenient shipping-point” to Canada, according to one of Samuel Joseph’s colleagues.
⁶⁰⁶
“I could put [runaway slaves] in a car [in Syracuse] and tell them to keep their seats until they crossed the suspension bridge, and then they would be in Canada.” During the decade after 1850—the year Congress severely strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, which required all Americans to capture and return runaway slaves—a slave passed through Syracuse nearly every day en route to Ontario or Quebec. A historian found that Samuel Joseph “personally aided over a thousand fugitives to reach Canada.”
⁶⁰⁷
The minister fed, bathed, clothed, and sheltered them, accompanied some of them across the border, and toured their Canadian settlements to ensure they were comfortable.
⁶⁰⁸
Throughout slave states May’s name and address were known as conduits to freedom.

Bronson and Anna were still away from home when Abigail’s inheritance was finally released from probate in the summer of 1844, more than three years after Joseph May’s death. Bronson still resented his exclusion from the May estate. “A little income—her support nearly—
falls to her from her Father’s Estate,” he informed Junius in August, following his and Anna’s return. “But she will bind her interests with mine, I trust, and rely on something more sure and worthy than Boston Gold; asserting a true and brave independence by adherence to the . . . labours of self-support.
⁶⁰⁹
We shall see. . . .”

Louisa was still only eleven years old that summer, but she too had been changed by her experiences in the town of Harvard. Fruitlands had revealed to her the gulf between her parents. And it had affirmed her sense of Abigail as her best ally. “No one will be as good to me as mother,” she had written in her journal in October.
⁶¹⁰
Two days after Christmas she had added, “Mother often says, if we are not contented with what we have got it will be taken away from us, and I think it is very true.” Knowing all this, Louisa resolved to be contented with what she had got. She would labor for her mother’s bread, as Abigail had suggested. She would do anything in her power to bridge the gulf between her parents.

Chapter Eight

The Best Woman in the World

F
inally,
Louisa thought to herself after her family had moved, in 1845, to a ramshackle house in Concord. “I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and am very happy about it,” she wrote in her journal.
⁶¹¹
More nook than room, Louisa’s new bedchamber was on the ground floor of the house purchased early that year with a thousand dollars that Grandfather May had left to Abigail, which her father called “Boston Gold.” Eight adjoining acres were a gift from Emerson to her father. To enlarge the house, Bronson had lined the ground with logs and rolled two existing barns onto its sides; Louisa’s little room was in one former barn.
⁶¹²
The Alcotts arrived at Hillside, as they called the house, when Louisa was twelve and her sisters were fourteen, nine, and four years old.
⁶¹³

Lying on her bed, with a view of daylilies, lilies of the valley, and the rock garden and wall that her father was building on the hill behind the house, Louisa could finally think, dream, and write uninterrupted. It was bliss. “It does me good to be alone, and Mother has made it very pretty for me,” she reported in March 1846. “My work-basket and desk are by the window, and my closet is full of dried herbs that smell very nice. The door that opens into the garden will be very pretty in summer, and I can run off to the woods when I like.” According to a male cousin, Louisa could “run like a gazelle.
⁶¹⁴
She was the most beautiful girl runner I ever saw. She could leap a fence or climb a tree as well as any boy.”

A few months past her thirteenth birthday, Louisa had already “made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no more a child.
⁶¹⁵
I am old for my age, and don’t care much for girl’s things. People think I’m wild and queer; but Mother understands and helps me.” Other girls sometimes teased her, and Boston cousins called her a strange, “half-educated tomboy.”
⁶¹⁶

Only her mother seemed fully to understand and accept Louisa—perhaps, as both her parents suggested, because she and Abigail were so alike. They both saw clearly, felt deeply, and struggled to express themselves and be heard. Observing her mother’s struggles inspired Louisa to be a better person so she could be as helpful as possible to her mother. “Now I’m going to
work really,
for I feel a true desire to improve, and be a help and comfort, not a care and sorrow, to my dear mother,” she promised herself.
^617
619

Abigail encouraged her to write often in her journal and to compose poems so as to be “less excitable and anxious.” Just before they moved into Hillside, Louisa had written “little verses . . . with some success,” her mother observed. “She is making great effort to obtain self possession and repose” by expressing her feelings in words.
⁶¹⁸

Every now and then Louisa discovered in her journal a message from her mother. “MY DEAREST LOUIE,” one note began. “I often peep into your diary, hoping to see some record of more happy days. ‘Hope, and keep busy,’ dear daughter, and in all perplexity or trouble come freely to your MOTHER.”

Knowing that her mother would soon again read her journal, Louisa replied therein: “DEAR MOTHER,—You SHALL see more happy days, and I WILL come to you with my worries, for you are the best woman in the world. LMA.”

Even at twelve, Louisa had tried to bolster her mother’s confidence. Painfully aware of her mother’s ongoing marital troubles, the child had written her a poem of consolation:

God comfort thee dear mother

For sorrow sad and deep

Is lying heavy on thy heart

And this hath made thee weep.
⁶²⁰

There is a Father o’er us, mother,

Who orders for the best

And peace shall come ere long, mother,

And dwell within thy breast.

Then let us journal onward, mother,

And trustfully abide,

The coming forth of good or ill

Whatever may betide.

Louisa’s physical father, meanwhile, continued to be troubled by the “darker temperament” that his second daughter shared with his wife. Biographers have noted that “Bronson assigned great value to physical appearance as a sign of moral thought” and had a “passion for the blond complexion.
^621
622
Blue eyes and fair hair, he thought, were signs of the angelic type, determined in a former state of existence, while the dark eye and the swarthy face betokened the demon.” On March 16, 1846, Bronson confessed to his journal that he sometimes wondered if Abigail and thirteen-year-old Louisa were possessed. “Count thyself divinely tasked if in thy self or thy family thou hast a devil or two to plague and try thy prowess and give thee occasion for celebrating thy victories . . .
⁶²³
Two devils as yet, I am not quite divine enough to vanquish—the mother fiend and her daughter.” He did not define the fiendish behaviors he observed.

In contrast to Louisa, his other daughters seemed more virtuous. Anna and Elizabeth were studious, he noted a month later; “I corrected their Journals which they wrote very faithfully.”
⁶²⁴
But “Louisa was unfaithful, and [thus] took her dinner alone.” Even five-year-old Abba—whom he punished for not attending her reading and spelling lessons, by making her read aloud before eating dinner—earned his approval. Her “little heart was very sensitive, and [she] felt this gentle reproof of her unfaithfulness.” Louisa, however, seemed not to have such a penitent heart.

Perhaps sensing her father’s disapproval, Louisa identified with and tried to help her poor mother. At Hillside, according to a family friend, “Both Anna and Louisa strove hard to reinforce the family exchequer.”
⁶²⁵
Louisa knew that Abigail felt burdened by her indebtedness to Emerson for all his kindnesses, pecuniary and otherwise, so she hatched a plan to
tutor his elder daughter, Ellen, alongside her own younger sisters and a few neighbors. For several summers, then, the teenage Louisa ran a little school in the Hillside barn. She told the children stories her mother had read or told to her. She also invented stories, which the children “went wild” over, according to Ellen Emerson.

Louisa created for her pupils a fairy kingdom, a peaceful place among the flowers that grew around the house. She gave the fairies names and led them on adventures. “Once upon a time, two little Fairies went out into the world, to seek their fortune,” Louisa began the story of “Lily-Bell and Thistledown,” in which the selfish, prickly Thistledown must undergo an arduous journey to learn how to have a kind heart. In another tale, the pure love of the violet conquers the cruel Frost King, protecting all the flowers from being killed and winning the Frost King’s heart. In yet another fairy tale, Louisa created a little Water-Spirit named Ripple “down in the deep blue sea” whose happiness ends when she encounters the mournful mother of a dead boy. The mother begs the spirit to revive her child, as the prophet Elisha does in the Old Testament story that Abigail, like her own mother, had read to her girls. The Fairy Queen advises Ripple to travel to the distant home of the Fire-Spirits, “high up above the sun.” There the Fire-Spirits agree to help her in exchange for jewels. She takes the flame they provide back to the sea, revives the child with it, and returns him to his mother. Then she must journey back to the Fire-Spirits to pay them in pearls before returning, happily, to the sea. “I made [Louisa] write them for me,” Ellen Emerson recalled of the stories that later became the material for Louisa’s first published book.
⁶²⁶