March (27 page)

For a moment, there was a blaze in her eyes that looked like exaltation. The images came to my mind, unbidden. I cannot know, I will never know, if I saw aright. An unexpected encounter in an autumnal field. A youth giving way to a moment’s base lust or a year’s corrupt longing. A scuffle amid the yellowing honeysuckle, a fall, a gun discharging, a face exploding like a shattered watermelon. And another face, lovely and pitiless, hurrying silently away.

Grace had dropped her head, and her voice, when she spoke again, was even lower than before. “The remorse-that came later. When I saw the loss in my father’s eyes, and in the eyes of Mr. Harris. When Mr. Harris left, because of my brother’s death, and I watched the plantation come slowly undone, and saw everyone suffer on account of it. Prudence and Justice sold, Annie drowned. All of it, all of it, because of my actions.

“So, do not presume that I have no experience with a conscience that flays me alive, every waking day.”

“Whatever it was that you did-” I stumbled, and began again. “Whatever misadventure happened as you sought to defend yourself-” But there she cut me off, waving her hands impatiently as if to clear a noxious mist.

“I do not ask your absolution. I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try to do the good of which our hands are capable for the people who come in our way. That, at least, has been my path.”

“Well, then,” I said, a little querulous, “that, too, is what I purpose. When I am a little stronger I could work with you: there will be needs, great needs, when colored troops are enlisted at last-”

She cut me off again, angrily this time.

“We have had enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.”

She had raised her voice and her eyes glared. I looked away, astonished by the vehemence of her rejection. “Go home, Mr. March,” she said. Then her voice softened. “If you sincerely want to help us, go back to Concord and work with your own people. Write sermons that will prepare your neighbors to accept a world where black and white may one day stand as equals.”

“But I don’t know if I can preach at all anymore ...” My voice broke into a high whine, like a boy on the cusp of manhood. I imagined it would break, just so, if I ever again mounted the steps of a pulpit. For me, silence had become more eloquent than any sermon.

She moved toward me and laid a hand on my arm. “Go home. Be a father to your daughters. That, at least, you can do. They are the ones who need you.”

She didn’t say it, but the unspoken words hung in the air between us.
They
might need me: she, most definitely, did not.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Concord

You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.

But some steps require more effort than others. As I set my foot upon the path leading to that little brown house, I felt like an impostor. Surely, I had no business here. This was the house of another man. A man I remembered. A person of moral certainty, and some measure of wisdom, whom many called courageous. How could I masquerade as such a one? For I was a fool, a coward, uncertain of everything.

Had I been alone, I might have turned back then, melted away like the snow on that bright, mild morning, become a particle lost in the vast spate flowing through the landscape of war, so that my daughters could live with the unsullied memory of that other man, and not be obliged to know this inferior replacement.

But I was not alone. John Brooke had a firm grip upon my arm and the young Laurence boy pranced brightly ahead of us, barely able to contain his excitement. He was carrying on as if he brought some bright-wrapped, welcome Christmas gift. If only he knew for what shoddy goods he was the forerunner. I pulled my muffler up high around my face, so as to hide the trembling at the corners of my mouth. Truly, walking up that path was an act of courage greater than any asked of me at war.

The boy burst into the house ahead of us, opened the door to the parlor, and vanished behind it. I leaned against the hall table. John Brooke, thinking my weakness a product of the journey, clasped a strong arm around my back. Thus encompassed, he propelled me forward whether I would or no.

The door opened. My eyes, snow-dazzled, registered only a blur. Brooke tried to say something, but his words disappeared under a general uproar. There were soft arms flung around my neck. Someone tripped over a footstool and did not even trouble to rise, but set about embracing my boots. I looked down on golden curls. My Amy. And Jo-hand to her head-her cropped, curly head-as if she were about to faint. Meg-could it be Meg, this womanly figure?touching heads with Brooke in the confusion and adding to it with blushes and mumbled apologies. Meg and John-so that was the way of it-I hadn’t realized-and Marmee, serene in the center of the maelstrom. Her face weary but smiling. I felt the grip of her will like a gaff plunged deep in me: she had been determined to see this day. She would have me back in the boat, she would keep this craft, our family, afloat, together, no matter how damaged my state, or her own, no matter how uncertain the seas.

She raised her hand in a calming gesture.

“Hush!” she said. “Remember Beth!”

But Beth had heard the commotion, of course. How not, in that small cottage? My little Mouse, her red gown flying, ran toward me on unsteady legs. Instinct opened my arms and I caught her-frail wisp that even I, depleted, could hold without effort.

I fumbled through the next hours feeling somehow swaddled like a mummy, or wafted away on the fumes of an ether-soaked rag. At times, I knew I was being touched, but I could not feel the contact on my flesh. I knew I was being spoken to, but I could not quite make out the sense of the words. Oh, I made some reply; I know this, for I sensed that my mouth shaped words, and I must have said reasonable things, as the faces that regarded me remained calm, and no one looked startled or taken aback. But I cannot tell one word of what passed as I made my way from those parlor greetings to the Christmas dinner table and finally to an armchair by a twilit fireside.

The temperature dropped sharply as evening came on, and a little snow flurried outside. Had someone, walking in the white street, looked in at our window, he would have seen in the family tableau a simulacrum of domestic joy. Beth sat on my knee, Meg beside, her hand resting on the arm of my chair, Jo opposite, and Amy on the cricket at my feet.

Some turn in the conversation made me glance down at Meg’s hand. The flesh was puckered and burned. Suddenly, it was not Meg’s slight stove burn that I saw, but Jimse’s melted flesh, healed into the white cobweb that would not allow his little palm to fully open. I had been concerned that the hand would trouble him, later in his life. And now there would be no later life.

But even while this thought filled my mind and clouded my heart, somehow, my mouth was uttering small encomiums about Meg and her diligent housework, and how her scarred, workworn hand seemed finer to me than the unblemished one of which she had used to be a little vain.

Beth, her small face pressed close to my ear, asked me to say how I thought the year had changed Jo, and so I did, speaking in praise of her newly dignified bearing and of her careful nursing of her little sister. And all the time I spoke, my heart ached for the dignified bearing of that other nurse, who would soon march off to care for the colored fallen, and whom I would likely never see again.

“Now Beth,” demanded Amy, leaning against my knees. I said something about finding my Mouse less shy, and then a real emotion pierced my rote recital, as I recalled how nearly I had come to losing her. I held her close. “I’ve got you safe, my Beth, and I’ll keep you so, please God.”

And I looked down, and began to speak of the change in Amy, and how I perceived, by her forbearance at the dinner table, a newfound consideration for others. But when she looked up at me, lit by my praise, the tilt of her head and the light in her eyes recalled my pupil Cilia. That poor little girl, whom I had not been able to keep safe. My mind reeled with the memory of her terrible wounds, the buzz of the flies, the stink ... I felt my gorge rise and knew I would not be able to continue to speak. So this was how it was to be, now: I would do my best to live in the quick world, but the ghosts of the dead would be ever at hand.

Fortunately, Jo asked something of Beth at that moment, and the conversation turned from me. Beth slid from my lap, went to her little piano, lightly touched the keys, and began to sing:

All eyes were on her then, before anyone had thought to ask their father how a year at war had changed
him.
I hid my face in the gathering darkness until Marmee came in with a taper, and bent over the lamp. The wick caught. There was a tiny clink as she settled the glass. As she turned the screw to adjust the flame, light flared. For an instant, everything was bathed in radiance.

Afterword

March
is a work of fiction that draws its inspiration from one of the great American families of the nineteenth century, the Alcotts of Concord, Massachusetts. For its scaffolding, I have borrowed from Louisa May Alcott’s iconic
Little Women,
among the first novels to deal, albeit glancingly, with the Civil War. But it is to Alcott’s father, the transcendentalist philosopher, educator, and abolitionist, A. Bronson Alcott, that I am most indebted.

Readers
of Little Women
will remember that the novel opens on a rather bleak Christmas Eve in the home of the March family. The father of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy is absent: he has gone south to minister to Union troops. In a dramatic moment two-thirds of the way through the narrative, a telegram arrives, urgently summoning Mrs. March to Washington, where her husband lies gravely ill. The crisis is resolved when Mr. March appears unexpectedly on the following Christmas Day, so that the year, and the novel as it was originally published, both close with the family reunited. Alcott’s story is concerned with the way a year lived at the edge of war has worked changes in the characters of the little women, but what war has done to March himself is left unstated.

It is in this void that I have let my imagination work. In attempting to create a character for the absent father, I have followed Alcott’s lead, and turned for inspiration to her own family. Alcott modeled the March girls on herself and her sisters: she, of course, was Jo, the aspiring writer. Meg was modeled on the dutiful Anna, who married young; Beth was the delicate, doomed Elizabeth; and Amy was her youngest sister, May, who achieved early success as an artist in Europe before dying of childbirth complications. So it seemed natural to turn to the journals, letters, and biographies of Alcott’s father, Bronson, for inspiration of my own.

Bronson Alcott was a radical, even by the yardstick of nineteenth-century New England, where all manner of new ideas, from a reappraisal of the nature of God to the dietary benefits of graham crackers, found eager adherents. He recorded his own life in sixty-one journals and his letters fill thirty-seven manuscript volumes in the Harvard College Library. He is the subject of an 1893 two-volume memoir by Franklin B. Sanborn and William T. Harris, and a 1937 biography by Odell Shepard. Warm references to Bronson Alcott-often as mentor and inspiration-appear frequently in the letters and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were among his closest friends.

I have drawn heavily on this material in creating a life and a voice for March. Occasionally I have borrowed snatches of Bronson’s own words: for example, the expressions of affection for his family in Mr. March’s first letter home, or the physical description of John Brown. I have also, in places, used the actual words of Emerson and Thoreau (readers of
Walden
will recognize the rant on Flint’s pond), though I have taken large liberties with their context.

Bronson Alcott grew up with barely literate parents on a hardscrabble Connecticut hill farm. In his late teens he went south as a peddler of notions and books to wealthy planters. His early journals seem blind to slavery’s cruelties, so swept up was he in the leisured life of the mind that the slaves’ labor made possible for their wealthy owners. Yet years later, back in New England as a middle-aged philosopher, he risked his life by stepping into the line of fire to protest the repatriation of a runaway slave.

His radicalism took many forms. A vegetarian, he founded a commune, Fruitlands, so extreme in its Utopianism that members neither wore wool nor used animal manures, as both were considered property of the beasts from which they came. One reason the venture failed in its first winter was that when canker worms got into the apple crop, the nonviolent Fruitlanders refused to take measures to kill them.

The Mr. March
of Little Women
departs from Bronson Alcott’s biography in many important respects. Bronson was an educator, not a minister of religion (he is credited with inventing the concept of recess, and also for attempting one of the first racially integrated classrooms). Also, since Bronson was already sixty-one when the Civil War broke out, he did not go south with the troops as does Mr. March, who is portrayed as more than a decade younger. So I have imagined a war for a Union chaplain of Bronson Alcott’s transcendentalist and abolitionist convictions.

The first problem I encountered was temporal. What year of the Civil War are we dealing with, anyway? Louisa May Alcott takes a novelist’s license here. The one anchoring date in
Little Women
comes quite late in the book, and is the November 1861 inscription on Amy March’s last will and testament. This puts the novel’s opening on the prior Christmas Eve in 1860. Since the first shots at Fort Sumter weren’t fired until April 1861, Mr. March could not have been “away down south where the fighting is” during that Christmas. So I have taken the liberty of moving the action forward a year. I chose to put Mr. March at the battle of Ball’s Bluff simply because the terrain of that small but terrible engagement lies just a few miles from my Virginia home, and because many soldiers from Massachusetts first “saw the elephant” there. For details of that battle I am indebted to the wonderful interpretive work of the National Park Service, to John Coski at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, and to the book
From Ball’s Bluff to Gettysburg ... and Beyond: The Civil War Letters of Private Roland E. Bowen, 15th Massachusetts Infantry 1861-1864,
edited by Gregory A. Coco.

I consulted two fine books on Civil War chaplains:
Faith in the Fight
by John W. Brinsfield et al., and
For Courageous Fighting and Confident Dying
by Warren B. Armstrong. But I have drawn most heavily on the 1864 memoir,
Chaplain Fuller. Being a Life Sketch of a New England Clergyman and Army Chaplain,
by his brother, Richard F. Fuller. Chaplain Arthur Buckminster Fuller was known to Bronson Alcott; the chaplain’s brilliant elder sister, Margaret, had worked for a time as an assistant at Alcott’s Temple School in Boston.

It was in researching the role of New England clergy that I became intrigued with the story of the contraband and the North’s mixed record of high idealism, negligence, and outright cruelty. During the war, three-quarters of a million African Americans—one in five of the Confederacy’s black residents—came within federal lines. Though the Sea Island experiments at Port Royal have been studied extensively-
Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne,
edited by Rupert Sargent Holland, and
Rehearsal for Reconstruction
by Willie Lee Rose, were particularly helpful-the ad hoc situations on individual, privately leased cotton plantations are less documented. I have relied on Thomas W. Knox’s
Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field,
a remarkably honest first person account by a Yankee war correspondent who turns cotton planter in an attempt to make a quick fortune. In creating a world for March, I have hewed very closely to Knox’s record. The tragic outcome at Oak Landing is based on Knox’s account of the harrowing end to his own venture. Two other books were helpful here: Louis S. Gerteis’s
From Contraband to Freedman
and Elizabeth Hyde Botume’s 1893 memoir,
First Days Amongst the Contrabands.
For those who care about such things, I freely confess that I have taken a small novelist’s license with the time frame, because plantations on the Mississippi would not have been leased to Northerners quite so early in the war.

In deciding how a man like March would render African American speech, I have followed the conventions in the writings of Knox, Towne, and other Northerners who went south in that period. Though the character of Grace Clement is entirely fictional, her voice is inspired by Harriet Ann Jacobs’s elegant and painful 1861 autobiography,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.

I am grateful to the expertise of Dr. Norman Horwitz, who introduced me to Sickle’s leg and other gruesome Civil War medical relics in the National Museum of Health and Medicine at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The work of the historian Drew Gilpin Faust on the handling of the dead during the Civil War provided many useful details. For a picture of hospital life in Washington I was able to turn to Louisa May Alcott’s
Hospital Sketches,
the memoir of her brief service as Civil War nurse. Alcott served at the Union Hospital, a converted hotel in Georgetown, and wrote vividly of its shortcomings. That short work preceded
Little Women
and was her first real publishing success. The poem attributed to Cephas White was composed by an unnamed patient of Alcott’s; she transcribed a copy of it in a letter to her aunt that is held among the rare manuscripts in the Library of Congress.

For the fine bookstores, new and used, and the many fascinating museums of Concord I am also extremely grateful. The memory of its illustrious former residents is well served by the proud sense of historic stewardship that pervades the town. A short distance away, just outside the town of Harvard, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands dream lives on in a way he could not have imagined, as an intriguing museum and a place of exceptional beauty.

I would like to thank my editor, Molly Stern, and my agent, Kris Dahl; my early readers, Darleen Bungey, Linda Funnell, Brian Hall, Elinor and Joshua Horwitz, Sophie Inwald, Graham Thorburn, and William Powers. I must also thank Maritess Batac and Amanda Levick, my indispensable supports.

As with so many things in my life, this book owes its being to my mother, Gloria Brooks. I was about ten years old when I read
Little Women
for the first time, at her suggestion. Though she recommended the book, she also counseled that I take it with a grain of salt. “Nobody in real life is such a goody-goody as that Marmee,” she declared. In that, as in almost all things, she was correct. Louisa May Alcott’s real family was far less perfect, and therefore much more interesting, than the saintly Marches.

Lastly, I should like to take a flyleaf from George Eliot’s
Middle-march,
which she dedicated to her “dear husband ... in this nineteeth year of our blessed union.” In the nineteeth year of our own union, I retract unreservedly my former characterization of my husband, Tony Horwitz, as a Civil War bore. Further, I would like to apologize for all the times I refused to get out of the car at Antietam or whined about the heat at Gettysburg; for all the complaints about too many shelves colonized by his Civil War tomes and all the moaning over weekend expeditions devoted to events such as the interment of Stonewall Jackson’s horse. I’m not sure quite when or where it happened, but on a sunken road somewhere, I finally saw the light.