March: a novel

by Geraldine Brooks

  It was a constant wonder to me that a man who could be abrupt to the point of unkindness with adults had nothing but gentleness and patience for children. One day, he arrived at the door, suggesting to the girls a huckleberry-gathering expedition. I, restless from a morning of quill pushing, decided to accompany them. Henry was a master for such a mission, for he knew with an unerring sense exactly where every variety of the berry might be found, and so could give the little ones swift success in their hunt. Jo had amassed quite a creditable harvest when she tripped on a tree root and fell, spilling the entire contents of her basket. She set up such a howling as would have driven beasts to ground and set the birds aflight throughout the wood. Even then, Jo was showing signs of her mother’s volatile temper, and Marmee absolutely refused to bridle Jo’s outbursts, saying that the world would crush her spirit soon enough. We had exchanged sharp words on the matter, and I was glad that Marmee was not there when I chided Jo and asked her to control herself. My words, however, were to no avail. Meg tried her sisterly best, kindly offered her a share of her own gathered berries, but Jo would have none of it. Her berries were lost, and no other berry might replace them.

  Thoreau knelt down then and put his massive arm around the tiny heaving shoulders. “Dear little Jo, you could not help but fall just here: Nature’s own fairy folk tripped you up a-purpose. They want little girls to stumble now and then to sow the berries for the next crop. Next year when we come here we will find a grand garth of bushes laden with berries on this very spot, and we will owe them all to you.” At this, Jo’s little mouth ceased trembling and the lips turned upward again in a smile of pride and pleasure.

  When Marmee confided that a third child would soon join us, I rejoiced in the news, all the more so as her poor ailing father was finally released from his suffering within a month of the confinement, and it seemed apt that the sweet spirit who is our Elizabeth should arrive from heaven as our consolation.

  If Marmee had been ardent in her abolitionism before the birth of her children, their coming into our lives set her on fire. I came upon her one day, nursing little Beth, with Jo curled up asleep, pressed against her lap, and Meg making an imaginary tea party at her feet. It was a delightful scene of maternal tranquillity, except that my wife’s shoulders shook and her face was wet with tears. I came up to her and gently inquired as to the source of her distress, thinking that the fatigue of the new mother and the death of her dear father perhaps had combined to oppress her spirit.

  “No,” she sobbed, when I probed her. “I am thinking of the slave mother. How can I sit here, enjoying the comfort of my babes, when somewhere in this wicked land her child is being torn from her arms?”

  My passionate wife had an uncommon ability to feel within herself what others must be feeling. Sometimes, harsh upon her own nature, she would refer disparagingly to this trait as her “morbid sympathy with human suffering.” At other times, she would use the power of her emotion as a spur to good works. But always she felt that what we did-the speeches, the occasional provision of overnight refuge to a runaway-was none of it enough. Sometimes, the ferocity of her views burst out in that same intemperate rage I had witnessed unleashed upon Mr. Emerson. It was the only cloud marring the amity of our union. I liked it very little when I was the object; even less when it was aimed at one of our intimates.

  My wasp of an aunt was, understandably, no great favorite with Marmee, but for my sake she bore a certain amount of forced intimacy. I required this of her because my dear uncle was, that winter, in the last stages of a long illness, and I felt-correctly, as it happened-that he would not be with us come the spring. There was something poignant in watching the old man, who had not had children of his own, sporting with our young ones. Jo, especially, took his fancy, for even before she could read, our writer-to-be was drawn to books. My uncle had a fine library, and he allowed Jo great liberty, letting her build railways and bridges even with his rare volumes. When she wearied of this, he would fetch down an interesting old folio with lavish plates and beckon her onto his lap. It was a pleasure to see Jo perched in the crook of his arm, her dark head nestling against his wattled neck as he turned each page.

  It was just such a convivial scene that Marmee’s temper marred one Sunday’s teatime very near to the end of my uncle’s life. I had mentioned that we planned to attend a lecture that same evening, to be addressed by John Brown, who was visiting Concord for the first time. Aunt March, always forthright in her opinions, stated that she found Mr. Brown’s views extreme, and that she herself would never think of attending an address by one so radical. She was not alone in Concord in viewing Brown so; rumors about wild Old Brown had him sleeping with a dagger in his teeth and a pistol for a pillow. “I have always considered,” Aunt March said, in the proud Boston accent she affected, “that slavery is more a matter for prayer than protest. Preferably,” she intoned, peering meaningfully over her half glasses at my voluble wife, “silent prayer.”

  Marmee’s anger unsheathed itself Her voice became cutting. “Why, I believe you would decline to keep company with that notorious radical, Jesus, were he to appear in Concord!”

  My teacup rattled in my hand. Aunt March’s eyes narrowed. I placed my index finger on my lips-a signal we had agreed upon-when Marmee, remorseful after just such another outburst, had asked me to help her curb her temper. Though she looked straight at me, and could not have missed the gesture, she chose to ignore it. “You are,” she hissed at my aunt, “incapable of appreciating a moral argument.” It was not her words-though these were hostile enough-but the manner in which she uttered them. I cannot recount all she said-my own nature is such that I would repress all memory of such exchanges-but insult followed slur, leaving no room for the attacked party to answer. At such times I thought I would rather live in the midst of a crashing thunderhead than with this Fury of a wife. Aunt March, who had herself no great claims upon an even temper, had turned quite purple.

  My uncle, who had many more years of experience than I in averting such scenes, clapped a hand to his breast. Jo slid from his lap, looking up at him anxiously. “I am unwell,” he said, rising unsteadily. “Would you excuse me?” He was, in fact, quite gray in the face, and I felt a stab of my own real anger at my wife, that her outburst should add to his afflictions. Uncle March reached for his wife’s mottled hand, which was trembling with rage. “My dear, would you mind? I need your assistance.” Much against her own inclination, for she was never one to shirk a skirmish, Aunt March gave her husband her arm and the two made unsteady progress toward the door. I did not wait for any further hint, but swept an arm around my own wife’s waist and propelled her from the premises. My idea was to walk off her temper, thinking that the brisk winter air would cool her. But I thought we might have to march to Boston and back before she managed to regain her self-command.

  Eventually, she calmed, and we made our way to the town hall to hear the divisive speaker. There were more than one hundred citizens gathered there, no doubt interested, as I was, to lay eyes on the man of whom we had read so much. The hall was ill lit; a few oil lanterns cast sharp shadows on Brown’s severe visage as he made his way to the podium. He was, in type, a true frontiersman. I assumed that this must be an impression he deliberately cultivated, since he wore, upon his arrival at the hall, a coonskin cap. Later, I learned that he was entirely unaware of his own person, and that the cap, made from furs his sons had hunted and his daughters had sewn, was a product of his necessitous circumstances. He shrugged off a heavy woolen military overcoat, revealing square shoulders and sinewy arms formed by long days of land clearing and the other physical toil necessary to establishing himself and his large brood in the harsh landscape of the Adirondacks.

  He must have been approaching his fifties. But he had a younger man’s energy, all held in tight reserve. The word that occurred to me was couchant: ready to spring at the least rustle in the grass. To continue the predator analogy, his nose was huge and beaked like a rap-tor’s. His eyes, too, w
ere eaglelike; his rufous hair, silvering at the temples, shot backward from a low point on a large brow deeply scored with lines.

  Brown knew his audience. He began his oration with a nod to the town’s proud history, commenting on the great justice of what had been done here in 1776; not only, indeed, its justice, but also its inevitability. His argument proceeded then in easy steps to assert that a war to end slavery was equally inevitable. “I tell you this,” he declaimed, “the two most sacred documents known to man are the Bible and the Declaration of Independence. Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by violent death than that a word of either should be violated in this country!” This drew a scattering of applause, although not from me. I was not so profligate with the lives of women and children as he. I glanced at Marmee, but instead of the disapprobation I expected, her black eyes were warm and approving. Here, then, was a man intemperate as she, a man whose measure matched her own. Lifting up his voice, Brown proclaimed that he had no doubt it would be right, in opposing slavery, not only to accept a violent death, but also to kill. I felt my face settle into a scowl at this. If there is one class of person I have never quite trusted, it is a man who knows no doubt.

  I do not think I was jealous of Brown, exactly, for finding approval in my wife’s fine eyes. And yet I was uneasy, as we left the hall, and were invited by our girls’ teacher, Mr. Sanborn, to an impromptu reception for the speaker. The Emersons and the Thoreaus were attending, Sanborn assured us. Marmee assented even without waiting for a word from me, and at that I felt my gloom settle a little deeper upon me, rolling in like a damp fog.

  We got to Sanborn’s rooms a little before Brown, who, when he arrived, seemed ill at ease. I judged him a man unused to refined interiors. The young man introduced him to those he had not yet met, coming at last to us. Up close, I noted that Brown’s corduroy suit was frayed at the sleeve. His hand, when I took it, was calloused, as you would expect, and there was dirt trapped under his fingernails.

  Marmee addressed him with great animation, inquiring about every particular of his Adirondack project, which, with the largess of a wealthy Quaker benefactor, aimed to turn indigent blacks into landowning farmers-and voters. Brown and his boys had surveyed and registered the freedmen’s land titles so that unscrupulous whites could not lay claim to them, and now they were helping the settlers master the rudiments of farming in a harsh landscape with a short growing season. Brown spoke kindly but tersely in answer to her queries, only becoming animated when Marmee asked if such a settlement was not a boon to the enterprise of assisting runaways on to Canada, as the border was not very distant and a black community must offer better opportunities for concealment. Brown’s eyes bored into hers as he recounted the flight of a couple he had but recently assisted under pursuit from a bounty hunter who, he remarked coldly, he had been obliged at last to shoot. Marmee’s lips, as he said this last, were parted. Her face wore an expression I could only describe as avid. I could see that Brown ignited the very part of my wife’s spirit I wished to quench; the lawless, gypsy elements of her nature.

  She was congratulating him on his works and wishing him even greater success in the future. “I could do so much more, madam, had I only the means. But I am dogged by debts and lawsuits.”

  I had heard something of Brown’s business history: how he had been most unfortunate in certain well-meaning efforts to sell American wool to the English mills. But I had no idea, until he began to enumerate his woes to my wife, ,of the extent of his indebtedness and his legal worries. Marmee turned to me, and I saw the question framed in her eyes. I had seen the way our girls jostled for her gaze, and I felt myself that moment like a child in want of her approval. I realized then that I was jealous. She saw Brown as a heroic figure; I wanted her to see me that way. And yet I did not have it in me to make wild rides to the border, shooting over my shoulder at bounty hunters. Even in speech, my most stirring sermon paled beside the blood-dipped oratory of Brown.

  Well, then. If I could not earn my wife’s esteem, perhaps at least I had the means with which to purchase it. I had, for some time since, been quietly divesting myself of my industrial interests, as the repulsive effects of the factory system had become clear to me. I had come to the conclusion that I could not, in conscience, profit from the degradation of human toil and the despoilation of water and air, once I began to grasp how very much the returns on my investments were married to these consequences. So I had sold out of my shares in this factory and that, as opportunity presented, and I had a large store of capital awaiting a worthy use. Although I had not spoken of it to anyone, I had it in my mind to found a Utopian community one day, when the girls were older; a “place just right” where men and women of learning could live with Nature, but without its exploitation. But that was a dream for the future. It need not preclude some use of my capital in the present.

  “If you have some time tomorrow to call on me, Mr. Brown, perhaps we could discuss this further?” Marmee’s smile when I said this last was, I deemed, worth whatever sum Brown asked of me.

  The mild-mannered man of business who presented himself at my study the following morning was a very different cast of being from the wild-eyed orator of the night before. Brown bearing his cashbook was almost irreconcilable with Brown bearing his broad sword. It was a transformation so complete as to be quite disarming. He seemed humble, diffident, almost embarrassed by his errand. I tried to set him at his ease. It would be an odd thing, in a former peddler, if I were to suddenly conceive that trade was somehow a base occupation for a crusading idealist. Brown had sought wealth for the highest reasons: so that he might support his large family and underwrite his antislavery struggle. That he had not amassed a fortune was largely, it seemed to me, the result of ill luck. Certainly, as he laid out his affairs, I saw a history of diligent, even backbreaking, effort. He had toiled and he had failed, and I couldn’t find it in my heart to blame him for it. He did not come to me, he said, asking for charity, but for an investment in land that would be, also, an investment in human liberty. He had a new scheme that, if it prospered, would relieve his indebtedness and then fund what he described as a vast magnification of the Underground Railroad. I was captured by the vision he laid out: of brave escorts, well armed and amply supported, who would risk all to shepherd not just individuals to freedom but, working plantation by plantation, liberate dozens, scores, perhaps even hundreds of escapees at a time.

  The business venture that was to fund this enterprise seemed sound enough-Brown clearly knew both land and livestock. He pulled out his maps and pointed to tracts in Ohio that had jumped in worth from eleven dollars to a staggering seven hundred dollars an acre. The land he proposed to buy would likewise soar, he said, as the same canal system pushed west. These were dazzling projections, but even if he were wrong, and the potential profit was not so vast as he calculated, then my capital at least would be secured in the land itself. Once I had agreed, his demeanor reverted immediately to that of the passionate evangel. He shook my hand vigorously. I rang for tea and Marmee came to pour it. It was a felicitous moment, for she entered the study in time to hear Brown declaiming : “Mr. March, know that one good, believing, strong-minded man such as yourself is worth a hundred, nay, twenty thousand, men of weak character.” I could not help adding a little flourish to this. “I can take no credit, Mr. Brown. What is it that Heine says? ‘We do not have ideas. The idea has us ... and drives us into the arena to fight for it like gladiators, who combat whether they will or no.’” It was a pompous little utterance, in retrospect, and, recollecting the blank face Brown showed me, it was plain enough that he had little time for German poets, no matter that they described his character with precision. Indeed, I think he had little time for reading of any kind, save the Old Testament, which he seemed to have by heart, and which, I came to realize over the course of our acquaintance, he relied on as a military manual as much as a spiritual guidebook.

  For about a year, I allowed mysel
f to bask in his approval and, even more, in the approval from my wife that came as its by-product. The initial sum he had asked was itself large; and in the months after I had advanced it, he wrote to me of further expenses which must needs be met to secure the earlier outlays. The town that would grow up on our land would need a hotel; it would need a warehouse. Soon, the skeletons of these large buildings loomed large on the bare prairie, yet the promised canal and the town itself remained mere dreams. Somehow, Brown’s confidence always stanched my skepticism and carried me along. Always, he was certain that just a little further investment would assure our vast return. I considered each request, and I assented, for by then I was in the stream so deep that rowing back to shore looked more arduous than pushing on. What I did not know-and where Brown was culpable-was that I was not, as I thought, his sole financier. Brown had borrowed against the very same tracts time and time again, spending the money, I learned much later, on secret arms caches that were not destined for the facilitation of escapes, but for the mounting of insurrection.