Marmee & Louisa (19 page)

Abigail, in an effort to explain her growing difficulties since the men’s arrival, blamed her diet as “not enough diversified.” Bronson had turned vegetarian in 1835 after hearing a lecture by Sylvester Graham, who advocated a simple diet based on his own coarse crackers, strict vegetarianism, and chastity. Now Bronson expected his wife and children to follow suit.
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Flesh eaters “belong . . . to the race of murderers,” he said.
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Charles Lane had a still more restrictive diet. He avoided animal products altogether and consumed only raw food. Bronson had now taken on the cooking, although Abigail still fed the children meat and milk when she could. Her husband’s typical feast for company entailed oatmeal pudding, apples, coarse bread, and nuts.
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Often they had food enough for only two daily meals, each consisting entirely of bread or potatoes and water. Lane criticized even their apples, which were a family staple, for not being “mellow.” She felt that “we are not favorably situated here for any experiment of diet—having little or no fruit on the place, [and] no houseroom.”
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Ultimately she blamed herself: “My disrelish of cooking [is] so great that I would not consume that which cost me so much misery to prepare.”
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She also resented Lane for usurping her favorite duty, the children’s daily lessons.

“All these causes,” she concluded, “combine to make me somewhat irritable, or morbidly sensitive to every detail of life.” She often felt “a desire to stop short and rest, recognizing no care but of myself.” It would be the rare parent of two-, seven-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children who would not wish sometimes to stop short and rest. “Yet without money we can do nothing,” she added ruefully.

At bottom, apparently, she feared insanity. “I hope the experiment [in communal living] will not bereave me of my mind,” she wrote in November. “The enduring powers of the body have been well tried. So I wait, or rather plod along, rather doggishly. . . . The mind yields, falters, and fails. This is more discouraging to me than all else. It unfits me for the society of my friends, my husband, and my children.” She could not tolerate being unfit for the society of her children. Something would have to change, although she knew not what.

Louisa, so attuned to her mother’s moods, was acutely conscious of her pain. Seeing the change in Abigail since the arrival of the men, Louisa began to doubt her father’s judgment. She threw contentious questions at him and then, unhappy with his responses, withdrew from him.
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Her father sensed her aloofness. In the letter he presented to her on her tenth birthday, he advised Louisa to change. “I live, my dear daughter, to be good and do good to all, and especially to you and your mother and sisters.
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 . . . Will you not let me do you all the good that I would? And do you not know that I can do you little or none, unless you are disposed to let me; unless you give me your affections, incline your ears, and earnestly desire to become daily better and wiser, more kind, gentle, loving, diligent, heedful, serene.” Louisa’s response to the request that she appreciate her father’s goodness does not survive.

The birthday note from her mother, which came with a gift, read in part, “DEAR DAUGHTER . . . I give you the pencil-case I promised, for I have observed that you are fond of writing, and wish to encourage the habit.
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Go on trying, dear, and each day it will be easier to be and do good.” Louisa was fond of writing and would go on trying to make it a habit in order that, as her mother suggested, she be and do good. In addition, her mother thought, writing could serve as a “safety valve to her smothered sorrow which might otherwise consume her young and tender heart.”
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She wrote for Louisa a series of rhymed couplets, beginning, “Oh! may this pen your muse inspire, / When wrapd in pure poetic fire.”
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Less than a month later, on the day before Christmas, Abigail sought a reprieve from her “arduous and involved” duties of the past three months by making a visit to relatives in Boston.
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She desired “recreation,” she explained.
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At forty-one years of age, Abigail was “care-worn and depressed” and suffering from vision loss and painful, decaying teeth. Taking a delighted Louisa with her, she announced to Bronson, “We may be [away] from home for some weeks.”
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“Distance and absence from Home and cares will restore her,” Bronson hoped.
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He felt “very happy” with Abigail gone, he wrote to his brother Junius, who now lived in New York near their sisters and mother, because his friend Charles Lane, “the best substitute for yourself at fireside . . . is near to me.”

Several days in Boston with Louisa left Abigail “quickened by a new spirit of confidence and love.” One evening she attended a public lecture on education, a topic that continued to fascinate her. Standing up afterward to engage in the discussion, according to an observer, Abigail “quite electrified the audience” with her inspirational public speaking.
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A note
she received that week from Bronson served to remind her of what she called his “perfect trust in God and goodness,” particularly now that he was again at a distance.”
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A few weeks earlier, while living under the same roof as her impractical spouse, she had written in her journal, “Give me one day of practical philosophy.
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It is worth a century of speculation and discussion.”

Abigail returned home with Louisa on January 1, 1843, resolved to face the new year with restored confidence and hope. A new year meant a new diary, as it had since Abigail was ten years old. Louisa too was now ten, old enough for a journal. Eleven-year-old Anna had already started hers. Their financial situation was so precarious that she thought the children might benefit from writing to each other as a way of expressing their feelings. To this end, Abigail established a household post office to provide the girls “and indeed all of us” a way of sharing “thought and sentiment,” particularly amid conflicts. Hanging a basket by the front door, she explained to Elizabeth, Louisa, and Anna that if any discontent occurred, the post office would provide a “pleasant way of healing all differences and discontents.”
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Anyone could deposit in the basket “letters, notes or parcels,” which would “be distributed to the respective owners” each evening after supper. The post office worked well in inducing the children to interchange “notes of reconciliation, reestablishing friendships.”
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Writing helped them, as it helped her, to face and understand their emotions.

Even as her children began to learn how to express their difficult feelings, Abigail had no one with whom to share her own anxiety. Her husband seemed to have withdrawn, physically and emotionally. Bronson may have shared a room with her due to their cramped quarters, but he had not slept in their bed since his return from England, her diary suggests. Charles Lane’s devotion to celibacy may have influenced Bronson.
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Moreover, Abigail felt “greatly beset by men to whom we are owing small sums of money. . . . Mr. Alcott feels that nothing can just now be done but let them wait. I wish I could be more comfortable under this state of things. I have stated my mind [to him] very explicitly, and yet I have not said all I feel, for I do not know how to do it advisedly.”

Her husband, she feared, was turning anarchist. In January she overheard him, Lane, and Wright discuss how to “overthrow” the government because of its “errors.”
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In the same month Bronson refused to pay
his poll tax, a fixed, per-person tax, prompting Concord authorities to arrest him. He had planned for this act of civil disobedience to send him to jail, but before he was committed Elizabeth Hoar’s father, the judge, paid the tax for him, sparing Bronson what Abigail bitterly called “the triumph of suffering for his principles.”

In the bitter cold of early March she traveled the few miles to Lexington to discuss her situation with her brother. Samuel Joseph and his family had moved to Lexington in 1842, after his activism cost him his pulpit in South Scituate. The congregation had asked him to depart soon after he invited black parishioners to sit in the front gallery among whites.
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He had preached, “If a slaveholder, with his gold and fine clothing, were to visit this church he would be given the best seats” on the floor, “but his colored slave, the victim of his tyranny (though he might be a disciple of Christ) would be sent up to the negro pew” in the balcony. Never before had anyone integrated parishioners of different races and classes in the church. Samuel Joseph was now employed by Horace Mann, the pioneering secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, in Lexington as the principal of a Normal School, an early teachers’ college.
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His salary was stretched by his need to rent a house, but his family’s move to Lexington proved to be a boon to Abigail and her children.

“I am at a loss about money,” she told her brother. Although Bronson still had no income, he intended to purchase a house and a farm. In addition to his older, larger debts, she owed $175 to Concord shops. She asked Samuel Joseph how she would pay even their “little debts.”
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She often asked Bronson this “difficult question,” but he had no satisfactory answer.

“I am quite at a loss myself,” Samuel Joseph said.
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“I feel dissatisfied that Mr. Alcott finds no means of supporting his family independent of his friends. They have to labor; why should not he?” Bringing his pastoral skills to bear, he said, “I leave it for time to settle. Your husband’s unwillingness to be employed in the usual way produces great doubt in the minds of his friends as to the righteousness of his life because he partakes of the wages of others. . . . It is certainly not right to incur debt and be indifferent or inactive in the payment of same.”

Abigail marveled at her brother’s clarity. He always found a good and loving path. She saw that he was “embarrassed how to proceed, with no
means to help us himself and no confidence in the disposition of others to do so.”

That spring, following the departure of Henry Wright due to his disillusionment with Bronson’s philosophy, Charles Lane agreed to purchase for their community a farm on about eighty acres in the village of Harvard, fifteen miles west of Concord.
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The property cost $1,800 (equivalent to $43,000 in 2000), and Lane had only $1,500. To cover the balance, the owner offered him and Bronson an interest-free loan, payable over two years in four payments of $75 each (about $1,800 in 2000). Bronson had no money, so someone else had to guarantee the loan.

Emerson refused.
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“I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman,” he confided to Margaret Fuller. He had come to hate Bronson’s “cold vague generalities” and “majestic . . . egoism.” Considering Bronson’s character the year before, Emerson had observed, “I know no man who speaks such good English as he. . . . He takes such delight in the exercise of this faculty that he will willingly talk the whole of the day, and most part of the night, and then again tomorrow. . . . Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. . . . His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17th October; today, Alcott on the 18th October.
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 . . . I do not want any more such persons to exist.”

Abigail again asked Samuel Joseph for financial help, but he did not have three hundred dollars to spare. However, to “secure to my sister a house for herself and family,” he agreed in April or May to sign the note for the mortgage and to serve as Lane’s agent in the sale.

Abigail’s “three eventful years in Concord” were nearly over.
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She hoped that their next home would be happier, more fruitful. Perhaps it would be, for her husband and Lane had decided to call it Fruitlands. But Abigail seemed to be growing frail. Her eyes and teeth were failing her, and each passing year, it seemed, she more closely resembled her own mother. Whenever she prayed, “Give us this day our daily bread,” she understood, as she never had as a child, that she meant exactly what she said.

As she packed for another move, she found among her papers a print of an etching she admired of a mother and a daughter. The daughter reminded her of ten-year-old Louisa. On March 12, 1843, Abigail pasted the print on heavy paper and wrote beneath the image, “DEAR
LOUIE . . .
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In my imagination I have thought you might be just such an industrious good daughter and that I might be a sick but loving mother, looking to my daughter’s labors for my daily bread. Take care of it for my sake and your own, because you and I have always liked to be grouped together.”

The “industrious good” daughter would spend the rest of her life responding to this message from the “sick but loving mother” who looked to her for her daily bread. Some months later Louisa pasted in her journal the etching and the note from her mother. Beside it she composed a poem about her mother’s dream of writing a book:

TO MOTHER

I hope that soon, dear mother,

You and I may be

In the quiet room my fancy

Has so often made for thee—

The pleasant, sunny chamber,

The cushioned easy-chair,

The book laid for your reading,

The vase of flowers fair,

The desk beside the window

Where the sun shines warm and right:

And there in peace and quiet

The promised book you write;

While I sit close beside you,

Content at last to see

That you can rest, dear mother,

And I can cherish thee.
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