Eden's Outcasts (18 page)

It took another week for the Alcotts to make ready for the move. Two of the converts whom Alcott and Lane had succeeded in winning for the cause, Wood Abram and Samuel Larned, went ahead of them along with Lane's son in order to prepare the farmhouse for occupation. Abba and her daughters packed up their belongings, contending with all the mixed emotions that arise when one leaves one home for another. Abba could not help looking back on all that had transpired during her three fleeting years in Concord. Her father had died, and her youngest daughter had been born. On the first of June, the day of the departure, nostalgia and hope crowded together in her mind. Early that morning, the family's belongings were loaded onto a large wagon. Abba and the girls said their farewells to Hosmer Cottage and took their places in the wagon. Lane settled in beside them. It remained only for Bronson to climb into the driver's seat, take the reins, and urge the horses forward.

T
HE FARMHOUSE AT FRUITLANDS, WHICH STILL STANDS,
does not offer a commanding view of the surrounding country. However, a short walk up the hillside is rewarded with a sweeping view of the Nashua Valley and the bluish slopes of Mount Monadnock in the far distance. Black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace grow profusely in the meadow. Mockingbirds trill fantastic arias, damselflies ruffle the stillness of the air, and chipmunks dash boldly past the front door of the house. The look of the land today is far different from what it was when the Alcotts took possession. Most of the once-open, cultivated land has been overgrown by forest, so that even the rocky and rutted path that led to the house is visible only to those with a keen eye or an experienced guide. Where Lane and Alcott sowed their first and only crop, there now grow thick stands of ash, white pine, and wild cherry trees. They are not quite so thick, however, as the squadrons of mosquitoes and deer flies that rudely remind one that this, like any other place on earth, is not paradise.

Although Fruitlands was to be a highly literary commune, the best writer who lived there was only ten years old at the time. The closest Louisa May Alcott came to writing a memoir at Fruitlands was a short story called “Transcendental Wild Oats.” The story has long tantalized those eager to know the truth about Fruitlands; it presents facts and fabrications side by side, offering no dependable guide as to which is which. In the story, Louisa recollects the day she first saw Fruitlands as being attended by “the pleasant accompaniments of wind, rain, and hail.”
¹
Charles Lane, however, wrote that the trip took place on a sharp, clear day, colder than normal for that time of year. In either case, it was not the best of days for traveling. But there was no time to waste. In Massachusetts, the first of June falls perilously late in the planting season. Spring wheat is in the ground by the end of April; potatoes should be planted no later than the last of May. Although the planting seasons for beans, barley, and sweet corn were not over by the time the Alcotts arrived at the Fruitlands farmhouse, these too would ideally have been planted earlier. Recalling his childhood, Bronson Alcott must surely have understood the prospects that await the farmer who spends the spring months discussing philosophy in fashionable people's parlors. Yet Lane had purchased the Fruitlands property only on May 25. Before they had even begun, Lane and Alcott had placed themselves in an almost unwinnable race against the calendar.

If Alcott and Lane had been patient, they could have used the summer and autumn of 1843 as a time of preparation, making the necessary repairs to the house and barn and raising the organic materials with which they might have fertilized the land during the following spring. But a cluster of worries had pressed Alcott and Lane to move forward without delay. First was the concern that their financial position would worsen in the next ten months. To Alcott, every month spent in Concord was likely to mean a deeper plunge into red ink. In America, Lane had no business contacts that might lead to employment. Moreover, there was the matter of principle to be addressed. Lane's journeys from London to Alcott House to Concord had followed a trajectory of renunciation, a path on which he was determined to continue. It would not do for the steps toward establishing Fruitlands to partake, any more than necessary, in the foul habits of getting and spending.

From Concord to Harvard, Massachusetts, is a distance of fourteen miles. For the seven travelers who made the journey, four of them children not yet in their teens, the trip took almost the entire day. In “Transcendental Wild Oats,” Louisa recalled that the wagon borrowed for the journey was a large one, spacious enough to contain Bronson, who drove, Abba, their four daughters, and “a motley load” of possessions. Bronson's attention was perhaps more focused on his dreams and visions than his driving; in Louisa's narrative, the small horse that draws the wagon is left to follow the road “all his own way.”
²
The mother holds an infant while another girl snuggles close to her father. The remaining two pass the early part of the journey chatting happily together and, as the afternoon extends toward evening, sing soft, murmuring lullabies to their dolls. “Timon Lion” the character in Louisa's story who stands for Charles Lane, strides alongside the wagon on foot; whether Lane's decision to walk was dictated by a lack of space or his stalwart disdain for luxury is unclear. Although Louisa also places a young, brown-faced boy in the scene, this detail is fictitious; the only boy who lived at Fruitlands, William Lane, was already at the homestead, awaiting his father's arrival.

Rolling slowly along the road, the family may have struck passersby as a picture of togetherness. On this togetherness, the success of Fruitlands was largely to depend. However, Louisa and her older sister, Anna, were becoming ever more capable of forming independent judgments about their parents. As a teacher, Bronson had always most loved working with younger children, in part, perhaps, because they were most willing to accept his ideas and authority uncritically. For Anna and Louisa, the time when their father could do no wrong was drawing to an end. This fact suggests an unspoken reason why Bronson became attracted to the idea of an insular community with himself at its head. Alcott was enchanted by fatherhood. He loved, as most men do, the adoring regard that prepubescent children lavish on their fathers. And like many fathers, he probably dreaded the almost inevitable withdrawal of affection that comes with adolescence. By removing his children from a world that judged him harshly, Alcott might have hoped to preserve his preeminent place in his daughters' hearts for a while longer. Indeed, had Fruitlands succeeded, Alcott would have remained perpetually a father in a symbolic sense, since the “consociate family,” both young and old, would have owed him its filial love even after his daughters had moved on to more mature affections. It is unclear whether Alcott paused to consider that one often loses most quickly the thing one tries to maintain beyond its time. In June 1843, Anna and Louisa were very much “in the wagon” insofar as they still lived for their father's approval and believed that what he thought best must finally be right. For Louisa, at least, a change was coming.

Abba and the girls first saw the Fruitlands farmhouse in the late afternoon light. They could hardly have been in a mood to appreciate its rustic beauty. The house is a two-story structure, painted so vividly red that its color was the only detail of living there that three-year-old May remembered as an adult. If, on approaching the house, Louisa or one of her sisters asked her father where she would be sleeping, Bronson would have gestured toward the low-pitched roof of the house. The only area in the house spacious enough to accommodate Anna, Louisa, and Lizzie was the attic.

Originally intended to serve only until “suitable and tasteful buildings in harmony with the natural scene” could be erected, the Fruitlands farmhouse was the home of the Alcotts throughout their experiment in communal living.

(Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum)

In their desire to renounce the world, Alcott and Lane had been attracted to the Fruitlands property because the house was well removed from the main road. For this reason, and because the house lay at the end of an incline just steep enough to be treacherous, the last few hundred yards of the day's journey presented the greatest challenges to beast and traveler alike. No horse could have negotiated the rutted, uneven cart path without stumbling. Happily, though, catastrophe was avoided, and wearily triumphant, the Alcotts soon stepped over the threshold. Abba's first task in her new home was to assemble a hasty dinner of bread and potatoes. Tonight, however, was not the time to begin the task of putting the house in order. The travelers were so worn out by their journey that they lacked the will to set up the beds; they spent their first night at Fruitlands amid blankets and sheets spread on the floor.

At some point that day, Abba found time to scribble a paragraph into her journal. She did not write about the sights and sounds of the day, but rather of the high purpose of the commune and the sobering challenges that lay ahead. She wrote: “[T]here is much to strengthen our hearts and hands in the reflexion that our pursuits are innocent and true—that no selfish purpose actuates us—that we are living for the good of others.” But Abba realized that the Alcotts and Lanes, acting alone, were too small a force to make the venture a success. Her tentative assessment was that, “if we can collect about us the true men and women; putting away the evil customs of society, I know not why we may not live the true life, putting away the evil customs of society and leading quiet exemplary lives.” Yet Abba seemed already to be bracing herself for disappointment when she wrote, “tho we may fail it will be some consolation that we have ventured what none others have dared.”
³

The experiment had attracted a handful of recruits. They were not precisely “the true men and women” Abba had hoped for in her journal. In particular, “true women” seemed to be in short supply. Apart from Abba and her daughters, Fruitlands attracted only one woman during its entire existence, an Anna Page from Providence, Rhode Island, who did not arrive until August. In a concession to the world of commerce, Lane and Alcott hired a local farmhand, whom they paid by the week. As for the regular male adherents of the commune, they were a cast of characters well worthy of satirical fiction. Twenty-year-old Samuel Larned was a self-styled ascetic whose various programs of self-denial included once subsisting an entire year on nothing but crackers. Another, Abraham Everett, was later remembered by Anna Alcott as “the hermit,” an interesting mark of distinction in a community that was not famously sociable. Everett, however, had a persuasive reason for feeling bitter about life within society and for renouncing the world of money and property; his relatives had once conspired to commit him to a madhouse as part of a scheme to cheat him out of an inheritance. In writing of him, Lane attested that Everett was quite sane, even if he was not “a spiritual being—at least not consciously and wishfully so.”
⁴

Surely the most visually arresting of the band of eccentrics was, to use Louisa's description, a “bland, bearded Englishman” by the name of Samuel Bower “who expected to be saved by eating uncooked food.”
⁵
Mr. Bower had another interesting proclivity. Whereas Alcott saw enemies in cotton and wool, Bower took the doctrine of abstention a step further and espoused naturism, claiming that clothes themselves were an obstacle to spiritual growth. Some uncertainty exists as to how freely Bower was permitted to indulge his disdain for clothing at Fruitlands. By some accounts, he bared all only during strolls after sundown; it has also been suggested that he was pressured into the compromise of draping himself in a sheet. In any event, the mental image of Bower, sheeted or sheetless, in daily contact with the real-life counterparts of Marmee and the March sisters, beggars the imagination.

Ironically, the most dependable assistance that was offered to the Lanes and Alcotts came from a man who never formally joined the community. He was Joseph Palmer, described by Anna Alcott as “the old farmer who plowed the sacred soil.” Palmer, as if to add another lightly surreal touch to the community, hailed from a place called No Town, so named because it lay outside the limits of any municipality and was thus exempt from local taxation. Like Bower and Everett, Palmer was attracted to Fruitlands as a haven from the persecutions and judgments with which the world had pursued him. Palmer's offense against society had been wearing a beard. For the crime of being twenty years ahead of popular fashion, he had been jeered at, physically assaulted, and even refused Communion at church. Once, when he was set on by a group of men intent on holding him down and shaving him, Palmer had taken out a knife and stabbed one of them. For this act of self-defense, he was sent to jail, where he had to defend his beard again, this time against fellow inmates. Years after these events, when facial hair had become popular, Palmer met a preacher who had once denounced Palmer's beard from the pulpit. Palmer walked up to the man and stroked the latter's whiskers with his hand, murmuring, “Know ye that thy redeemer liveth?”
⁶
Palmer's experiences had led him to sympathize with others who were willing to suffer for principle. He brought the Alcotts furniture for the house and offered his labor for no pay. Whenever—and it was often—the Fruitlanders found that they lacked the right tools for a job, Palmer would drive to No Town and return with the required item.

Three days after arriving, once the rest of the furniture had come and she felt entitled to a few moments of leisure, Abba took a walk around the property, taking note of “woodland, vale, meadow, and pasture.” She enthusiastically declared the view to be “one of the most expansive prospects in the country.” All her worries vanished. Delight and confidence enfolded her. In the drawing rooms of Concord, perhaps, she had doubted Emerson when he proclaimed the sovereignty of Nature and smiled at her own husband's ecstatic immersion in the Over-soul. Here, on this hillside, however, all of it seemed undeniably real. While the impressions were still fresh, she hastened to her journal: