Eden's Outcasts (31 page)

Louisa believed that the honest work one did willingly for pay was always noble at its core. This conviction, coupled with a feeling that she would explode if she did not soon find some hard but rewarding task, led her during the winter of early 1851 to accept a job in Dedham, ostensibly as a lady's companion. The position was offered by a ministerial-looking man who announced himself at Abba's intelligence office as the Hon. James Richardson. With ornate turns of phrase, he stated that his sister, a nervous invalid, required someone to give her company and to see to the minor household tasks that had become too burdensome for her. The work, he assured Abba, would be quite nominal, and the person selected for the position would be “one of the family in all respects.”
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Perhaps it was the promise of being a family member that captured Louisa's fancy. When her mother asked whether she could suggest anyone for the job, Louisa responded “Only myself.” She miscalculated terribly. In Louisa's mildly fictionalized telling of the story, Richardson's home sounds like an unholy union between Miss Havisham's estate and the House of Usher. The woman she was expected to befriend was a mousy, mentally feeble creature, who at the age of forty possessed the wits of a child. Mr. Richardson proved worst of all. He had conceived a paranoid delusion with regard to another servant, his elderly housekeeper, who he thought had attempted to poison him and whom he suspected of brewing further “nefarious plans.”
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Yet Richardson's irrational loathing may have been preferable to the attraction he conceived toward Louisa. Before she arrived, he wrote long letters to the eighteen-year-old, expressing the hope that she would allow him “to minister to [her] young and cheerful nature.” After she arrived, she soon discovered that her duties had more to do with Richardson himself than with his sister. Although her memoir of the episode contains no clear suggestion of sexual impropriety, her employer began to expect a kind of intimacy that was almost equally unsettling. One morning, he surreptitiously observed her as she prepared breakfast. When she discovered his presence, he begged her not to run away and remarked on the pleasure of seeing “something tasteful, young, and womanly” near him. At the end of each day, he compelled her to come to his study and listen as he read from crackbrained, abstruse texts. She became “a passive bucket, into which he was to pour all manner of philosophic, metaphysical, and sentimental rubbish.” She was “to serve his needs, soothe his sufferings, and sympathize with all his sorrows—be a galley slave, in fact.”
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Before much time passed, she told Richardson flatly that she would rather scrub floors than listen to his reading.

Louisa's candor was promptly punished; she was burdened with the hardest tasks of the household and, as a crowning insult, was expected to black her master's boots. Seven weeks after her work in Dedham began, Louisa announced that she would be Richardson's drudge no more. Making her way back to Boston on a bleak March afternoon, she opened the pocketbook he had given her containing her wages and found that he had paid her only four dollars. In the story she based on her time with the Richardsons, Louisa writes that her family indignantly sent the pittance back. In her account book, however, she counted the four dollars as part of the year's income, suggesting that necessity may actually have triumphed over pride. Throughout her writing career, Louisa routinely transformed family tragedy into the stuff of comedy. Even twenty-three years after the fact, however, she was unable to perform such alchemy regarding her sojourn in Dedham; the tone of the piece she based on the episode is unmistakably bitter.

Fortunately, not all the influences she felt during this period were so degrading. She grew attracted to the preaching of the extraordinary minister Theodore Parker, who had been a visitor to Fruitlands and a sometime attendee at Alcott's conversations. His unorthodox opinions—he had been known to comment that Christianity would be better off without the Gospels—alienated many Bostonians, so much so that he was forced to preach at Boston's Music Hall instead of a regular church.
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If Emerson represented the poetic aspect of transcendentalism and Alcott its educational side, then Theodore Parker was its political warrior. Parker's steel blue eyes would look intensely through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he urged his listeners to fight for social change and take up arms for abolition and equality. Parker's advocacy of women's rights resonated strongly with Louisa, and he soon joined Emerson and Thoreau among the leading transcendentalists to whom she felt a filial, almost romantic attachment. She was looking, it seems, for figures to fill the place in her life that her own father did not perfectly occupy, and yet, interestingly, she gravitated toward men whose opinions and characters were not vastly different from Bronson's. Instead of looking for an alternative to her father, she apparently craved a better version of him.

Soon after her return to Boston, Louisa's need to be up and doing was briefly enflamed, not by family concerns, but by a public controversy. On April 3, 1851, the escaped slave Thomas Sims was taken prisoner in Boston, giving the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts the chance to decide the constitutionality of the new federal Fugitive Slave Law. Two months earlier, to the embarrassment of the local authorities, a crowd of free blacks had burst into the courtroom and forcibly liberated another fugitive, known as Shadrach, as his case was being argued. To avoid another incident of that kind, the courthouse where Sims was imprisoned was promptly surrounded by chains and an armed guard. When Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw was obliged to stoop beneath the chains in order to enter the courthouse, the symbolism of justice bowing down to power and oppression was too blatant to be ignored. Bronson, normally slow to anger, reacted with shame and indignation. He observed, “The question ‘What has the North to do with slavery?' is visibly answered…. Such disgrace to the country, to the State,…to humanity…cannot be long borne with, nor silently.” He promptly accepted a position on a vigilance committee, organized to protect other blacks from being arrested and, if possible, to rescue Sims. A few scenes like the spectacle in the courthouse square, he thought, would settle the nation's destiny.
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Louisa was as active on the slave's behalf as a young woman could be. Her sympathies must have been moved all the more by the knowledge that Sims was only seventeen, a year younger than herself. With her father, she attended a large gathering at the Tremont Temple, where Horace Mann, Wendell Phillips, and a host of others decried the hated law and pled eloquently for liberty. As the great reformers of New England heaped abuse on Daniel Webster, whose speech to the Senate the previous year had all but assured the law's passage, Louisa laid fanciful plans to liberate Sims from bondage. As a righteous sense of injustice mounted within her, she felt as if she were “ready to do anything,—fight or work, hoot or cry” to save the helpless young man she had never met.
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Similarly, all of Bronson's waking moments were absorbed by the Sims crisis. When not attending meetings of his committee, he followed the forward press of events in person, first attending the court session where Sims's lawyer argued against the constitutionality of the law, then hearing Parker denounce the sins of the republic before a packed house at the Music Hall, and finally standing amid an anxious throng outside the courthouse, awaiting the judgment that would determine Sims's fate.

The news, when it came, could not have been worse. Judge Shaw upheld the law, and Sims was returned to Savannah, Georgia, where he received a public whipping that nearly killed him.
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The trial of Sims, including the attendant security measures, had cost the city of Boston three thousand dollars. Bronson thought it would be a handsome piece of honor and justice if he and his antislavery compatriots would refuse to pay that amount in taxes and willingly go to prison for their noncompliance. His disillusion knew no bounds. Until April 1851, he had supposed that God had blessed him with a host of “beautiful properties”: a city, a civilization, Christianity, and a country. He now doubted whether any of these birthrights was truly his.
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Bronson had long endured the knowledge that his country generally did not share his vision of reform. Yet the Sims affair had given him a renewed sense of the nation's perfidy. The country not only lacked interest in improving itself; it seemed determined to make itself worse. “The devil's claims are fairly admitted,” he grumbled, “and his right to be here and take part in mundane affairs is unquestionable.”
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Though glad to play his part when the need arose, the ferment over Sims had reminded him of “the ultra-private person that I am, and how little in keeping with my habits is all that passes about me.”
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He could find no place that felt like his own.

Although Abba was more directly concerned with more localized injustice than with the national calamity of slavery, she too was out of patience with the world. She was working to exhaustion at her intelligence office, and her lonely struggles to aid the downtrodden were making her more combative. The same month that Thomas Sims went back to Georgia, Abba wrote to her brother Sam, “My life is one of daily protest against the oppressions and abuses of Society.” The wage slavery that awaited the poor immigrants who flocked to Boston struck her as a “whole system of servitude” whose consequences were hardly better than southern slavery.
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The men and women she had met whose relentless toil could not earn a living wage had filled her with pity and rage:

Louisa proudly realized that her mother “always did what came to her in the way of duty and charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love's sake.”
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In her crusade, Abba collected sympathetic cases like stray kittens. Since she was running her service from the family's apartment, the line between work and home inevitably blurred, and as Louisa recollected, the family's meager rooms in High Street became “a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men.” She continued, “Father and Mother had no money to give, but gave them time, sympathy, help; and if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires. This is practical Christianity.”
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In April 1852 a terrible reminder came of the Alcott family's emotional instability. On the twenty-fourth, Bronson's thirty-two-year-old brother Junius took his mother's hand and told her he was going to Boston. Instead, he went with his brother Ambrose to Couch and Alcotts, a nearby bolt and lathe factory that he and Ambrose had been managing.
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Then, evidently before Ambrose could react, Junius did something unthinkable. In her journal, in plain, semiliterate phrasings, Bronson's mother described what happened next. Junius “went Streat into the wheel and was gon the nuse came that he was dead…but I bore it with reconcelation.”
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In his journal Bronson eulogized his favorite brother as a man of “tenderest sensibilities and…mystic mind.”
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He never wrote of him again. Louisa's surviving writings contain no mention at all of the death of the uncle for whom her father had felt such concern and had so often attempted to take under his own roof. One can hardly doubt, however, that the death cast a long shadow over the Alcotts.

Louisa's reactions can only be guessed. Her Uncle Junius, like her father, had experienced episodes of mystical awareness, coupled with behavior sufficiently erratic to raise worries among his extended family. The year of Junius's death, Louisa listed her favorite books in her journal. Among them was one that she prized especially highly, Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
. Both in her reading and in her lived experience, then, she was led to consider the plight of families cursed by hereditary insanity. Though no clear evidence exists to prove the point, it would be extraordinary if Louisa never reflected on the fate of her uncle, the trials of her father, and the latent propensities that might have been passed into her own blood. Her most significant writings for adults, the works into which she was to pour the greatest portion of her true self, were to return frequently to the specters of depression, inherited madness, and suicide.

Fortunately, not all the news that spring was so terrible. Shortly before Junius's death, there had come a much-needed modicum of financial relief. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having just completed a period of breathtaking productivity that had seen him produce
The Scarlet Letter
,
The House of the Seven Gables
, and
The Blithedale Romance
in only three years, had decided to return to Concord after a seven-year absence. His thoughts turned to the old Alcott home at Hillside, which the family still had not succeeded in selling. Despite Bronson's sporadic efforts to maintain it, the house had fallen into some disrepair, and withered vines now trailed where Bronson had once cultivated orderly and verdant bowers. However, Hawthorne knew a good acquisition when he saw one. He made an offer of fifteen hundred dollars.

Had he offered twice as much, Hawthorne would still have gotten a reasonable bargain. Nonetheless, fifteen hundred dollars was approximately what Bronson could expect to earn in ten years of conversing, so he accepted the novelist's terms: a $750 down payment, with the balance to be paid in a year's time. The monies were used to create a five-hundred-dollar trust for Bronson and a one-thousand-dollar trust for Abba. A newspaper called the
Semi-Weekly Eagle
caught wind of Hawthorne's purchase of the home. However, Alcott had lately been so removed from the public eye that the reporter thought he was probably dead. The
Eagle
was only able to speculate as follows: “If he is in heaven, he is certainly cutting up some shine or other there; and if in the antipodes of heaven, it is equally certain that he is giving a distinguished personage, supposed to have much to do with the affairs of the world, a vast deal of trouble.”
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