From Miss Alcott’s E-mail: Yours for Reforms of All Kinds by Kit Bakke. Reprinted by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher Copyright 2006 by Kit Bakke

It was a wild, windy day, very like me
in its fitful changes of sunshine and shade.

— Louisa May Alcott, 1865, age thirty-three

December 14, 2005

Dear Miss Alcott,

I hope this first packet arrives to find you feeling energetic and ready to work. I have enclosed the first part of your history for your comment and correction. You will see that it’s more about Mr. Emerson and Concord than it is about you or your parents. Your parents, as you well know, are so rich and complex that they deserve a chapter all their own. But we can’t skip over Concord, can we? It’s not just your hometown; Concord is a living being, a palpable, persistent presence in your life. I notice that no matter how vigorously you complain about its small-mindedness, you have never been able to leave it for long.

I hope the following does your neighborhood justice. You cannot imagine how lucky I think you are to have grown up around such intelligent and thoughtful people. My childhood neighbors certainly didn’t chatter about ethics and the higher purposes of human life as yours did. What did that feel like?

Since you have very fairly asked about me, I will tell you that there were six or seven families on our road, and we kids played constantly together in the woods and the lake, while our parents helped each other out with projects on their houses or in their yards and had dinners together. Perhaps that part isn’t very different from your Concord childhood. I grew up in a rural area, but most of the fathers went to work in Seattle, which was a small city in those days. There was a fair amount of scotch and gin drinking among the adults in the evenings, as I recall, and I guess that limited the depth of their conversation. Most of us kids were born at the end of a terrible war that had raged all over Europe, parts of Asia, and the Pacific Islands (much worse than the Franco-Prussian war you and May were caught in on your 1870 European trip), so our parents were just glad to be home safe. But what followed was not peace, exactly. It was a scary time called the Cold War, when the United States and other countries were stockpiling weapons against each other that were powerful enough — and this is not hyperbole — to destroy the entire planet. So that was hanging over everyone’s trying to get back to a normal life. War must have been a common topic of grown-up conversation, because the most popular game we kids played in the woods was “Army Camp.” We made little shelters in the underbrush from fir branches and rocks and then ran around attacking each other or barricading our camps against invasion. The boys let us girls play, but I remember spending more effort on defense than offense. Our woods were thick with Douglas fir, alder, salal, ferns, and blackberries — perfect for making secret camps. Sneaking around to find and occupy each other’s camps was a lengthy part of the game. We all slept outside a lot too, using our fathers’ old army sleeping bags.

You invented lots of imaginative games too, and put on swashbuckling plays for the whole neighborhood to enjoy. These days, though, in the twenty-first century, kids don’t seem to have as much time for making things up. Their lives are far more structured, and guess who does the structuring? Grown-ups! It’s too bad, because as you well know, grown-ups are not famous for knowing what’s best for children.

My generation has been accusingly called the Me Generation because all we think about is me me me. I can see where that comes from, but unless I’ve completely whitewashed my own history, we weren’t always so self-centered. We used to think about what would be good for other people.

When our elder daughter was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, she learned all about my generation’s work to improve housing and job opportunities for black people and poor people, and about how hard we fought to end America’s unconscionable invasion of Southeast Asia (yet another war — this time against Vietnam, with incursions into Laos and Cambodia). I’m afraid we gave her the impression that we were well on the way to fixing all the world’s problems. She was angry with me when she grew old enough to realize that wasn’t true at all.

Two steps forward, one step back. I am counting on your being able to help with this dance. I am looking forward to your comments on this first piece of your history. Here we go with our first small step.

Hopefully yours,

Kit Bakke

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[After her letter, as in all of her chapters, Kit Bakke prints the essay she is sending to Louisa for comment. Readers are filled in on Louisa’s temperament, activities, family, famous neighbors, concerns and the gist of their discussions about “Humanity’s place on Earth, our relationship with nature, the meaning of God, and the identity of the soul.” Each chapter then ends with a letter from Louisa to Kit, in which she comments on the essay and responds to Kit’s letter.–ed.]

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December 30, 1887

Dear Mrs. Bakke,

Yes, I count this as a fair beginning, & am pleased to remember those neighborly days. Your essay has distracted me from my headaches & dizziness, which never go away for long. I am glad to see the end of this 1887. Did get a few things accomplished though, including adopting Anna’s son, my dear nephew John. Now he will clearly inherit all my copyrights. I don’t want any legal hurdles to exist between my heirs & my money.

For someone who never met any of my neighbors (I assume! Although with your future poking its way into my parlor, perhaps I am to be apprised of more surprises?), you have introduced them reasonably well. We certainly left a trail of breadcrumbs & apple cores, didn’t we? Aunt Mary Emerson was quite a character. She was very short & squat, you know, barely over four feet. In her shroud she looked like a perambulating canvas-covered haystack.

Sometimes we did think what we were doing & thinking was important enough to be remembered for hundreds of years, but at other times we were grateful just to stumble from one day to the next. My faithful & serene father, obviously, never doubted that his life was worth being projected into the future. Five million words in his journal, you say? That is truly prodigious. Bless his soul, would that he had converted a tiny fraction of that effort into action — then the world would surely be a better place!

But my rudder, as you call it, came straight from my parents, in a sort of messy combination sometimes. I expect you will get to the fact that the two of them weren’t always steering into the same port. Dear Father was such a trial at times, but so sweet about it, you know.

I was moonstruck by both Mr. Emerson & Henry Thoreau, as everyone seems to have guessed. In a schoolgirl way, mind you. Mr. Emerson was quite regal & good-looking, & so, so gentle & kind to me — like a father, grandfather, uncle & godfather all wrapped into one. And Henry, how I weep for him even now! I hope you will write more about him. I still hear his flute from time to time. He was too good for this world. (As is Mrs. Emerson, I must add!)

I will tell you some more gossip. Did you know that Mr. Emerson opened his wife Ellen Tucker’s coffin thirteen months after her death? He loved her so much — he thought her so infinitely angelic that maybe she would still be whole. He did the same later with his son Waldo’s coffin. The poor man was so devastated when Waldo died — just five years old, scarlet fever, so quick. Fifteen years later, when Sleepy Hollow was opened as our town cemetery, the Emersons moved him there. During the move, Mr. Emerson peeked inside. It occurred to me to make a gothic tale of such things, but I couldn’t. Both Mr. Emerson & Henry helped so much to soften the never-ending turmoil I had with my dear father. I do think the fact that we had the same birthday spooked us both, especially since we sprouted up into such different vegetables. Father never let me forget, in that quiet way of his, that I had inherited what he thought were Mother’s least attractive traits.

I would prefer that you not go on about what I look like. Appearances, in real life, are not as germane as they are in fiction. It’s how one lives that matters. I suppose, though, if my motley form gives heart to others as poorly endowed as I am, then it’s all to the good.

Looking forward to seeing how you take a run at transcendentalism. I think you will find its wispy ways difficult to capture. My father, you know, said much the same thing as you quote Mr. Emerson saying to Henry. In my father’s “Orphic Sayings,” published (& much ridiculed, it pains me to add) in the Dial, he said, “Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you.” I suppose you will be talking more about the Dial when you talk about transcendentalism.

But first I think you need to tell your friends more about Mother & Father. They have never been far from my thoughts, even as I have become an old lady myself. Sometimes I wonder if all that filial closeness is good. You may notice in my books that I usually put parents off-stage. You are going to tell me, I trust, about your parents.

I am concerned about all the wars you keep referring to. I would have hoped that after the dreadful carnage of the Civil War that America would have learned its lesson. No sensible person could want a reprise of such suffering.

And yet . . . & yet, when I remember honestly, I was so eager to go to the front myself, & experience all the undeniable excitements of battle & the energy of fighting for just cause . . . perhaps that devilish yearning, in enough people, is enough to spark a war all on its own.

Lost in memory,

Louisa M. Alcott