Frado, Linda, Ellen, and Iola

Like many other budding scholars and writers, I was a voracious reader prone to solitude and imagining "castles in the air" (117). It's no surprise that I would declare publicly that my favorite character from Louisa May Alcott's classic was Jo; however, in secret I also admired Amy's frank penchant for luxury and material comforts. I was never attracted to Meg's dutifulness or Beth's transcendent morality. Yet the scene I most remember is when the Moffats make over Meg into a "newly dressed doll" (76) in "borrowed plumes" (77) in chapter 9, "Meg Goes to Vanity Fair." As one of the few black girls in my private primary school, and later as the only black student in honors classes in my public high school, I knew what it was to constantly feel out of place, to be reminded subtly and overtly of your difference, and to want desperately to belong. That is why this scene at the "small party" (73), where, despite her desire to fit in, Meg has the "queer feeling" (77) of being made a spectacle, is memorable. It's where she and her sisters learn the importance of not judging yourself by the barometers of others but "to know and value the praise which is worth having" (83).

Not until I was in graduate school at Cornell University in Lois Brown's class on nineteenth-century black women writers would the names of heroines from African American women's literature become as familiar to me as those from Little Women. The groundbreaking recovery work of Hazel Carby, Ann duCille, Frances Foster, Claudia Tate, and others would exponentially widen my literary landscape. While the March sisters are bemoaning how "dreadful to be poor" and a "Christmas without any presents" (11) in the midst of Civil War, Linda Brent's chapter "Christmas Festivities" describes enslaved women's attempts to "gladden the hearts of their little ones" despite the slave auction that presages "the Slaves' New Year's Day" (Jacobs 118, 15). Slowly, memorable exclamations like Amy's "Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty" (132) in response to Jo's sacrifice of her abundant chestnut hair to bring her father home from the Civil War hospital would be supplanted by Iola Leroy's declaration that she was "tried but not tempted" by white men's propositions (Harper 115). Alcott's autobiographical novel set the standard for a decidedly American, New England girlhood, but nineteenth-century black women authors would deploy sentiment and sensation in their autobiographical fictions for a different objective. In their hands, Alcott's tropes (with influence from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child) became powerful tools of resistance, shining the spotlight on "little women" who were not allowed a true or intact childhood; whose plot trajectories forked not between artistic spinsterhood and marriage, but who became adolescent mothers confronted with a choice for freedom with or without their children; whose domestic labors served others, toiling like the unaffectionately nicknamed Frado as "Nig" under the constant threat of a beating; and whose adventures abroad involved stowing away on a ship (Linda Brent) or gendered and racial passing on a train (Ellen Craft). I'm glad that on its 150th anniversary Little Women can be read intertextually alongside new classics that portray the diversity and texture of what it meant to grow up female in a nation besieged by racial injustice and sexual predation, but with the grounded hope that like Marmee's daughters they would have the opportunity "to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected, to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow to try them as God sees fit to send" (84).