So Many Beginnings, by Bethany C. Morrow
So Many Beginnings is a remix, or re-imagining, of Little Women — a novel about a mother and four sisters set during and immediately after the American Civil War, but focusing on a Black family rather than a white one. The concept is really interesting, especially given that a) Little Women is kind of a foundational text for me, and b) one of my quibbles with it has always been how it sidesteps issues of race and slavery, making the March’s life far more blandly white than that of the actual Alcott family, who hid an enslaved person in their home for awhile when Louisa May was the same age Jo is at the beginning of the novel — why didn’t LMA write that story??!
Bethany Morrow has written the story of four sisters who, with their parents, escape slavery and are living in Freedman’s Colony on Roanoke Island during and immediately after the final years of the civil war. The general outlines of the family are similar to Alcott’s March family — Meg is the responsible older sister, who is a teacher, Josephine is an aspiring writing. Bethany, rather than existing only to die young and beautiful, is a seamstress (she does get sick during the story, but not with the same results as Beth in Little Women), and Amy/Amythest is a dancer. The plot doesn’t slavishly follow that of Little Women; there is a Laurie character, but the progress of his and Jo’s relationship is different (and perhaps more interesting!) than in the original novel. And the challenges the sisters face are, as you would expect, very much intertwined with the challenges free Black people faced in those years. I learned a lot I didn’t know from this novel, particularly about the Freedman’s Colony, which I had not heard of before. It was informative and interesting to read about the racism and paternalism faced by freed Black people from the perspective of a family like the Marches in this novel.
One small quibble I had with this book is that I felt it ended too soon! Not so much that it needed to be longer, but that I thought the most interesting conflict in the whole book came late and wasn’t fully developed. Jo’s aspirations as a writer in this novel are similar to the original Jo March’s ambitions in Little Women, and like the original Jo she faces many roadblocks along the way, including editors who want to turn her stories into something that doesn’t feel true or honest to her. In So Many Beginnings, Jo writes a memoir about her family’s experiences under slavery — but the people who want to publish it, both patronizing white folks and free-born Northen Black people, feel that her story would be more powerful and reach a wider audience if Jo, who is very well-educated within the scope available to her, and quite well-read, would rewrite her story in “slave dialect,” so that she speaks in the voice white Americans are used to hearing from southern Blacks.
If you’ve read the original account of Sojourner Truth’s “Aint I a woman?” speech, you know how prevalent this kind of thing was in 19th century American — recasting the voices of Black people to make them fit the expected stereotype of the poor, uneducated Black person who speaks in a heavy dialect. I thought the choice Jo faced — rewrite her true story to make the voice less true, but get the story to a wider audience — was the most interesting conflict in all of So Many Beginnings, and I was disappointed it wasn’t given more narrative space, as I really wanted to read about that! But despite that quibble, this was a really interesting way of recasting and reimagning a familiar story.
