Little Women: Jo's Hair

One gray afternoon in November, the March sisters were complaining that nothing pleasant ever happened, when the servant Hannah came in holding a telegram as if it might explode.Mrs. March read the two short lines and dropped back into her chair, white as paper, and Jo read them aloud in a frightened voice: “Your husband is very ill. Come at once.”Their father was away in the war, working as a chaplain, and the girls felt as if all their happiness were about to be taken from them; but their mother steadied herself and said, “I shall go at once, but it may be too late.”

Hannah wiped her face on her apron, said that she would not waste time crying, and hurried off to work as hard as three people.Mrs. March calmed herself and began to plan, and she asked Laurie, the boy next door, to send a telegram saying that she was coming and to leave a note for Aunt March, because the money for the long journey would have to be borrowed.She gave each daughter a job, and everyone scattered like leaves in a gust of wind, so that the quiet, happy house was broken up as suddenly as if the paper had been an evil spell.

Mr. Brooke, Laurie’s tutor, kindly offered to travel with Mrs. March to Washington, and Meg was so grateful that she nearly dropped a cup of tea.Aunt March sent the money in a note saying that she had always said no good would come of Mr. March joining the army, and Mrs. March put the note in the fire and the money in her purse.The short afternoon wore away and every errand was done, but Jo, who had gone out to run some errands, had still not come home, and the family began to worry.

At last Jo walked in with a strange look on her face, half fun and half fear, and laid a roll of bills before her mother, saying, “That’s my contribution toward making Father comfortable and bringing him home!”“Twenty-five dollars! Jo, I hope you haven’t done anything rash?” said Mrs. March, but Jo answered that she had not begged, borrowed, or stolen it; she had only sold something that was her own.Then she took off her bonnet, and everyone cried out, for all of her thick brown hair had been cut short.

“Your hair! Your beautiful hair!” cried Meg, and Beth hugged the cropped head tenderly, but Jo pretended not to mind, saying that it would be good for her vanity and that her head felt deliciously light and cool.Mrs. March said that it had not been necessary, but she knew how willingly Jo had given up the one thing she was proud of out of love for her father, and the look she gave her warmed Jo’s heart.Jo explained that she had seen tails of hair for sale in a barber’s window and had walked in on an impulse, and that the barber’s kind wife had talked him into buying it, then saved a long lock for Jo, which Jo gave to her mother to keep.

That night, in the dark bedroom, Meg heard a stifled sob and asked whether Jo was crying about Father, and Jo answered, “No, not now — it’s my hair!”“I’m not sorry,” she whispered; “I’d do it again tomorrow” — and at midnight Mrs. March moved quietly from bed to bed, kissing each of her sleeping daughters.