I read the chapters that told the history of their arrival in America over and over, and seized on the phrase “black Irish.” I grew up in a predominantly Irish suburb of Boston — I knew that people used the phrase to describe Irish people with darker hair and darker skin. I took that murky definition and decided it must mean Francie was black like me. Francie — with her fierce and sometimes unknowable mother, in her allegiance to her block, in her ability, borne of necessity, to create better worlds for herself inside her mind — all of these read as markers of black girlhood to me. I claimed her as mine.

When I made my claim, I did not feel as if I were betraying my blackness. Indeed, I felt an immense power, as if I’d found a way to read the book that only I was clever enough to discover. So I feel conflicted about the criticisms of “Little Women.” I understand the fatigue of watching a prestigious film about white women being claimed as a cultural watershed for women everywhere. But I also feel the pull of narrative, of images on the screen, of watching an artist build a world and inviting others to enter.

“Where are the black characters?” I remember reading on Twitter. And then a response saying you don’t want to see director Greta Gerwig trying to portray black characters. Never mind that Ms. Gerwig did include black actors as townspeople. And then the turn again: Let’s stop imagining ourselves in white stories and instead create our own.

To this point, I think of the life of Ellen Garrison Jackson. Nine years older than Louisa May Alcott, she was a black girl in Concord, Mass., the second generation to live in her family’s homestead. Like Alcott, she grew up in a family committed to radical social change. Her mother worked as an abolitionist, occasionally working in coalition with white female activists in Concord. In 1866, she initiated an early lawsuit over segregation in public transportation, testing the nation’s first Civil Rights Act and predating Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott by nearly a century.

Many of the things that readers respond to in the story of the March family — the questions of how to live a life of moral fortitude in an immoral world; the fierceness of righting injustices that young girls feel when they encounter the world — are a part of the history of Ellen Garrison Jackson. She could easily and with historical accuracy be included in the “Little Women” universe. The fact that she isn’t speaks to the value of the question of “Where are we?” The question can be valuable in helping to find the stories that are deeper and more complicated than the conventions of narrative fiction.

In the movie theater, watching the March sisters onscreen, I sat beside my own sisters, Alcott superfans, and my niece, who has been dragged to Orchard House, the Alcotts’ home in Concord, more times than she can count. Watching a movie and dissecting it scene by scene afterward with my sisters is one of my keenest pleasures, one I took for granted in childhood. One I recognize as an adult now as rare.

As we left the theater, we fell into the practiced conversation of sisters, a volley of interjections, an endless round of “and then,” “but so,” “and now.” It is worthwhile to point to the absences, the silences, the erasures in stories. But the questions should be an invitation to creation, not an end to conversation.

Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the novel “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” and a contributing opinion writer.

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