by Norman Lock
“I cannot write,” I said irritably.
My mouth burned with drink, my nostrils with smoke.
“Doubtless, Henry Bibb, Moses Roper, Solomon Northup, and Frederick Douglass thought as much—or as little of themselves. Henry likes to say that ‘ancient trees can put forth rare blossoms.’ Likewise, misery can sharpen a dull nib and transmute iron gall to ink.”
Much later, I would read the slave narrative of Henry Bibb. In it, he wrote:
I was brought up in the Counties of Shelby, Henry, Oldham, and Trimble. Or, more correctly speaking, in the above counties, I may safely say, I was flogged up; for where I should have received moral, mental, and religious instruction, I received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep me in subordination. I can truly say, that I drank deeply of the bitter cup of suffering and woe.
Bibb had made that cup his ink pot, and the bitter drink had instilled in him eloquence, which was that of a man who sought to tell the truth about himself by every means of which utterance is capable. The truth lies beyond our eyes’ power to perceive. The obscurity that defied Henry’s measuring stick, cod line and stone plumb, and spyglass was pierced by his symbols. Literature is the “city upon a hill,” for which John Winthrop yearned; it is the Celestial City atop Mount Zion, which John Bunyan sought; it is the place where meaning waits to be discovered. All this I know now to be the case.
“I saw poor Bill Wheeler shambling down Monument Street on the stumps of his legs, long after the parading militia had passed him, as though he was determined to catch up with it,” said Hawthorne, peering into his empty glass as if expecting to find meaning there. “I felt sorry for him; his solitary life must be a trial. Henry wondered if he might not be better off as he was; that, in his estrangement, he might enjoy a secret communion with nature. I remember having given him a sharp look, which he appeared not to notice.”
I thought Hawthorne’s observations on the contradictory nature of humankind naïve.
Having finished our supper and settled with the landlord, we walked across the Common to our hotel. We paused to watch a dark solitary shape walk beneath a lamppost and, having left its ring of light, disappear. I was prepared to hear him comment on the fugitive quality of life, but Hawthorne had nothing to say on this or any other subject. His unusual volubility had spent itself at supper. I was glad of the silence, which I, too, considered companionable. I looked up and found the Drinking Gourd, called by some the Big Dipper and by others the Great Bear. Following the two stars of its cup with my eyes, I found the North Star, which has shown the way to freedom for so many of my people.
When the sun comes back
And the first quail calls,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is waiting
For to carry you to freedom,
If you follow the Drinking Gourd.
With a suddenness that could have made me cry out had I not been used to keeping my feelings in check, I realized that the star that had been, for us, like the one that had shed its light on the place where Jesus lay in a manger did not shine on America. The shepherds and the magi had followed theirs to a stable in Bethlehem, but ours did not point to Boston or Maine or to any other part of the Union. Our Bethlehem lay farther north, in Canada, where slavers’ laws did not apply and man hunters came as thieves and outlaws liable to arrest. I shuddered to think how precariously I occupied the little space I called mine, in Concord. My safety was illusory, my status as doubtful as it had been in Virginia—no, it was more so: On the plantation, in slave shacks and in the mistress’s kitchen, I had known my place.
“It’s a lovely night,” said Hawthorne.
“Yes.”
“We’ll make an early start tomorrow. The packet boat to Salem leaves at six; your train, at quarter past seven. I’ll be in Concord again in a week or two.”
We went inside the hotel and parted with a handshake at the foot of the staircase; Hawthorne had a room on the second floor; mine was in the attic. I lay in bed under the rafters of the pitched roof like an overturned boat, waiting for sleep to take me. I thought over the crowded day’s events. While I had traveled little in Boston, in my mind and nerves, I had relived a long journey spent in misery and fear, and I was exhausted.
IV
Having returned to Concord, I went immediately to Bush. I felt I owed Emerson an accounting of my meeting with Garrison. I would neglect to tell him that I had squandered his money on whiskey and cigars. While I waited in his study, I could not help but think of him as a being—a golem, if you like—endued with the musty breath of foxed paper and the ancient dust of libraries. But I may have been wrong. It is easy to misjudge others—a commonplace remark, but nonetheless true. We close our minds to the completeness of others, striking from the portraits we draw of them in our imaginations all contradiction. Emerson was not afraid to contradict himself, which gave him license to contradict others. His criticism was never harsh, unlike, say, that of Edgar Poe, whose barbs could wound.
“Good afternoon, Samuel,” said Emerson cheerfully, coming into the study. “I’ve been weeding the garden. Henry is not the only one who enjoys a bit of dirt on his hands.”
Emerson could make prosaic matters sound like parables.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Emerson. I hope you’ve been well.”
“Well enough. It’s Lidian who worries me, as always,” he said as he sat behind his desk.
“Is she poorly?” I asked sincerely, for I liked the lady and knew her to be often ill.
“The old complaint. She is resting in her room.” When I shut my eyes, I could see her pinched face in the shadow of her mobcap. “Your visit to Boston with Mr. Hawthorne—it went well?”
I told him about my visit. Of my narrative, I said only that it would be published in The Liberator.
“I’m glad of it. That much lies within your people’s power to effect change.”
His head swiveled like an owl’s from the contemplation of his long, slender fingers, raised into a steeple, to regard my face.
“Don’t be offended, Samuel. You are a man—I would not have you think that I consider you otherwise. But laws bent to evil purposes have in some ways unmanned you. Your people are powerless because they are so in law. By my saying ‘your people,’ I am making a racial distinction, which, regardless of my intention, contributes to the division between us. All that you can do is to testify, as earnestly as is in your power, against injustice. You must do the little that has been left for you to do, and that little is the publication of your narrative.”
I had been somewhat distracted by a fly at the windowpane, noisy in its disgruntlement to be let out. But I had heard enough of what Emerson had to say concerning my duty to my race. I would have been satisfied to bring hell fire down on Jeroboam’s head, never mind his damned frock-coated fraternity. If I prayed for anything, it was for the pleasure of seeing him torn limb from limb, his bowels pulled out, roasted, and fed to his pigs.
“What’s to be done with me, Mr. Emerson?” I asked after his voice had died in the room, to be reborn one day in the ears of posterity.
“Done with you?”
“Am I always to live like this?” My empty sleeve took in Emerson’s study, as if the answer to my question lay there.
All at once, I was determined to reveal myself to him as I was, a man uncertain of his place and future, unafraid to show a white man his discontent. He sat back in his chair and regarded me solemnly. I think I must have held my breath.
“You have aspirations,” said Emerson, his voice modulating into thoughtfulness.
He must have believed that I was satisfied to live as a virtually free man in Concord, within earshot of the Lyceum and the “academy” over which he tranquilly presided—a Socrates who would never be offered the fatal hemlock.
“Yes,” I replied in a tone that I hoped sounded dignified.
“That’s as it should be,” he said. “I have been insensitive. What would you lik
e to do, Samuel?”
I had no idea, not having pondered an answer to a question I believed would never be asked of me. I replied impulsively, “A teacher.” I was acquainted with Emerson well enough to know that only lofty ambitions could please him. I don’t believe I was frivolous in wanting to be well dressed someday besides being well-spoken.
He was radiant.
“As a colored teacher of colored children, you can be of inestimable value to your race.” We both knew that there would be no opportunity to teach white children. “I have friends on the faculty of Middlebury College, in Vermont. The college admits negroes. I’ll write to find out what can be done for you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Emerson. I’m grateful.”
I put out my hand, and he took it.
He was as good as his word: I matriculated in the fall of 1848 at Middlebury. The year before that, he had gotten up a subscription to pay for my freedom. Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott and his daughter Louisa May, Henry’s father, John Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, the Wards—even, it has been my constant pleasure to recall, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Sam Staples, who had reluctantly jailed Henry for refusing to pay his poll tax—all contributed.
“You have a gift,” said Emerson. I had none that I could see. “A natural felicity.”
“I read the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress,” I said to impress him.
“I admire what you’ve managed to accomplish, Samuel. You should do well at Middlebury.” He took a bound copy of his essay “Self-Reliance” from a desk drawer and inscribed it to me with his best wishes. I accepted the gift with a show of gratitude.
I left Bush in an exultant mood. Nothing had been settled: The college was unaware of my existence, as defined by the laws that sought to confirm or deny it, and the idea of my legal emancipation from Jeroboam had yet to be entertained, proposed, and executed. As far as my master knew, I was a fugitive, with no more claim to liberty than a parlor chair that had decided to walk off in search of a promised land for furniture. Nonetheless, I sensed a change in the air, as if the wind had swung on its hinge away from the noxious Slough of Despond, in which I had been mired, to the Delectable Mountains, where all sweet things await us. Selah!
Outside in the dooryard, I took off my coat and chopped wood to last several days. I did so because I wanted to. Emerson stood at the window, but I could not see his face clearly behind the imperfect glass.
“The imperfections are there so that we should be reminded of the glass and our presence on the wrong side of it,” I once overheard Henry tell Lidian, who had been industriously rubbing a window clean of smudges.
“Nonsense, Mr. Thoreau!” she cried with a laugh. “You see symbols where none exists.”
I WAS SCOURING MY CABIN FLOOR with sand when Henry knocked. I unlocked the door and invited him inside.
“There’s no point in locking it,” he said, wiping his boot soles on the grass outside.
“What brings you here?” I asked, to change the subject, one which was of long standing between us.
“I’ve come to ask you to a picnic by Fairhaven Bay.” He had taken off his hat and was holding it like a collection plate. “Hawthorne’s in town for a meeting of the Transcendental Club. I’ve borrowed Hosmer’s boat.”
“When?” I asked. I had no plans, but I wished to appear like someone who did.
“Tomorrow, at nine o’clock. We’ll meet at Egg Rock and travel up the Sudbury to the bay.”
I knew that stretch of river, having often walked it with Henry. There were excellent huckleberries and sweet blackberries to be had there, if one did not mind being nettled. I had grown up (or been “flogged up,” in Henry Bibb’s colorful variant) in nature, as though I had been an aborigine—rain, dirt, mud, and cold had been my elements. But I had looked upon the outdoors as a space in which to toil. That it could also be a place in which to play was an alien notion.
“I’d like to go,” I said.
“Good.”
He was in one of his laconic moods, and I thought he would leave me to get on with my floor. Instead, he sat in the “visitor’s chair” and watched me scrub.
“Nothing like Walden sand for purity, or its ice, either.”
I knew he was thinking about the Carlson boy. His memory would cast a shadow over Henry’s sunny nature. During the winter, when he had resolved to measure the depths of the pond, we drilled holes all across the ice and then dropped a plumb line to the bottom. When icy water spurted through the hole, Henry shrank back like a man afraid to step in something disagreeable.
I did not care to dwell on death, having been overly acquainted with it. I concentrated my attention on the floorboards, which had become smooth and glossy under my ministrations.
“How does your journal grow?” I asked, thinking of the nursery rhyme that I had been humming all morning.
“Like snow on a window ledge,” he replied. “The more it piles up, the less I can see of what’s outside.”
“You’re too hard on yourself, Henry.”
“Maybe.”
He chewed thoughtfully on a stem of tasseled grass.
“Why do you let the devil ride you?” I scolded him, knowing he was too lost in thought to care—or to get up on his high horse, the way he sometimes did.
“He does have his spurs in me!” Self-mockery made him likable.
“Nobody will mind if you stop,” I said to be spiteful.
“You’re right, Samuel.”
“I don’t see that it gives you pleasure to be shut up so much indoors.”
“If I could only go about with a telegraph key in my pocket!”
More whimsies!
“What’s this, some sort of talisman?”
He had picked up a small tribal god from my windowsill. I had carved it out of pitch pine. I liked the smell of it.
“Something I whittled.”
“It has a strong face. Your gods are crude, but powerful.”
“They’re not my gods,” I said, annoyed. “I’m a Methodist when I’m anything at all.”
“Don’t let Waldo hear you say that. Just the thought of Methodists gives him boils.”
Henry was weighing the carved wood in his hand like someone attempting to discover the worth of a thing with no use that he could see.
“Take it,” I said on impulse.
I was kneeling, as if in terror or humility, but I was only scrubbing a floor.
“How’s that?” he asked, cupping an ear.
“I want you to have it.”
How I relished the thought of making him a gift!
“Well, thank you, Samuel. It’s most kind of you. I’ll put it on my writing desk, next to the pinecone from the White Mountains and the water-moccasin skin John found on the bank of the Merrimack. It may inspire a journal entry.”
With my knife, I had reached deeply into Henry—into his vitals—and carved a symbol more ancient than the cross there. I pictured my rude figurine taking its luminous place in the firmament of his mind. Was he thinking of my carving when, later, he wrote in Walden, “One hastens to southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport; but I trust it would be nobler game to shoot one’s self”?
He sat awhile longer in my hut, holding the effigy on his palm, spellbound—listening, it seemed to me, to a distant voice that may or may not have been an African one while I swept the floor clean of sand. I can often be persuaded of the most nonsensical ideas. His face appeared not homely, as Hawthorne had described it, but tragic. Beneath the sunburned flesh, I thought I saw the ivory of his skull as it would come to be in time. I sensed his weariness, which might have been the consumption that one day would finish him. Perhaps he was tired of being in eternal opposition to society, to decorum, to law, to the Almighty—to all that is not natural, which is the greater portion of man’s world. Whi
le he sat in the waning light, was he listening to harmonies beyond my hearing? There were moments during the year I spent in his company—under his spell, fight it as I may!—that I loved him, however grudgingly. As the withdrawing light shadowed his face, I sensed something else about Henry Thoreau: a thwarted desire for intimacy, an incapacity common to us both.
“Henry . . .”
I judged that the moment had arrived when our acquaintance could be promoted to something more closely resembling friendship.
“What is it, Samuel?”
Just then, a squirrel came through the doorway with quick little jumps. It raced into a corner of the hut, raising a chitter of protest and alarm.
“It is not a symbol, Henry,” Henry said, admonishing himself with a smile that included me. “It is only a squirrel.”
I chased it back outside with a broom.
WE EMBARKED AT EGG ROCK, at a little after nine o’clock. Hawthorne worked the tiller; Henry and I rowed. Useless in the nearly breathless morning air, the sail was reefed. In spite of my handicap, we rowed well together, and the boat made headway against a gentle current. The midges rose and reassembled on the water with each stroke of the oars, whose blades from time to time were lifted out of the river, draped in green and brown weeds.
Henry reminisced about his and John’s trip down the Concord River to the Merrimack. I listened with half an ear, wishing I might remove my shirt like Henry, now that the sweat had begun to dampen it, but I was shy of letting them see a back italicized by the whip. I did not want the issue of slavery and abolition raised, as it surely would have been. I wanted to enjoy an ordinary day on the river, like a man unconstrained by bad luck or a spiteful destiny.
“I overheard Sam Staples reading from the Boston paper how the Knickerbockers fell to the Brooklyn Club last week in Hoboken, twenty-three to one,” I said, to put the conversation on a mundane course. In truth, I cared nothing for boyish pastimes.
