by Paul Collins
"The word slave was not used," he later recalled. 'We spoke of free negroes and servants." There were servants on the Falmouth estate that Moncure grew up on; it was the largest house in that city, one befitting a wealthy clan of gentleman farmers and judges that could count George Washington among its ancestors. Moncure was a bookish child who took what he read seriously—and what he read, above all else, was the Bible. Riding through the abandoned old villages of rural Virginia, where nothing remained but crumbling old chimneys of vanished houses, he came face-to-face with his own ancestral calling. "At Acquia church, weird in its solitude and desolation," he wrote, "I paused for a time, and tried to picture my great-great-grandfather, Parson Conway, perched in the little black pulpit high up a column, and his congregation gathered there a hundred years before. He was the only clergyman in our family line."
And so it was in 1850 that the Conway clan gained its second minister. Moncure became a circuit preacher, riding rural routes and raining holy brimstone upon bewildered farmers. When not in the pulpit, he could be found in local lyceums, propounding his novel new theory that he had arrived at after reading the latest work of naturalist Louis Aggasiz on the differentiation of species. Blacks, Conway helpfully explained, were not covered by the Bill of Rights. They were not covered by state laws either. Slaves—servants, rather—were not protected by any human law at all. Because, you see, they were not human.
Granted, he thought blacks should be allowed to read and go to schools-he was not a cruel man, after all!-and he remained attached to the memory of the black nurse who had raised him in the family mansion: "I remember the comely coffee-coloured face of my nurse, Maria Humstead, nearly always laughing, as if I were a joke," he fondly recalled. "Her affection was boundless, and her notions of discipline undeveloped." No, he was not a hateful man. He was a racist, and that was not the same thing. He believed in race: he believed it marked a natural border. On one side of that border were humans. And on the other side were . . . not quite humans.
This otherness was always the implicit assumption of slavery—but to make it explicit, couched in terms of genus and species?-this was a little much even for his fellow Young Virginians. But that was Moncure Conway. He was the soul of the Southern Rights Association, and the hardest of the hard Southerners. He was the one man in Virginia who could give a roomful of slaveholders pause because he was . . . well, too racist.
Even amid all these labors, Conway still liked to come home for a spell, and recline in the fields of his childhood. Gathering up his hunting flintlock one sunny morning, and an old copy of Blackwood's Magazine to while away the hours, Moncure set out into the wilds outside Falmouth. He came to a spring by the side of the path, and cupped a broad folded leaf to gather himself a small handful of cold water. His thirst sated, he sat down and set his flintlock aside. The woods, the water, the sky above—these were elements of his native land that he happily surveyed. Suddenly two slave children came rustling out of the bushes—stark naked. They were carrying water cans, and they set about filling them, completely unashamed of their own nakedness.
"I talked with them a little," Conway recalled, "found them rather bright, and, when they had disappeared, meditated more deeply than ever before on the condition of their race in America."
Troubled as he was, turning to his magazine hardly helped. Leafing through it, he found himself drawn into a minister's essay, one musing upon the nature of the "true self." It struck unaccountably but inexorably at his heart. He suddenly looked up at the sky, and then at the ground, the innocent haunt of the young black children. Then he looked at himself with his gun, bewildered. "What was I doing out there with a gun hying to kill the happy little creatures of earth and sky?"' he muttered, appalled. 'Was it for this that I was born?"
Shaken, he went home and set down his gun, never to pick it up again. He was still secretary of the Southern Rights Association, still a preacher of dogma and damnation. But something was changing inside Moncure Conway.
Methodist itinerants lived on horseback—they had no fixed address, no set routes, and no real means of room and board except for the kindness of congregation families in each town. It was asceticism with saddlebags. Conway rode the lonelier routes of the Old Dominion, following the melancholy circuit that the moralizing historian Parson Weems had traveled decades before. Strange men and decayed villages would appear like conjured magic in the deserted woods; one day, Conway found an impoverished Corsican carrying a wheezing hurdy-gurdy, and there in the forgotten road the two men played old songs, easing their road weariness for a brief spell. And then—it was back on the path again, hastening toward the next village to warn against dancing, against immorality, against losing their immortal soul to hell.
In the course of these wanderings, he came across a fertile cluster of farms near Brookville. He stopped at their meetinghouse out of simple curiosity, and found a religious service conducted in a dignified and meditative silence; he left strangely moved, and stopped by several more times, his theological curiosity piqued. After several quiet observations, he was greeted outside of the meetinghouse by Roger Brookes, a wise and respected voice of the community. Brookes proved to be the first Quaker the young man had ever spoken to in his life.
Without even realizing it, Conway had met a leader of the most progressive of Quaker communities—the Hicksites. The term meant nothing yet to the Methodist preacher, who had never heard of Elias Hicks, Paine's Age of Reason, or the struggles of liberal Quakers decades before. But what he did understand was what he could see with his own eyes: gentle people, well-ordered houses, prosperous farms. And as a Southerner, this last fact was absolutely perplexing. The Hicksites were antislavery, after all, and . . . and . . . Why were their farms so superior to others in the Virginia countryside?
Church elder Brookes regarded Conway silently for a long time.
"Has it ever occurred to thee," he finally said, "that it may be because of paying wages to all who work for us?"
Their conversation politely turned elsewhere, but after leaving the Quaker settlement behind, Conway was thrown into inner turmoil. The men and women he met were cultivated, charitable, and cheerhl: they were good Christians. 'Yet what I was preaching as the essentials of Christianity," he wrote incredulously, "were unknown among them. These beautiful homes were formed without terror of hell, without any cries of what shall we do to be saved?" How could this be?
Another blow came with the death of his old nursemaid. Standing by her grave, he found himself in disbelief at his own claims about her race. These were the people he claimed as being something other than human—the very people who had raised him? His doubt became an abscess, and his vindictive old Christian God meting out damnation and resurrection, victory and slavery, all this now appeared crude and senseless. Conway was in spiritual agony, and each sermon became harder for him to deliver. He pondered joining the Quakers, but upon visiting them he found that grave old Roger Brookes knew better.
"Thee will find among us a good many prejudices," the elder counseled, "for instance, against music, of which thou art fond, and while thou art mentally growing would it be well to commit thyself to any organized society?" Conway knew Brookes was right, but where else could he turn? Desperate, the pious young man wrote a letter to the minister whose essay he had read in Blackwood's, an essay urging truthfulness to oneself and to what one knows to be just and right: "About a year ago I commenced reading your writings. I have read them all and studied them sentence by sentence. I have shed many burning tears over them: because you would gain my assent to Laws which . . . I have not the courage to practice."
When Conway looked upon his old Southern nationalism, his defenses of slavery, his bitter Old Testament God, his heart broke: he could not believe in them anymore. But what was he to believe in instead—and how could he believe in these things here, in Virginia?
The unseen and mysterious minister made a fateful reply:
The earth is full of frivolous people, who are bending t
heir whole force and the force of nations on trifles, and these are baptized with every grand and holy name, remaining, of course, totally inadequate to occupy any mind: and so skeptics are made. A true soul will disdain to be moved except by what natively commands it, though it should go sad and solitary in search of its master a thousand years.
Conway read the letter again and again. This was what commanded him: this was his master. He knew what he had to do. He resigned his post and bought a train ticket to Cambridge, Massachusetts—and to a new life at the Harvard Divinity School.
The elder Conway watched his son pack his books away for school with a baleful glare. "These books that you read and are now about to multiply affect my feeling as if you were giving yourself up to excessive brandy," his father said, growing visibly upset. "I cannot assist what appears to me grievous error."
And so his father turned his back on the son's new life: all the men in Moncure's family did. Only the women came to bid him a tearful farewell at the railway station. Even his own horse, as Moncure had ridden into Falmouth, was spooked and tried to leap into the Potomac. It was as if everything in his homeland was against him. Young Moncure, not yet even twenty years old, was a spiritual and physical exile—and as the locomotive belched smoke and embers in its northward path, he thought about meeting the minister whose words were now calling him up north. Before that fateful day reading the magazine essay by a roadside spring, Conway had never heard this minister's name before; and yet he now clung to his mysterious correspondent's letters like a lifeline, a rope pulling him into a new life. In his bag he kept a published volume of his Essays, and pondered finally meeting the man behind the letters upon its spine: Emerson.
Run the footage of the life of any literary luminary of the nineteenth century, and sooner or later, the grave and bearded form of Moncure Conway will invariably walk in from one side of the frame, tip his hat, and then quietly exit from the other side. Even the first day of Conway's very firstjob as a teenager, penning brief satirical items for his cousin's newspaper in Richmond, he'd run into another young author leaving the newspaper office . . . Edgar Allan Poe. It might seem like a noteworthy encounter, except that his entire life was l i e that.
I lay out the other photos of box 46 like the cards of a royal flush. Moncure Conway, sitting in a shady grove with a child, chatting amiably with a bearded man: Bronson Alcott, the caption reveals. Another photo: snaps of a pleasant home and writing room, sent by a good friend—Helen Hunt Jackson. Next is a portrait of Mark Twain's children, posing outside their home in Hartford, grinning for Uncle Moncure. Then there are the photos of Conway's own children; one of these is of a frowning, blond-haired baby: ELECTRO- PHOTOGRAPH declares the red ink on the back. Another photo of the baby, now dressed in plaid, the back simply reading: "Our little Emerson Conway." It is poignant, and it has the feel of a posthumous note-for the baby died just months later. Our little child: what else can one say? But for a man who lives out the term of his life, there is much, too much to say: so much that it gets lost in the tonnage of archival memory. Whole people can get lost. People like Moncure Conway.
I set aside the photos, and turn to my little array of boxes. Deep inside an archival box of personal effects I feel another item—not photos at all. It is wrapped in gauze and tied with a thin red ribbon; it is solid and heavy. My fingers against it detect a rounded edge through the fabric.
Could it be—could it be?—a bone of Thomas Paine's?
"Queeny!" Emerson shouted from his library door.
Moncure, nervously sitting in the philosopher's library, watched upon by wall portraits of Swedenborg and Goethe, observed Mrs. Emerson gliding into the room. Emerson was clearly touched by the great theological and geographical distance that his young protege had traveled. My young correspondent, he informed her, has come all the way to Concord just to meet m e l e t us prepare the house so that he may stay a few days.
Who knows the effect one person may have on another? A simple gesture, an offhand word, an essay knocked out on a deadline: these may send a life ricocheting in a new direction, and the instigator will hardly ever know it. But maybe it did not have to be that gesture, that word-maybe someone has been waiting for anything at all to send them off. And so, as Conway earnestly recounted how profoundly he'd been moved by Emerson's essay in Blackwood's Magazine, the author was duly modest about it.
"When the mind has reached a certain stage," Emerson assured him, "it may sometimes be crystallized by a slight touch."
But there was something kindred in their spirits: Emerson immediately took to the exiled Southerner. When Conway ex-pressed deep admiration for a book by the late Margaret Fuller, the philosopher immediately entrusted his young admirer with the signed copy of Woman in the Nineteenth Century that Fuller herself had given him. After dinner, the two men went for a stroll around Walden Pond. Conway found his mentor had reached a fairly pragmatic view of religion—a minister, Emerson supposed, was still moderately useful in the world. Not for saving souls, but "to have a conscientious man to sit on school committees, to help at town meetings, to attend the sick and the dead." As Conway mused over the fine points of Divinity School curriculum, Emerson cleared away the undergrowth of conversation with one sentence: "An actually existentfly is more important than a possibly existent angel."
They passed a bush, and Emerson halted.
"Ah! There is one of the gods of the wood!"
Moncure looked disconcertedly into the thicket, and saw nothing.
"Where?" he asked.
"Did you see it?"
"No, I saw nothing—what was it?"
"NO matter."
"What was it?"
"Never mind," Emerson smiled, "if you did not see it."
Puzzled—had it been a squirrel? A wood sprite?—Moncure walked on with the grinning philosopher until they stopped to rest by the ruins of an old shanty. It had been built and lived in a couple of years earlier by another student of Emerson's, a pencilmaker in the village. He was, apparently, writing a book about the experience, and they decided to pay the fellow a visit.
When Emerson and his Conway arrived at the Thoreau family residence, the gawking young student was struck by the contrast in the family. The son Henry David clearly resembled his father John Thoreau, "a kindly and silent pencil-maker," and mother Cynthia, and yet "neither parent impressed me as possessing mental qualities that could account for such a rare spirit as Henry." Perhaps, as Emerson did, the student should have been carefully examining the ground during their walk around Walden. For he would have found that there are very tenacious plants that will grow in the cracks of rocks, and in the worst sorts of soil: there is no accounting for this unless you closely examine their roots. But in mature creations these are well buried; all you can see is the bloom.
What, asked Thoreau, are you studying at Harvard?
"The Scriptures," his earnest visitor replied.
"Which?"
A bemused Emerson saw how this would befuddle the young Christian. 'You will find our Thoreau a sad pagan," he explained.
Thoreau showed the visitor his collection of Asian theology, which he had studied assiduously. And perusing what he once would have dismissed as heathen texts, here in a New England pencilmaker's home, the ardent young Southern preacher had come to a place far from his old orthodoxy. But just how far, he would not discover until the next morning.
The man was trembling, hiding, terrified: he was hunted.
Henry David Thoreau ushered Moncure inside his house; their talk the day before of a pleasant morning walk was gone now. All was urgency and guardedness inside the Thoreau house, for in the next room, being tended by Henry's sister Sophia, was human contraband. A servant, in the parlance of Conway's genteel homestead: an escaped slave, in everyone else's.
The fugitive looked up at Conway and recoiled in horror. He was from Conway's home county. And here, in his room, was the secretary of the Southern Rights Association. He had been betrayed!-his masters had come to take
him back! It was only with much reassurance that Thoreau and Conway finally convinced the trembling man that he was among friends. The runaway had shown up at Thoreau's door at dawn, seeking his stop on the Underground Railroad. By the next morning he was on his way to Canada. And Moncure Conway had, for perhaps the first time in his life, witnessed a federal crime—indeed, had quietly aided and abetted it.
Finally taking their promised stroll together, Thoreau gave his visitor his own tour around Walden Pond. Their walk was filled with long silences punctuated by extraordinary lectures on—on anything, really—rocks, grass, the varieties of pine needles and the sound the wind made in them. Walden the book was not yet published: here, in Walden itself, Thoreau was thinking paragraphs aloud in front of an amazed Conway, and then conjuring natural magic. The sly naturalist had discovered that the female bream, quite unusually, would stay to defend its eggs: it would never flee. If your walking companion hadn't seen the fish, you could perform a seeming miracle. The woodsman, reaching nonchalantly into the water, would pull out a wriggling fish with his bare hand.
Clank.
Everyone in the rare book room looks up: I look down. Unwrapping the gauze clumsily, this is what slid out: not bones, not teeth, not even another framed photograph of Paine's hair. No, it's—well-It's something-from the hardware store.
I heft them in my hand, my brow furrowed: the pieces of metal are cold to the touch, and tarnished with age. They are a bundle of old iron keyhole plate covers, the sort of rectangular flourish you'd find screwed into the wood around the doorknob in a Victorian home. What, exactly, they are doing among the personal effects of a dead man is . . .
Nope. Haven't a clue.
I examine the plates carefully, and fish out the thick magnifying glass from my pocket. It's one of those massy glass lenses they sell with the compact edition of the OED, in order to read the microscopic print, and it's an absurd thing to carry around in your pants-but you'd be surprised how often it can come in handy in a place like this. I move the lens up and down until the smooth iron surface comes into focus. There are no fingerprint tarnishes visible on the metal; perhaps I am the first in many years, in decades even, to unwrap this piece of gauze. And there are no scratches in the metal either: you would expect stray key scratches on a doorplate, perhaps a clumsy scuff mark from a signet ring. But no: these are, or were, brand-new. They just happened to be sitting in Moncure Conway's desk when he died.