White Heat

by Brenda Wineapple

To look at thee a single time

  An Epicure of me

  In whatsoever presence makes

  Till for a further food

  I scarcely recollect to starve

  So first am I supplied.

  The Luxury to meditate

  The Luxury it was

  To banquet on thy Countenance

  A sumptuousness supplies

  To plainer Days whose Table, far

  As Certainty can see

  Is laden with a single Crumb—

  The Consciousness of thee—

  He didn’t answer right away; wanting his reply to be perfect, he procrastinated. Then he begged, apologetic, for her to “write & tell me something in prose or verse, & I will be less fastidious in future & willing to write clumsy things, rather than none.”

  She held firm. She wanted him to visit. “I would like to thank you for your great kindness,” she wrote stiffly, “but never try to lift the words which I cannot hold. Should you come to Amherst, I might then succeed, though Gratitude is the timid wealth of those who have nothing.” At the letter’s close, she returned, more emotionally, to her appeal. He had saved her life, she reminded him. “To thank you in person has been since then one of my few requests. The child that asks my flower ‘Will you,’ he says—‘Will you’ and so to ask for what I want I know no other way.”

  Her request was direct and unequivocal. And she possessed a fine sense of drama.

  THOUGH INTRIGUED, perhaps half in love (or so he may have fancied), and doubtless moved by this strange woman, he would not stand at the threshold of the Homestead for yet another year. He would never antagonize Mary with a special trip to see the poetess his wife regarded as crazy.

  “Why do the insane cling to you so?” Mary had crossly asked. To Higginson that was a compliment. “The great reason why the real apostles of truth don’t make any more impression is this—,” he had explained to her many years before, “the moment any person among us begins to broach any ‘new views’ and intimate that all things aren’t exactly right, the conservatives lose no time in holding up their fingers and branding him as an unsafe person—fanatic, visionary, insane.”

  He had not changed. “If every man who is accused of having a crack in his brain is to be silenced, which of us is safe?” he asked. Half-crack’d visionaries: they remained, always, his ideal.

  And when he told Dickinson that he had to put off his trip to Amherst because of work, he had spoken the truth. To make ends meet, he clambered aboard trains to lecture in out-of-the-way places, for his writing could not pay all the bills even though Fields in 1866 had offered him one thousand dollars for ten Atlantic articles. But when Fields renewed the offer the following year, Higginson turned it down. He hated choosing subjects near at hand, he said, referring to his accounts of army life, which he reluctantly began publishing in 1864 and detested writing.

  “I feel this strangely in turning over my army papers, they seem to belong to some one twinborn with me, but who led a wholly different life from me,” he had written his family. “It is hard to link ourselves to this something which was ourselves but is no longer & never will be again.” Although he missed the camaraderie of the men and the daily sense that he was doing good and that he was respected, even loved, for it, Higginson did not idealize the days of grisly war. To write of them—of himself during them—was difficult. “That I was in it [the war] myself seems the dreamiest thing of all,” he said.

  I cannot put my hand upon it in the least, and if some one convinced me, in five minutes, some morning, that I never was there at all, it seems as if it wd. all drop quietly out of my life, & I shld read my own letters & think they were some one else’s. This is one thing that makes it hard for me to work on them, or write anything about those days.

  But he forced himself because he had a mission: to educate the public about the heroism of the black troops. “Until it is done,” he knew, “the way will not seem clear for other things.”

  Still, he was unhappy. He looked haggard. He had been slow to adjust to his new home in Newport, Rhode Island, the temperate seaside perch where Mary and her several cats had moved while her husband skirmished in South Carolina. Though she hoped the salty sea breeze would reinvigorate her, she had come for more than climate: paternal seat of the Channings, with its picturesque coastline, gambrel-roofed houses, and puffed sense of its history, Newport was, as Henry James would say, the “one right residence in all our great country.” For centuries it was also a hospitable spot for Quakers, antinomians, Jews, Unitarians, and other freethinking heretics, although the Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, shortly after stepping ashore, took up the local custom and purchased himself two slaves. More recently artists and eccentrics and plutocrats included the James family, the architect Richard Morris Hunt, his brother the painter William Morris Hunt, the matchless John La Farge (one of Higginson’s favorites), and Longfellow’s witty brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, the man who reputedly said “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” (Oscar Wilde later borrowed the remark—and credit for it; Higginson borrowed it too.) Writers also flocked to Newport: Julia Ward Howe, who with Higginson formed a Town and Country Club, the poet Kate Field, Mary Mapes Dodge (author of Hans Brinker), and the perky widow Helen Hunt, who, mourning her husband and son, had rented two dainty rooms in the place where the Higginsons boarded.

  Higginson preferred the physical beauty of the place to the people and so stretched his long legs along the crooked streets near the shaggy warehouses or poked about the old hulks and fancy yachts in the cluttered mast yards. Ambling over the sturdy unpainted wharves, among rusty anchors and old barrels, he called this part of town Oldport to distinguish it from the more affluent section of the city, with its grand liveries and well-dressed hotels. Year-round residents like the Higginsons paid scant attention to the rich summer people, he wrote in The Atlantic, with their gowns and gossip. Instead he lived for the pale, hazy light that in winter played on the water when the sun narrowed and the sky turned the color of charcoal. He sat on the cliffs near the beach and watched red and green sailboats flash before him; he collected driftwood from sandy coves and repeated the names of the rock formations for the sound of them: Hanging Rock, Spouting Rock, Paradise Rocks. It wasn’t Massachusetts but would have to serve.

  The Higginsons were staying at Mrs. Hannah Dame’s boardinghouse on Broad Street, a wide, leafy thoroughfare fronted by great elms and commodious eighteenth-century houses. Seated in a wide chair with its arms rigged as pear-shaped tables, Mary amused her guests with her crusty maxims and her innumerable barbs about people and books. Good-hearted Helen Hunt tried to entertain her, decorating Mrs. Dame’s back parlor with baskets of flowers for a musical evening of Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Beethoven, arranged both for Mary’s benefit and for Wentworth’s, so he could repay the courtesies of his neighbors without excluding his wife. Otherwise, he occasionally stepped out to this or that soiree with the vivacious Mrs. Hunt on his chaste arm.

  Thomas Wentworth Higginson at 46, in Rhode Island, 1870.

  But he had no political traction. His appointment to the Newport School Committee was vetoed because one of its members assumed that, as a soldier in the First South Carolina Regiment of Volunteers of African Descent, he had to be black. Elected regardless (the mistake was discovered), in sweet retaliation Higginson abolished segregated schools in Newport. For his efforts, he lost the next election.

  Proudly calling himself a Black Republican, Higginson viewed Reconstruction as the opportunity to eliminate discriminatory practices and laws; Reconstruction, to him, first meant the redistribution of the land of the former plantations to the freed slaves, for he was not eager to appease former Confederates and, less so, former slaveholders. He also launched a verbal campaign to end segregation in the North as well as the South, on the streetcars of Philadelphia, in the schools of New York, or in the special galleries reserved for black people in Boston theaters. “When the freedmen are lost in the mass of freemen, then
the work will be absolutely complete,” he wrote. And he advocated full and immediate enfranchisement, which he termed simply fair play. The best preparation for freedom is freedom: “Fail in this result, and the future holds endless disorders,” he warned his readers, “with civil war reappearing at the end.”

  Though he often spoke in public on behalf of the Freedmen’s Aid Society (his sister Anna was secretary of the Brattleboro, Vermont, bureau), he declined to join the New England branch as one of its officers. “I do not want to give any more years of my life exclusively to those people now, as much as I am attached to them,” he told his sisters. Also, he was dubious about the project: though intending to make good on General Sherman’s promise to give every family of former slaves forty acres and a mule, General Saxton, now assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, was blocked at every turn by white farmers who wanted to keep the black population from owning land. Precipitously mustered out of service in 1866, Saxton was replaced by the unscrupulous (Higginson’s word) Brigadier General John M. Brannan, a former military head of the Department of the South. “If it had been left to him,” Higginson complained, “the freedmen would not have had a house, nor a school, nor a musket, nor a friend; the colored women would have had no liberty, except to be the concubines of the United States officers; nor the men, but to be their servants.”

  Confiscated land was soon handed back to its former white owners, ex-Confederates were reseated in Congress, and men like Nathan Bedford Forrest, after presiding over the capture—or the massacre—of black troops at Fort Pillow, went on to lead the newly founded Ku Klux Klan. Affairs in the president’s office weren’t much better. Andrew Johnson failed to carry out the mandate of the Radical Republicans, and Higginson wrote scornfully that “what most men mean to-day by the ‘president’s plan of reconstruction’ is the pardon of every rebel for the crime of rebellion, and the utter refusal to pardon a single black loyalist for the crime of being black.” In the North the situation was almost as bad. The expectations heaped on the freed slave were so unrealistic—a racism in reverse—that Higginson cried, “Do you suppose that black men are born into the world such natural saints that none of the vices of the white men are found among them?”

  His outcries lost to the ephemera of journalism, Higginson’s lasting contributions to Reconstruction were his Atlantic essays on the war, collected in 1869 as Army Life in a Black Regiment. Including material copied directly from his journals as well as a narrative of his three expeditions, his ruminations on the valor of the black soldier—and his outrage that black soldiers had been underpaid when paid at all—Army Life is a minor masterpiece. Today considered gently racist, if not condescending, it nonetheless remains a striking, unusual, and empathetic social document; its account of daily activity in the army during wartime is riveting in its detail, compassion, and humor. Higginson’s very real affection for his regiment is evident on every page, as is his pride in what he and his soldiers were able to do, and his transcriptions of the spirituals sung by his men is itself a remarkable—and groundbreaking—contribution to African American folk culture.

  At the heart of the book is the voluptuous Sea Islands, a tropical forest of Arden in a world of violence: “Galloping through green lanes, miles of triumphal arches of wild roses,—roses pale and large and fragrant, mingled with great boughs of the white cornel, fantastic masses, snowy surprises,—such were our rides, ranging from eight to fifteen and even twenty miles,” he wrote. “Back to a later dinner with our various experiences, and perhaps specimens to match,—a thunder-snake, eight feet long; an armful of great white, scentless pond-lilies. After dinner, to the tangled garden for rosebuds or early magnolias, whose cloying fragrance will always bring back to me the full zest of those summer days.”

  Edmund Wilson, calling Army Life limpid and unaffected, likened it to the memoirs of General Grant, and praising Higginson’s lush description, Howard Mumford Jones, a twentieth-century literary critic, called Army Life a study in enchantment. But it is also an expression of disenchantment: frustration with stereotypes and pat assumptions, with empty promises and vainglorious men, and surprise at the revelation that you might not be the person you thought you were. It is therefore a book of lights gleaming in the dark, of Southern marshes and Northern confusion, of tangled vegetation and of fearsomeness and fragile hope.

  Nowhere is this clearer than in “A Night in the Water,” a stunning, almost existential essay composed in Higginson’s most straightforward, pellucid style. Again his metaphor is of swimming into unknown territory, and this time he recounts a nighttime excursion when, swimming naked, he is suddenly clutched by fear:

  Doubts trembled in my mind like the weltering water, and that awful sensation of having one’s feet unsupported, which benumbs the spent swimmer’s heart, seemed to clutch at mine, though not yet to enter it. I was more absorbed in that singular sensation of nightmare, such as one may feel equally when lost by land or by water, as if one’s own position were all right, but the place looked for had somehow been preternaturally abolished out of the universe. At best, might not a man in the water lose all his power of direction, and so move in an endless circle until he sank exhausted? It required a deliberate and conscious effort to keep my brain quite cool. I have not the reputation of being of an excitable temperament, but the contrary; yet I could at that moment see my way to a condition in which one might become insane in an instant. It was as if a fissure opened somewhere, and I saw my way into a mad-house; then it closed, and everything went on as before.

  Like Dickinson, he too could find poetry in these deep, dark states of mind. They must have known this about each other. But for Higginson the vision of blankness passes. Everything goes on as before. He is a daylight man.

  Yet there was more to him than sunshine and reform, and perceptive readers, like Dickinson, could sense it.

  In 1869, William Dean Howells, preferring the book’s soldiering to its poetry, favorably reviewed it in The Atlantic, which he, not Higginson, would soon take over, and observed, rather ruefully, that the nation had grown tired of racial issues.

  IN NEWPORT, HIGGINSON CHOPPED WOOD early in the morning for exercise. It staved off depression. In the afternoon he swung from parallel bars and taught calisthenics at the gymnasium he had helped found. At dusk he sauntered about town. He also sat at his desk for four hours each day, pen in hand. In addition to the promised articles for Fields, he reviewed books like Thoreau’s Cape Cod—he had hoped to edit Thoreau’s journals—and he continued to contribute a steady stream of articles to The Independent, The Radical, The Nation, and the New York Tribune, in which he called for the education and enfranchisement of the freed slaves.

  And at the same time aching to do something completely different, he inched his way toward a novel.

  But aside from the astonishing “Night in the Water,” Higginson’s finest work remained his political writing. Packing his outrage into sentences of force, grace, and civility that made his anger all the more pointed, he said exactly what he meant. He did not gussy up his prose with scholarly comment or learned allusions. “All Southern white men cannot be instantaneously convinced that their late slave is a man and a brother,” he declared in 1865, “nor is it necessary that they should be. It will be enough, for the present, to convince them that he must be treated like one.” He declaimed in strong, ringing terms fueled by ethical self-certainty, as when he excoriated northerners and liberals in Congress.

  It is we who are permitting black loyalists to be disarmed, and white rebels to be armed again, under the name of “militia.” It is we who are permitting open proclamation of the re-establishment of slavery under the name of “apprenticeship.” It is we who consent to the exclusion from the courts and the ballot-box of those who have fought to reopen the ballet-box and re-establish the power of the courts. It is we who are reviving the old assumption that “the people” of the South means the white population, rebel or otherwise; and tha
t the black loyalists are something less than “the people.”

  Yet he devalued his political writing as unliterary. “It is not that politics are so unworthy, but that no one man can do everything,” he wrote in The Atlantic essay “A Plea for Culture,” which had prompted a note of approval from Dickinson. “There are a thousand roughhewn brains which can well perform the plain work which American statesmanship now demands, without calling on the artist to cut blocks with his razor. His shrinking is not cowardice,” he continued; “this relief from glaring publicity is the natural condition under which works of art mature…. A book is the only immortality.”

  A book—not journalism, not politics, not the transient affairs of the everyday. This is what Emily Dickinson dreamed of. Perhaps he was thinking of her. (“A precious—mouldering pleasure—’tis—/ To meet an Antique Book—.”)

  “In these later years, the arduous reforms into which the lifeblood of Puritanism has passed have all helped to train us for art,” Higginson observed, “because they have trained us in earnestness, even while they seemed to run counter to that spirit of joy in which art has its being.” Higginson caught the drift of what had happened to his—and Dickinson’s—Puritan heritage: that cleft between action and art, or what he called earnestness and joy. But he was also rationalizing his steady removal from the cause that had shaped his life, that had brought him to the church and thrust him out of it. Nurtured on the New, steeped in the exuberance of a just reform, Higginson had entered the war half-skeptical, half-hopeful: he saw his country sundered, its ideals politicized, its racism pervasive, and he understood, as if for the first time, how intractable institutions are, how difficult it is to change them. In Newport his political efficacy was nil. “I don’t believe there is a man here whom it cost more to come here than it did me,” he would reflect in his journal. “I don’t believe there has been a blacker Republican than I. I know for one that I have tried to find a sufficient sphere of duty inside the Republican party, and it has been nothing more or less than hard knocks and blows that drove me out of it.” His specific references are unclear, but the corruption and meretricious razzle-dazzle of postwar America—the era soon known as the Gilded Age—and the material excess so palpable in Newport disgusted him. “Nobody has any weight in America who is not in Congress,” he bleakly observed, “and nobody gets into Congress without the necessity of bribing or button-holing men whom he despises.”