by Norman Lock
The sky that afternoon was strangely colored. “Like pewter,” Emerson described it; “like the heart after its first transgression,” said Hawthorne; “like a fluke’s when it has been left to rot,” said Henry. They were literary men, and I could not fault them for their whimsicality. Had they been otherwise, they would have left no mark. Who would have heard of the economy of the mouse or the iniquity of the poll tax collected to subjugate the Mexicans if Henry’s words had fallen short of his wisdom, had failed to stir the hearts of men and women in a measure equal to his own passion?
When they came off the river, their cheeks burnished and their beards grizzled with beads of ice, they stood awhile, flapping their arms like pump handles to get the blood flowing again and talking of this and that. They did not always speak like Transcendentalists or littérateurs. Sometimes they spoke as ordinary men do about commonplace things. It is an obvious remark for me to make, but most of us expect the great men among us to inhabit an elevated plane, from which they never depart. Henry could talk to Hawthorne about the pickerel in Long Cove, where Walden Pond bumps up against the Fitchburg tracks, as well as about Poe’s latest tale. He could talk about crop yields and weather as easily as Paley’s Natural Theology. Once to my surprise, I overheard him quarreling with Emerson over baseball and Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Rules, after discussing the merits of Lyell’s Principles of Geology.
Henry snuffled at ice crystals in his nose and said, “Last winter, I broke some ice on Swamp Bridge Brook and saw a shining city of steeples rising from the bottom of a floe.” He wound his muffler tightly around his neck. “I’ve seen crystals in frost that resemble budding branches. There is a continuity throughout nature that is best expressed metaphorically.”
“A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and faithfully renders the likeness of the world,” said Emerson, his voice trailing off toward infinity, where his thoughts tended.
“I sometimes wonder if we don’t do reality a disservice with our metaphors,” said Hawthorne, stamping his feet to warm them.
Many times I found their conversation tedious; they could make the game of baseball sound as serious as a parliamentary debate, and the local husbandry a gloss on Virgil’s Georgics.
I was not an illiterate, thanks to Mistress S—and to my own painful and secret efforts to learn to read, but many years would pass before I could comprehend the books that lay scattered around me like pearls before swine or—less demeaning—crumbs before sparrows, whom Jesus loves. In 1846, I could read a seed catalogue, a book by Cooper or Defoe, the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress, and poems by Whittier or Longfellow. I did not know what to make of Emerson’s essays, which had not been shaped by a mind born in bondage, nor were easy to comprehend for one still fettered by custom and habit. I could no more think in new ways and to new purposes than I could build my house in the woods to appear otherwise than the hovels I had known in slavery.
A pious woman had given me a copy of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” I had taken it from my pocket to read while Henry was writing in his journal. It was cold in his little house, and the iron stove was murmuring.
“What is that you’re reading, Samuel?” he asked.
I told him and—to my surprise—he rose from his writing desk, tore the pamphlet from my hands, and threw it in the stove.
“That was my property!” I shouted. Strange to hear myself claim ownership when, until recently, I myself had been another’s property.
He looked at me shamefaced and, shuffling in embarrassment, apologized. “Forgive me, Samuel. But it pained me to see you reading a tract that would scare you with a hell as real and fiery as that.” He opened the stove door, and we watched in fascination while the fire waggled its tongues. “God is not angry!” he cried, his stoical upper lip showing teeth. He had sufficient Unitarianism in him to scorn fundamentalist Christian melodrama. “Hell is inside us: It is the pain we cause ourselves.”
If I had not known in my shredded heart that hell was outside us, I would have agreed. Many years would pass before it would be mended. Like an article of clothing, however, the stitches—that ragged scar—would always be visible in my character.
I was wrong when I faulted Henry for having chosen to live in poverty—he would not have called it that—when he could have lived comfortably in his family’s boardinghouse in the village. I mistook him for a poseur, a dilettante of the ascetic life. At the time, I could not have said what he was. When I could distinguish gold from base metal, so to speak, I understood that his two years in the woods were—as he himself called them—an “experiment,” which, having been concluded to his satisfaction, he did not need to belabor. His genius lay in his ability to live fully by living variously.
EARLY IN FEBRUARY, A CREW of one hundred men, mostly Irish, from the Tudor Ice Company, of Boston, arrived at Walden to harvest ice. I watched as they walked behind horse-drawn cutters, a pair of sharpened blades scoring pond ice instead of breaking sod. And then with saws, picks, gaffs, and tongs, other men cut blocks and loaded them onto sleds for the poor horses to haul to the icehouse. I pitied them their labor, watching their breath transpire into the cold air, as if they were giving up the ghost of themselves. Each day the men began merrily enough, but by evening, when the winter light was going, their jests turned to oaths. When the shadows had lengthened into darkness, their curses faded into a silence broken by the grunts of men and animals and the scoring of the ice.
Watching the horses slumped in harness beneath the driver’s lash, I asked Henry, “Would you kill a man?”
“In a manner of speaking, or in actuality?”
“I’m asking if you could kill a man, if you had a reason to.”
He resented the question. Perhaps it brought to earth an ethical choice he could never put into practice or a wish he could not gratify.
“What reason could there be?” he asked.
This man who had always looked me in the eye turned his to the vegetable and mineral world that lay open to his curiosity and would never pose a question that might shame him. I realized that the source of his strength and also of his weakness was nature—one that did not include the mass of ordinary men and women, regardless of how he might stand and pass the time of day with them. He studied nature, admired it, venerated and adored it. For him, there could be no higher order or realm.
“If you should be set upon by thieves . . .” I said to prod him into speech.
“I have nothing to steal,” he said—smugly, I thought.
“By assassins, then.” I persisted, wanting blood from the stone that his awkward self-consciousness had made of him at that moment.
“I could not ransom my life with theirs,” he said after the smallest of hesitations.
“And to save me?” It was all I could do not to shout at this upright man, whose greatest wish, I believed at the time, was never to be thrust into a position where he could be forced to violate his principles.
I left him to them and walked to the sandy edge of the pond to watch men untroubled by philosophy or religion beyond a rough-and-ready acceptance of the faith of their Irish mothers or thoughts beyond a warming draft by the fire at Hartwell Bigelow’s tavern, near the burial ground, where teamsters and the local rowdies drank steadily toward forgetfulness.
The hour was at hand when the men could put away their tools and tramp into Concord, where they were lodged. They walked in silence, the sweat inside their clothes turning to ice. Curious, I followed them into town, while night sealed the woods with a darkness thick as pitch. Most of the icemen headed for the light that fell through the tavern window onto the iron-colored snow. Bigelow’s creaking door announced their arrival into the noisy room, whose walls seemed to tremble in the lamp-and firelight.
I thought of Henry, alone in his cabin, and hated myself for having tried to shame him. He meant me well and wished for all the
satisfaction of a life well spent. If I saw a chasm yawn between us, the fault might have been my own. I did not understand how a mind could waver between alternatives—a strange notion for a slave, who must be constant in his submission to authority. A bondman has no more use for a subtle mind or a personality than a hitching post.
The icemen pushed in among workmen from Concord’s pipe and bucket factories, the tinsmith’s and blacksmith’s, the coopery and tannery. I could disentangle from the general din the accent peculiar to New England, together with a sardonic Irish and an imperious German. The men were a boisterous, irreligious lot, whose noise increased with each whiskey glass or pint, the cacophony mingling—if sounds and odors can be said to mingle—with the smell of peat, tobacco, and a ferment of roots, hops, and spruce, released from a fiery rum concoction by the red-hot mulling pokers. My eyes watered in the smoke-filled room, and soon my head felt light, although I had only a glass of porter planted between my elbows where they rested on the rough-hewn bar.
On either side of me sat an Irishman from County Clare. They were reminiscing fondly about the river Shannon—finer than the Concord or the Charles; the Cliffs of Moher—grander than the Palisades, though neither man had seen the Hudson River; Galway Bay—lovelier than Dorchester Bay, which they had glimpsed from the heights of south Boston; and the geniality of an Irish hearth that burned peat from an Irish bog. They spoke to each other between gulps of raw whiskey, which lacked the taste, color, and fire of the venerable Jameson, as though I were not a man sitting between them, but a pane of window glass.
I was accustomed to living as if I took up no more space or air than a dog does—less, for a dog in a southern household may be privileged. Let us say, then, that my conspicuousness had been on the order of a hoe or, since I had been a kitchen slave, a saucepan—necessary, but not really seen and rarely appreciated. I grew to resent the micks sitting on either side of me. Like anyone else, I could be contemptuous of others, although I knew enough to keep my scornful thoughts unspoken.
There are noble hearts among us. There are also hearts as pitiless as sleet. To maintain that all negroes are innocent is as pernicious as to declare us all guilty of iniquity. The former attitude consigns us to a state of perpetual childhood, the latter to savagery; both justify the strict governance and chastisement of our overseers. It is the commonly held opinion that we will be incapable of harming ourselves or others just as long as our chains are not struck off.
I glared at the man seated on my right, who, with a careless shrug of his broad shoulders, had caused the porter to spill from my glass.
I am not a big man, but, when a young one, I could have held my own against most other men in a fair fight or a dirty one if I could have disenthralled myself of the habit of abjection and found the will to unfetter my strength, which was constrained by fear.
“What’s the matter, nigger?” he asked, his eyes glinting the way eyes will in spite.
“I am not a nigger,” I said in a voice whose quaver I barely managed to control.
“You sure do look like one. Does this boy look like a darkie to you, Colin?”
“He does and all.”
“Then what in the hell are you looking at?” demanded the irascible Irishman, whose name was Tyrrell, after having set his glass down on the bar with a bang.
I wanted to kill the thick-skulled galoot, and remembered the prickly exchange of views I had had with Henry earlier that night. I wished he were there so that he might wrestle with his principles. Notwithstanding his narrow build and awkwardness, Henry was hardened by manual labor and his habitual tramps and climbs in the mountains north of the village. Knots of muscle stood out on his calves like hawsers. He could have been a teamster or a porter if he had not been an idler—a description he cherished as the mark of a man bent on self-discovery. Henry did not sponge or beg for money or favors. If the world considered him shiftless, he could say, with some truth, that he hurt no one nor lived at another’s expense. (His self-reliance was partly self-delusion, as it must be for any mortal.) Naturally, Henry would not have bothered to defend himself against the village backbiters, who lived within the sound of Emerson’s voice but were nevertheless deaf to it.
Henry’s presence in the tavern would have made no difference: Roughnecks came and went at the urging of sobriety and intoxication. Indifferent to the niceties of polite combat, they would have murdered the pair of us. And yet, fretted as I was by an accrual of humiliation, I wanted to strike them and, perversely, I wanted to be struck by them. I felt a kind of self-hatred, for which I cannot even now account.
I must have tensed; maybe I went as far as to raise myself to my full height where I stood between the two Irishmen at the bar. The one called Colin must have sensed what I meant to do. He took me by the wrist. I thought he meant to throw me or to twist my arm behind my back and break it. Then I saw something in his eyes I could not interpret: not fear or excitement, sadness or understanding, but something partaking of them all. I don’t know what I saw in his blue eyes. I let my body relax and my shoulders slump—not in submission, but as a man will who lets out a deep sigh after a storm of emotion has been spent.
Tyrrell went to the cask to draw himself a mug of lager.
Colin winked at me—he may have smiled—and made a joke of my black skin. “Will it rub off?”
He did not mean to insult me, and I was not insulted. He looked at the palm of his hand, the one that had held my wrist, as if he expected to see his skin turned the color of my own.
“I never touched a black man before,” he said shyly.
I was thrilled to hear him call me a man. He was loutish; there was nothing in the least refined about his manners or his words. I could not imagine his life, but I guessed it was hard, maybe even mean. I had heard that the Irish were considered little better than my own people and that indentured servitude, while of only seven years’ duration—time unmarked by neither whip nor auction—wore down body and soul. I looked into his eyes—he did not seem to mind as his friend Tyrrell had minded—and tried to read his thoughts.
None can know another’s mind. Nonetheless, we do speak and write of others as if we have known them well. What can Melville have known of Ahab, or Edgar Poe of Usher, or Hawthorne of Dimmesdale? And yet they have written of them in the belief that we possess a common soul. So it is that I have found within me courage to speak of and for various persons met during my stay in Walden Woods as though I had sounded to the bottom of them . . . as if I had sifted them fine.
Colin studied my face like an unlettered child straining to make sense of chalk marks on a slate. Then he shook his head and said, “It must be a strange thing to have been born a negro.”
“Yes,” I replied, not knowing what I meant by it.
Tyrrell returned with his beer and took his place at the bar.
“You and the coon palavering, are you?” he asked his friend brusquely.
“Let him be for Christ’s sake!” growled Colin. “He’s not a bad fellow”—he finished the sentence with a wink at me—“for a blackie.”
Tyrrell wiped the foam from his mustache and, with a splinter, picked at his teeth.
I wish that I could write that I walked back to Colin’s rooming house and, away from the commotion of Bigelow’s tavern, we talked like two people determined to know each other better. I might have tried to speak of my feelings and thoughts when I had belonged to another man—you cannot imagine the shame of such a confession. In turn, he could have told me about the poverty and hunger of the Irish, whom even the potatoes had failed. But we would have no such conversation.
If I seem preoccupied by my own story, I believe that it is as necessary to Henry’s own as weft and weave are to a basket. I am not mentioned in his account of his sojourn in Walden Woods. I was not important to his experiment. I might have spoiled the design of his story. Who knows what thoughts pass through the mind of an author? Henry will be remembered, while what I write here will be forgotten soon enough. In any case,
I am certain not to write it half so well. Henry had a genius for making common things seem monumental. In his work, an acorn assumes the proportions of the Taj Mahal. My pen, I fear, would turn the Taj Mahal into an acorn.
BY MARCH, THE ICE TAKEN by Frederic Tudor’s men had returned to Walden Pond’s Deep Cove. Hands in our pockets, Henry and I were walking along the margin of stiff marsh grass when his attention, concentrated on a snow-white ermine worrying a shrew, was caught by something red twenty or thirty yards from shore.
“What is it?” I asked.
His eyes were sharper than mine; his habit of looking closely had doubtless made them so. His range of vision was remarkable: He could detect a lofted eagle whose compact shadow slipped across a distant hillside as readily as a garter snake sliding through the grass at his feet.
“It looks like a piece of red flannel,” he said.
He had already started toward it, cautiously as anyone uncertain of his footing and the thickness of the ice would. It was too early in the year for it to make a noise like guns-hot—that sharp crack or boom one hears in late March or early April, when the thaw begins. But still, the ice splintered some when it took a man’s weight.
“Go carefully!” I shouted as he neared the red rag. “The ice is new.”
I watched as he got down on his hands and knees and scraped with the blade of his hand. He took off his hat, brought his face near the frosted pane of ice, and peered at what lay underneath it: a drowned boy—child of one of the woodcutters living by the Assabet River, which flows into the Concord. It was the end of his scarf Henry had seen, raised stiffly above the surface like a frozen pennant. The clarity of Walden Pond’s ice, which Frederic Tudor coveted, had made a kind of window, through which Henry saw the boy’s face and—in my fancy—the boy saw his.