by Norman Lock
She felt Henry’s forehead once again, looked him over critically, and left him in my care, along with the barley wine, which I myself drank.
My gaze was drawn to Henry’s flute. It was a lovely thing of auburn-colored fruitwood and ivory. In all that stark room, there was nothing else so magnetic. It seemed out of place, like a velvet cushion in a monk’s cell. I knew nothing of music except the songs of tribulation and deliverance sung by the slaves and the quadrilles, cotillions, and polkas danced by our “betters.” Heard outside in the yard through tall windows stained gold by the light from the candelabras, the music had tumbled brightly over our misery like a bride walking unsullied through an ash pit.
Henry gave me a gold watch in gratitude for having nursed him back to health. Later, he admitted that it was of no value to him; he claimed to be indifferent to time as it is measured by clocks. He regretted having made me a present of it, fearing that it would “throw a chain round my neck more galling than a slave’s iron collar.” But I was happy to have it and would not give it back to him. I dreamed of one day owning a gold fob and, perhaps, a diamond to decorate it.
When Henry was well again, we walked to Egg Rock, at the confluence of the Sudbury and Assabet rivers, where they enter the Concord. There seven years earlier, he and his brother, John, had embarked on their excursion. They had feasted on bream and passenger pigeon during two weeks on the Merrimack and Concord, a boyish adventure that would do nothing to change the world or their own uncertain future. But at that moment in their brief histories, they came as near to giddiness and the folly of love as they ever would. Their mutual hopes of winning Miss Sewall’s hand had yet to be dashed. While they rowed or sailed the rivers in their gaily painted boat, time was held in suspension and gravity forbore to weigh too heavily on them. Afterward, Henry wrote a book about their boat trip to the White Mountains.
The White Mountains remain, although I have never seen them, as does Egg Rock. In their season, rushes and wild flags still grow in the shadow it casts on the grassy bank. Aspens and alders are still leaning over the leisurely, meandering Concord, which the Algonquians call “Meadow River.” The abutments of the North Bridge, where Lexington and Concord militias bloodied British redcoats, stand defiantly in the river. Bream continue to swim and passenger pigeons to mob the sky. But Miss Sewall bestowed her hand on another, and by the time I went to live in the woods near Henry, his brother had died of tetanus. Now Henry, whom we once thought as perdurable as Egg Rock, the abutments of the North Bridge, and the rivers that flow from the continent into the Atlantic—he, too, has vanished—an unscheduled departure into regions where the clock does not strike or the bell toll the hour. We can only hope that Henry, who chafed at time’s regulation, is satisfied.
His hour not yet come, he was sitting with his back against the rock.
“The stone feels warm,” he said luxuriously while I stared at the river with an intentness usually reserved for great mysteries.
Always I have been drawn to the water’s edge. To stand where one element gives way to another restores my belief in possibility. It must be what Blanchard felt when he made the first balloon ascent—not as it rose into the sky above Paris, but just moments before, when it was still tethered to the Champ-de-Mars.
Henry might loaf, but his mind was never idle. One might have thought him sunk in the pleasure of that moment by the river, but his mind was picking it apart with the assiduity of a cotton gin.
“Does the sun feel obliged to warm the rock so that I may sit comfortably with my back against it, or is this pleasant warmth only an instance of accidental goodness—an unwitting act of kindness shown to me? And if the sun is unconcerned by my well-being—if, in fact, it acts on the world without awareness or intention—am I any less indebted to it? The universe is probably unaware of my existence by the Concord River, in Massachusetts, on the third day of May, in the year 1846. What matters is that I am aware of it.”
“The first time a fish knows anything of men is when it gets yanked up from the bottom at the end of a string,” I said with homely wisdom while admiring the cardinal flowers.
“A rude awakening for the poor fish,” he said. “To behold the face of its god for the first time and see there only pitilessness.”
Henry joined me on the riverbank, where we amused ourselves by skipping stones. I admit that I tried to outskip his. I was eager to beat him, while Henry did not care whether or not he won. He was ambitious for his mind’s sake, never for those things for which most men yearn. Brothers have fallen out over a woman, but I doubt Henry objected to John’s infatuation for Ellen Sewall. Henry was a gentleman in all but his clothes and manners, which were not rude, but rustic, and never intended to provoke the villagers, who considered him a crank. It would not have occurred to him to count his “skips” or mine while our stones glanced off the surface of the water.
Not content for long to dwell on the surface of things, he felt the need to peer into the depths—of the cosmos as William Herschel beheld it anew, of reality as Plato had conceived of it, of the earth as James Hutton grasped it. Fingering the skipping stone he had been about to throw, he said, “Think of it! This pebble is millions of years old! And where we’re standing was once the bottom of a great ocean. The earth is not changed catastrophically, but gradually, not by sudden conversion, but by reasonable motions toward a new condition. Who can say whether the place to which all tends is better or worse than whence they came?”
Henry mused on the stone, which he seemed to be weighing on the palm of his hand, while I went back to skipping them. I was happy to watch them bound five, six, seven times before sinking to the bottom, where they—to Henry’s mind—longed to be at rest.
“Objects in nature,” he said, “have a kind of nostalgia that seeks to return them to their former places in time. Life is an endless to-and-fro, a desire to stay and a wishing to be gone.”
He continued his apostrophe to the stone until I shut my ears to his voice, which had become more insistent and annoying than the drone of a wasp. Most of us must keep talking, afraid that, in the silence that rounds our lives, death will come like a shivaree, derisive and clamoring. But I sometimes longed to hear the foolishness of ordinary people.
AT SHATTUCK’S STORE, WHERE WE WENT that afternoon to replenish our flour, lard, paraffin, and salt, we encountered Emerson, who carried a bolt of blue muslin under his arm.
“Our Edith is to have a new frock,” he said, and, in the next breath, he continued irrelevantly, “I fear we’ll see rain before the day is out.”
“Why should you fear it?” asked Henry to nettle him.
“It is something one says when he can think of nothing else,” Emerson replied irritably. “I wouldn’t care to spend my days worrying about my every word’s effect on posterity.”
This, from a man who spoke as though he had an amanuensis in his pocket!
“How did you find conditions at Brook Farm?” asked Henry, ignoring the rebuke.
“The fire bell rang its death knell. I’m sorry for it, although neither of us could quite believe in Brook Farm as Utopia.”
“I’d rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven,” replied Henry.
Emerson beamed at his protégé.
“The farm was no better than a plantation,” said Henry. “Hawthorne paid a thousand dollars to join the Ripleys and slaved for six months shoveling cow manure before he quit the place in disgust.”
Emerson sniffed, saying, “I fear that the communal ideal will always be a kind of genteel slavery for people like us.”
I resented his patrician air and wished his kind could wake up one morning on the clay floor of one of Jeroboam’s shacks.
“If you have the time, I’d like you both to meet someone,” said Emerson.
“I promised Hosmer I’d tar the bottom of his boat,” Henry replied, excusing himself. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Samuel.”
Henry ambled toward the river, taking his parcels with him.
I followed Emerson to Freemasons’ Hall, where I first met William Lloyd Garrison.
“YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE URGED Fourier’s communal ideal on Hawthorne and the Ripleys,” Emerson chided Garrison, the Boston abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator. “The graft could never have taken on an American stock.”
“They were too ambitious and unnecessarily extravagant,” replied Garrison with some heat. “The cost to build the Phalanstery bankrupted the community, or nearly so. Meat, fish, and butter had disappeared from the refectory tables before the behemoth burned down, while the joy of laboring for the common good had been replaced by communal drudgery.”
“In any case, Brook Farm is finished and won’t rise again from its ashes,” said Emerson.
Leaving them to argue the merits of associationism, I wandered into the library, where I was startled to see Joseph, with a hammer in his hand. He was equally surprised to see me there.
“Mr. Long,” he said with what I thought was a hint of ridicule. “What brings you to the Lyceum?”
I did not know how I should answer him. Had I said that I was there to see the books, he might have thought that I meant to show my superiority to one who was clearly there to mend a shelf. On the other hand, if I were to make an excuse—if I were to tell him I had stepped into the library by chance, he might have gotten the idea that I knew full well I had no business there. Self-consciousness had hobbled me. So I lied. How often have I done so to forestall a shame that I did not deserve but—with the uneasiness of a man who is watched—could almost believe that I did?
“I’m here with Mr. Emerson,” I said at last. “I’m helping him carry his packages.” The packages were mine, and I realized with a pang that I had cast myself once more in the role of a bondman. “Mr. Garrison told me you were in the library. I thought I’d say hallo.”
He noticed the hammer in his hand and appeared not to know what to do with it. I laid my hand on a copy of John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic, and, in turn, Joseph laid his on Asa Mahan’s Scripture Doctrine of Christian Perfection. The moment was awkward for both of us. I could not see how to extricate myself. The doorway leading to the main room might have been on the other side of a snake-infested swamp. We stood facing each other for what seemed an age while sounds that ordinarily escape notice grew loud: The clock ticked, its seconds falling like hailstones; the oak shelves groaned; and the books, their thin, papery voices, whispered like a congress of old men.
“Have you been well, Joseph?” I asked, finding the room impossibly crowded, though we were its sole occupants.
“I have been well,” he said in the stately way of ancient negroes.
“And your sister and her brood?” I asked.
“They are also well. I hope you are enjoying your life in the woods.”
Did he mean to ridicule me? I could not decide, but I thought it best to remain civil.
“Very much so,” I replied.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
With an ostentatious gesture, I fished the gold watch out of my pocket by its chain and said, “I must be going. Mr. Emerson will want his packages.”
Joseph nodded slyly, as if at Emerson’s porter. I turned and left the room. No sooner had I crossed its threshold than the sound of hammering resumed. I could not remember the cause of our estrangement. Perhaps neither did he.
“Mr. Long, Mr. Emerson has been telling me of your former life of bondage. I wonder if you’d allow me to bring that story to the attention of readers of The Liberator. Slave narratives are the gunpowder that will help us destroy that despicable institution.”
I glared at Emerson. I had no desire to put my painful recollections at the service of abolition. I was sorry for the millions of my race in captivity, but I had closed that chapter of my life and had no wish to reopen it. I did not want to be another “well-spoken negro” of the sort that was made much of in the South, as though a monkey, by the perseverance of its owner, had been made to talk. There is nothing so wounding to the spirit as to see one of us dressed in fancy clothes, buckled shoes, and a powdered wig and made to parade the streets, holding a parasol with which to shade his mistress. I would rather have been a miserable field slave than a pet nigger.
“What do you say to that, Mr. Long?”
I admit with shame that I answered the good man with an ignoble caricature of the darky. I might have just stepped off a minstrel stage or from the cover of “Jump Jim Crow,” adorned with a sketch of “Daddy” Rice blacked up and shuffling.
“No, suh,” I said like the white man’s idea of a coon. “I ain’t interested.”
I almost did a comical jig, but decided against it. The negro’s self-caricature must never be obvious, or the white man will know that he is being mocked.
Emerson looked as if he could lynch me from the gas bracket. Garrison was embarrassed. Having stepped in a dung heap, I was eager to get away by myself, where the reek could not shame me even more.
“I’s got be goin’,” I said, and I left hastily, leaving those two champions of my people’s cause to despise me.
In those days, even simple human transactions were complicated for me by doubt and self-loathing. I had let myself become the very thing I despised, and, in doing so, had abased myself before two men whose regard I valued. I was like a child who, having been caught in a lie, tells an even more outrageous one. A slave is ruled by three all-consuming emotions: fear, sorrow, and hatred. Ambivalence is a luxury of the freeborn. There were slaves, and there were masters. As one of the former, I had expected nothing, wished for nothing, hoped for nothing, aspired to nothing, been nothing but what I was. The way was clear, even though it led nowhere.
In the morning, a boy delivered a note from Emerson, asking if I would “please visit me at Bush, when convenient.” I knew that rancor could be concealed beneath a pleasing manner. Politeness was the perfect covert from which to shoot one’s poisoned arrows. My impulse was to run and hide. I could make my way into Canada and, in its wilderness, lose myself. I might become a fur trapper. I had heard that the coureurs des bois, French-Canadian woodsmen, did not despise black people. But I was unprepared for such a life and for the quick death that would surely follow, with nothing to survive my frozen bones buried under snow but The Florist’s Guide given to me by a Quaker woman.
Having resigned myself to Emerson’s displeasure, I went to visit him that afternoon.
LIDIAN SHOWED ME INTO her husband’s study. He had always been cordial, but this afternoon he did not rise to greet me. Unable to hold his gaze, I studied the steel pen on his desk, which had recently replaced his quill. Henry, too, had taken to using one, his a gift from Elizabeth Hoar on the occasion of his having left Concord for Staten Island to tutor Emerson’s nephews. That job came to naught. The world meant Concord for Henry, and he could not leave it for long. I felt my face begin to burn under Emerson’s gaze like a dry leaf kindled by sunlight through a glass. My refusal to face him squarely infuriated him as much as did the minstrelsy I had made of my meeting with Garrison. Magnanimous in his praise of others, Emerson had no doubt spoken well of me to the antislavery crusader. Knowing how much I had disappointed him made me all the more sullen and determined to prove myself unworthy of his friendship.
“Yesterday, you insulted the divinity within you,” said Emerson at last. He spoke calmly and judiciously, but death warrants have been just as politely served.
“Divinity?” I repeated. The idea astonished and disturbed me.
“Yes,” he said. “It is in each one of us.”
In Jeroboam? I said to myself. In the slave catchers, man hunters, and nigger-breakers.
“I don’t give a damn for it!” I said, finding courage to be rude. “I’d be much happier finding the man inside me. I’m not sure I have ever met him. It’s he who interests me. You, Henry, and Mr. Garrison—what is it you want of me?”
“Your advancement.”
Were we always to be treated like children?
&nbs
p; “I want to be more than a well-spoken negro!” I cried, recalling the words I had uttered to myself in Freemasons’ Hall. “I want to be more than a fancy nigger you can show off like a trick pony!”
My vehemence embarrassed him even more than the ugly word I had used—one that he strove to eliminate from the speech of his fellow New Englanders, if not from their minds, which were beyond his power to reform.
“I never intended to patronize you, and if I have done, I apologize. It is difficult to know how to approach another human being. Do you know what it means to be human, Samuel?”
I shook my head, for, at that moment, I did not know. Later, I would recall the boy and the old man who had hidden me in the meadows near the James.
“Nor do I, although I have attempted to discover it and hope one day to do so.”
Emerson looked up from his desk at me, his hands folded like a schoolboy’s. He was waiting to hear what I would say. For the first time in my life, I had the upper hand. I stared at motes of dust dancing in a shaft of sunlight. I beheld my will as if it, too, were a shining thing. I admired it like a boy entranced by a bird’s nest or a butterfly’s wing. I could have made the man dance! Strange to say, however, I decided not to take advantage of him and his generous nature. I would neither play upon him, his feelings, nor play the fool for him. It was, I realized later on, a historic moment in my history. I had made the second-most important decision of my life: The first was having resolved to seek my freedom in the North. Emerson was still waiting for me to speak. I think he wanted my forgiveness. I wanted to ask for his but could not find the words.
“We are separated by a gulf.” He was ill at ease, this man who seemed to have all words at his command. “One scarcely knows how to begin to cross it.”
Ten years earlier, Emerson had written, “I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise to ever occupy any very high place in the human family.” His views had changed since then, and only a few others, such as Garrison and the fugitive Douglass, could speak against slavery with his oratory, passion, and moral suasion. Emerson’s compass had swung round to true north—to abolition. He had come a long way, if not so far as John Brown would travel by the time he reached Harper’s Ferry.