by Norman Lock
He held out his hand, and I took it gladly. At that moment, I felt the absence of my left hand keenly and wondered what sign of reconciliation Emerson would have contrived if I had lacked the right one instead. The moment might have been all the more awkward for want of a conventional—a symbolical—gesture. Perhaps he would have embraced me, or possibly there would have been no reconciliation. We live suspended by filaments, deluding ourselves that we are upheld by our own cunning.
Outside in the yard, Lidian was repairing an old cucumber frame. Sunlight sparkled on the panes. Leaning over them, I saw my face and hers commingled there. Henry would have struck a rhetorical figure whose meaning would most likely have contained a morsel of truth.
“Have you and Mr. Emerson made it up between you?” asked Lidian.
I hoped he had not told her of my foolishness. Once again, I wondered about the private lives of public men, then shook off the thought as one does a pesky fly determined to settle on one’s nose. I felt pity for this sickly woman with the haggard face. I sensed again a triumph in that pity.
“Let me do that, Mrs. Emerson.”
“Thank you kindly, Mr. Samuel.”
I was grateful that she had never once taken notice—by word or glance—of my handicap. She gazed at the tulip tree, its flowers rising like flames from among the leaves. There was no telling whether her satisfaction resided in the yellow blossoms only or—like that of her husband and the other Transcendentalists—comprehended the universe. Contented, she turned and left me to get on with my work.
The May sun fell warmly on me while I braced the joins, puttied the loose glazing, and scraped the scales from the wood, which I painted the green of the hull of Henry’s old boat, the Musketaquid, renamed Pond Lily by Hawthorne. Perhaps the joy I took in that modest labor was what the Brook Farmers had felt at the beginning of their communal experiment, fated to come to grief, like most things that humankind attempts. But I would never find a job quite so satisfying as fixing Mrs. Emerson’s cucumber frame.
The work had taken only half a mind; the balance swung about like a weathercock in a variable wind or a compass needle finding its way north, which, in my case, was Mr. Garrison and the discomfiture I had caused him. He deserved an apology, but I had not matured sufficiently to tender one. Besides, he had returned to Boston. I might have written a letter, but I could not trust myself to distill the rout of my emotions into sentences that would be understood without benefit of the author’s gloss.
“Dear Sir: I apologize for my—”
What, exactly? My rudeness? Childish spite? My ignorance of good manners and, more to the point, of myself—the man I wished to be if only I could escape my cell like poor Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo?
I will begin my atonement in Concord, I told myself. I will go and see Joseph.
I FOUND JOSEPH INSIDE the livery stable, currying “witches’ stirrups” from the mane of a chestnut-colored horse.
“Afternoon, Samuel.”
“Good afternoon,” I replied with a sniff. A part of me still wanted to appear grand.
As if to explain his presence there, he said, “I help old Jake when his lumbago raises hell with him, if I have the time.”
The horse shied, snorted, and stamped until Joseph calmed it with his hand.
“I heard you made a fool of yourself in front of Mr. Emerson and Mr. Garrison.” The remark seemed innocent of criticism or ridicule, and I took it as such, trying all the while to ascertain whether or not he bore me a grudge.
“I did!” I said with a laugh, as if my contretemps had been a joke on them.
Honesty comes hard, even for an honest man, which I was not completely.
Joseph put down the currycomb, slapped the horse’s rump affectionately, and closed the stall. He looked at me intently. What thoughts went through his mind, I could not have said. We went into the tackle room, where Jake had a deal table and a couple of chairs.
“Sit yourself, Samuel.”
He took a bottle of corn whiskey from a liniment shelf, uncorked it, filled a glass, and set it in front of me.
“Drink,” he said in a voice pitched somewhere between invitation and adjuration. “For Sunday’s sake.”
I enjoyed a glass of whiskey. But on the plantation, I had mostly resisted the temptation to get soused on the Sabbath with the other slaves, not out of prudery, but defiance. The masters encouraged inebriation on the Lord’s Day in order to humiliate us and to discourage thoughts of running away. Six days we labored and, by nightfall, we were too worn-out to think; on the seventh day, those who might have been inclined to make trouble were stupefied by the massa’s liquor. Joseph seemed untroubled by reservations, unless he meant to test mine. I saw that he was studying me, taking my measure with the eye of a tailor or an undertaker. To refuse his whiskey might insult him. Possibly, he hoped to be insulted; it would give him cause to strike me or have done with me.
“Aren’t you drinking, Joseph?”
“After you,” he said quietly, nodding first at me and then at the glass. In the windowless room, his dark face was darker still. His eyes, what I could see of them, partook of the mystery of humankind, which is less comprehensible than that of the stars.
We were to drink from the common cup. Did he mean it to be a chalice of bitterness, or one of forgiveness? I swallowed some and felt the liquor’s warmth. He drank off the rest and set the empty glass on the table as emphatically as a judge’s gavel or an auctioneer’s hammer. I could not see clearly the part I was to play in the melodrama he seemed to be making up as he went. I filled the glass again and drank until clarity grew overcast, as when the sun is hidden by clouds, trimming the brightness and erasing the shadows by which all things on earth are made distinguishable.
“I wasn’t sure what kind of man you were,” he said, wiping his lips on his sleeve.
It was the question I had been asking myself. I thought I knew the answer, but I could not have given it with whiskey fuddling my brain. Maybe I could not have answered him—drunk or sober. I would leave such ruminations to Emerson and the Transcendental Club.
“I’m like you,” I said to Joseph, leaving it at that.
He must have interpreted my evasion to suit himself, because he became amiable.
“When I came east, I was like a wasp that’s been smoked out of its nest,” he said. “I was mad, and I wanted to sting—didn’t matter who so long as they were white people.”
Now, it was my turn to nod. I did so, I thought, with sagacity, as though I were R. W. Emerson himself. Being drunk, I might have looked foolish. Joseph had more to say, but I shut my ears to him. I listened to a wasp buzzing at the door to its house of ash-colored paper, built high up in the rafters. It was probably the very wasp—the real wasp—that had inspired Joseph’s simile. Henry would have relished this moment, I said to myself, and hoped I would remember to tell him about it.
“Once I saw a dead boy in the pond,” I said, apropos of nothing.
“You already said,” muttered Joseph, who, by now, was also on the excursion boat that carries a man out onto the waters of oblivion, where the scenery is obscured by mist and a false memory of Eden. The world had turned golden like the whiskey.
I was ready to apologize to Garrison. I would put down the glass and walk the twenty miles to Boston. I would tell him the story of my life with the eloquence and credibility of Dickens relating Oliver Twist’s. I would take Joseph with me so that he, too, could give an account of himself. Afterward, we would take a steamboat out onto the Atlantic and then head south to the Potomac and thence to Washington City, where we would address Congress. Our stories would so move its members that we would not have to demand or even ask for abolition. Those weak, contentious, backbiting men would become statesmen who, by acclamation, would put an end to human bondage. Everywhere, our people’s chains would be struck off for all time.
And then I fell asleep.
I dreamed of riding to freedom inside a coffin, or maybe I did n
ot dream but am only now recalling a vivid and harrowing thought that suddenly came to mind and seemed as doubtful as a dream.
In the morning, I woke to the nickering of a horse. In the stable, Joseph was reciting messianically from the Book of Exodus: “‘And the Lord said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence . . . And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.’” I was frightened, believing that Joseph had lost his wits in the night.
“Joseph, are you yourself this morning?”
My head pained me from the liquor and from having laid it all night on a sack of feed. I felt like somebody whose acquaintance I would not be pleased to make.
Joseph closed the book and looked into my eyes with a brightness and a fervor in his own that made me think again he had become deranged.
“I’m leaving Concord, and I want you to come with me.”
“Where?”
“Mexico, Samuel. Soon, others of our race will join us there, and, when we’re ready, we’ll march—an army of negroes—into the South to free our people.”
I looked at him as if he had just invited me to set myself afire or put a bullet in my brain.
“I’ve been thinking about this ever since I attended the Negro National Convention at Buffalo. I heard Henry Garnet’s ‘Call to Rebellion’ and was stirred to the roots of my soul. We can’t wait for enlightenment or for divine intervention to end our people’s misery. We must do what is required of us now.” He took a folded broadside from his pocket. “Listen, Samuel!”
He read from the broadside, which he had marked with a pencil manufactured by J. Thoreau & Co. Ironical, isn’t it? Or maybe not: The Transcendentalists believe that all things are connected, which would preclude the idea of chance from the business of the universe. In any case, the Thoreaus made an excellent pencil, which Henry himself had perfected.
I have kept the broadside, and I will set down something of what Joseph read to me.
You had far better all die—die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. If you would be free in this generation, here is your only hope. However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood. If you must bleed, let it all come at once—rather, die freemen, than live to be slaves. . . . Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been—you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. . . . Let your motto be resistance! resistance! RESISTANCE! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency. Brethren, adieu. Trust in the living God. Labor for the peace of the human race, and remember that you are FOUR MILLIONS.
Nathan Hale with a British noose around his neck must have looked as Joseph did then.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Samuel,” he said, his eyes glinting with a light seen mostly in those of the insane or the possessed.
He was mad—yes, and perhaps he had always been.
“I am safe in Concord,” I said, after having been momentarily returned to Jeroboam’s stable by the bewitching odors of hay, manure, sweat, and leather.
“What is your safety against the continuing bondage of four million souls?”
I would not be swayed. A sane man does not put his head twice in the lion’s mouth.
“You may have forgotten what it was like to be a slave,” I said, “but I haven’t.”
I waved my wrist at him languidly, like someone refusing a beggar alms. Without a hand, the gesture must have appeared ridiculous. Had our situations been reversed, I would have laughed to see Joseph’s empty cuff. His outrage increased to fury.
“It took courage to chop off your hand!” he cried. “Look into yourself to find it again.”
“To lose a hand to a single chop was far easier for me to bear than the accrued pain of a thousand stripes. My back is a calendar of torment, every scar a week spent in hell. One more lash will finish me.”
My histrionic remark must have sobered him. I watched his spine melt—that’s how it seemed. His shoulders rounded, and his head lowered. He held on to a stall rail to keep from falling, or else from flying off like Elijah in the fiery chariot.
“Samuel, we have a moral duty to take up arms.”
His indignation had blunted, and I began to wonder if I had allayed his brainstorm.
“Joseph, you are needed in Concord,” I said cunningly.
He shook his head in doubt and sorrow.
“If I could kill all slavers, masters, overseers, drivers, and slave breakers with a thought, I would think it,” I said. “But I can’t, and I won’t go back to ‘Egypt’ and the fiery furnace.”
To have done so would have meant more than the whip, the spiked collar, or the inside of a barrel bristling with nails. I had caused willful and malicious damage to my master’s property by having chopped off my hand. Of no further use to him, Jeroboam would hang me.
“I’ll go alone, then,” he said offhandedly, as if we had been arguing over a trip to Staten Island.
I was afraid, but I could not admit to my fear. Instead, I told him that I had work to do “on my character”; I needed to study the Word and see for myself whether or not He meant for me to spill blood.
“Take it.” He thrust the broadside into my pocket. “It’s the Word of God.”
There is none so arrogant as a man with a righteous cause.
A few days after Joseph had wrestled with his angel, or devil, or, what is worse, himself, he left Concord. Whether he went to Mexico and marched against the South, with the Almighty at one side and Henry Garnet at the other, took passage to Africa, as Garnet had also urged, or died ingloriously in a crib, a knife worked between his ribs, I never heard.
I stayed inside my shanty, wishing I could remain, like Henry, aloof from politics and causes. I would have liked to tend beans, ponder, and play the flute to a mouse ensconced underneath the floorboards. I would have liked to sit on the front step in the evening and watch the pond turn transparent before taking on the gaudy colors of sunset. I would have liked to be a Romantic and peruse nature’s book instead of Garrison’s newspaper. I would like to have had a room at Bush, where I could have thought high-mindedly and fashioned toys for the Emersons’ children.
Slavery is the first injustice, against which all other hardship and privation are mere annoyance; the drudgery of a purposeless life is the second. The first destroys the human spark and the body that should have housed it; the second, the mind, which Emerson says is holy. In those days, I read the Bible in search of the comfort one takes in the story of another’s misery. I read The Pilgrim’s Progress and thought Christian was a fool. I had lived too long in the City of Destruction to consider the Celestial City anything but a slave’s daydream. Divine Providence might have embraced the sparrow, but not the negroes—nor the Indians, the Chinese, the Irish, or the Hebrews. God would cast an earthward gaze from heaven’s tower and admire his roses, while the man hunters dragged me back to Virginia.
Emerson had asked me what it meant to be human. I should have told him that a person cannot be human if his life is perpetually in the grip of terror and uncertainty. Just as cities are built by people unafraid of marauding barbarians and the caprices of a hostile universe, so will we become human when we no longer live in fear for our lives.
FENDA WAS AN OLD WOMAN when I visited her. Her skin was the color of a coffee bean but not so smooth anymore. It was no longer read by her husband’s fingers, affectionately or passionately, according to the blood’s tides and fevers. Bright rags were twisted in her thin hair, giving her a fantastical appearance.
“I want to know what will happen to me,” I said after a child had answered my knock and taken me inside to her.
In the dusky room, she sat with a ball of wool on her skirts, knitting like Fate a span of mortal life, and I found myself looking nervously at what wool remained before she must taper off and finish.
Not me, I prayed, and the voice inside my head was that of a child, sitting in the slave pen, waiting to be sold. Let it be somebody else’s strand she works!
We are said to be a superstitious race. The kindest masters look upon us as benighted children in need of oversight; the cruelest consider us brutes incapable of reason and therefore beneath God’s notice. The Quaker widow, who sent me northward from Brooklyn, had read me a poem of William Blake’s that began:
My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as if bereav’d of light.
Blacks may be naïve, but so are poets who gaze wistfully at the world and hope to find large meanings in small things. They search for intimations with which to shake off the confines of a narrow life as avidly as any astrologer, medium, or diviner. Superstitions, myths, poems—what are they if not appeals against the death sentence handed down at the moment of our birth? They are proof of our fear and yearning. What were Henry’s Walden Pond, Waldo’s Over-Soul, and the Phalansteries of the associationists if not petitions to something beyond the tiny fires in the darkness that are every one of us?
Fenda laid her knitting in her lap and, at a glance, took my measure.
“I can see your past plain enough,” she said.
“It’s the future that interests me; I know my past,” I said, trying not to sound flippant.
“Just because you’ve had one don’t mean you know it,” she replied placidly.