by Norman Lock
I sighed and was about to leave her to her mystifications, when she laughed.
“Mister,” she said, “you are touchy as a white man!”
Maybe I was at that.
“What you want to know for?” she asked.
“Because I’m scared I won’t have one.”
“Everybody has their future to get through the best they can.”
“I deserve a happy one!” I blurted.
“Nobody—man, woman, or little child—deserves anything except as God wills it.”
At that moment, Fenda might have been the Almighty or one of the ferocious goddesses of the Hindus or the Babylonians. I would not have been surprised had she put on the head of a jackal or a robe of fire. Like a voodoo priestess, she could have tied her soul to the wool in her lap and bid it strangle me as the serpents had Laocoön and his sons.
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” she said, relenting. Perhaps she saw my fear or smelled it. Her nostrils had flared. In any case, she spoke gently, almost sadly, now. “As much as I can know of it.”
I thanked her more profusely than she deserved after having disconcerted me. She called to the child—her granddaughter—to bring a bowl of cool water, a candle, and a phosphorus match. I watched while she lit the candle, mumbled words to herself, and let the melted tallow drip into the bowl, where it made shapes on the water. Fenda then took up the bowl and brought it close to her clouded eyes.
“I sees a body falling in the water,” she said simply.
I supposed she meant the Carlson boy.
“I sees a book, but I don’t see your name wrote on its pages.”
I supposed it was one that Henry was writing.
“What else,” I asked impatiently.
“Piles of dead men.”
That, in itself, was not an uncommon sight.
“What killed them?” I asked.
She shook her head. Whether she was old or cataracts had also grown over her second sight, she saw nothing of the coming war between North and South, with its staggering heaps of corpses. She did not see Bull Run or Shiloh in the wax shapes floating in the bowl or the death of Henry’s friend John Brown.
She scattered barley onto a flat stone and scried what might befall me in the pattern of the grains.
“Will I love a woman?”
“You will ‘know’ a woman but not love,” she replied.
“Where? Where will I ‘know’ her?”
“In Adam’s Woods.”
“When?”
“Don’t know,” she said, sweeping barley grains from the stone with the edge of her hand. Her fingers, I saw, were gnarled like pine branches.
Seeing my disappointment with whatever vision of the outer world remained to her, she smiled ruefully, and, with a shrug of her frail shoulders, which I could easily have mistaken for a tremor, she said she was sorry.
Was she sorry for my unhappy future, or did she regret that she could be of little help to me in meeting it? I did not ask. I put a few coins in her hand—inscribed with an unintelligible future of its own—and left her. I stood in the dooryard, listening to the click, click, click of her needles.
III
A week after Joseph’s fiery departure, I was sitting beside Hawthorne in a car of the Fitchburg Railway. Having been in Concord, he was traveling to Boston to meet with his publisher, William Ticknor, and celebrate publication of his new book, Mosses from an Old Manse. Emerson had suggested that I accompany Hawthorne to Boston so that I could see to my own business there. He had gone so far as to buy my ticket and provide me with enough money for meals and a night’s stay in the town.
Also enclosed in the envelope was the briefest of notes: “Give my regards to Mr. Garrison.” I was annoyed by Emerson’s presumption—but only slightly. I had intended to apologize to the abolitionist, and Emerson had merely supplied the means to that end.
That morning on the train to Boston, I was besotted by movement. Mistress Jeroboam had once invited me to peer through a phenakistoscope. It amused her to see the dismay of her house niggers when they beheld, for the first time, the illusion of a horse set in frantic motion by the turning of a crank. In the same way, the world outside the carriage window appeared to dissolve to eyes innocent of speed. I had never before traveled more rapidly than a wagon or steamboat allowed. I glanced at Hawthorne—admired for his darkly handsome looks—to see what effect our headlong progress was having on him. He appeared not to notice, his hazel eyes fixed on the page of a book.
The fields flashed green or brown, according to their cultivation; ditches, brimming with recent rain, shone or turned black as clouds shambled past the sun; and telegraph poles—like an endless row of crosses—lurched behind us into a cloud of coal smoke. Having tired of reading, Hawthorne closed his book, stretched his legs in the aisle, and smiled.
“The first time aboard a train is thrilling.”
I agreed.
“I do miss Concord,” he said. “It suited me.”
I gave him a practiced look suggestive of polite inquiry.
“I am not comfortable in society and was under less obligation than I am in Salem or Boston. I don’t dislike people, but I tend to be shy of them.” He was silent awhile and then said, “Concord is dangerous, however; it can do mischief to those of weaker intellect.”
“How so?” I asked, his last remark having taken me by surprise.
“Idealism scares me, Samuel.”
Idealism meant nothing to me. I was sick of philosophy and wished that I might turn my head to the window and continue my observation of the earth in motion. I was fascinated, as if I were seeing the planet itself turning on its axis and hearing, in the train’s lumbering, the groan of its iron hinge.
“Emerson’s world consists of sublimely radiant ideas far removed from the lives of mill girls in Lowell, shoemakers in Lynn, hands in the lead-pipe works in Concord—or from those who like to drink their beer in Bigelow’s taproom. Waldo has a puritanical streak in him, and, like most ascetics, he doesn’t much care for our fallen world.”
I gave every appearance of being interested in what he had to say, although my mind was becoming lulled by the clicking of the tracks.
“He mistrusts our animal nature, and I have every reason to fear Puritanism,” he said. “My great-great-grandfather was a judge at the witch trials of the 1690s and never repented of it. It was a short step from Plymouth Rock, on which his father had stood, to the Salem pillory and stake. I’ve always feared that a strain of intolerance, which is no more than an extra measure of devotion to an ideal, might be a part of my character that needs only to be ‘barked’ for the grain to show.”
He murmured like a fly trapped in a jam pot. The light passed through my closed lids—pink and wavering, turning black when the train entered a grove of thickset trees. Words fell like meteors through a twilight of sleep: “Fanatical . . . theocracy . . . skepticism . . . arbiter . . . reason . . . mischief . . . ecstasy . . . sin . . .” I saw Henry on the river, sitting in the green-and-blue boat, waving his soft hat toward me and shouting, “Samuel! Samuel! Samuel, we’re here.”
Hawthorne was nudging me good-naturedly.
“I’m afraid my dull oratory put you to sleep.”
“I heard some,” I replied, as the world reemerged from somnolence.
“A bad speech, like a glass of raw whiskey, is best appreciated at its finish, when the senses are addled and judgment is in abeyance.”
Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, who, of the three, had the least concern for his reputation, could mint sentences bright as new pennies. They could have filled almanacs with their clever turns. Listening to them in conversation—Emerson leading, Thoreau affirming or contradicting, Hawthorne by turns romantic, mute, and ironical—I would become lost like Hansel and Gretel in the woods—scattered crumbs eaten by birds—or like Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in theirs—goodness eaten away by sin and spite. All three men spoke to posterity. They were concerned with a future in which I
had no place. Each one viewed the world through a separate curtain—lace, cretonne, or burlap redolent of dust. At the time, I believed that, of the four of us, only I saw the world for what it was: a plantation writ large. Emerson’s Nature, Henry’s Walden, Hawthorne’s Puritans were nothing but stories. I believed then that stories did not contain even so much as a morsel of truth, nor were they intended to unravel a mystery. They themselves were mysteries—insolvable and useless. I wonder if I do not believe that even now.
Hawthorne and I left the depot. Outside on Kneeland Street, Boston thrust up all around us, brick and stone, elm and chestnut trees, while down in the harbor, masts of sailing ships stood stiffly against the sky.
“I’ll leave you to your own affairs, then,” said Hawthorne, patting the top of his high hat to secure it against a freshening breeze that brought the smell of salt and tar from the east, where the bay and ocean were. “Do you know how to reach your destination?”
I could not decide if he knew I was bound for The Liberator offices. I told him I would find my way and left it at that.
“We’ll meet at Lamb Tavern, at Three Sixty-nine Washington Street.” He turned me toward the north and said, “Walk up Lincoln to Summer Street, then head northeasterly to Washington. I’ll be there at five o’clock. We’re staying the night at Park House, near the Common. We’ll be quite comfortable, and the cost is reasonable.”
I nodded. He smiled once again and was soon gone around a corner. I was proud that he had tipped his beaver hat to me, and I looked to see if anyone had noticed.
I asked a cabman if he knew the way to Garrison’s newspaper.
“Are you riding or going by shank’s mare?” he asked suspiciously, taking his pipe from between his bearded lips.
“I’m afraid I must walk,” I said, turning out my pockets to prove my lack of means. I had hidden Emerson’s largesse inside my shoe. The cabman, aloof on his seat, was not inclined to be helpful now that the possibility of a fare had been scotched.
“I’d very much appreciate the kindness, sir.” I hated that “sir.”
“Oh, very well!” he grumbled. He thumbed a dog-eared copy of Stimpson’s Boston Directory till he came to the newspaper’s address. “Twenty-five Cornhill.”
“I’m much obliged to you, sir.”
I knew better than to ask the way. He returned to smoking his church warden, and I went on until I saw a policeman, who gruffly directed me. The newspaper occupied the first floor of a brick building distinguished from a street of uniformly cheerless commercial enterprises by its signboard bearing the newspaper’s name and motto: The Liberator. Our Country Is the World—Our Countrymen Are Mankind. Standing at the street door, I felt my nerve—strained by each step I had taken after having left Hawthorne—failing.
What was I but an insolent fool to have insulted a man like Garrison, whose infamy was proof of his sincerity toward the great cause he espoused. I recalled stories of his courage that Henry had told me during our rambles. Accused of having fomented Nat Turner’s grisly revolt, the Georgia Senate had put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. He had been burned in effigy in Charleston and condemned from pulpits even in his native Boston, where a gallows had been raised outside his house. In 1835, during an address to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the hall had been stormed. Garrison escaped through a window but was seized by the mob, dragged through the streets, and, a noose having been put around his neck, he would have been lynched had it not been for the sheriff who jailed him. I could not do otherwise than admit that William Garrison was a braver man than I and risked more for abolition than Emerson, who argued, however cogently, for emancipation from the safety of lecture platforms and journal pages.
I got up nerve at last and went inside, where I was greeted by a young man whose shirt sleeves were engulfed by enormous sleeve protectors spotted with ink. My entrance had made him pause in his flight toward what I assumed was the press, whose mechanical clatter I could hear nearby. He wore a galley draped over one arm like a waiter’s linen cloth. Impatient to be gone about his business, he spoke to me nevertheless with the utmost respect—even, I thought, admiration. For an instant, I imagined that I saw in his face something very like envy, but such could not have been the case.
“May I assist you in anything, sir?” he asked.
“I wish to see Mr. Garrison, if convenient. I have come from Concord for the purpose.”
“May I tell Mr. Garrison your name?”
“Mr. Samuel Long.”
On hearing my name, did I imagine that he frowned?
“If you’ll please take a seat, I’ll tell him you are here.”
He withdrew down the hall. He seemed to be gone longer than was necessary. I began to fidget on the hard wooden chair while the clock over my head ticked off the seconds. The sharp smell of printer’s ink and dust stung my nose. Perhaps, I thought, I am to be kept waiting as a chastisement for my affront to Garrison and the cause. Then the door at the end of the passage opened, and Garrison came toward me.
“Mr. Long,” he said without much warmth. “You wish to see me?”
He was civil, if reserved. I did not merit a friendly reception.
“I have something to say to you, if you’ll allow me.”
“Very well. We can speak privately in my office.”
I followed him into an office cramped by an accumulation of books, pamphlets, and paper that spilled everywhere like excelsior from a broken crate. There was no prim green desk as in Henry’s cottage, nor an impressive one announcing a scholar of importance as in Emerson’s virtuously plain study. Garrison’s was the office of a busy man who had, in Hawthorne’s words, “work to do in the world.”
I glanced outside the window, where an enormous cask seemed to be floating down the street like a Spanish galleon. I had once traveled in just such a vessel. At the curb, a man was beating a dray horse, which hung its head dispiritedly. Garrison cleared his throat. I turned and sought his eyes, determined not to let my gaze wander. He searched mine with the watery eyes of someone who has spent his life poring over pages of printed matter. He was small, narrow, and worn, with a head nearly as bald and seemingly as breakable as an egg. I wondered all the more that such a man should be so very much a man that he could ignore the threat of a public humiliation and a repulsive death such as is usually reserved for people of color.
“Mr. Garrison,” I said, “I wish to apologize for my discourtesy to you at the Lyceum in Concord.”
“I was appalled by your hateful caricature of the negro,” he said in the sternest of voices.
He was angry, and I saw the fearlessness and probity of a man who could defy a lynch mob. Before my eyes, he seemed to grow in stature. To all appearances a grammar school master or a grocer’s assistant, he became, in my fancy, an Old Testament prophet—an Ezekiel in spectacles, foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem. I could have bowed down to him, but he would have mistaken my awe for abasement—more of the “hateful caricature.”
“Did you intend to shame your people by it?”
“No,” I said, rising to my full height to show him that I was unbowed. I, too, wanted to appear fearless.
Abruptly, his manner changed toward me. Where, a moment before, light had flashed angrily from the twin panes of his spectacles, now I could see kindness—sadness—in his eyes.
“Can you tell me, Mr. Long, what possessed you to ape Brother Tambo? To play the fool—a ‘darky’ or a ‘coon’ in a ‘Tom show’?”
I was like the animal inside the oyster shell: naked and vulnerable. Fancifully speaking, I wanted to shut the doors to my shell on their hinges and waggle my muscular tongue down into the mud to hide myself from Garrison’s piercing gaze.
“I doubted your sincerity,” I said after a silence.
“How so?” My remark had clearly taken him by surprise.
“I believed your interest in me went only as far as I could be useful to you. I was a knife you could sharpen on the grindstone of your righte
ousness,” I said like a well-spoken negro.
“Would that not be a good thing?” he asked.
I heard the creak of shoe leather as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
“No matter how righteous the cause, I don’t want to be useful at the price of being used. I’m sick of people’s curiosity. I am sick of being a curiosity.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised by his magnanimity. He stood behind his chair and inclined his head toward me, saying, “Then it is I who must apologize.”
For me to have rebuffed him—for reasons self-evident or obscure—would have been churlish.
“I’ll be glad to tell you my story,” I said.
He nodded, and I saw he meant to make no more of the folly that had brought me to his office. He called to the young man who had admitted me.
“Mr. Owens,” he said when the man appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Long has consented to share his story with our readers. Will you be so kind as to take down his words?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, sitting at a corner of Garrison’s desk with pencil and foolscap at the ready.
Garrison motioned that I, too, should sit and then did so himself.
“In your own time, Mr. Long, and in your own way,” said Garrison, cleaning the glass of his much-smudged spectacles with a handkerchief, into which, having finished his polishing, he blew his nose.
Haltingly, I narrated the events that time had spun into the thread of my life, in the order of their imperfect recollection. I appeared to be looking at Garrison, but what I saw were scenes from the past, translucent, like magic lantern slides. The result of my maundering later appeared in The Liberator. I will copy into this, my eulogy for Henry, passages from the published account having to do with my flight to freedom—what there can be of it for a fugitive. I have said enough already about my preceding years as a slave.
A SLAVE NARRATIVE: AS TOLD BY SAMUEL LONG TO WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
. . . When I had staunched the blood issuing from the stump of my wrist with hot tar, I walked through the vegetable patch as slowly as I dared, so as not to attract attention. Seen at a distance, I would have appeared like any other slave, and I’d had the presence of mind to put a hoe over my shoulder to further the deception. I made my way across a field planted with corn and managed to enter the woods at the back of Mr. Jeroboam’s plantation. Beyond it was a creek overgrown with sumac and cottonwood trees. My intention was to conceal myself in a thicket near the water, where I could quench my thirst and rest awhile. I was fortunate in having fresh water close to hand and also in its being late in the day, an hour or two until the sun would begin to set. I do not believe that, had I made my escape earlier in the day, I could have gotten away. Furthermore, if there had been no convenient woods, I would have soon been seized. Not caring for the hunt like his neighbors, Mr. Jeroboam did not keep dogs, another fact in my favor; dogs, especially bloodhounds, are more dangerous to a man in flight for his life than are men, who, unless they be Red Indians, can more readily be outwitted or “thrown off the scent.”