A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  “Hallo, Hawthorne!” shouted Henry from our lofty vantage, but he must not have heard him. “He’s probably got his nose in Longfellow’s new poem, when he should be opening his pores to this miraculous light—all the more miraculous because it isn’t in the least rare or kept out of circulation by bankers.”

  I felt adrift. Night was seeping from the rocks and soon would gather its shadows like a tide to drown first the woods and then the cliff. And when the cliff had been eaten away by darkness, I would be as a man standing in midair—a ropewalker with neither pole nor rope on which to step out into oblivion.

  Henry had taken off his hat and was sitting on a boulder like a man in a pew, charmed by the stained glass.

  “A poor man with holes in his pockets can profit by sunsets as well as a rich one with a vault in which to keep his money and, at the last, his poor bones.”

  I dared not speak my mind. I was doubtful and afraid. I wanted faith but could no more raise it from the depths than Hawthorne could Leviathan.

  “‘THE INACCESSIBLENESS OF EVERY THOUGHT but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it,—you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.’”

  I was painting the Emersons’ fantastical summerhouse, which Henry and Bronson Alcott had built for them at Bush. Emerson had been reading aloud to Lidian from an essay he had written several years before. He intended to refer to it in a lecture he was to give at Freemasons’ Hall. Lidian, who deferred always to her husband in matters of philosophical expression, had become lost in the thicket of his thought. Listening to him reason on the poet’s task, I, too, had caught my sleeve on a bramble, so to speak.

  “I don’t understand what you are saying, Mr. Emerson,” she said from the shadow of her coal-scuttle bonnet. Her decorousness extended even to her husband.

  “What don’t you understand?” he asked.

  “What you mean by ‘the inaccessibleness of every thought, save—’”

  “—But, not save,” he said, with a mild reproof. “The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful.”

  “The phrase ‘The thought that we are in’ puzzles me.”

  And also me, I said to myself while I liberated a blister beetle from the wet paint in which it had become mired.

  “I mean to say that we are—every one of us—locked inside a thought that excludes all others,” said Emerson tolerantly.

  “Mr. Emerson, dear, the meaning is not clear to me.”

  I wondered whether or not Lidian addressed her husband with equal formality in their marriage bed and decided that she did.

  Emerson emphatically closed his journal, indicating a change of topic.

  “Samuel, I’ve read your account in The Liberator. It was very fine indeed.”

  “Mr. Samuel, I was very much moved when Mr. Emerson read it to me,” said Lidian, whose genial spirit no illness seemed able to dampen. “I cried at how much you had suffered.”

  I thanked them both.

  “I have heard from Mr. Garrison,” said Emerson. “He reports that your narrative produced a great effect in his readers—as much, in fact, as Frederick Douglass’s had.”

  I did not know what I was expected to say, so I said nothing. In a silence magnified by the drone of a wasp, the side gate swung open on its hinges.

  “Please excuse me, gentlemen,” said Lidian, rising. “I must see to the grocer’s boy. Pray he has bought the mutton.”

  “Mutton!” Emerson grumbled during her retreat to the side gate and her groceries. “You see how the world turns on trifles. The circus of commerce never loses its power to astonish and delight us. Mutton, by God!”

  I could not make out whether his grievance was with mutton or with the mundane.

  “Mr. Garrison has suggested—and I agree wholeheartedly—that you ought to tell your story at antislavery society meetings held in Boston, Lexington, and here in Concord. You will be doing your people a great service—the Union, too, if reason and honorable debate can lessen the division between North and South and forestall a civil war.”

  “I am not an orator,” I said brusquely, hoping to put an end to the conversation.

  “Oratory is not wanted,” replied Emerson. “We have enough orators on both sides of the issue to sink the nation under their heavy hearts, leaden words, and ponderous rhetoric. What is needed is the thing itself.”

  I must have appeared doubtful, for he went on to say, “What is urgently needed is a man who will say plainly and truthfully how it was to be a chattel slave in another man’s possession and to have removed himself at the risk of his life.”

  Is this, then, what I am meant to be? I wondered.

  “I would like to think about it, Mr. Emerson.”

  “Do. Do give some thought to it, Samuel, and give us your answer when you’ve made up your mind one way or the other.”

  He stood, tucked the journal under his arm, and walked off toward the house—to see to the mutton, perhaps.

  I finished my painting for the day and, putting aside my bucket and brush, went home to my—call it a house. I was tired of living in shacks. Henry was welcome to his, but I would call mine by a more spacious and auspicious name.

  “Why am I so cross-grained, so unable to enjoy my new freedom, no matter that I had made myself a present of it?” I said to the dusty bleeding hearts growing in my dooryard. Self-pity can be a spice for our daily meat—for our ration of mutton and bitter ale.

  V

  Later that summer, Henry went to jail. Sam Staples, who had offered to pay his poll tax, walked sheepishly beside him, past the poor farm, the poorhouse, across the Mill-dam, and into the Middlesex jailhouse. Henry took possession of his second-story cell like a dog a manger or, better said, a doge his summer palace. For subjects, he had only one: a “barn burner.” He, too, had been careless with the god’s gift to humankind, which Heraclitus deemed the soul’s chief constituent, together with water, the baser part.

  That night, a drunkard in the cell below Henry’s called on the darkness to answer a question.

  “What is life?”

  The night gave no answer, so the questioner provided one: “So this is life!”

  “What is life?” he asked again, and, after a silence, once more replied, “So this is life!”

  “What is life?”

  “So this is life!”

  “What is life?”

  “So this is life!”

  The drunkard examined the night like a witness in the dock, but the night had no answer for him—not having seen any more than the sot did of what lay inside the heart’s darkness, or else being unwilling to disclose it.

  The tedious litany continued for some time, until Henry called out to him in exasperation, “Well, what is life, then?”

  Neither the drunkard nor the night made reply.

  Henry had been searching for the answer since his Harvard days. He had looked for it in books, in the wilds, in conversation with Emerson, Channing, Fuller, Alcott, Hawthorne, and his brother, John. Never having found it, did he stand by his cell window or with an ear to the floor, straining with every particle of his being to hear what a drunkard would say? For a moment, did he have the greatest of expectations of finding the answer to philosophy’s fundamental concern in the Middlesex jailhouse, on a hot July night in 1846?

  Giving no more thought to his place in the universe than a badger would, the barn burner began to sing “Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken.” I sometimes wonder whether simple men might not be nearer the truth than the titans among us, if only they had the ambition to speak it.

  I remember standing outside the jailhouse that night and calling as loudly as I dared to the barred window of his cell: “Henry, Henry Thoreau.” I could see Sam Stap
les in his house across the alley from the jail, sitting at his supper table. Fortunately, he did not look up from his plate.

  The silence seemed absolute—deaf as I was in my nervousness to the noise of crickets, night birds, mosquitoes, creak of branches, and the occasional restless nickering of a horse. To have raised my voice in order to be heard would have shattered the night like a pane of glass, or at least it would have shattered my strained nerves. The moment brought back for me the fear and stealth of nights when I would creep outside into the dark rather than use the common straw and—later—nights spent on Ragged Island, sick with fever, during my flight from Master and Mistress Jeroboam’s South.

  “Henry!” I called up to the window once again.

  He had not heard me. He might have been praising the virtues of temperance and a natural life to his companion; he might have been turning over the thoughts that he would later spin into a famous essay on his imprisonment. More likely, he was asleep. He had had a busy day. He had left his hut in the afternoon to have a shoe mended in the village and had gone to jail instead—carried there by his philosophy and bravado. Henry had gone to jail and would come out more or less the same Henry. In my opinion, conversions do not happen overnight. I believe in a Darwinism of gradual change in the mind as in nature and not in the burning bush or lightning bolt. The road to Damascus leads to Damascus. Henry’s night in jail had been a gesture—although not an empty one, I’ll grant him that.

  The next day, Sam Staples released him. To give the rebel his due, Sam had to evict him. A veiled woman, who might have stepped from a Romantic novel into plain-speaking Concord, had paid his poll tax for him.

  “Henry, if you will not go of your own accord, I will put you out, for you cannot stay here any longer,” said Sam, tired of Henry’s shenanigans.

  Henry left his fellow prisoner to finish his own sentence, and, having caught and saddled his horse, was soon gathering huckleberries on Fairhaven Hill.

  His imprisonment had been another experiment. He enjoyed it too much for it to have impressed me, though the world celebrates it as a brave act of civil disobedience. Emerson was right when he wrote to him afterward:

  Don’t run amuck against the world. Have a good case to try the question on. It is the part of a fanatic to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or a surplice, on pædo-baptism, or altar-rails, or fish on Friday. . . . The state tax does not pay the Mexican War. Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does. Yet these you do not stick at buying.

  Furious, Henry threw the letter into the fire. When he strode off on his short legs like a field marshal to the barricades, I filched what was left of it.

  I never discovered the identity of the mysterious woman who had paid his tax. Many women admired Henry’s mind; few, however, saw in him the requisite material for a husband, much less a lover. He was not handsome. Hawthorne was handsome; so, too, was Emerson. Henry had been roughly made. His brows were too beetling, his eyes too sunken, his legs too short, his arms too long, his shoulders too slumped. His clothes were out of fashion, and his manners belonged to a galoot rather than a gallant. He would not have graced a drawing room or a lady’s parlor. I could not picture him in a woman’s bed. When he danced, as he sometimes did after singing “Tom Bowline,” his favorite air, his big feet rode roughshod over his poor partner’s toes. An awkward figure in society, he could be seen to best advantage in his hut, in the woods, in the taverns of Concord, and in the Middlesex County jailhouse, where his reputation was made as much as it would be in the lyceums. He would turn his brief but glorious imprisonment into literature. Was this alchemy no better than a forger’s art? Was the use to which Henry put his action a kind of profiteering? His fellow citizens considered the night he spent in their jail in no more favorable light than his having burned down three hundred acres of Concord woods and very nearly their town. Those who did not know him might have mistaken him for a fool. But for all his misadventures, Henry could be kind, especially to children, who loved his antics and his stories.

  When Henry left his cell, he was not a changed man so much as a chastened one. After that night, he would be more alert to the concerns of ordinary men. We live in the natural world, which was his constant study, after all, although I swear there is no more unnatural creature than a man. Certainly, there is no more cussed one. The following week, he lent his front yard to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.

  “Henry, you’ve become a ‘come-outer,’” said Emerson, who had come out for abolition two years before.

  “I’m afraid that our efforts will be like those of a man who sets out to save a gnat from drowning and, in the process, squashes it,” replied Henry soberly.

  “We can only try,” said Emerson.

  “I fear for the gnat,” said Henry.

  Is he talking about Nat Turner and his catastrophic uprising? I wondered.

  Why it should have taken Emerson so much longer to come out than Garrison or John Brown could be construed as a measure of his mind’s fretfulness—the solemn debate he needed to have with himself before a decision could be made. He might change his mind, but not lightly. Henry could be as impulsive as a water bug, but his mentor was a rock on which great causes could dash themselves to pieces while he deliberated their merits. There was no saxifrage that could crumble the mountain of his opinions and beliefs save one: reason.

  The meeting in Walden Woods had been publicized in The Liberator and other antislavery papers of the time. The Transcendentalists turned out like a fraternal order. Garrison arrived with Lewis Hayden, who had once belonged to Henry Clay, a senator from Kentucky. Hayden was a great man and a brave one. After he had spoken movingly of his life, I made my way to the front of the crowd and, clearing my throat as emphatically as Henry was wont to do, asked Garrison if I might not also tell my story.

  “By all means, Mr. Long! I dare say there is hardly a soul here who has not read your narrative in The Liberator, but to have it from your own lips would be a privilege.”

  “Bravo!” shouted Emerson, standing beside Lidian, who encouraged me with a warm smile and a nod of the head.

  I sought Henry’s gaze to see what emotion it might convey, but his eyes were hidden in the deep sockets of his face. Hayden and I shook hands with the solemnity of two mourners at a funeral while the abolitionists applauded. We might have been congressmen, heroes of a hard-fought campaign, or a pair of talking monkeys.

  I repeated what I had told Garrison and his scribe in Boston, although not so readily. I stumbled over my words, as if the consonants had been boulders in my path. I kept the article that reported on the meeting, which appeared in the Middlesex County Republican. Its editor, William Schouler, was generous in the space he allocated to my recollections. I will spare my readers their reiteration and supply only the introduction for their curiosity.

  ABOLITIONISTS GATHER IN WALDEN WOODS, CONCORD, FIRST OF AUGUST, 1846.

  MR. EMERSON & MR. GARRISON, OF BOSTON, ADDRESS CROWD.

  STIRRING ACCOUNTS OF CRUELTY GIVEN BY FORMER SLAVES!

  Abolitionists and sympathizers came to Walden Woods on Saturday last to attend a meeting of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, presided over by one of its founders, Miss Prudence Ward, of that town. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson, eminent moral philosopher, poet, lecturer, and essayist, together with Mr. William Lloyd Garrison, famed abolitionist and publisher of The Liberator newspaper, each delivered an address from the front porch of Mr. Henry Thoreau’s cottage. Also a resident of Concord, Mr. Thoreau is a naturalist, an author of many essays, and the inventor of an improved pencil, manufactured by the family business of J. Thoreau & Co.

  Two former slaves, Mr. Lewis Hayden, now residing in Boston, and Mr. Samuel Long, presently of Concord, spoke with natural eloquence and the fervor of men who have undergone the severest trials under the execrable institution of chattel slavery.

  The sky above Concord was gray and gloomy, suitable for so grave an occasion, and a light rain
fell intermittently on—

  I do not remember its having rained that day, but I do recall that, after Hayden and I had testified to our former abjection, a party of soldiers marched into Henry’s yard, accompanied by a drum and an old senile dog belonging to Hartwell Bigelow. A sergeant of infantry stood in the doorway and, with a scarcely perceptible seesawing on his boot heels, fulminated against the Mexicans with the vitriol of Jonathan Edwards denouncing sin or Father Mathew the evils of strong drink. That the soldiers exuded an atmosphere of spiced gin was beside the point. How so intemperate an interruption of that most sober of convocations should have been neglected by the Middlesex County Republican is inexplicable, unless it did not happen on the day of the abolitionists’ revival meeting, but on some other. Who knows but I might have imagined it while soaking in a redolent atmosphere of my own making, snug in my hermitage. Memory is partly fact, partly fumes.

  And yet, I do remember Henry’s glowering. . . . Well, Henry often glowered, and, just as often, smiled like anybody else. At the end of the day, the Henry Thoreau who materializes from the pages of this book will be my Henry. There were as many Henries as there were people who held opinions of him. The same will doubtless be true for Samuel Long. People are not truths—we are not even facts. We are atmospheres no easier to catch than a flea or weigh than a gnat. We treat one another like stones able to be grasped by the hand and put in our pockets, forgetting the holes in them.

  After the meeting, which had been routed by soldiers or rain or had come to an end in the ordinary way by having exhausted the matter at hand, Hayden and I walked under the chestnut trees to the Emerson house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike. I became aware of him as a man. He wore his hair cropped, and his beard and mustache were neatly trimmed. He had the smell of stale tobacco and wintergreen about him, along with a faint odor of sweat in his clothes. Manager of a Boston haberdashery, he outfitted himself with garments that were almost fashionable. While he had endured much in his youth before escaping from Kentucky into Canada, only his eyes told of his suffering—I never saw his naked back or shoulders. I was surprised to hear him grumble about his lumbago. The complaint seemed trivial for a man whose catalogue of misfortunes rivaled Job’s—a splinter in the foot of a condemned man limping to the gallows. The ardor with which he had addressed the crowd had been dampened: He was becoming like a coal that has given up its light and heat. But to my eyes, Hayden possessed the particulars of character that make each of us an individual. Sauntering along the dusty road, we were two men together, content to speak or to keep silent as we liked.