A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  After a wordless interval, he said, “Will you be staying on in Concord, Mr. Long, or moving north?”

  “I have no plans,” I replied.

  “You must be cautious. Do not believe for an instant that you are safe.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I continue to be wary even now that I have my papers.”

  I tasted the gall of a momentary resentment, because he had papers and I had none but a forgery.

  “You must make yourself useful, Mr. Long.” To my questioning look, he said, “To Mr. Emerson and Mr. Garrison. If you can be a tool for their purpose—which is a noble one—they may reward you with your freedom.”

  I almost asked if it did not mortify him to be the tool of others—regardless of the cause—but I thought better of it.

  “General Lafayette tipped his hat to me when I was a boy,” he said. “If I was worthy of a great man’s respect, I am worthy of that of lesser men. We are men, Mr. Long, and we should feel neither shame nor inferiority. We cannot help but feel afraid, for our enemies are many and cruel and our protection is nonexistent, but we must swallow our fear as we have had to swallow so much else in life.”

  In the Emersons’ front parlor, where the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Transcendental Club had assembled, Hayden seemed to grow vague, while I felt empty and wooden, as if I had been hollowed out by termites. I do not know why I should have felt this way. We were not ignored; we were treated like guests. Emerson, Garrison, and the rest were all smiles and compliments. I do not recall if Henry was there. While we were being fussed over, I could not rid my mind of the feeling that Hayden and I were two blue-ribbon oxen at a county fair.

  The conversation traveled along the rails of propriety, as it applied to subjects hallowed by the recognition of their import. None dared laugh or smile, except in the beaming manner with which we indicate our approval of others. After a time, Henry—so he was there!—grew merry, as he often did in front parlors when high spirits plucked at his sleeve, which they would at unlikely times. He sang a comical song, and then he danced in that clodhopping way of his. Emerson, Garrison, and the rest looked dismayed until—spurred by Henry’s example or by the wish to save him from embarrassment—Hayden got up and danced, lumbago and all. Before my wondering eyes, he once more took on shape and substance. I wished that I might take his hand again to confirm his reality and to convey my admiration.

  I might have said to him, “You have my respect, sir.”

  He might have replied, “If it is freely given, I am pleased to have it.”

  “I see in you an example of how to be a black man living in a world where we are not wanted.”

  “Do not mistake this caricature for the thing itself.”

  “‘What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency,’” I might have said, invoking Henry Garnet’s “Call to Rebellion.” But I did not. Our exchange was supposititious and for my mind alone.

  The party having been brought to an end by the impending arrival of the Boston stage, Hayden was carried out the door in a flood of well-wishers and into Emerson’s shay.

  I WALKED TO BRISTER’S HILL to be among my own people. I had avoided the hill, telling myself that it was not on the way to anyplace I happened to be going. The truth lay in the disquiet I had felt when visiting Fenda’s shack: a disquiet closer to disgust. Walking the dusty path that wound among shanties and chicken yards, my gorge had risen at seeing once again scenes familiar from my childhood.

  Its being Sunday, most of the people on the hill were at church. It had been built of pine boards, with a shake roof, and with the expectation of paint and a modest steeple, but the collection basket had not garnered enough coins to pay for adornments. Still, the roof had been washed by rain, the walls (two of them) bleached by the sun, the floorboards scoured by river sand, and the benches dusted by the worn seats of the faded clothes of the brothers and sisters in Christ. A plain altar and a wooden cross, with a suffering Jesus carved in hickory, were all that set the room apart from a grange hall. And yet, as I listened to the exhortations of the preacher and the fervent Amens of his congregation, I sensed that something of glory clung to the bare walls like invisible tendrils of ivy, and I could almost see the Holy Ghost descending on a slant of light.

  I had not thought much about religion since I was a boy being “read over” with the other house slaves by Mistress S— in her second-best parlor on Sunday mornings. The blessings of the Savior were not for us, and heaven, if we were ever let inside the gate, would be just another plantation. Henry’s and Emerson’s relations with the next world were subtle and complicated. Neither man would set foot inside a church, unless it was to see someone off to holy wedlock or eternal life. I doubt they believed in the latter—not as Sunday schools teach it. They had their own ideas about the former, as well. Lord, deliver us from eccentrics and fanatics! No, I had not had much to do with hope and glory.

  That day in the African Baptist Church, on Brister’s Hill, we sang an old hymn that the masters and overseers would have paid us with the lash for singing, if we had dared:

  Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel?

  Deliver Daniel, deliver Daniel?

  Didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel,

  And why not every man?

  I had intended to slink home to my cabin after the service, but the congregation eddied around me like an affectionate tide carrying me out the church door. For an instant, I thought I would be borne along, down the hill and into the Sudbury, to have my sins washed clean while the choir sang “We Are Going Down Jordan.” I got as far as a deacon’s dooryard, where a red rooster was picking at the ground as if the Almighty had seen fit to scatter it with seed pearls.

  “Sir, we’d be pleased to have you to supper with us,” said the deacon, whose name was Cato Robbins.

  Warily, I accepted his invitation. I was unused to the hospitality of negroes, who, as slaves, had neither houses, chickens, nor extra plates to lavish on guests. In fact, I could not recall, as I stood dithering in the Robbins’s front yard, ever having been entertained by a black person, except as one slave would share with another a jar of corn liquor doled out on Christmas day by their master to make them grateful.

  “Give me your hat, Mr. Long,” said Robbins when we had crossed the threshold.

  He hung my hat on a peg, and then, rubbing his calloused hands together, he asked me to sit in the best chair. I could hear his wife moving about in the shed, where the stove was. She was cheerfully humming “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel?” while, one by one, shelled peas rang into a pot.

  The Robbins’s two-room house was little better than my own ramshackle place. It was, however, clean and tidy, and the walls had been whitewashed. A rug, stitched together of once-colorful rags, seemed more like a flag of defeat than a bold show of defiance against the general dreariness—relieved, in part, by cheap engravings of a Holy Land without negroes, which had been distributed by the Baptist Missionary Society.

  “You visiting, Mr. Long? Have you got people on the hill?” asked Robbins.

  “I live down by the village.”

  “What wouldn’t I do for a nice piece of bottomland? This godforsaken dirt would likely kill a mule if a man had a mule to kill. I know it’s killing me,” he said with a laugh. “We be that much closer to God’s heaven than folks living down below, but, Lord, it is a hardscrabble life!”

  “Bless us, Jesus!” his wife sang out from the kitchen.

  “I have a bean field,” I said, somewhat bending the truth.

  “Do you now? Beans must just about grow themselves down there!” he said with an envy I enjoyed. “Well, we must all be glad to have work to do in the vineyard.”

  “Praise Him!” said Mrs. Robbins while she set out the supper.

  We made a meal of corn mush, fatback, and peas, which we ate on mismatched plates. The food was good, and the Robbins’s faces were kind,
but I am ashamed to recall that I looked down on them as simple folk without an ounce of wit or intellect. While I can claim a small measure of both now, I possessed neither quality then. I pitied the Robbinses the triviality of their conversation, which took in the weather, the preacher’s remarks, the shabbiness of Lester Ingraham’s Sunday coat, the Robbins boy’s sprained thumb, the girl’s suitor, the health of the chickens, and a fried-fish supper held at the church the weekend before. Not a word was said about the Mexican War or the previous day’s antislavery meeting, which they had not attended.

  None of the negroes living on Brister’s Hill or along the Great Meadows, where a second colony had been established after Massachusetts had outlawed slavery in 1783, had been present in Henry’s dooryard.

  “I did not see you yesterday at the abolitionists’ meeting,” I said, determined to throw Robbins into confusion.

  He fidgeted, watched a fly on the rim of his plate, and then looked at me.

  “I was in the fields yesterday.”

  “The meeting went on till near sundown. You might have come later to hear Mr. Hayden speak. Mr. Hayden is a courageous man.”

  Modestly, I did not mention my own contribution to the evening, which, in my mind, had assumed heroic proportions, although, in retrospect, I realize that I had made a poor showing next to Hayden. I have never gotten over my shyness. You would think a slave could not be shy; that such niceties would be no more possible for him than for a sheep or a dog. There is no time or place for privacy on a plantation. But even in a litter of newborn dogs, there will be a runt. I had been the runt of mine.

  “Well, you see, Mr. Long, I had the dirt and sweat of the day on me, and I was afraid to give the white folks any offense. There is nothing worse for a man’s pride than to watch other folks move upwind of you.”

  Robbins laughed to prove to me that he had only been joking, but I knew he had spoken in earnest. I, too, had felt the same humiliation. Even so, I sensed that something else had kept him from going down the hill to Walden Woods the day before—something closer to the marrow of the truth. Much later, I realized that the women of the Female Anti-Slavery Society would have welcomed the black people of Concord much as a congress of ornithologists would a flock of birds.

  He drank some water—he was, unfortunately for me, a teetotaler. He put the glass on the table, wiped his lips on the back of his hand, grunted, but still he would not speak his mind.

  I waited to hear what he might say.

  He shifted uneasily in the second-best chair. The ordinary noises of a summer’s day—children playing in the yard, two men arguing in the lane, squabbling chickens, a disgruntled crow, a peevish bluebottle—stole into the room with us, but they soon faded into the silence of the familiar.

  To provoke him into speech, I said, “White people like to talk about the black man and his troubles.”

  He replied carefully, like a man refusing alms who might have to beg a crust later, when he was truly hungry.

  “We’re grateful to the abolitionists and to all white folk who must speak for us because our tongues have been cut out, in a manner of speaking.” He was as nervous as if I myself had been a white man. “But the plain truth is, Mr. Long, I feel like a child whenever I see Mr. Emerson. Not that he ain’t good to us. He’s a fine man. Lot of fine white people in Concord, Mr. Long—no denying it. But . . .”

  “But a man gets tired of being the object of other people’s goodness,” I said, finishing his thought for him.

  “He sure does!” said Robbins, pleased that we were in agreement on so delicate a matter.

  I did not want to be in agreement with him. I had let myself become ensnared in his feeling of inferiority. I realized that I had been vain of my association, which I thought of as intimacy, with the important men of Concord. Suddenly, I felt like a feudal lord who, visiting the hovel of one of his serfs to show his magnanimity, falls into a dung heap.

  “Now, Henry Thoreau is a fool!” said Robbins with a horse laugh that invited inspection of his back teeth. “Sometimes, he stops by to visit when he’s out rambling. He always brings some little gift: a flute whittled out of a fir branch, a pretty stone picked up out of the river, or a pinecone. Lord knows, if we wanted pinecones, we’d go out and get them ourselves! But he’s thoughtful like that and likes to sit in the yard and tell stories. The children love him. Yes, sir, Henry’s a sweet fool! I know the man’s got sense and education, but he don’t show off like some.”

  I resented Robbins’s familiarity with Henry, whom I considered mine. Hadn’t Emerson put me in charge of him? Wasn’t I paid a stipend every week to keep him from mischief? Henry had showed an entirely different side of himself to this poor, ignorant black—a quality I had not seen before.

  “He’ll walk up Brister’s Hill with a string of perch if he thinks somebody might be hungry for a fish fry.”

  A book ought not to be a stew pot of gossip and opinions, but that is where the truth lies sometimes, if one has the wit to sift for it.

  “You’re a friend of his, aren’t you, Mr. Long?”

  “We’re good friends,” I said. “You might say I’m his sounding board.”

  Oh, how readily we will plume ourselves with the merest acquaintance with famous men—or infamous ones if an element of romance attaches to them!

  “You don’t say!” said Robbins respectfully.

  His gaze was fixed on the violet light of dusk seen through the window behind me.

  To make sure that he took my meaning, I said, “He likes to try out his thoughts on me before he writes them down.”

  Thus did I cast Henry’s habit of thinking aloud in a light flattering to me. Frankly, I seldom offered him my opinion of his grand ideas, knowing that he would have welcomed it about as much as a flea’s. Or so I thought. Maybe he would have been pleased to hear it.

  Robbins whistled and said, “A man like him is bound to have trunks full of thoughts.”

  “He’s got a fat ledger book full of them,” I boasted, as if I had been its author. “Mr. Channing calls Henry’s hut ‘the inkstand’ because of all the ink he’s used up writing them.”

  “Henry never has a serious word to say when he visits,” said Robbins approvingly.

  To hear that there was a side to Henry that Robbins had not seen pleased me. I was like a dog jealous of its master’s cossetting, unwilling to share it with anyone else even if it meant an occasional beating.

  “Mr. Thoreau is mostly serious,” I said haughtily. “He’s a philosopher and not a clown or minstrel show comic.”

  “Philosopher!” said Robbins with a note of veneration in his husky voice. “To think that the man who plays a wood flute and rolls around on the ground with the children philosophizes!”

  Henry had a streak of boyishness running like base metal through the ore of his character. But mostly he was serious. I would watch him pursue the business of philosopher, chasing down an idea and treeing it as a dog does a raccoon or a runaway. I would often see him writing in his journal. For all his seeming indolence and carefree nature, he worked as hard in his hut on his manuscripts and lectures as he did in his bean field or at a barn raising. While he was sociable insofar as he wished to be, he was always ready to lend his strong arm, which his narrow frame belied, and his mechanic’s skill to his neighbors’ betterment.

  “Henry’s not a person to lord it over the rest of us. Not like some,” said Robbins.

  I wondered if he meant me.

  His wife—her name, if I remember aright, was Charlotte—came out of the kitchen and sat on what must have been the third-best chair. It was wobbly, like a milking stool with a short leg. She was a pleasant woman in her early middle age. She wore a red rag around her neck, and I wondered idly if it might not have been hiding a scar. Tired, she spread her legs and allowed her dress to drape demurely in a gingham fold between them.

  “Supper things all washed and put away,” she said.

  Outside in the yard, the boy was tormenting a chicken
with a stick while, standing by the fence, the girl waited for her suitor, or so I supposed by the pink ribbon in her hair and the way she would rise impatiently onto her toes.

  “Another day gone,” said the deacon.

  “Another day tomorrow,” she replied with a woman’s unconquerable optimism.

  “Lord willing,” said the deacon.

  The shadows had come out from under the furniture and climbed halfway up the wall while we had been talking. Robbins began to fidget in his chair. I sensed that the time had come for me to take my leave of them. I did so with the noblesse oblige the feudal lord would have shown if he had not fallen into a backyard shit pile.

  Mrs. Robbins eased past her husband’s bulk at the front door and stepped out into the yard to examine the darkening sky for omens, as she would doubtless do every day of her life. Her husband’s shadow fell on top of hers in a way that made me shiver.

  “Come again,” called Robbins from his threshold while I started down the hill toward Walden.

  I did not think that his invitation was in earnest, and I never stopped there again. I would leave such frolics to Henry, who could afford to be democratic. I had my way to make in the world and needed to be careful of the company I kept. It would do me no good to be considered just another Brister’s Hill negro. Henry detested the pious—he called them “goodies.” So did Emerson, who was more genteel about it. I did not care for them, either, but I was afraid of their disapproval.