A Fugitive in Walden Woods

by Norman Lock

  While I walked through the crowding trees, my spirit rebelled. Why should I be always cautious? I asked of the darkness. I don’t want to go to church and shout halleluiahs and Amens or tiptoe around Emerson’s study as if it were a flower bed I might trample. I was sick of putting my life in somebody else’s hands. I had a hand of my own. It was black, and it wanted nothing more at that moment than to hold a jar of whiskey or to tickle a woman. I wished to be in some low haunt, among worthless, no-account black men for a while.

  I plunged down the hill, heedless of tree roots and creepers, eager to destroy the person whom, up until now, I had had little hand in making. There comes a time in a man’s life when he needs to hit rock bottom—to be barked like a tree branch, skinned like a rabbit—to be reduced to soup bones by macerating self-pity—to be, finally and entirely, naked as on the day the light first dawned for him. Sometimes there is no better way to begin a reformation than with rioting. To stupefy oneself—to court the sickness unto death—can be of sovereign benefit when one does not know his own mind. Lying in his own vomit, he remembers. He is ashamed, and he remembers.

  BY GOOSE POND, A MULATTO named Isaac Till made whiskey. Born in Spanish Town, he had been freed in 1833, when the English abolished slavery throughout the empire. His nose had been cut off by the plantation militia in the Baptist War, as the slave revolt in Jamaica was called. With a bandanna over his nose and mouth, he looked like a highwayman, and indeed his shanty, with a still in the backyard, was called the Highwayman’s. The makeshift saloon was condoned by the village as a harmless outlet for negroes. Patrons liked to sit in Till’s yard and drink his fiery liquor. One of them might play a fiddle while the rest did a country dance, but mostly they drank, told stories, or pitched pennies.

  They had welcomed me until I began to speak. My conversation, having been curried by Henry and Emerson, made them wary. Sitting on a rail fence like a row of sullen blackbirds, they glared at me from bloodshot eyes until Till sent me sprawling with an elbow to the gut. Those on the fence guffawed at my humiliation. Till helped me to my feet, dusted me off, and filled a jar with whiskey “on the house.”

  I poured it down my throat as if Till had indeed ruptured my gut and it was crying out for an anodyne to ease the pain.

  “Ordinarily, we don’t care for high-toned niggers, but I see by your missing hand that you have toiled in the vineyard, like the preacher says. So—What’s your name?” I told him it. “Sit yourself down, Samuel; we don’t stand on ceremony at the Highwayman. Sit down and take your mind off your feet.”

  I was prepared to dislike Isaac Till for his pompous and fulsome manner as much as I had Cato Robbins for his slyly obsequious one. I would have gotten up and left, but the whiskey was working through my veins like God’s own grace.

  “You looking for something at the bottom of that jar—or trying to forget it?”

  His bandanna would flutter like a sail spilling wind when he talked; a laugh set it flapping.

  “Just trying to get along,” I said, unable to decide on an answer to his question.

  “That’s how it is in this woebegone world. Not fit for a black man or a white one, either. There ought never to have been a sixth day of creation. God should have let well enough alone, and if He’d rested Himself after His labors at the Highwayman’s, He’d have forgotten all about His harebrained idea of making man- and womankind. The world would have turned out a damn sight better without us shitting up the place.”

  As if giving evidence to man’s debasement, one of the inebriates vomited into the grass.

  I leaned against the rough wall of the shanty, stretched my legs, and sang, “The riverbank makes a very good road. / The dead trees will show you the way. / Left foot, peg foot, traveling on, / Follow the Drinking Gourd.”

  “You look to me, Samuel, like a man full of troubles,” said Till, while the besotted blackbirds perched on his fence rail answered my song with a rude one of their own.

  “I am a colored man!” I shouted above their impiety. “And I have been banished!”

  “Sweet Jesus!” replied the drunkards as nearly in concert as their addled brains and thickened tongues would allow.

  “God sent His fiery angel to cast me out!”

  “With fire and sword he chased you out the back gate!”

  “Now I am a stranger in a strange land!” I cried.

  “Lord have mercy!” the chorus groaned.

  “The cup is bitter.”

  “The cup is bitter,” they repeated before returning to their jars.

  Our lamentation having come abruptly to an end, silence settled over the yard like that which stilled Egypt’s houses when the Angel of Death passed over the blood-smeared lintels of the Jews.

  I drank a second jar, and, closing my eyes, saw sparks light up the darkness. I heard the sound of pennies being pitched, heavy shoes scuffling, sullen voices rumbling low. I could have slept there, against the shanty’s wall, until the Lord came at the head of His army of the righteous and put us sinners to the fiery sword.

  “Samuel. Samuel, wake up!” Not the Lord, but Isaac Till, highwayman, was tugging at my sleeve. It was late; the others had gone home to bed. Though darkness still held sway, it was already Monday morning. “Looks like there’s just two colored men of leisure hereabouts,” he said.

  “I was dreaming,” I said, trying to shake off the remnants of sleep.

  The moon had sunk low; the stars were unknown to me. I might have been in another country for all I recognized of what lay scattered about in the darkness. The highwayman was leaning over me like a cutthroat. His breath as it came through the cloth of his bandanna smelled of whiskey and something bitter—horseradish maybe. The rims of his ears were edged with the yellow light from the lantern at his back. I noticed that a notch had been cut out of one of them.

  “It’s gone,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “The dream. There’s not even a piece of it left to speak of.”

  “Better that way. Better not to dream at all.” He studied my face in the feeble light. “What’s your story, then?”

  I did not feel like telling mine again, so I borrowed bits and pieces of Lewis Hayden’s, the one I had heard him tell at the abolitionists’ picnic. I could just as well have used Joseph’s—or Frederick Douglass’s. The particulars might be different, but the sorrows were the same.

  “You’re lucky to have escaped with all your parts, except for your hand,” said Till when I had finished Hayden’s tale, which I had embroidered with strands of my own to account for my dismemberment. “Most don’t, and those who do aren’t safe till they got their freedom papers.”

  I nodded, and for the second time that night, I felt a chill.

  “The king of England took my nose, and I still feel like I’m sitting on a woodpile waiting for somebody to come along with a Lucifer match. I want to get up into Canada, where the man hunters can’t touch me.”

  A feeling of enmity for all white people—man hunters and moral philosophers alike—swept over me, so that my head reeled and I was sick. That a man’s life should depend on a piece of paper was intolerable.

  “Too much ‘corn,’” said Till with a smile that neither mocked nor condoned my folly.

  He went inside the shack and came out with a damp rag. Tenderly, he wiped my face, like a mother caring for a feverish child or a priest administering the last rites. Impulsively, I took his hand and kissed it. Angrily, he pulled his hand away. An emotion can alter with the swiftness of a leaf being turned over by the wind. I might have embarrassed him, or perhaps he had reasons of his own to turn to me in fury, saying, “You get on your way now, nigger! I don’t have time for foolishness!” His reasons might not have been known even to himself—I mean to the part of a man that builds walls to keep his neighbors out.

  He went inside and slammed the door behind him. I picked myself up and walked into the night, which was not yet ready for dawn. A mist had grown across the stars; the moon was down. Nothin
g shone except for two unsteady lights, no bigger than candle flames, far off amid the trees—a farmer’s house, no doubt. The world was mostly silent, save for the scuffing of my shoes against Walden Road and the indignant beating of my heart.

  I was in a rage against myself and everything that was not myself. I was steeped in anger as the trees were in darkness. A bitter anger, a bitter darkness. I wanted to hide my face behind a bandanna and riot in the village’s quiet streets. Had I a Lucifer and some punk wood, I would have made a hell of Concord.

  Reckless, I ran through the sleeping town and out the Cambridge Turnpike to stand in perplexity outside Emerson’s house. In an instant, I had broken a bedroom window with a stone. The noise, abruptly defiant, sent a shiver through the expectant night. I pictured Garrison in Boston, awakened from sleep by the tremor and rising up in jubilation because the slaves had revolted and were massacring their masters under Nat Turner’s solemnly approving gaze. I pictured Garrison in his nightshirt, marching down the street, singing “Come Along, Moses.”

  I crouched behind a box hedge—night lying in pieces around me like shards of smoked glass, or so it seemed to me, whose body quivered sympathetically with the tumult I had raised. I was curious to know how Emerson would behave. Like a philosopher? Like a man surprised in the dark? Would he come to the window and extemporize in Latin on stoicism? Would he shout defiance into the night? Would he shrink in terror beside Lidian in their bed or hide beneath it?

  And what should I do next? Should I step from the safety of the box hedge into the light falling from his window and shout my defiance at him?

  “Now is the day and the hour. Resistance! Resistance! Resistance!” I cried in Henry Garnet’s incendiary words.

  No, reader, I did not call aloud for insurrection, but only in my mind. But some would say that the willingness to act is all—if not all, the first step. I was not a brave man—not then and not now; I was only a man with the usual virtues and vices. Was Henry any more than I? Was Emerson?

  Emerson appeared at the broken window, like a ghost in a nightshirt, holding a candle and peering into the yard. Lidian stood behind him, shivering in her nightdress. I was sorry to have frightened her. Neither said anything. The silence increased, as if every living thing were straining to hear a word of admonition or rebuke. Not a word was uttered. The world exhaled, and the innocent sounds of a summer’s night resumed. The candle was snuffed, the shutters were closed, and the Emersons went back to their bed.

  For a reason known only to the deranged, my resentment flared into fury. I walked—strode, for there was a deliberateness in my gait—toward Walden Woods and Henry’s hut. I wish that I could remember the thoughts—sensations, really—that tumbled through my agitated brain. I recall only the sting of a willow branch whipping my cheek while I stumbled through the woods, and the welt that it raised. At this remove in time, I can only guess what I had meant to do when I reached the hut. Break his window? Henry would have turned my vandalism into an adage: The greatest service a man can do his neighbor is to break his windows and rid his house and mind of stuffiness.

  I stopped by Walden Pond, and, like a Roman taking a ceremonial bath before laying waste to his enemies, I washed myself in its dark water. It sobered me and brought down the temperature of my ire. What, after all, had Henry done to me? He had been disdainful at times, impatient, dismissive, even, on occasion, cruel. But he treated everyone—stranger, friend, or acquaintance—the same. He was roughly fashioned and a Jacksonian Democrat. While he could rub people the wrong way, he also delighted them. He lived by no man’s sufferance, but by his own conscience and industry. If he was ever a guest, as he had been and would be again in Emerson’s house, he was neither obsequious nor indolent.

  Chastened, I walked to his cabin and saw that the candles were lit, the front door open to a night that was always kind to Henry. I suspect that he would have welcomed a catamount into his hut and put out a saucer of milk, as though it were no fiercer than a house cat. I sat under the open window and listened to the scratching of his pen against the pages of his ever-increasing journal, thinking, This is the sound of a mind working late into the night, when the body wishes for sleep but the muted voice natters on. Scratch, scratch, scratch, like a dog digging at its fleas. I was grateful not to be caught in such toils. I would sooner have mucked out the Augean stables—it was a job I was used to, after all. Scratch, scratch, scratch. I pictured the ink laid down by Henry in words, thick as leaves, intensifying the darkness. From the top of a pitch-pine tree, a thrush trilled in expectation of first light.

  What makes a man behave so? I wondered. To struggle endlessly against himself as one might try to shift a boulder from his path or rid himself of a stubborn stool. I could see nothing in it but burden and futility.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sound no longer nettled me. Now it consoled like the noise made by a guitarist’s calloused fingers sliding over the strings, reminding us of human imperfection and tenderness. While I listened to the music of Henry’s lucubration, my eyes closed and I prepared to make the “middle passage” required each night of us all until the last, when the light will be put out for good.

  I AWOKE LATE IN THE MORNING, to find a blanket covering me and, under a piece of limestone, a note in Henry’s sprawling and untidy hand.

  Monday, 3rd August

  Come, if you will, to Emerson’s this afternoon. A picnic is being made for Mr. Hawthorne, Inspector of the Revenue, who is treating us to a royal visit. Waldo thinks that you, being one of his few Concord intimates, should be on hand at our little party. Formal dress is not required.

  Your friend, HENRY.

  P.S.

  The night air can be dangerous.

  That a man could wish, at one moment, to bite the hand that feeds him and, at the next, to lap up crumbs of another’s affection is proof of his insecurity. I doubt that few in Middlesex County were as unsure of themselves and their place among their fellows as I was then. To have been called an “intimate” and to have been signed “your friend” pleased me. With the vanity of an acolyte putting away the stole of the priest he serves, I folded Henry’s blanket and laid it on his cot. Thus will a man seek nourishment in thin air and preen himself with feathers and broken buttons if his wits are turned. I would gladly go to Bush, I decided.

  After having left the Old Manse, Hawthorne was appointed Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem. While his post in the Custom House relieved the family’s pinched existence, Hawthorne worried that the inspiration that had favored him in Concord would not follow him to Salem. During his visits to the village, he admitted to a nostalgia for the “charmed atmosphere” of Concord and the surrounding countryside.

  I stopped at my cabin to wash and change into clean clothes, and then I walked out the turnpike I had trod like one of the Furies on the previous night. Passing by the Emersons’ still-shuttered window, I was careful to look everywhere but at it. Had anyone witnessed my shifty manner, I would have given myself away as the perpetrator of the night’s mischief. Henry was waiting at the gate.

  “Lidian and I were treated to a shivaree,” said Emerson after Henry and I had shaken hands with Hawthorne and settled ourselves on two slatted garden chairs—comfortable as the rack. “Evidently, they mistook us for a bridal pair. To my eyes, she does retain her bloom and sweetness.”

  He smiled gallantly at his wife, whose gaunt face managed a ragged blush.

  “It’s a shame that Mrs. Hawthorne could not accompany you,” she said.

  “She awoke this morning with another of her sick headaches,” replied Hawthorne.

  “I am sorry to hear it,” said Lidian ruefully, lowering her gaze from his shy face to a bed of yellow violets.

  “Were you frightened by the outrage?” inquired Hawthorne.

  “Outrage?” said Emerson, nonplussed.

  “The window,” replied Hawthorne, nodding in its direction.

  I thought his use of the word outrage to be exaggerated in the ca
se of a broken window. Henry must have thought the same, because he said, “If a windowpane is reason for outrage, what can one say about the Mexican War?”

  “There is nothing so alarming as the sound of splintering glass,” said Hawthorne, ignoring Henry’s contrariness. “One imagines Vesuvius or some other paroxysm of nature.”

  “Or an insurrection,” said Henry, his eyes lively in their deep sockets.

  “Smashing my window was not an act of civil disobedience, Henry,” said Emerson.

  “I fear there are iconoclasts afoot,” replied Henry with a smile that took in his little audience before finally lighting on me.

  I squirmed, waiting to see if he would betray me. He kicked at a pebble in the grass but let the matter drop. A mockingbird sang unreliably in the interval.

  “I’ve read that electricity has been successful in the treatment of migraine,” said Lidian.

  Hawthorne answered her solicitous glance with a grateful one, which was interrupted by Henry’s imitation of a sick duck.

  “Quack, quack, quack.”

  “Don’t be whimsical, Henry!” admonished Emerson, while Lidian frowned. “Quack derives from the Dutch word quacksalver, meaning a ‘hawker of salve.’”

  “That’s as may be, Mr. Emerson, but I don’t think poor Mrs. Hawthorne’s headaches are in the least amusing,” said Lidian reproachfully, glancing at Henry.

  “No, you are right to be annoyed, Lidian,” said Emerson.

  Hawthorne shrugged; Henry seemed perplexed.

  Will you incriminate me in last night’s offense against property to shift disapproval from yourself? I wondered.

  “Samuel, will you have time tomorrow to replace the broken windowpane? It is too bad to be shut up when the weather is hot,” said Emerson.

  “I’ll be glad to, sir,” I replied, smiling with an agreeable, if a fraudulent, charm.

  Henry laughed, seemingly for no good reason. The Emersons looked askance at him.

  “Shall we play a game of pall-mall?” suggested Hawthorne to change the subject.

  “Oh, yes!” said Lidian, glad of a diversion.