A Fugitive in Walden Woods Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Norman Lock and The American Novels series

  “A mesmerizingly twisted, richly layered homage to a pioneer of American Gothic fiction.”

  —New York Times Book Review on The Port-Wine Stain

  “[Walt Whitman] hovers over [American Meteor], just as Mark Twain’s spirit pervaded The Boy in His Winter. . . . Like all Mr. Lock’s books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield.”

  —Wall Street Journal on American Meteor

  “Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion. . . . [A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream.”—NPR on American Meteor

  “Make[s] Huck and Jim so real you expect to get messages from them on your iPhone.”

  —NPR Weekend Edition on The Boy in His Winter

  “Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth. They merge with an iconic American character, tall tales intact, to create something entirely new—an American fable of ideas.”—Shelf Awareness on The Boy in His Winter

  “[Lock] is one of the most interesting writers out there.”

  —Reader’s Digest

  “One could spend forever worming through [Lock’s] magicked words, their worlds.”—The Believer

  “[Lock’s writing] lives up to Whitman’s words . . . no other writer, in recent memory, dares the reader to believe there is a hand reaching out to be held, a hand to hold onto us.”

  —Detroit Metro Times

  “Lock is a rapturous storyteller, and his tales are never less than engrossing.”—Kenyon Review

  “One of our country’s unsung treasures.”

  —Green Mountains Review

  “Our finest modern fabulist.”—Bookslut

  “A master of the unusual.”—Slice magazine

  “A master storyteller.”—Largehearted Boy

  “[A] contemporary master of the form [and] virtuosic fabulist.”—Flavorwire

  “[Lock’s] window onto fiction [is] a welcome one: at once referential and playful, occupying a similar post-Borges space to . . . Stephen Millhauser and Neil Gaiman.”—Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  “[Lock] is not engaged in either homage or pastiche but in an intense dialogue with a number of past writers about the process of writing, and the nature of fiction itself.”—Weird Fiction

  “Lock’s work mines the stuff of dreams.”—Rumpus

  “You can feel the joy leaping off the page.”—Full Stop

  “Lock plays profound tricks, with language—his is crystalline and underline-worthy.”—Publishers Weekly

  “[Lock] writes beautifully, with many subtle, complex insights.”—Booklist

  “[Lock] successfully blends beautiful language reminiscent of 19th-century prose with cynicism and bald, ugly truth.”

  —Library Journal

  “Lock’s stories stir time as though it were a soup . . . beyond the entertainment lie 21st-century conundrums: What really exists? Are we each, ultimately, alone and lonely? Where is technology taking humankind?”—Kirkus Reviews

  “All hail Lock, whose narrative soul sings fairy tales, whose language is glass.”

  —Kate Bernheimer, editor of xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, and Fairy Tale Review

  “[Lock] has an impressive ability to create a unique and original world.”

  —Brian Evenson, author of Immobility and A Collapse of Horses

  “Lock is one of our great miniaturists, to be read only a single time at one’s peril.”—Tim Horvath, author of Understories

  “A writer exquisite in the singularity (read for this ‘genius’) of his utterance.”—Gordon Lish

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE AMERICAN NOVELS SERIES

  The Port-Wine Stain

  American Meteor

  The Boy in His Winter

  ALSO BY NORMAN LOCK

  Love Among the Particles (stories)

  First published in the United States in 2017 by

  Bellevue Literary Press, New York

  For information, contact:

  Bellevue Literary Press

  NYU School of Medicine

  550 First Avenue

  OBV A612

  New York, NY 10016

  © 2017 by Norman Lock

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher upon request

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

  Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

  This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

  This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.

  First Edition

  135798642

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-23-8

  For E.G.

  I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else I knew as well.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  There is no history. There is only biography.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  —A—

  FUGITIVE

  in

  WALDEN WOODS

  (Summer 1845–Fall 1846)

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  BEGUN ON MAY 11, 1862, BY SAMUEL LONG, FREEDMAN, IN MEMORY OF HENRY THOREAU, WHO DIED ON MAY 6 OF THAT YEAR; FINISHED IN PHILADELPHIA ON DECEMBER 20, 1862.

  I

  I HAVE ALWAYS MAINTAINED THAT, in his bean rows, Henry Thoreau revealed his true character. There one could see the exactitude of the mechanic and land surveyor at variance with the fancies of the loafer and philosopher. Henry combined both strands of human nature in his makeup; it was this mixture that made him contrarious. His bean rows, as I pointed out to him on more than one occasion, were three parts agriculture, one part invention. Had he been born and raised, like me, in slavery, he would have given his master the very great happiness of beating him to within an inch of his life. It takes but a single lash more than what the welted flesh can bear to deliver the body across that inch into extinction, which some have reason to call blessed. A free man, Henry could let his rows wander with his thoughts, if he had a mind to do so. His mind, as we know, was often elsewhere, while, even after my escape to the North, mine—a part of it anyway—strained like a plow horse to evade the driver’s scourge. I strove always to ingratiate myself, as would anyone or anything whose existence depended on the good opinion of others.

  I first set eyes on Henry Thoreau in the summer of 1845, in the little woods owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson near Concord. I had been a fugitive since ’44, when
I disenthralled myself from the stable where my master had had me shackled next to his most valuable Thoroughbred, Bucephalus, in order to teach me to respect the rights of property and of southern horseflesh. It took zeal, resolve, an ax, and a bucket of pine tar to free myself—the ax and tar, used to dress the horses’ hooves, belonged to my master, Mr. Jeroboam, but the zeal and resolution mustered to chop off my hand and dip the bloody stump into hot tar were all my own. Fortunately for me, I was fastened to Bucephalus’s stall by just a single manacle—Jeroboam called it a “coon cuff.” While I was desperate to be gone, I would not have had the courage to chop off both my hands.

  Unless you have been scourged with a “cat” or thrashed as if you were nothing but a heap of wheat, the pain of amputation is unimaginable. It would be indelicate of me and offensive to the ladies to liken it to childbearing, which the Bible calls “travail” to give it its due. I would have screamed—and most likely bitten off my tongue like a chaw of tobacco—if it had not been for the iron bit in my mouth, put there by my overseer to remind me of my status, which was much lower than the horse’s. If it had not been for the tar that cauterized the wound, I would have crossed over Jordan into “nigger heaven,” which is what unkind folks call our promised land of broken-down cribs and juke joints, with a minstrel show on Saturday night and a fish fry on the Sabbath to keep us “darkies” happy.

  I admit that, in my frenzy, I nearly massacred the horse with the ax I had used to correct the accident of birth that had caused me to be born into slavery. But for all his fancy airs and graces, Bucephalus was no more at fault than I, and, though he was a prizewinning quarter horse and a stud to boot, he had even less liberty than most colored people. I had infuriated Mr. Jeroboam, which, of course, is not his real name. I have acquaintances in Virginia, left behind when I escaped with my life and nothing else, and would not want them to suffer on account of my frankness. Jeroboam locked me in the stable because I had allowed a stone to get stuck in a hoof, which might have lamed Bucephalus and prevented him from racing Horace Merriman’s stallion Meteor at the National Course, in Washington City. The five-thousand-dollar purse was ten times what Jeroboam had paid for me, a black child who had been taught his table manners and his alphabet by an old harridan belonging to one of Richmond’s genteel families. My color is that of the horse chestnut, which Mistress S—thought highly desirable in a house nigger. She admired my “coat” as much as Jeroboam did Bucephalus’s, which it resembled in color and gloss. Why a Christian gentleman saw fit to spoil my hide with the whip and not that of his horse, which could be as recalcitrant as any of his human property, testifies to the horse’s superior breeding. Jeroboam could trace Bucephalus’s ancestors back five generations, while I did not know so much as the Christian names of my mother and father. I worked harder than a hardscrabble farmer’s mule for my master, ate my slops without fussing, and never showed him my teeth or nickered at him. He beat me nonetheless.

  So I ran away.

  In some states in the Union, I am considered no better than a thief. I had been bought and paid for—“at a fair price!”—by Massa Jeroboam. He had my bill of sale to prove it. I was there when he showed it to his daughter—a pretty moppet without a particle of meanness—after he had upset her by bloodying my thick African lips with a heavy gold ring decorating his fist. In spite of his legal right to me, I broke God’s eighth commandment jubilantly and stole myself out of bondage. I would also break His sixth with good reason. To tell the truth, which I hope to do, I had become sick to death of the “thou shalt nots”—especially those laid down by the white race exclusively for the black one. In their number and absurdity, they would have astonished Moses on Mount Sinai and—if He were not preoccupied with the glory of His sunsets and the sublimity of His mountains—would vex the Almighty, for whom ten commandments had been a sufficient number to keep mankind in check.

  I confess that I did steal myself from my lawful master, Jeroboam, and I have no more to say on the subject.

  I have decided to write about a man who figured largely in the story of my life and to add my grief to the general sorrow that has welled up out of New England’s soil—product of a nature too flinty and miserly to be called bucolic. This book of mine—if such it will turn out to be—is a wreath laid on the gravestone of a man who briefly walked among us without much “show” and with no thoughts at all of wealth. At the outset of our—I will call it “friendship” for the sake of simplicity—I had mistaken Henry Thoreau for an ordinary man with all the faults of our kind, when, in actuality, he was an extraordinary one with only a few of them. I shall try to tell how it was for him and for me in Walden Woods after he had gone there to live on Independence Day 1845, until September 1846, when I left them for good.

  I had gone into the woods and built a shack of my own before the start of his rustication. I went at the request of his friend Waldo Emerson. It was Emerson who had taken me in after a harrowing escape from my “Egypt,” and it was he who would later take up a subscription among the abolitionists to buy me my freedom. When I had first arrived in the village—for me, the last station of the Underground Railroad—I lived under his protection. He began the long, difficult task of illuminating my benighted mind. Thoreau, also, would do much to enlarge my perception of the world. But it would be left for me to finish the task, which is as it should be, although I have yet to do so.

  If I had not been a negro slave, I would express my eternal gratitude to Mr. Emerson, Mr. Garrison, Mr. Wendell Phillips, Henry, and to others who redeemed me. But in that I am a negro and I was a slave, I realize as fully as a man or a woman can the fugitive, uncertain quality of life, which makes notions like freedom and eternity no more than pretty stories with which to console a child during the terrors of the night. What is more, if the reader will pardon me, I insist that I am in debt to no one for restoring what ought to have been mine since birth. The sparrow is not obligated to the rain that quenches its thirst and causes the earth to give up its worms. I am a man. Is a man any less than a bird? What is this impertinence but the self-reliance that Emerson espouses and Thoreau practiced in his lifetime. Like them, I wish to be reliant on no one but myself.

  I was no less a man when I was no more than an entry in Jeroboam’s ledger book. But the full flowering of a person is impossible under the blight of slavery. Human beings cannot survive the frost of all their hopes. Hamlet’s “nutshell” aside, I was no “king of infinite space” in the slave pen, on the auctioneer’s block, at the whipping post, or while manacled to a stable wall. There must be more than a constancy of pain, sadness, and fear—heart and spirit must be unbroken—if we are to be anything other than “chattel personal” by law and according to our owners’ accounts. Black people are not so many chains, rags, and bales of cotton to be overseen by slave drivers and valuated by bookkeepers.

  Now I must tell a terrible truth: There is no nobility in suffering, no wisdom born of pain, no holiness that will suffuse a tortured soul and exalt it. To preach otherwise is to be guilty of sentimentality, as onerous for any despised people as the bigots’ calumnies. Ignorance begets ignorance; prejudice breeds enmity; viciousness becomes the common coin of men. We are not purged of our base nature by misery, nor is the gross part of us burned clean by fiery torments. Except for a few saints among us of whatever color, suffering is a rancorous thorn in the heart. Enraged at times past enduring, I could have cut my master’s throat, along with his wife’s and their innocent daughter’s, for there is no restraining a man who has been robbed of his manhood.

  Bondage, as Frederick Douglass said, is “the graveyard of the mind.” In answer, Wendell Phillips wrote to him: “You began . . . to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul.” That death is the extinguishment of the small fire given us at birth to warm our hearts and to lighten our spirits during the winter that is in store for every one of us.

  Setting o
ut to write, I had no thought of composing a slave narrative. What could I add to the accounts written by Henry Bibb, Moses Roper, Solomon Northup, or Frederick Douglass? Instead, I had intended that this writing should be a eulogy in praise of the great heart and mind that belonged to Henry David Thoreau.

  He died on May 6 and was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in his native soil. He was let down on ropes into a gash of freshly opened earth, in the family plot, his coffin decked with wildflowers. I think that he would have preferred to lie beneath a tree, where a man or woman might pause long enough to contemplate eternity, which is said to be without end, but can also exist within the brief space of a pain or sorrow. He had “travelled much in Concord” for forty-four years, which, for such a man as he was—a “consumptive” of the body, the spirit, and the senses—was a good age. According to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry was “as ugly as sin”—always Hawthorne would harp on sin!—“long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior.” But his ugliness and rough manners became him, said Hawthorne, as they do Mr. Lincoln, whom the world calls “Honest Abe.”

  I was not in Concord when Henry died, but for a time, I was with him where he was, perhaps, most alive: in the woods outside Concord. We came to know each other tolerably well; I have yet to understand anyone half so much. In that he loved John Brown and detested slavery, I owe him my regard. Although I did not always bear him affection or show him my goodwill, I have greater cause to care for Henry Thoreau than I can admit. I do not mean to be secretive—nothing annoys so much as a wink and a nod hinting at a mystery. God knows how much relief it would bring me to be rid of it. But for Henry’s sake and my own, I must keep the secret until his reputation and my well-being are beyond injuring.

  Henry and I spoke together for the first time toward the end of August 1845. He was watching the sun go down above the trees to the west of the clearing where his house stood. To call it a “house” is to do it more justice than it deserved, although it was well made, like his sentences, and, for him who lived in it, comfortable and sufficient to his needs, which were few. It might have been his apparent delight in austerity that annoyed me that evening.