A Fugitive in Walden Woods Read online

  I had entered the clearing warily—not that I had anything to fear from him, but it was, even in Massachusetts, habitual for me to approach a white person with apprehension. At the sound of my approach, he reluctantly turned his gaze from the colorful rags of a summer’s dusk.

  “Good evening, Mr. Thoreau,” I said. “Allow me to introduce myself. My name is—”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Long. You are Waldo Emerson’s . . .”

  What word he might have used to define my relationship to the celebrated man of letters—whether man, boy, charity, or friend—was left unsaid.

  “Yes,” I replied, willing at that moment to be called by any name that Henry wished. The habits of the bondman persist long after the chains have been struck off.

  “I’ve noticed your comings and goings,” he said gruffly.

  Henry was too honest always to be agreeable. Courtiers are ingratiating, but he was a man who did not curry favor. Ministers are polite, but to Henry, religion and government were matters for the individual conscience alone. He had strong principles, but he would not have forced them on anyone. He would never truckle or fawn, nor would he tolerate flattery. He had peeled the veneer of civilization like bark from a stick. Henry was a natural man, as forthright as the sunset he had been admiring. It went about its business without a thought to pleasing him, although it did so all the same. He did not expect to enrich his empty purse by mining twilight for its gold, rubies, and emeralds. The state of his purse held no interest for him. If he had any transaction with the setting sun, it was to mint a new metaphor for his journal. I resented him for his indifference to things I had only now, in my manhood, begun to think were within reach of my still-tentative grasp.

  “The sky is fine tonight,” he said, granting me that much of his regard.

  I nodded and, taking my pipe and tobacco pouch from my pocket, offered him some Cavendish, which he declined—not with contempt for a luxury, but like a man with an appetite for something else.

  “We are neighbors,” he said, looking off in the direction of my hut.

  “Nearly so.”

  “Almost too near, I would have thought.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thoreau. I hadn’t considered . . .”

  “No matter,” he replied, cracking his knuckles to signal a change of subject. “You have a fine window sash.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I used to admire it when it hung on Jim Healey’s shack while he and the other Irish were building the Fitchburg line. They’ve moved on since.” He snuffled like a man whose nose has just been visited by a gnat. “How much did you pay for it?”

  I was unaware of the cost of the window sash or of anything else that had gone into the building of my shack.

  “How much did Emerson pay, then?”

  I could not tell if he had meant to mock me. He might have been merely curious. He took a keen interest in economy—nature’s and mankind’s both.

  “They built a railroad so that the ladies hereabouts can go to Boston to buy a hat, when we have a perfectly good milliner in Concord,” he jibed.

  I recalled that Mistress Jeroboam had bought her hats in Richmond, where the latest folderol from Paris could be gotten. I must have said as much to Henry, because he began to fume.

  “Why must we always look abroad for the cut of our clothes!” he sneered. “We can sew a button on as neatly as the French.”

  I thought then that he was needlessly opinionated where small matters were concerned.

  “Can you weed a bean row with that one hand of yours?” he asked, looking at my shirt’s empty cuff.

  “I can.”

  “If you’re not above bartering, we can do each other some good.”

  I REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME I went to Emerson’s house to report on Henry’s progress at Walden. I make us sound like a pair of conspirators, with myself as spy, but that was not the case. The older man was concerned for his protégé’s welfare. They had been friends and correspondents since 1837. It was Emerson who had encouraged Henry to keep a journal, which he did until his death. Otherwise, the original thoughts of this original man would have mingled forever in the waters of Lethe, the universal forgetfulness. We have Emerson to thank for the many excellent works of natural history and ethics, especially Walden; or, Life in the Woods—a book that, if I may be permitted to indulge in clairvoyance—will be read after Walden Pond has been emptied and the woods thereabouts cut down.

  Emerson’s house was roomy and foursquare, like his philosophy. Two-storied, mansard-roofed, and white-clapboarded, “Bush,” as he and his wife, Lidian, called it, was an easy walk across Mill-dam from Walden Pond. The parlor could sometimes be noisy with opinions concerning nature’s sovereignty, voiced by Henry, Emerson, and his Transcendental Club, which had made Bush its academy and Concord its omphalos, as Bronson Alcott, a “tedious archangel,” liked to say.

  I would listen to them debate the necessity of conformity, government, institutions, and religions. Once to my dismay, the club—to which Henry did not belong—argued the nature of reality. Emerson averred, “Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena.” He might have been right, but I would argue—adducing the scars on Frederick Douglass’s back and on my own—that the body, too, is a reality—importunate and undeniable. I was a simple man, only recently having escaped the nightmare from which there is seldom an awaking. My people live foremost in a physical world, where the Arcadia of thought and speculation is as far away as Eden from a cotton field. We must grub like Job.

  I am straying from my purpose, which is to praise Henry David Thoreau. But perhaps I have not strayed far. Even now, he and I are bound to each other. I, more so than he, for he was the greater man—I readily admit it. I gave him something, however, that he would have lacked otherwise: knowledge—no matter how imperfect—of another order of humanity, another kind of man.

  “What do you think of him?” Emerson asked on that September morning when I arrived at Bush and was shown by Mrs. Emerson into his study. I was frightened even then of speaking—ill or well—of one white person to another. A man will wear his chains long after they have been removed, in the same way one feels pain in a leg that has been cut off. “Go on, Samuel,” Emerson said kindly. “What is your frank opinion of our friend Henry?”

  I looked around the study and took courage in its simple furnishings, the profusion of books, the light falling without harshness onto the varnished floorboards, the desk where he had left an unfinished manuscript, one sentence of which I noted with especial approval: “I have only to endure.”

  “He walks—”

  “Oh, Henry has always walked!” said Emerson, smiling broadly.

  “He walks as if he means to leave something behind, but he always returns to the place whence he started. He walks as if he were fleeing the cruelest of drivers.”

  “I suppose he is,” said Emerson thoughtfully. “It will wear out your boot soles if you try to keep pace with him.”

  “He talks while he goes.”

  “He’s worth listening to, Samuel. And his health?”

  “Well enough, I should say.”

  “He has consumption. But he will not rest himself. He is eating himself alive. Ellery Channing exhorted him to ‘go out upon that’—Walden Pond, he meant—‘build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other hope for you.’ Neither do I, poor fellow. Henry is a meteor and will not last.”

  “He doesn’t complain.”

  “No, there’s no point. Nature’s character is stoical, and Henry is a natural man. What does he say of the pond?”

  “That it is deep.”

  Emerson laughed again. I could not see the joke, if joke there was. But in time, I would come to know the pond’s dark depths and appreciate them.

  “He lived here, at Bush, before going to the woods to live. He did odd jobs in
return for his keep. Henry is a handyman; he knows how to use tools. He and his father built a house for the pencil works from wood huts left over by the Irish laborers on the Fitchburg Railroad. Well, you know he built that hut of his himself—or so he would have us believe. He had the assistance of George Curtis and Edmund Hosmer in raising it.”

  “I would not call it a hut,” I said. I had lived in huts and had done without so much as a blanket. I had slept in an empty sack.

  “His ‘hut’ is a symbol of his emancipation and, because of it, it needn’t be barren to make his point,” Emerson replied.

  That was the difference between us. Henry’s life, like his house, his sojourn in Walden Woods, and his night of imprisonment, were literature. I mean no disrespect to him or to those among my readers who love him. Henry was a fine man, maybe even a great one. I cherish his books as I do his memory. I admire the breadth of his thought, his indifference to the world’s opinion, and his nonconformity. But he was free to do as he wished. We can never know how he would have stood the cow-skin lash, an overseer’s fists, the galling chain, or the auctioneer’s hammer, which seals the fate of negroes on the block—a block no less dire for us than it was for the English king who lost his head on one.

  Those were the thoughts that tumbled pell-mell through my brain. I did not speak them aloud—dared not, fearful that to be critical of his friend might prompt Emerson to renounce me. I lived in fear of the man hunters.

  Lidian brought us tea, and, after having finished mine, I returned to the woods and my own hut. By Emerson’s generosity, I enjoyed the luxuries of an iron stove, a planked floor, a washstand and bowl, a feather bed, and blankets to warm me through the cold Massachusetts winter I spent in Walden Woods—a warmth augmented by ardent spirits, the occasional gift of Nathaniel Hawthorne, when he came to visit us in Concord. Drinking nothing stronger than beer, Henry was happy to besot himself with sunsets or the view from Nawshawtuck Hill of shorn buckwheat fields red in the distance.

  AUTUMNAL FIRES SWEPT THE HILLS, and soon the leaves would fall. Henry and I walked west from Walden Pond, across the Fitchburg tracks, and on to Bear Garden Hill, boots scuffling among the first leaves to have dropped. They lay in copper, gold, and russet heaps. We strayed among the fiddleheads, which would shed their fronds under the first snow, but now were green and moist. Henry admired them for possessing “the delicacy of a Fragonard,” whose paintings he had seen in an album of copperplate reproductions belonging to Lidian Emerson.

  “I would not mince about a rich man’s salon,” he said, “to ogle the king of France, much less an oil painting in a gilded frame. But a book is a democracy of sorts, and I am free to look at what I like.”

  Having never seen a Fragonard, I did not feel qualified to comment. My experience of painting was limited to the sturdy views of New England hanging in Emerson’s study and some gaudy portraits of Jeroboam’s ancestors, which, for all I know, he might have purchased—gold frames and all—for the sake of a doubtful pedigree. He had an acquisitive nature, and there was little he could not afford to buy.

  “What do you say, Mr. Long? Is the view not worth the climb?”

  “Call me Samuel.”

  “Good, and you must call me Henry.”

  I looked at the scenery, while Henry refined the ore of his keener perceptions into an aphorism for his journal.

  “Nature has a taste for dainties as a woman does bonbons,” he said, picking a sponge mushroom from the grass.

  “I have never eaten a bonbon,” I said pensively.

  “They are not worth your regret, Samuel.”

  Who is Henry to decide what I should or should not regret? I thought. It was childish of me. I cared nothing for bonbons, but suddenly I worried over them like a dog a bone, which has no more nourishment than a stick.

  “Our local barley sugar candies are treat enough.”

  With that assertion, he had settled the matter. We walked awhile in silence, except for what sounds the woods will make. He kicked a stone out of his path, and we listened to it tumble down the hillside.

  So it was, during our first months together. Despite my promise to Emerson that I would befriend Henry during his time in the woods, I had taken a dislike to him. Dislike may be too strong a word for the disapproval I felt. I knew from Waldo and his acolytes how very good a man Henry was, for all his roughshod ways. He envied no one his station. He was as carefree as a bird and as abstinent as a Hindu. But still he nettled me.

  What were his privations next to those that I had had to bear? His father owned a factory. Henry had gone to Harvard. Emerson was his patron. He would have wanted for little if he had been desirous of material comfort. I considered his abnegation willfulness, an ostentatious virtue as annoying as chastity. Henry lived poorly by the world’s judgment, when he could have lived well. His renunciation was no better than that of a man who, having filled his stomach, throws away what is left of his meal in sight of a starveling. And I was the starveling!

  Carping has no place in an elegy, but Henry could be insensitive. Did he not write in Walden: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself”? He read that passage to me, as he did much of what he was writing in his journals at the time. Listening, I felt the heat of resentment mount like mercury in a thermometer, and I did what I could not have dreamed of doing when I was a bondman in Virginia: I contradicted a white man.

  “It is much, much worse, Henry, to be driven by a vicious brute whom law and custom have given charge over one’s life than by an inner demon,” I said. I might not have used those words exactly; my education had only begun.

  I could see that I had offended—no, hurt him, his feelings. Strange even now to write of feelings. It is said that negroes have none, any more than dogs do. On the contrary, I can assure you that we hate. Remarkably, we also manage to love when we can, although our hearts have been torn to pieces. We also feel pain, which is stronger than love—stronger than our hatred. Pain makes us afraid. One never gets used to it. The flesh can knot and welt and perhaps, in time, heal, but the mind remains raw—the voice within one’s head a shriek. Henry’s idea of a slave driver was on the line of a carnival barker or patent-medicine man, whose voice whipped up enthusiasm but drew no blood. For blood, one required a whip, a fist, a fence post, or an ax.

  To his credit, Henry had understood me.

  “You’re right,” he said, rising from the step in front of his little house to walk about his yard. He was a man who liked to combine his thinking with his walking. “Words seem to want to go their own way. It’s their willfulness that’s the trouble. Once you’ve begun to rock, even a hobbyhorse can run away with you!” he said, having returned to the step on which I sat. “I’m guilty, Samuel, of having made a metaphor of slavery with which to furnish my thought.”

  He was off again on his circumnavigation of the leaf-strewn yard—his ambit as narrow as a chicken run. But his mind was wide as the firmament. “Slavery is an idea; its overthrow must come from a countering idea.”

  By the time he returned to the doorstep, he had changed his mind again.

  “No, we cannot end slavery with an idea, not even a glorious one. Those in the North who cheer Frederick Douglass and purchase his narrative will not shorten the term of human bondage by so much as a minute. I am not for war, nor am I for the indefinite postponement of justice in order to keep the peace.”

  Like Emerson, Henry was not afraid of contradicting himself. Perhaps his supple mind was capable of braiding diverse strands of thought into a rope with which to save a man or hang him.

  Having again circled the yard, he stopped in front of me and, quoting from Douglass’s autobiography, said: “‘You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.’ Douglass became a man not by his wits—attempting to reason with Covey, the ‘nigger-breaker,’ who had just beaten him without mercy and was preparing to do so again—but with his
fists. He fought the overseer and so disenthralled himself. His escape into the North was almost beside the point, for he was already free.”

  I said nothing, my mind a jumble.

  “Sometimes the heart must become a fist, which it resembles.” He smote his palm with his. “I’m afraid there is nothing I can teach you, Samuel!”

  I could not guess his meaning. Did he judge me as intractable and hopelessly backward, or was the judgment delivered against himself—an acknowledgment of his shortcomings where other people were concerned? Or did Henry lament—his voice had been sorrowful—the inability of anyone to instruct another in what was most important and, conversely, the impossibility of ever knowing another’s heart or mind?

  But then he surprised me by making what seemed an apology for his having presumed to teach me about suffering and what the South calls its “peculiar institution.”

  “Being no more than a man, with many of the faults of that accursed species, I am bound to make mistakes. I shall depend on you, Samuel, to reprove the fault in me.”

  I nodded warily, while he took from his pocket a bone-handled jackknife.

  “I can—on second thought—teach you to play mumblety-peg.”

  A NORTHERN WINTER IS ANOTHER KIND of bitterness. It has about it the Yankee character—rawboned, hard-bitten, and dour. One who is unused to it can feel as though he has been invaded by the earth itself—its flint and rocky soil, into which the recent dead cannot be laid till thaw. Henry was untroubled by the cold. Having spent most of his twenty-nine winters in Concord, he had become inured to it by his endless tramps. He knew the countryside in flower as well as under snow.

  I recall the first time I saw him skating on the frozen river, together with Emerson and Hawthorne. He cut a figure like a scarecrow prone to pratfalls. Emerson was competent, Hawthorne skillful. Until recently, he and his wife, Sophia, had lived in Concord, at the Old Manse, but the rent had increased beyond their means. Residing now in Salem, Hawthorne would return to visit his literary friends.