Henry D. Thoreau 23

Henry D. Thoreau 23

"That like an arrowe clear

Through Troy rennest aie downward to the sea,"--

 

to Walden or White Pond, to Bateman's Pond, to the Mill Brook, the

Sanguinetto, the Nut-Meadow, or the Second Division Brook. All these

waters and more are renowned again and again in Thoreau's books. Like

Icarus, the ancient high-flyer, he tried his fortune upon many a

river, fiord, streamlet, and broad sea,--

 

"Where still the shore his brave attempt resounds."

 

He gave beauty and dignity to obscure places by his mention of them;

and it is curious that the neighborhood of Walden,--now the most

romantic and poetical region of Concord, associated in every mind with

this tender lover of Nature, and his worship of her,--was anciently

a place of dark repute, the home of pariahs and lawless characters,

such as fringed the sober garment of many a New England village in

Puritanic times.

 

Close by Walden is Brister's Hill, where, in the early days of

emancipation in Massachusetts, the newly freed slaves of Concord

magnates took up their abode,--

 

"The wrathful kings on cairns apart,"

 

as Ossian says. Here dwelt Cato Ingraham, freedman of 'Squire Duncan

Ingraham, who, when yet a slave in his master's backyard, on the day

of Concord fight, was brought to a halt by the fierce Major Pitcairn,

then something the worse for 'Squire Ingraham's wine, and ordered to

"lay down his arms and disperse," as the rebels at Lexington had been

six hours earlier. Here also abode Zilpha, a black Circe, who spun

linen, and made the Walden Woods resound with her shrill singing:--

 

"Dives inaccessos ubi Solis filia lucos

Assiduo resonat cantu, tectisque superbis

Urit odoratam nocturna in lumina cedrum,

Arguto tenues percurrens pectine telas."

 

But some paroled English prisoners in the War of 1812, burnt down her

proud abode, with its imprisoned cat and dog and hens, while Zilpha

was absent. Down the road towards the village from Cato's farm and

Zilpha's musical loom and wheel, lived Brister Freeman, who gave his

name to the hill,--Scipio Brister, "a handy negro," once the slave of

'Squire Cummings, but long since emancipated, and in Thoreau's boyhood

set free again by death, and buried in an old Lincoln graveyard, near

the ancestor of President Garfield, but still nearer the unmarked

graves of British grenadiers, who fell in the retreat from Concord.

With this Scipio Africanus Brister Libertinus, in the edge of the

Walden Woods, "dwelt Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes,

yet pleasantly--large, round, and black,--such a dusky orb as never

rose on Concord, before or since," says Thoreau. Such was the African

colony on the south side of Concord village among the woods, while

on the northern edge of the village, along the Great Meadows, there

dwelt another colony, headed by Cæsar Robbins, whose descendants still

flit about the town. Older than all was the illustrious Guinea negro,

John Jack, once a slave on the farm which is now the glebe of the Old

Manse, but who purchased his freedom about the time the Old Manse was

built in 1765-66. He survives in his quaint epitaph, written by Daniel

Bliss, the young Tory brother of the first mistress of the manse

(Mrs. William Emerson, grandmother of Emerson, the poet):--

 

"_God wills us free, Man wills us slaves,

I will as God wills: God's will be done._

 

Here lies the body of

JOHN JACK,

A native of Africa, who died

March, 1773, aged about sixty years.

Though born in a land of slavery,

He was born free;

Though he lived in a land of liberty,

He lived a slave;

Till by his honest though stolen labors

He acquired the source of slavery

Which gave him his freedom;

Though not long before

Death the grand tyrant

Gave him his final emancipation,

And put him on a footing with kings.

Though a slave to vice,

He practised those virtues

Without which kings are but slaves."

 

This epitaph, and the anecdote already given concerning Cæsar Robbins,

may illustrate the humanity and humor with which the freedmen of

Concord were regarded, while an adventure of Scipio Brister's, in his

early days of freedom, may show the mixture of savage fun and contempt

that also followed them, and which some of their conduct may have

deserved.

 

The village drover and butcher once had a ferocious bull to kill, and

when he had succeeded with some difficulty in driving him into his

slaughter-house, on the Walden road, nobody was willing to go in and

kill him. Just then Brister Freeman, from his hill near Walden, came

along the road, and was slyly invited by the butcher to go into the

slaughter-house for an axe,--being told that when he brought it he

should have a job to do. The unsuspecting freedman opened the door

and walked in; it was shut behind him, and he found the bull drawn up

in line of battle before him. After some pursuit and retreat in the

narrow arena, Brister spied the axe he wanted, and began attacking

his pursuer, giving him a blow here or there as he had opportunity.

His employers outside watched the bull-fight through a hole in the

building, and cheered on the matador with shouts and laughter. At

length, by a fortunate stroke, the African conquered, the bull fell,

and his slayer threw down the axe and rushed forth unhurt. But his

tormentors declared "he was no longer the dim, sombre negro he went

in, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool

straightened out and standing erect on his head." Without waiting to

be identified, or to receive pay for his work, Brister, affrighted and

wrathful, withdrew to the wooded hill and to the companionship of his

fortune-telling Fenda, who had not foreseen the hazard of her spouse.

 

It was along the same road and down this hill, passing by the town

"poor-farm" and poor-house,--the last retreat of these straggling

soldiers of fortune,--that Thoreau went toward the village jail from

his hermitage, that day in 1846, when the town constable carried him

off from the shoemaker's to whose shop he had gone to get a cobbled

shoe. His room-mate in jail for the single night he slept there, was

introduced to him by the jailer, Mr. Staples (a real name), as "a

first-rate fellow and a clever man," and on being asked by Thoreau why

he was in prison, replied, "Why, they accuse me of burning a barn,

but I never did it." As near as Thoreau could make out, he had gone

to bed in a barn when drunk, and smoked his pipe there. Such were the

former denizens of the Walden woods--votaries of Bacchus and Apollo,

and extremely liable to take fire upon small occasion,--like Giordano

Bruno's sonneteer, who, addressing the Arabian Phenix, says,--

 

"_Tu bruci 'n un, ed io in ogni loco,

Io da Cupido, hai tu da Febo il foco_."

 

It seems by the letter of Margaret Fuller in 1841 (cited in chapter

VI.), that Thoreau had for years meditated a withdrawal to a

solitary life. The retreat he then had in view was, doubtless, the

Hollowell Farm, a place, as he says, "of complete retirement, being

about two miles from the village, half a mile from the nearest

neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field." The

house stood apart from the road to Nine-Acre Corner, fronting the

Musketaquid on a green hill-side, and was first seen by Thoreau as a

boy, in his earliest voyages up the river to Fairhaven Bay, "concealed

behind a dense grove of red maples, through which I heard the

house-dog bark." This place Thoreau once bought, but released it to

the owner, whose wife refused to sign the deed of sale. In his Walden

venture he was a squatter, using for his house-lot a woodland of Mr.

Emerson's, who, for the sake of his walks and his wood-fire, had

bought land on both sides of Walden Pond.

 

How early Thoreau formed his plan of retiring to a hut among these

woods, I have not learned; but in a letter written to him March 5,

1845, by his friend Channing, a passage occurs concerning it; and it

was in the latter part of the same month that Thoreau borrowed Mr.

Alcott's axe and went across the fields to cut the timber for his

cabin. Channing writes:--

 

"I see nothing for you in this earth but that field which

I once christened 'Briars;' go out upon that, build

yourself a hut, and there begin the grand process of

devouring yourself alive. I see no alternative, no other

hope for you. Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else,

nor anything else. Concord is just as good a place as

any other; there are, indeed, more people in the streets

of that village than in the streets of this." [He was

writing from the Tribune Office, in New York.] "This is

a singularly muddy town; muddy, solitary, and silent. I

saw Teufelsdröckh a few days since; he said a few words

to me about you. Says he, 'That fellow Thoreau might be

something, if he would only take a journey through the

Everlasting No, thence for the North Pole. By G--,' said

the old clothes-bag, warming up, 'I should like to take

that fellow out into the Everlasting No, and explode him

like a bombshell; he would make a loud report; it would be

fun to see him pick himself up. He needs the Blumine flower

business; that would be his salvation. He is too dry, too

composed, too chalky, too concrete. Does that execrable

compound of sawdust and stagnation L. still prose about

nothing? and that nutmeg-grater of a Z. yet shriek about

nothing? Does anybody still think of coming to Concord to

live? I mean new people? If they do, let them beware of you

philosophers.'"

 

Of course, this imaginary Teufelsdröckh, like Carlyle's, was the

satirical man in the writer himself, suggesting the humorous and

contradictory side of things, and glancing at the coolness of Thoreau,

which his friends sometimes found provoking. In his own person

Channing adds:--

 

"I should be pleased to hear from Kamchatka occasionally;

my last advices from the Polar Bear are getting stale.

In addition to this I find that my corresponding members

at Van Diemen's Land have wandered into limbo. I hear

occasionally from the World; everything seems to be

promising in that quarter; business is flourishing, and

the people are in good spirits. I feel convinced that the

Earth has less claims to our regard than formerly; these

mild winters deserve severe censure. But I am well aware

that the Earth will talk about the necessity of routine,

taxes, etc. On the whole it is best not to complain without necessity."