I knew that Harlan, secretary of the interior during Johnson’s presidency, had sacked Whitman because of Leaves of Grass, which he judged obscene. That was nearly eleven years ago, and it had returned, the cheap denigration of his life’s work and life, both: a grievance the old man gnawed, like a marrow bone, in his winter, his sad decrepitude. If he’d ever forgotten the affront. I could not pity him: I was no one to pity a great man, however reduced by age and sickness. I was sorry. We can feel sorry for people fallen on hard times without demeaning them by pity. Though I could have cried to see Whitman’s rheumy eyes, his gnarled, arthritic hands, the remains of a coddled egg left from breakfast on his shirt. His great head waggled a little, the way an old man’s will.
I stood and shook his hand. From his chair, he threw an arm around my neck and drew my face down to his and kissed me. Our beards entangled as briefly as our two lives had done — in Brooklyn, Washington, and now in Camden — and then they disentangled, one from the other, although he’d be often in my thoughts.
“Thank you for your visit, young man. Will you be stopping at the exposition?”
“Briefly, Mr. Whitman.”
“Walt — call me Walt, as you would a comrade.”
“Walt.”
He smiled, and I watched his face undergo a metamorphosis that would have entranced Ovid: It passed from the unalloyed joy of an elk at the summit of its range to the anguish of a deer, an arrow through its lungs and heart.
“Perhaps, I’ll be able to visit it next month. Sadly, the organizers did not invite me to read my poems.”
He would visit the Centennial Exposition and slide his fifty cents through the ticket window, like any ordinary citizen of the democracy he cherished and sometimes wrongheadedly defended. Still, you couldn’t help but love him — at least I couldn’t, who had heard him bellow his love while the waves crumbled on Brooklyn’s pleasant shore when I was nearly twelve.
I left him sitting in the kitchen, upright in his chair, his saucer flooded with tea, without a backward glance— knowing that the door to my childhood, which I believed long ago dead and buried, had finally closed with the shutting of the Whitmans’ front door on Stevens Street.
That evening, I crossed the Delaware to Philadelphia and joined Custer at the exposition. Two months later, a telegram from Salt Lake City would arrive there, electrifying visitors with the news that Custer and all his men (save one) had fallen at the Little Bighorn. Shortly afterward, Whitman would write “A Death-Sonnet for Custer” and publish it in the New York Daily Tribune.
I.
From far Montana’s cañons,
Lands of the wild ravine, the dusky Sioux, the lonesome stretch, the silence,
Haply, to-day, a mournful wail — haply, a trumpet note for heroes.
II.
The battle-bulletin,
The Indian ambuscade — the slaughter and environment
The cavalry companies fighting to the last — in sternest, coolest, heroism.
The fall of Custer, and all his officers and men.
III.
Continues yet the old, old legend of our race!
The loftiest of life upheld by death!
The ancient banner perfectly maintained!
(O lesson opportune — O how I welcome thee!)
As, sitting in dark days,
Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope,
From unsuspected parts, a fierce and momentary proof,
(The sun there at the center, though concealed,
Electric life forever at the center,)
Breaks forth, a lightning flash.
IV.
Thou of sunny, flowing hair, in battle,
I erewhile saw, with erect head, pressing ever in front, bearing a bright sword in thy hand,
Now ending well the splendid fever of thy deeds,
(I bring no dirge for it or thee — I bring a glad, triumphal sonnet;)
There in the far northwest, in struggle, charge, and saber-smite,
Desperate and glorious — aye, in defeat most desperate, most glorious,
After thy many battles, in which, never yielding up a gun or a color,
Leaving behind thee a memory sweet to soldiers,
Thou yieldest up thyself.
I wasn’t taken in by that horseshit, either.
San Francisco, May 10–16, 1876
If I’d ever been tempted to unknot the rope that bound my destiny to Custer’s, it was during the six days I spent in San Francisco, while, confined at Fort Snelling, in Minnesota, the general wrangled, wept, and sulked in disgrace for having defamed brother officers — not to mention Orvil Grant — at the impeachment of the secretary of war. I was ravished by the city on the bay and by a woman living there.
Anna McGinn owned a studio on Kearny Street — a rarity at a time when photography was practiced mostly by men, if for no other reason than the weight and cumbersomeness of the apparatus, glass plates, and chemicals. Anna was making ambrotypes, an innovation superior to daguerreotypes but considered quaint by wet-glass snobs because they could not be reproduced on paper. They were suitable to hang on parlor walls or to enclose in little gold shrines for gents to carry in their coat pockets, like a cigarette case or a whiskey flask. But though she held me captive for a handful of spring days — never mind the San Francisco damp — I’d come to believe in my inalienable destiny as an assassin.
Nevertheless, those days do deserve mention as the pinnacle of my experience of love. Had I met Anna before my visit to Whitman, I could have told him what I thought of that most disquieting emotion. I said nothing about Fire Briskly Burning. He might have understood my feelings for her — he understood far stranger affections; but I wasn’t sure if his racial tolerance was sincere or merely literary. Now that I think of it, I wonder whether I did love my winter squaw. She seems at this remove in time and space no more than a dream. If life is nothing but a swamp in which we lose our way, the affections are quicksand in which we drown.
I met Anna in a gaudy saloon on the Barbary Coast, Frisco’s brawling, disreputable district, where every manner of vice and meanness could be found. She was there to deliver an ambrotype she’d made of a chanteuse for a miner whose pockets were lined with silver from the Comstock Lode. I was there to soak up local color and the rum brought by ship from the East Indies. I noticed her immediately; she had a striking profile, framed by hair that seemed in the light of the saloon’s gas brackets to flash with emeralds. In the sunlight, her hair was ash-blond. She was small-boned and delicate — shorter than I, who had drunk enough rum to surmount a habitual timidity before the opposite sex. I noticed that her fingers were blackened by the silver nitrate of her trade, or “black art,” as it was often called. I sidled down the bar and listened to her harangue the goggle-eyed miner, whose fickle affections had gone elsewhere. Anna got her money, and when she left the saloon, I followed her along Pacific Street to her studio on Kearny.
“I take pictures, too,” I said — idiotically in retrospect. I stood in the middle of her studio, trying my level best not to sway or breathe.
“You stink of rum,” she said, not deceived by my pantomime of sobriety.
“I took a drop against the damp. At the saloon up on Pacific. I noticed your fingers.”
“What about them?” she snapped, loudly enough to upset my precarious equilibrium.
“They’re stained black. So I knew.”
“What do you want with me?”
“To make your acquaintance.”