“Then go inside your cabin, my boy, and light a candle.”
That was the winter and spring when we lived in Springfield in the house on Franklin Street, a wood-frame row house no wider than a single room, somewhat dilapidated, barely furnished, in a neighborhood of mostly Negro freedmen, people who were even poorer than we. We were content, however, because for the first time in several years we were residing together, a regular family, and Father was not working someplace far off, careening about the skies like a wandering star or a comet due to return home sometime in the distant future. Even John, with his new wife, Wealthy, was with us that year, helping Father run Mr. Perkins’s wool warehouse.
John was easier to deal with than Father, or so it appeared, for as soon as John arrived from Ohio, the buyers of our wool began asking to see him, instead of the Old Man. This left Father free to pursue his several projects concerning the welfare and future of the Negroes in Springfield, who that year were particularly alarmed by the growing number of slave-catchers prowling through Northern cities. Father’s abolitionist work had taken on a new intensity there and a freshened singleness of purpose, probably because of the presence in Springfield of a large number of freedmen who were agreeable to him for their intelligence and for the ferocity of their opposition to slavery. It no doubt helped that he, in his fervor and clarity of purpose, was agreeable to them as well.
I myself was attached to the warehouse, where I was responsible for cleaning and sorting the wool that came in from the west, mostly from Father’s and Mr. Perkins’s associates in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and attending to its proper storage and, when the occasional sale was made to one of the woolen manufacturers, packing and shipping it on to the huge new factory looms of eastern Massachusetts. It was boring work, but not particularly arduous, and left me perhaps too much solitary time for dreaming about a future that in my heart I suspected would never be mine.
My dreams were for the most part the foolish fancies of a very naive and unusually immature young man — a shepherd boy’s idea of sophisticated Eastern society. I was twenty-four years old that winter, and Springfield was the largest town I had ever seen. The regular proximity of exotic (or so they seemed to me) young women kept me in an agitated state of mind and body, and I spent many an evening and early morning hour walking the streets alone, not so much to look at the young women, for they were not so much to be found on the streets during those hours anyhow, as to be alone with my tangled thoughts and feelings, struggling to control and organize them.
Most of my thoughts and feelings were surely driven by simple, natural male curiosity, unnaturally heightened by my lifelong fear of women and my shyness when among them and the rural isolation of my life so far, but they disturbed and confused me. I hesitate to make this confession, especially to someone I do not know and a woman, and very possibly I will write this down and then burn it, as I have certain other pages already written. In fact, I cannot say for certain if I have sent you some of these pages, all of them, or none. They are scattered and strewn about my table and cabin, and much of the time, when I am not seated here with pencil in hand, I am confused and lose myself and can’t distinguish what I have done from what I have not done.
I will tell everything. During the daylight hours, whenever I noticed an attractive woman, whether a pious young woman at church or a neighborhood friend of Ruth’s or one of the daughters of a Negro cohort of Father’s at an abolitionist meeting, I quickly averted my gaze and made every attempt to remove myself from her presence. But later, in the nighttime — while alone and walking the gaslit streets of the city, down along muddy, trash-strewn lanes and alleys by the river and past the taverns and brothels there, where I lingered outside and peered through fogged-over windows and glanced furtively through doors as whiskeyed patrons entered and left, and along tree-lined boulevards up on the heights where the large mansions were located and I stopped and gazed across lawns to darkened verandas — I imagined all sorts of encounters with all types of women, and little plays took place on the stage of my mind, in which I spoke all the parts.
“How do you do, miss? Are you out for an evening stroll? May I accompany you a ways?”
“Why, thank you, sir, I would appreciate your company and protection. Are you a native of these parts, sir? For I do not think I know you.”
They were pathetic little dramas, which enflamed my passions and sent me reeling back to our house on Franklin Street, where the rest of the family slept peacefully and virtuously. There I would toss and writhe in my cot in the room that I shared with my younger brothers, miserable, guilty, self-abusing.
Thus I little noticed the continued and worsening illness of another of the children, the baby, Ellen, born in Ohio the previous autumn, and I did not realize that my stepmother, Mary, had not fully recovered from her lying-in period following the birth. I lived in a household whose rhythms and concerns were being shaped once again by illness, and I did not notice. Here I was, this large, healthy young fellow lumbering out to work at the warehouse every morning, returning in the evening for supper and then slipping out again, stumbling through his days and nights with his mind filled only by the turbulence of lustful fantasies at war with private shames, while the rest of the family worried over another frail and failing babe and a mother unable to recover from the rigors of giving birth. In such a way did my preoccupation with trivial sins, with my sensual indulgence and guilt, cause me to commit a graver sin and to feel no guilt for it. No wonder Father seemed short with me that winter and spring: in my self-absorption, I thought that he and Mary and the rest of the family, John and Wealthy, Ruth, even the younger children, were casting me out, were not including me in their circle of intimate relations — when in fact it was I who had cast them out.
Then one night late in April, a few weeks before we planned to depart for our new home in the Adirondacks, I left the house in an unusually heightened state of alarm. I felt I had reached a fork in my road, and if I did not take a turning now I would be forever bound to follow the track I was on. A foolish desperation, I know, but the oncoming move to the wilderness of North Elba frightened me. We had begun dismantling and packing up our life in Springfield, almost without having yet settled there, and the house was filling with crates and cartons, and Father was making lists of goods and tools and was negotiating for a large wagon to carry everything north. That very evening he had informed me over our supper that my job would be to take the boys Salmon and Watson out to Litchfield, Connecticut, where he had been boarding his merino sheep and small herd of Devon cattle at the farm of a cousin, there to gather the livestock and move them north separately from the rest of the family, to meet up in the town of Westport, New York, on Lake Champlain.
I nodded and, on getting up from the table, sullenly announced that I would be going out to say goodbye to a few friends, since I did not expect to see them again. Father showed no interest in my stated intentions: I did not know, of course, thanks to my inane self-absorption, that his mind and the minds of everyone else in the family were very much distracted by the worsening condition of the sick baby, Ellen. It appeared to me that, but for our preparations to move, life was going on as usual. Except, as I saw it, no one particularly cared about me. So deluded was I that I had grown angry at them, at Father especially, for not having asked me pointedly where I was going, who were my friends, why did I need to tell them goodbye with two weeks yet to go before we left town? For not having caught my lie.