I also discovered that Thoreau was not only an extremely deft writer, but an irreverent one as well. Walden is full of puns (over five hundred by one scholar’s count). Thoreau jokes at one point that he “enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.” But even as he uses potty humor (he means in part that he fertilized the land by defecating on it), Thoreau is as serious here as he is in his recounting of the bug in the farmer’s table. He did enhance the value of the land by squatting on it. Better to squat on the land (live on land you do not own) than carry the weight of a mortgage on your back. “The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.”

    Although I was surprised and delighted by Thoreau’s poetry and his puns, I was completely unprepared for the chapter in Walden entitled “Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,” in which he describes the outcasts who lived in Walden Woods prior to his arrival. Half of them were former African and African American slaves. Thoreau carefully describes the bean field he planted during his Walden stay as situated in a landscape marked by their presence. To the east of his bean field was a cellar hole where the home of Cato Ingraham used to stand. Formerly the “slave of Duncan Ingraham,” Cato was said by some locals to be a “Guinea” or African “Negro.” By the corner of Thoreau’s bean field, “still nearer to town,” “a colored woman” named “Zilpha” lived in a “little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk.” “Down the road, on the right hand,” Thoreau continues, lived Brister Freeman and his wife Fenda. Brister was the “slave of Squire Cummings once.” It was Zilpah (Thoreau misspells her name as well as Squire Cuming’s) whom George Minot heard as she watched over a “gurgling pot” and Fenda who was the fortune-teller.

    In the years after graduate school, I put Walden aside and wrote a book about the role slavery and abolitionism played in shaping white views on interracial sex and marriage in Massachusetts and other Northern states. At that point, I no longer assumed that all of Concord’s history was as white as it and the town of Lincoln once seemed to me. And yet even as slavery in New England became a major field of study, yielding a wealth of new information about the extensive role slavery played in New England’s culture and economy, the history of slavery in the nation’s birthplace remained unwritten. The new books being published about Concord were still more or less about the town’s role as the cradle of liberty and literature. I found myself thinking again about Thoreau’s chapter on the former inhabitants. Walden seems to offer several clues about the experiences of individual slaves in Concord both before and after slavery. Thoreau’s extensive journals, I found out, offer still more. While he was never intent on writing a book about Concord slavery himself, Thoreau nevertheless recorded a plethora of information about area slaves and former slaves gleaned from town and county archives, area graveyards, and local memory, more, it turns out, than anyone before him or since. I decided it was time to finish what Thoreau had started: the history of slavery in the place we both called home.