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Unread 02-20-2017, 03:21 PM
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Default Slavery in Concord?

On Black Walden, an NEH supported project: From a review by Craig Lambert:

Perhaps it required an outlier like Henry David Thoreau to keep alive the memory of Concord’s enslaved residents. In a passage from Walden, Thoreau sets down some fragmentary knowledge about three local slaves—Cato Ingraham, Brister Freeman, and Zilpah White. Lemire makes these three paragraphs her epigraph. “The whole book is a gloss to explain this passage in Walden,” she says. “I started by pulling on the threads Thoreau gave me.” His famous cabin in the woods, in fact, was built in a black part of town—once freed, many local slaves had been forced onto Concord’s worst farmland, the wooded area surrounding Walden Pond. “Thoreau knew he was moving into the part of town where all the social outcasts lived,” Lemire explains. “And when he heard stories of former slaves, he wrote them down.”

One such former slave, Brister Freeman, is the hero of Black Walden. He was named with a diminutive form of Bristol, after the English slave-trading port, whose ships plied routes to both Africa and the West Indies. Black Walden’s other main protagonist is Colonel John Cuming, a wealthy landholder and doctor in Concord who was Brister Freeman’s master for twenty-five years, having received the nine-year-old slave boy as a wedding present from his father-in-law. Cuming was such an eminent Concord citizen that long after his death, the town declared holidays in his honor.

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2010/...e/black-walden
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Last edited by RCL; 02-20-2017 at 06:26 PM.
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