At the Frontier of Hope: BRISTER FREEMAN
W When you hear the words ‘Walden Pond’ you probably think of Henry David Thoreau and his cabin in the woods. If you’ve been here, you might also think of the many hiking trails and sandy little coves surrounding the gin-clear water of the pond where tens of thousands of people enjoy swimming and walking each season. What you might not think about is the community of formerly enslaved people who once lived near Walden. Not because it was the beautiful, tranquil scene we flock to today, but because it was considered an infertile, out of the way, undesirable piece of land to Concord’s white population. As Elise Lemire writes in her excellent book Black Walden, as many as fifteen formerly enslaved people ‘made a life for themselves in Walden Woods, enough that Henry David Thoreau could describe their community as a “small village.”’ One of the members of that community was Brister Freeman, who, for a short time, would become Concord’s second formerly enslaved black landowner. (The first was John Jack, he of the famed epitaph whose grave you can visit in Old Hill burial ground.) Freeman’s story is just one of many that make up the African American experience in Concord, but it is an encompassing place to start. Before we embark on our journey with Brister it should be noted that although there is a fair amount written on slavery in New England, nearly all of it is from the white perspective. First person accounts of what it was like to live as an enslaved person in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts are almost nonexistent. What little we know of their personal lives comes almost exclusively through the dispassionate and 24
Discover CONCORD
| Fall 2020
BY ALIDA ORZECHOWSKI
Codman Estate
callous lens of slave owners, tax records, and offhand observations like Henry’s description in Walden that are but footnotes in an otherwise white world. What has been pieced together, thanks to the herculean efforts of authors like Lemire, is that Brister was probably the fifth and last child of Lincoln and Zilpah. At the time of their youngest son’s birth in 1744, the married couple was enslaved by Chambers Russell, a justice of the peace and wealthy landowner of what is now the Codman Estate on the Lincoln, MA side of Walden Pond. While there’s no hard evidence, such as a bill of sale, of Brister being subsequently taken from his family and given to Timothy Wesson, it’s circumstantially logical that this was the same Brister that Wesson then gifted his ambitious son-in-law, Dr.
John Cuming, and daughter Abigail on the occasion of their wedding in 1753. Brister was nine years old when he was enslaved by the prominent Cuming family in Concord, and he would remain so for the next 25 years. That John Cuming’s gravestone would later describe him with words like pious, compassionate, and generous, simply underscores the persistent but false notion of ‘good’ slave owners, as no amount of benevolence - short of liberating Brister - should be seen as anything less than the monstrous act it was. Fortunately for Massachussetts, the American War for Independence would lead to the relatively early abolition of slavery here, though it was more an unintended consequence rather than any kind of collective moral stand on the part of white colonists. African Americans across the
