Every great dream begins with a dreamer.
In 1837,
nine women shared the vision
to rouse drowsy
Concord wives,mothers,aunts,sisters,neighbors
with the moral imperative of wakefulness.
And the sole black woman,
Susan Robbins Garrison,
her father and her husband former slaves.
that night moved to host the second meeting
of the newly founded
Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society
in her home.
Their gathering, this circle of domesticity,
these women of the CFASS,
were barely noticed, or
noticed simply for ridicule,
nonetheless,
their voices in the Walden wilderness,
like invisible gossamer threads,
were flung in search of bridges,
conjuring their collective powers
the way drops of water unobserved transform into swells
trusting that their movement,
methodically tended and unfailingly applied,
could ameliorate hard hearts.
Because HDT shared the Woods with a former slave,
Zilpah White, at liberty now,
but herself barely subsisting,
screeching and singing in the borderlands and liminalspaces
of historic colonial minutemen,
weaving flax and cotton into thread to scratch out a
living,
her name is forever pencil-written (even if it is
misspelled).
The eight Emersons Thoreaus Brooks Alcotts and Susan
Robbins Garrison
wrote, too,
while waiting for the Transcendentalists to rise,
applying the spring rain-like pressure that women know
can melt mountains.
They circulated petitions
until their gatherings became
speaking events,
And they even persuaded Mr. Emerson, finally,
to raise his voice, too.
Concord, somnambulate no more,
now caring for each, human to human,
even connecting passageways for
train riders
seeking freedom.
Tiny ripples of kindness
multiplying to
a swelling of gratitude.
All this from nine women meeting
with their sewing and tea.
One day, Susan Robbins Garrison
lay down,
though her grave was unmarked in Sleepy Hollow.
No headstone in the field, but a legacy of activism—
her steady faith in the unrelenting power of
holding fast to the belief
25that this future (once a dream)
is possible.
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