Brister Freeman and the Prophet of Walden Woods

Before Thoreau built his cabin, Walden Woods was where Concord put the people it did not want to see: men and women who had been enslaved, in Massachusetts, within living memory. One of them fought in the Revolution and took a new surname whose meaning announces itself. Thoreau went to the woods partly to write these neighbors down, and Kaag reads that act as prophecy in the old sense, withdrawing from a corrupt society in order to speak. But speaking for someone is a trap with two exits, both costly, and Thoreau walks into it with his eyes open. Kaag wants to show you the sentence where he does.