John Baulsir of Brooklyn told Johnston of Whitman’s going to Trinity Church in Brooklyn and forgetting to take off his hat: One of the church officials requested
him to remove it, but in such a low voice that he did not hear him; and
thinking that he was defying him, he deliberately knocked it off; whereupon
Whitman stooped down, picked it up off the floor, and twisting it into
a kind of rope—it was a soft felt—he seized the man by the
collar and struck him with it on the side of the head three or four times,
and then walked out, followed by the red-faced official, who vowed he
would have him arrested.
Burroughs said “it was the only instance he had ever heard of Whitman resenting anything.”
John Johnston and J. W. Wallace, Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890-91 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1917; rpt, 1918), p. 66; “it was the . . . anything:” Johnston 66n. |