Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  The Borderers were a suspicious breed of feuders and avengers, cold-eyed and mistrustful of all strangers, or any who interfered with them in the smallest way. They fought their way through Indian territory with fatalistic indifference to hard faring and danger, spreading south like a contagion along the Appalachians into western Virginia and the Carolina uplands. Many were drovers of cattle and hogs, throwing up low cabins of wood or stones packed tight with earth, hunting and gathering the abounding game and fish, trading meat where possible for grain and iron, boozing and bragging and breeding, ever breeding. Scattering homesteads and ragged settlements south and west to the Great Smokies and beyond, massacring the aborigines wherever fortune smiled, they broadcast the seed of their headstrong clans without relinquishing a single dour trait or archaic custom. When times were hard, not a few would resort to traditional Border occupations—reivers and rustlers, highwaymen and common bushwhackers. The Border Watsons were of this stripe, Cousin Selden implied—quarrelsome ruffians disdainful of the law, obstreperous rebels against Church and Crown, as careless of good manners as of hardship and rude weather, not to speak of all the finer sentiments of the human heart. Or so, at least, Celtic ways were represented by Cousin Selden, whose mother had flowered amongst the Cavalier gentry of Maryland, and been chivalrously deflowered, too, her son supposed.

  Selden’s amused, ironic views, well spiced by Mama, were regularly quoted to her children in their father’s presence. Though no match for his tart Ellen, Papa defended the Clouds Creek Watsons with a heartfelt rage. If the Watsons were mere Border rabble, he might bellow, then how would her precious Selden explain their prosperity in the New World? For whether by grant from the South Carolina Colony or Crown patent from King George, enlarged by enterprise, the first Carolina Watsons had acquired sixteen square miles—sixteen square miles!—of the best Clouds Creek country on the north fork of the Edisto River even before the muddy crossroads known as Edgefield Court House came into being. What was more, his late lamented mother Mary Lucretia Daniel for whom our little Minnie had been named was a direct descendant of President Jefferson’s great-aunt Martha. “Children, you have a proud heritage to uphold!” he exclaimed with passion, tossing his head dismissively in his wife’s direction as he spoke of her “traitorous” Tory antecedents and their “lily-livered longing,” as he called it, to be accepted by the Pickenses and Butlers and Brookses at the Court House.

  “Spare your poor children these vulgarities, I beseech you,” his wife might protest, to hone her point that his credentials as a gentleman were suspect. Ellen Catherine Addison, after all, had been born into aristocratic circumstances, however straitened these might have become. It was scarcely her fault that her feckless husband had sold off all of her inheritance excepting her mother’s set of Scott’s Waverly novels, which was missing her own favorite, Ivanhoe. “How did I ever imagine,” she would sigh, “that this rough fellow would be my Ivanhoe!” Gladly would she play the piano for her husband—“to soothe your savage breast, dear,” she might add with a girlish peal—could such an instrument be found in a Watson dwelling, or fit into it, for that matter, since for all their prosperity, those Clouds Creek Watsons, eschewing the white-columned mansions of the Edgefield gentry, were content with large two-story versions of the rough-sawed timber cabins of their yeomen forebears.

  “Yeomen?”

  For his abuse and dismal failure as a father and provider as well as for her own exhaustion and privation, the erstwhile Miss Ellen C. Addison repaid her husband with sly mockery of those “darned old Watsons,” as she called them. Any Addison was better born, more educated and refined, and in every way more suited than any Watson to consort with the aristocracy at Edgefield Court House, not to speak of Charleston, far less England—thus would Mama prattle. We scarcely heard her, so frightened were we of the enraged and violent man in the chimney corner.

  Mama blamed nothing on cruel providence but kept up her merciless good cheer in the worst of circumstances, as if otherwise our wretched family must go under. A topic that delighted her was the evangelical form of Protestant religion adopted by our country folk such as the Baptist Watsons, so unlike the discreet Episcopal persuasion favored at the Court House. In their “fellowshipping” at summer camp meetings, Mama had heard, the evangelicals lay about together in the grass, and not a few drank ale and wooed their females. Some might even take the time to be “born again,” said Mama, shaking her head. “When they’ve had enough preaching, the whole crowd joins in ‘the Great Shout,’ as I believe they call it, and something called ‘the Feast of the Fat Things.’ ” Winking at her children, Mama called out toward the porch, “Isn’t that what Baptists call it, Mr. Watson? Does our dear aunt Sophia participate in the Feast of the Fat Things?”

  “Love Feast,” Papa snarled, after a heavy-breathing silence. My sister, close to hysterics over the Feast of the Fat Things, would run away and hide while I, ever more frightened, stood my ground, dreading the oncoming cataclysm.

  Mama would be laughing in delight. “The Feast of the Fat Things—imagine! These upcountry weddings, children, you never saw such carryingson in all your life. The bride is usually with child—she is the Fat Thing, I suppose! They play all sorts of games, dance reels and jigs, and some rush about naked. They sing, ‘Up with your heels and down with your head, that is the way we make cockledy bread.’ Isn’t that quaint? And all the men dead drunk on their Black Betty—”

  “Dammit, woman! That’s the name for the bottle—”

  “—and after all this . . . love feasting? . . . these poor females settle down to their long, hard, dreary lives. To be sure, life is hard and utterly thankless for all women, children. But our backcountry women on dark isolated farms—‘too far away to hear the barking of the neighbor’s dog,’ as the old folks say—toiling like draft animals in the mud, with none of the culture and society of towns, nothing but silence and hostility and worse from brutish husbands—well, pagan or not, those poor creatures need that Feast of the Fat Things to bring a little light into their wretched lives, isn’t that so, Mr. Watson?”

  “Please, Mama, that’s not fair,” I whispered, so scared and upset that I scarcely knew what I meant.

  “Not fair?” She met my entreaty with a brief cold gaze. “Did you know that your father’s peculiar faith celebrates ‘Old Christmas’—the Feast of the Epiphany—which actually falls on the twelfth night after our true Christian Christmas? It is not consecrated to hymns and prayer but to hard spirits, horse racing, and chicken fights.”

  “Cockfights, for God’s sake!”

  “Cockers and gamesters. Isn’t that what you call yourselves, Mr. Watson?”

  COUSIN SELDEN

  When weary of discounting Papa’s family, Mama might praise Cousin Selden’s concern for the emancipated Negroes, who could find no work around the towns and villages. In this past year of 1867, under the Reconstruction Act, all our blacks had become wards of the Union government, to be protected henceforth as citizens and voters, and a Yankee detachment had been sent to Edgefield to ensure their rights. In a district where blacks outnumbered whites, and where white soldiers who had fought for the Confederacy had been disenfranchised, our men’s hatred of Reconstruction would find its scapegoat in the freedmen, especially those “woods niggers” or “road walkers” who wandered the mud roads between settlements, awaiting fulfillment of the Union’s promise of “forty Confederate acres and a mule.” The dark-skinned ragged hordes were cursed by seething whites as a menace to white womanhood, and were commonly terrorized and tortured, often worse.

  Captain Selden Tilghman, waving a copy of a Freedmen’s Bureau report that murdered blacks were being found along our roads and in the woods and swamps, had spoken publicly in favor of federal relocation of all freedmen from our Edgefield District, knowing well that our local planters counted on the exploitation of desperate near-slave labor to survive. The crowd heard him out only because he had “worn the gray” as a war hero with commendable wounds an
d battlefield promotions, but finally the more bellicose began to shout that Tilghman was a traitor. Wasn’t it true that he had freed his slaves before the War in defiance of Carolina laws against manumission, and openly endorsed Damn Yankee Abolition? Was it not Tilghman who had tried to interfere with the lawful execution of black Union soldiers imprisoned at Fort Pillow? Obliging General Nathan Bedford Forrest to ride up and command that the killing resume: Blood and Honor, sir! In Virginia they take no nigger prisoners, and no more shall we!

  Cousin Selden’s relocation proposal never reached a vote. As of that day, the cavalry lieutenant was chastised—“hated out”—with stony silence, hisses, blows, abuse. Next he would suffer thefts, slain animals, the burning barn, bawled death threats intended to drive the hated one to flee the region or destroy himself to expiate his dreadful sin of speaking out in favor of Christian mercy, Mama fretted, distressed that for the sake of her children’s safety, she had not dared speak herself (though our safety in her own household seemed not to concern her).

  Except to drop off books for me—he had interested himself in my education or the lack of it—the outcast no longer visited our house, but he had the crazy courage of his isolation. Refusing to abandon the family manse, he hung on at Deepwood even after word was passed that no one, white or black, was to enter its lane. The grounds and fields became sadly overgrown even as the old house withdrew like a wounded creature behind the climbing shrouds of vine and creeper.

  If only to spite her husband, Mama said that she had always shared Cousin Selden’s Abolitionist convictions. Mama’s memories were often prejudiced but rarely false, and one of them always rang true: when she asked her cousin why he had risked his life for that great lost cause he had no faith in, why he had not refused to take up arms, he’d said, “I was not brave enough.”

  Mama told us that despite his gallantry in battle, Cousin Selden’s family had repudiated him for turning away from his Anglican upbringing toward the New Light faith, which had always advocated Abolition and had sought—she smiled, pitching her voice toward her husband, seated outside on the stoop—“a more enlightened attitude toward the rights of women. Today our colored men can vote but not white women.”

  “White men neither!” bawled her husband from the porch. “Not those who fought.”

  “Addisons being Episcopalians like most of our good families, I had no real acquaintance with the New Light Church, nor with your father’s Baptist congregation, for that matter.” Eyebrows raised in amusement at the growled warnings from without, Mama invited us to pity those unfortunate women whose husbands were not God-fearing steadfast men who abstained from the grog shops, gambling, and sinful license to which the weak seemed so addicted, to the great suffering and deprivation of their families. Her tone was edged with such disdain that Papa, chivvied to his feet, loomed in the doorway. “And throwing away their wages on mulatta women,” she continued. “Harlots, of course, have never been tolerated in Edgefield District. It is the bordellos of Augusta which beckon our local sinners to Damnation.”

  Mama bent to her knitting with the martyred smile of the good churchwoman whose mission on earth was to purify and save the soul of her crude male lump by shielding him from Satan’s blandishments.

  “In our church, a man may be excommunicated for wife beating, or even,” she added, widening her eyes, “for adultery. With white or black. Or perhaps,” she inquired directly of her husband, “you Fat Feasters feel that mulatta girls don’t count?”

  My heart sank slowly like a stone into wet mud. The son, not the mother, reaped the inevitable thrashing. The father was already exhaling through his mouth like a man with a stuffed-up nose. “Oh please, Mama,” I whispered. “Please.” And this time, her quiver empty and her arrows all well placed, our mother relented. “Yes, Mr. Watson, we are still your slaves,” she sighed, offering a sweet rueful smile. “ ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the Church.’ ” Braving his glare, she added winsomely, “Ephesians, dear.”

  “Precisely because we soldiers cannot vote,” shouted our Papa, “South Carolina remains prostrate, at the mercy of damn Scalawags and their pet niggers! That’s Radical Reconstruction for you! That’s what your precious cousin fought for!” He whirled toward me. “Do you know who forced Reconstruction through the Yankee Senate, Edgar? The leader of the Abolitionists, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts! And do you know why?”

  “Oh we do, indeed we do,” sighed Mama. “And since we know that story so well, perhaps you will spare us yet another telling—”

  “Yes! Because Congressman Preston Brooks of Edgefield caned Sumner on the Senate floor for having insulted Brooks’s kinsman Andrew Pickens Butler! And Senator Butler—hear me, boy!—was the son of that same Lieutenant Billy Butler to whom Captain Michael Watson turned over the command of his brigade when fatally wounded by the Tories near Clouds Creek!”

  Deftly Mama lured him off the subject of our Watson hero. “Now which Mr. Brooks shot that black legislator the other day, dear? While he knelt in prayer?”

  “That was Nat Butler!”

  “In any case, children, Congressman Preston Brooks was my father’s commanding officer in the Mexican War. Unlike Clouds Creek, the Court House was strongly represented in that war.” Before Papa could protest, she cried, “Think of it, children. The Brooks mansion has four acres of flowers! In the front.”

  But Elijah Watson was not to be deterred. The caning of Senator Sumner had occurred on May 22 of 1856, six months after my birth, and once again Papa invoked that event to imbue his son with the fierce and forthright spirit of the South. He went on to extol John C. Calhoun, grandson of Squire Calhoun of Long Cane Creek, whose family lost twenty-three members to Indian massacres in a single year.

  “One day I saw the great Calhoun right here in Edgefield. Same lean leather face and deep hawk eyes as Andy Jackson, Old Hickory himself. Same breed of fearless Carolinian, unrelenting.”

  “Cruelty and vengeance. Are these the virtues you would inspire in your son?”

  Papa, in full cry, paid her no heed. Before the War, said he, our patriots had served in the Patrol, and in these dark days of Yankee Reconstruction, the Patrol’s place had been taken by that honorable company of men known as the Regulators amongst whom he was very proud to ride.

  “Honorable company!” Mama rolled her eyes over her knitting. Her needle points sped with a clicking noise like feeding beetles. She slapped her knitting down. “Is it considered honorable in this company of yours to harm defenseless darkies?” Braving his glare, she quoted Cousin Selden’s opinion that the vigilantes who terrorized the freedmen were mostly “those weak vessels cracked by war.” And she dared to cite Papa’s “socalled” superior officer, Major William Coulter, who—

  “Will Coulter rode with General Nathan Bedford Forrest!”

  —who keeps the cropped ears of lynched black men in his saddlebags. “No outrage perpetrated by that man, however barbarous and vile, seems to shake your father’s high opinion of him,” Mama sighed, implying that her husband, not being warped or cracked like Major Coulter, had been weak to start with. She would even hint that Papa had joined the vigilantes less out of conviction than because he knew no better place for a man with battlefield demotions.

  REGULATORS

  The Regulators made most of their patrols on nights of the full moon. Major Will Coulter, Captain Lige Watson, Sergeant Z. P. Claxton, and two younger men, Toney and Lott, were the five regulars. Others would come along when needed and a black man on a mule tended the horses.

  Lige Watson rode with a rifle in a saddle scabbard, a revolver in his belt, a hidden Bowie knife. From time to time, he would teach his son those arts of which Mama so disapproved: how to race horses, how to shoot, how to wield a knife. Sometimes he let me taste his whiskey, and when he was drinking, he might show me “just for fun” how to cheat at cards. But as I would learn, Papa was barely competent in
most of these attainments, which he confused with manhood. Because I was only twelve, I confused them, too.

  One happy day, he swung me up behind on his big roan. “Come along, boy, I’ll show you something,” he promised, grinning. We rode toward Edgefield. At Deepwood, Cousin Selden stepped forth onto the highroad in linen shirtsleeves, stretching his arms wide to bar our progress as the horse danced and whinnied, backing around in its own stomped-up dust.

  “Not one word,” Papa growled over his shoulder.

  Our slender kinsman murmured to the roan, slipping his hand onto the bridle so that Papa could not wheel into him, knock him away. The easy movement was so sure of horse and rider that the muscles stiffened in my father’s back. “Stand back, sir,” he snarled, shifting his quirt to his right hand as if set to strike Tilghman on the face.

  With his long fair hair and shy expression and high tenor voice, Cousin Selden looked less like a brave cavalry officer than a young clergyman. Because he had never married, Papa called him a “sissy” out of Mama’s hearing. However, that high voice of his was calm and very cold. “There’s three young nigras back up yonder in the branch. Wrists bound, shot like dogs. Since today is the Sabbath, Private Watson, I hoped you might assist me with a Christian burial.”

  To call a man “Private” who was known as “Captain” to the Regulators was proof enough of Selden Tilghman’s madness. “Dumped there last night,” he persisted. “These murder gangs ride at night, isn’t that true?” He had a fever in his eyes. His quiet fury and contempt seemed just as scary as Papa’s red eruptive rage. “Since you claim him as a kinsman, Private Watson, you cannot have forgotten the immortal words of Jefferson of Virginia.” Here he shouted, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just!”