Shadow Country

by Peter Matthiessen

  After Papa went to Graniteville, Mama joined me in the sharecropped cotton, yanking or whacking down the tough old stalks in the late autumn, digging and manuring the new furrows through the winter, planting in April, thinning in May. In June and July, when the plants blossomed, we cultivated with short hoes and from mid-August late into the fall, we picked the open bolls, hauling the cotton in burlap sacking to the gin, where it was processed and packed for the market. The small fingers that had danced and fluttered light as butterflies over ivory keys of the Addison piano became ever redder and more swollen as her hands turned coarse, but if this dismayed my mother, she refused to show it.

  Disrespectful of her lord and master, Mama worshipped her Lord and Maker at Edgefield’s Trinity Episcopal, whose severe facade and glinting steeple pointed the sinner’s steep ascending way toward the firmament. She looked forward to Heaven. “This World Is Not My Home, I Have No Mansions Here” was her favorite hymn, whereas Aunt Cindy would hum “In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions.” Like most of the old-time darkies at Silver Bluff Baptist, she preferred the New Testament’s Sweet Lord of Love and Mercy on this Earth to her white folks’ punishing Old Testament Jehovah, threatening all falterers at Trinity Episcopal with his terrible swift sword out of a cold gray sky.

  RABBIT GUM

  From the first year of the War, when I was five, until the age of fifteen, when I fled Edgefield District for good, I had very little to show for life besides the calluses and grime of endless seasons of hard labor, lice, mean dirt, and poverty. Every hour of every day not spent hacking a crop, I was trapping and snaring, fishing and gathering, even stealing from other gardens for our hungry family. We subsisted on clabber, that mix of thin milk, curds, and whey which looked like the source of Minnie’s pasty complexion.

  Black Tap Watson, not my father, taught me how to hunt and gather, how to set fine horsehair snares and sturdy rabbit gums, where to find wild tubers and the gopher tortoise, when to fish the creeks. In the wake of war, the common game—bear, deer, coon, and turkey, dove, quail, and wild duck—had all but vanished from South Carolina. Only young squirrels and blundering possums, with a rare rabbit or robin, fell to my sling. In summer, I gigged frogs and pin-hooked little fish to eke out the clabber and dandelion greens, the hardtack biscuits, dusty beans, and mouse-stained grits in our meager larder.

  Occasionally, in winter dusk, returning from my trapline out at Deepwood, I would wrench a few collards and cold muddy turnips from Tap’s patch next door. It was no sin to borrow vegetables from people “who had welcomed the Yankee bluecoats, then dared to lord it over their former benefactors,” as my father put it. Proudly would Papa have us know that Elijah D. Watson would never “accept charity from niggers,” while Mama, for her part, made certain he knew that his needy family was provided daily sustenance by his black neighbors.

  One afternoon in the twilight gloom, Tap appeared from behind his cabin. I straightened, putting a bold face on it, bringing from behind my back my stolen greens. Embarrassed, Tap lowered his stave. “You gettin so big, I took you for your daddy.” That the irascible old man said nothing else made clear I’d never fooled him; he had ignored my raiding for some time. He disappeared then but his rasp came back out of the dark. “Take what you be needin, White Man, jus’ so’s you know dat Black Man gots to eat, de same as you.” My holler that we aimed to pay him brought a derisive hoot. I shouted, furious, “Think we need charity from niggers?” Hearing nothing, I called, “Tap? I was aiming to bring you folks a rabbit.”

  “Rabbit?” Tap’s whoop came from his cabin door. “Some ol’ nigger must teached dat white boy purty good, he gwine cotch rabbits!”

  I tossed those greens onto our table, telling Mama they had come from “the Black Watsons.” Though this was true, my sullen way of speaking told her they were stolen, for she banged her heavy pot on the iron stove. “Nigger greens,” I teased her. “Just toss ’em out if you don’t want ’em, Mama.”

  In our poverty, waste troubled her far more than theft. “Hush,” she said, stoking the fire to boil water. “Our Lord provideth in our hour of need. To despise His bounty would be sinful.” Mama would set aside my sin until the greens were eaten; she never refused her share of my ill-gotten gleanings.

  Coldly I said, “ ‘And the thought of eating came to her when she was wearied of her tears.’ ” She stared at me. “From Cousin Selden’s Iliad.” She held my eye a moment, then turned back to the stove. “Good,” she murmured, a response to insolence that made me nervous. (Only later did I understand that she was mollified because her son perused the classics.) Told that Tap had dared raise a stick to me, she said “Good” a second time; on Tap’s behalf she gave the stove another wallop, scaring weak-eyed Minnie, who was bent deep into her primer as if to inhale her lessons through her nose.

  At supper, Mama reminded us that Tap, for all his gall and sour temper, had remained loyal all our lives and was therefore entitled to forget his place in certain minor matters. Old-time darkies, after all, often adopted gruff impertinence for want of a better way to express affection. Being well taken care of by their white folks, they had lost the fear that made most of their people mumble and shuffle and play dumb to get along.

  Tap Watson was the old kind of church Negro, Mama said, proud as could be that Silver Bluff Baptist, founded before the Revolutionary War, “was de oldes’ nigger church in de whole of de whole country.” True, its first minister had been a white man, but back in those days, black and white worshipped together. (Tap had attended “white folks church” without much spiritual reward. “All dat preacher spokin about is niggers strickly mindin Marster and Missus cause dem is de kin’ly-hearted folks dat’s feedin you for Christ’s sweet sake, Amen.”)

  Neither Emancipation nor Reconstruction had changed things very much, she said. The evil hostility between the races had begun in the first year of the War when the black faithful were banished to the church balcony. “Since the War, the poor things are not welcome at all, but mercifully they have their own nice church and their own Book of Genesis, too.” (Tap Watson preached that Adam and Eve had started out in life as darkies, but after their sin, they turned so pale with fear of the Lord’s wrath that they passed for white folks ever after.) These days, alas, the Negro churches were being harassed by the Ku Klux Klan, a mostly nocturnal organization founded by Major Coulter’s commanding officer, General Forrest, he who in the last year of the War had approved the slaughter of unarmed black Union prisoners.

  Tap was proud of his citizenship, proud of his vote, yet he was still cautious, holding that progress must be nurtured slowly lest it perish. He had been stoic about Z. P. Claxton’s execution of his runaway son, and he had not protested the Black Codes, which flouted Reconstruction by discouraging blacks from leaving their plantations, owning land, or even leasing it. Though he understood that for the black man, this was a time of terrible danger as well as hope, he had no interest in emigration to Liberia. Edgefield, where he was born a slave, was where Tap aimed to die as a free man.

  White folks pointed to Tap Watson as a fine representative of the Negro race, and because his loyalty was trusted, he was mostly forgiven his acid yellow eye and abrasive tongue. True, he was sour about whites, but he was just as sour about “Negroes.” Asked his opinion by the Edgefield Advertiser, he would neither repudiate nor approve a black man whose “genteel manner” and “good sense” had won high praise before the War but who was now denounced in the same newspaper for “swagger and bad character” because he had urged new “Negro” citizens to vote. As Tap intoned without a smile, “Them ‘Negroes’ gone to get us niggers killed.”

  The Papa I had once revered was drinking so unstintingly that I feared not for his life but for my own. Pleading or protesting, seen as defiance, only fed his drunkard’s fury as with hoarse gasps of stinking breath he punched and clouted me about the head or lashed me raw with a green switch across the back and legs. At such times, that rufous face looked demented and missha
pen: how could it be that I still prayed this smelly brute might love me?

  “Mr. Watson, I beg of you,” was all Mama said by way of protest. I learned early to expect no help from my mother. As for Minnie, she wet herself at the first hoarse shout, and her panic when the moment came to flee often caused me to be caught and beaten while trying to save her. Worse, she betrayed me to Papa every time we quarreled, complaining that her brother had been mean. Mama, too, used the threat of Papa’s violence to twist me to her will; it was injustice more than burning pain and terror and humiliation which raised tears to my eyes and stoked the rage which made it possible to hide them.

  I never let Papa see me weep and never yelped, just set my jaw and bit down hard on pain in the rigid way a dog clamps on another’s throat, forging my will like some fanatic in Hell’s fire until his demons wore out and his arm, too, all the while swearing secret oaths of vengeance.

  “Oh, you poor boy! Are you all right?” Mama’s murmured concern always came too late to spare me. When I only gazed at her by way of answer, her eyes got jumpy and veered off. “Please, Edgar,” she might beg, “it scares me when your eyes shiver that way.” The show of derangement was a poor revenge but I knew no other; my voice would have broken if I’d said one word. Eventually I realized that the “crazy” eyes that scared her were the first manifestation of “Jack Watson,” a shadow brother I had conceived out of loneliness after black Joseph’s death, having had neither time nor opportunity for friendship. Though Jack came unbidden, I would know that he was there from the sudden uneasiness of others.

  The first time Papa beat me to unconsciousness (perhaps I fainted from the pain), Mama fled across the yard to seek comfort on Aunt Cindy’s bosom rather than offer comfort to her son, who lay on the dirt floor in a dark realm from which all sun and color and all past and future had been struck away. In a dream, my mother’s figure pressed against a wall. Slowly she raised a fingertip to seal her lips, keeping God’s secret, bearing witness to His acts, not intervening.

  One day Minnie crept out of her cranny to find her brother, his whole body shaking, hauling himself onto his knees, using the bedpost, intent on the father sprawled upon his mattress. I never noticed her until she whimpered. When I turned, that whimper turned to a whine of fear—not at my bloody face but because crazy-eyed Jack Watson peered out through that grimace. The child cringed back as from an apparition.

  Though by no means deficient—she was bright—Minnie’s speech had become crippled by her fears, but like certain blind folk, she could apprehend what commonly escaped others, and she had been first to recognize an alien presence. “Oh Edgar please, I don’t know who you are!” she begged that first time, her voice seeming to call from faraway. Then the black bubble around brow and brain dissolved with a soft pop, and Jack was gone and time and space and sound and colors rushed back in—the thick rufous carcass in its fume of moonshine, the reek of broken dogshit boots, and the little girl shrieking as the body humped up in a great cough and thrash, fell off the bed, rose to all fours and then unsteadily erect.

  Elijah D. Watson stared about him like a man emerging from his root cellar after a tornado, wondering if his loved ones have survived. Relieved to see me on my feet, he offered a loose salute and grin. “No man can say Lige Watson’s boy don’t stand up and take his punishment!”

  Incredibly his stupid praise was solace. I could not know that one day soon I would vow to my shadow brother that when the time came, I would take his hidden musket from the rafters and blow that red-faced sweaty head clean off its shoulders.

  TURNIPS

  The night that old Tap caught me in his truck-patch, Mama said, “I shall have to tell your father”—though not, as usual, until after she et her fill. She had scarcely spoken when her spouse came barging through the door in soiled silk neckerchief and muddy boots and cavalry greatcoat of soiled gray which stank of booze and horses when it rained. Minnie gave a tiny shriek like a rabbit pierced by the quick teeth of a fox. I shouted, waving her outside. Dark eyes round, the little girl was off her chair and scurrying for the door, which the man had left open despite cold blowing rain. When she faltered, whining at the darkness, I shoved her outside into the weather, and she tumbled and blew across the muddy yard toward Aunt Cindy’s cabin.

  Papa was glaring at the door I had slammed closed. When Mama said coldly, “What is it, Mr. Watson?” he stared at his seditious wife in stupefaction. “Please, Mama,” I whispered. But she scarcely saw me, so intent was she upon her quarry.

  Mama’s vice, too, had worsened with our fortunes: mean teasing had become cruel baiting. She would poke her husband, nip at him, dance back with a delighted cry of fear when he surged suddenly toward rage, then trip forth once more in trembling suspense, prolonging her delight, as if this were the sole ecstasy that her life with him had left her. No longer able to re-strain herself, she dared too much, exposing us all to a careening din that would leave the cabin shattered, deathly still. And always she insinuated that the young son was the true head of this accursed family, with responsibility to protect it from the rogue father.

  “Have some turnips, Mr. Watson.” Mama spooned them up out of the pot and dumped them smartly onto a plate. “All we have to feed your little family, Mr. Watson.” In his life defeat, he scarcely heard her. “Nice fresh turnips from your neighbor’s garden.” she concluded neatly.

  Papa lurched to his feet, overturning his chair. “Charity? From niggers?”

  She clenched her cotton-pricked hard hands, then folded them beneath her apron—the very picture of sweet Miss Ellen Addison, she of the wasp waist and pretty primrose face and flying fingers. “You see, we are so famished in your household that your son was reduced to theft—” She stopped short. “Run,” she told me.

  But Papa had caught hold of my arm. I put my other arm around him, trying to slip in under the blows, hugging the thick trunk of him with all my might, but he swung me so violently, hurling me away, that my boots came off the floor. My head struck a log butt in the wall, and the world was obliterated as my brain exploded. People talk about seeing stars. A single star is all I ever saw, bursting forth in blades of fire that flashed through blackness and oblivion.

  Ghost voices, apparitions. Had night come? I did not know who or where I was, or why I lay inert. My brain was fixed in an iron vise of agony. I was unable to clear mist from my eyes or move a muscle lest I vomit.

  Hiding behind slack eyelids, I half-watched, half-listened; the shadow figures did not know I had returned. The shrouded woman sat holding a hand. My hand? I felt nothing. I wondered if my brain might not be bleeding. The man, in grainy silhouette, was staring out his small window into darkness. He had scared himself. He spoke: “He is too hard-headed. There is no discipline he will submit to.” The woman did not bother to remind him that if the son was ungovernable, the father was to blame, having stoked a rebellious nature by these beatings. She said none of that. She said, “I see. It was his fault, then.” She put my hand down, having forgotten it. “What a low beast you have become, Elijah Watson. The boy works night and day to support your family, he has never done you harm, no, quite the contrary. It is you who do him harm, time and again.”

  Hearing her voice speak up for me at last, my eyes welled; surprised, I had to struggle not to weep. “Are you so depraved with all your grog and fornication,” her voice continued, “that you would risk his life?”

  The man’s voice mumbled that it was an accident. He did not know for the life of him why this boy put him in a fury. He was lachrymose, baffled, scared, contrite, but he was also, as I now knew well, quite capable in drink of taking his son’s life. I heard a strange voice, dull, slow, and swollen: “If you ever lay hands on me again—on any of us, Papa—I will kill you.”

  Her voice: “Merciful goodness! Rest, Edgar. You must rest.” Had I spoken aloud? Had I imagined it? Either way, my threat made my fingers twitch and my saliva flow, it sent strange ecstatic shivers through my neck and arms that caused a bloodburs
t in my brain and the return of blackness.

  For a fortnight, I suffered fainting spells, unholy headaches. I would force my gut hard against my stomach wall to fire my resolve and keep my head from splitting. When Minnie pled that next time I must beg for mercy, I swore I would never stoop to “that low beast,” as Mama had called him, not if he split my noggin like a frozen pumpkin. But of course, by the time I recovered, he was drinking as before, and I was trying to please him as before, being doomed to love him.

  When sober enough to sit up in the saddle, Lige Watson rode with the Edgefield Rifle and Sabre Club—a detachment of the Regulators—having earned a reputation as a man who was good with horses and “would do the necessary” to protect the honor of the South and Southern womanhood; he went about his duties with grim fervor. But even Papa, who could be generous and not invariably unkind, had grown disturbed by the fanaticism of his commander. Apparently Sergeant Z. P. Claxton had accused Tap Watson of showing a hostile countenance to a white man. Advised by Captain Watson that this man on Claxton’s list was actually “a pretty good ol’ nigra,” Major Coulter gave him a long look of warning. “Sometimes it gets so us ol’ boys might feel like killing us a nigger,” Coulter told him in a low dead voice. “At them times it don’t matter much if he’s a pretty good ol’ nigger or he ain’t. Whether he done something or didn’t, understand me?”

  Papa boasted to his family that thanks to his efforts, Tap was spared without ever knowing he had been in danger. Papa hoped his son was proud of his good deed. The trouble was that unlike him, I understood—or at least Jack Watson understood—what Major Coulter meant. Us ol’ boys might feel like killing—wasn’t that the point? Feel like it. Major Coulter’s remark gnawed at my heart, less because it sounded so coldblooded than because it prized out from its seam something unnatural in my own nature—or something worse, a self I feared without knowing who it was, a hidden countenance of profound ire as cold as that chill breath on the wind that is a harbinger of weather change and storm.