Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

His family had known something of real war, of course, having had to scour bare sustenance from our remnant of the Artemas Plantation. The rest had been bought or otherwise acquired by Uncle Elijah Junior, who early in the War had assumed our mortgage, extending but meager help thereafter to the absent soldier’s wife and children. As a precaution against his nephew’s well-known temper, Mama said, he let us remain in the dilapidated house and raise such food and cotton as we might; even so, my mother, burdened with little Minnie, could not manage alone, not even with my nine-year-old hard labor. Uncle Elijah Junior sent us the hardheaded Dock, knowing Dock would run off again at the first chance, which he did, this time for good. Next, he sent old Tap Watson because Tap, the father of the slain Joseph, no longer worked well under Z. P. Claxton. Ol’ Zip had been too quick on the trigger, sighed Great-Uncle Tillman, but he scares some work out of ’em, we got to give him that.

A small blue-black man of taciturn, even truculent disposition, Tap had not forgotten the kindnesses received from the late Master Artemas, that vague and lenient planter who had owned Tap’s parents and who remembered on his deathbed to set this stern man free. Unlike his son, Tap preferred orderly bondage to the unknown dangers of “freedom” and had cashed in his emancipation by selling himself to Elijah Junior for cold coin. “This way, I has my job, somethin to eat.” Slave or freedman, Tap had never missed a day of work-that was his pride.

Told that his son lay dead in the swamp, he had set his jaw and turned his back on Claxton. “He’s your’n, ain’t he? Go get him,” Claxton barked. Facing him then, Tap Watson fixed the overseer with a baleful eye, not turning away even when Claxton pointed at the black man’s yellowed eyes and lifted his whip by way of warning. Great-Uncle Tillman ordered him to leave that black man be, and Tap finished slopping the hogs before hitching a mule to the wagon to go fetch the body. Never again would he acknowledge the overseer’s order, voice, or presence, which explained why Elijah Junior had been happy to be rid of him. Also, Tap had fornicated with Mama’s slave girl, Cinderella, now the tall young woman whom we called Aunt Cindy, and when he came to us, Mama ordered them to marry.

When I told Papa, home from the War, how Z. P. Claxton had killed Joseph, Papa said roughly, “Runaway? Damn well deserved it.” Impoverished, now past thirty, Papa had to start all over as a poor relation of stern prosperous kin who prided themselves on self-sufficiency and independence. A tenant farmer on the Artemas plantation, he was paying a third of all crops raised to his uncle Elijah Junior, and in the lean aftermath of war, struggling to make a cotton crop with his wife and children, he slid into heavy debt to his own clan. As a war veteran, broke and disenfranchised, he would rail against the injustice of his fate, yet he would not tolerate Mama’s criticisms of Elijah Junior. Indeed he acclaimed his uncle’s “Watson thrift” even when this dour trait caused his own household to go hungry. (It was all very well about Watson thrift, Mama would say, but how did such thrift differ from hard-hearted stinginess?) With gallant optimism, my father pledged that one day, with God on his right hand and his strong son on his left, he would reclaim his family land, restoring the line of Artemas Watson to Clouds Creek. Carried away, he roughed my head with vigor. Though my eyes watered, I wished my brave soldier daddy to be proud and did not flinch.

For a time “Elijah D.” enjoyed oratorical support from his aunt Sophia Boatright, a big top-heavy woman with a baying voice whose favorite topic-indeed, her only topic, Mama would whisper-was the Watson clan, all the way back to the English Watsons (or Welsh or Scots or perhaps Ulstermen, sniffed Mama), those staunch landowners and men of means who had sailed in the sixteenth century to New York City, then traveled on to Olde Virginia to claim their tract of free and fertile land. The first New World patriarch was Lucius Watson Esquire of Amelia County in Virginia, whose sons moved on to South Carolina as early as 1735. Their land grants were registered at Charleston, Aunt Sophia assured us, well before the arrival of those Edgefield clans which gave themselves airs today.

A worthy son of those forefathers was Michael Watson, a fabled Indian-fighter who chastised the Cherokees and later led a citizens’ militia against highwaymen and outlaws, the foul murderers of his father and a brother. Meanwhile, he acquired a tract of six thousand acres on Clouds Creek, which was consolidated as clan property when he married Martha Watson, his first cousin. (Here Mama dared roll her eyes for her children’s benefit, screwing her forefinger into her temple in sign of inbred lunacy and sending our little Min into terrified giggles.)

During the Revolutionary War, Captain Michael Watson had served as a field captain of Pickens’s Brigade, a mounted company armed with muskets for the deadly fight against the “King-Lovers” or Tories. At one point, he was captured and imprisoned at Columbia, where according to one reputable account-which Aunt Sophia enjoyed reading aloud at family gatherings-Martha Watson Watson, who was “small and beautiful, with wonderfully thick long hair… wound a rope around her body and carried files in her hair for the use of Captain Watson, [who] made his escape.” (Here my mother might pretend to struggle desperately with her own hair, risking what she called “the Great Wrath of the Watsons” with whispered parody: Captain Michael, darlin? Mah handsome hee-ro? Here’s a nice li’l ol’ file so’s you can saw those bars in twain and make good your escape! Just hold your horses, Captain dear, whilst I unsnarl this pesky thing from mah gloerious hay-uh! )

In an early history of South Carolina, our famous ancestor had been described as “a determined and resentful man who consulted too much the counsels which these feelings suggested.” Freed from Tory gaol, the choleric Captain rushed straight into battle, only to receive a fatal wound in the forest swamps of the south Edisto. Having turned over his command to Lieutenant Billy Butler, our ancestor composed himself and “died for Liberty.”

“Those Edgefield families prate about their ‘aristocracy’!” Sophia Boatright scoffed. “How about our Clouds Creek aristocracy? Our Watson forebears held royal grants for two decades before Andrew Pickens came down out of the hills, and they owned more land besides!”

(“Even so,” Mama might murmur to my flustered father, who could not forcefully suppress her on a family occasion, “it was called Pickens’s Brigade, not Watson’s Brigade, isn’t that true, dear? And that handsome young lieutenant who replaced Captain Watson became General Butler, father of General Matthew Calbraith Butler, who married the exquisite Maria Pickens, whose father, come to think of it, was a general, too. Has there ever been a General Watson, dear?” Such whispers were just loud enough to stiffen the black whiskers of Great-Aunt Sophia.)

Captain Michael’s only son, Elijah Julian, would become the landed patriarch of the Watson clan. Through industry and force of character, the “Old Squire” acquired eleven plantations, one for each of his children, among whom “his favorite was always his first little daughter, Sophia,” said Aunt Sophia. In the presence of her brothers, Aunt Sophia referred to the late patriarch as “the ramrod of this family”; a shuffle and shift of bombazine and feathers would signal the onset of another anecdote establishing her own ascendancy as the rightful claimant to that title. One day when the Yankees ordered their black militia to drill on her broad lawn, the Ramrod’s gallant elder daughter strode forth shouting, “Now you monkeys just stop all that darn foolishness and go on home!” which naturally they did.