Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

“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?”

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 and 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.”