Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

In dread, I trailed him down the road toward the square. Already word had circulated that the cast-out hero would defy the Regulators’ edict that he leave Edgefield District on pain of death; his apparition on the square ignited a wildfire whispering.

My kinsman hailed the market crowd from the courthouse steps. Off to the east, the black smoke rose from Deepwood. He made no mention of night riders or his half-burned house but simply denounced the murder of three Negro youths on the night before last. The refusal of a lawless few to accept the freedmen as new citizens, he cried, would imperil their own mortal souls and cripple the recovery of South Carolina. “Before the War, our colored folk lived among us and worshipped in our congregations. Most remained loyal during the War and many fought beside us.” He paused, seeking out faces. “Yet today there are those who revile these faithful friends, who treat them as dangerous animals and kill them. Every day black men are terrorized, not by outlaws and criminals but by socalled good Christian men, including some who stand here now before our court of justice!”

He glared about him. “Have not these poor souls suffered enough? What fault of theirs that they were enslaved and then turned free? Was it they who imposed the laws that you protest? Friends, it was not!” He raised both arms toward Heaven. “In taking revenge on innocents for the calamity and holy wrath we brought down upon ourselves, we only worsen a dishonorable lie.” He paused in the deepening silence. “We lost the War not because we were beaten by a greater force of arms. Yes, the North had more soldiers and more guns, more industry, more railways, that is true. But that was also our excuse, as we who fought knew well.” He paused again, lowering his arms slowly in the awful hush. “More than half our eastern armies-and our bravest, too-put down their arms and went home of their own volition. They did that because in their hearts they knew that human bondage could never have the blessing of Him who created man in His different colors.”

When yells of “Traitor!” started up and the first rock flew, Selden Tilghman raised his hands and voice, desperate to finish. “Our officers will tell you-those who are honest-that we only fought on so that the lives of our bravest young men should not have been sacrificed in vain. Thousands died for some false notion of our Southern honor and to no good purpose, and now our dear land lies ruined on all sides.

“Where is that honor now? In taking cowardly revenge in acts of terror in the night, do we not dishonor those who lost their lives? Neighbors, hear me, I beseech you! The ‘Great Lost Cause’ was never ‘great,’ as we pretended! It had no greatness in it and no honor! It was merely wrong!” He yelled “Wrong!” again into my father’s face as the Regulators rushed the steps and seized him.

Dragged down to the square and beaten bloody, our cousin was left in a poor heap in the public dust. I witnessed this. Round and round the crumpled body stalked Will Coulter, hair raked back in black wings beneath his cap, stiff-legged and gawky as a crow. Seeing Claxton leering as he kicked the fallen man, I longed to rush to interfere. Perhaps others did, too, but no one dared invade the emptiness around that thin still form.

When Selden Tilghman regained consciousness, he lay a while before rolling slowly to his knees. Visage ghostly from the dust, he got up painfully, reeled, and fell. Eventually, he pushed himself onto all fours and crawled all the way across the square to the picket fence in front of the veranda of the United States Hotel where Coulter and his jeering men awaited him. Using the fence to haul himself upright, he pointed a trembling finger at the Regulators. “Cowards!” he cried. “Betrayers of the South!” He repeated this over and over. With each “Cowards!” he brought both fists down hard on the sharp points of the white pickets, and with each blow he howled in agony and despair, until the wet meat sounds of his broken hands caused the onlookers to turn away in horror-until at last Captain Lige Watson of the Regulators strode forth at a sign from Coulter and cracked Tilghman’s jaw with a legendary blow, leaving him inert in the dust.

Selden Tilghman was slung into a cotton wagon and trundled away on the Augusta Road. In the next fortnight rumors would come that the Traitor was dumped at the gates of the Radical headquarters at Hamburg on the Georgia border, where in 1819, a slave rebellion led by “Coot” or “Coco” had filled Edgefield District with night fears. But nobody really wished to know what had become of him, far less recall what they had witnessed in the Court House Square. When Mama finally confronted him, Papa blustered, “Well, Regulators never killed him, I know that much!”

One day I awoke to recognize that my great pride in my father was shot through with misgiving. Hoping our cousin might somehow reappear-dreading it, too-I was drawn back to Deepwood over and over. Others in our district avoided it, afraid of “Tilghman’s Ghost,” which was said to come and go in that charred ruin. Wild rose and poverty grass invaded its fields, the woods edged forward, and wild vines entwined it. When the wind stirred, I imagined I could hear an ethereal wailing and sad whispered warning: Cousin Edgar!

Late in 1868, “the Bad Elijah” (Papa’s nickname at Clouds Creek) sold his share of our Artemas Plantation to “the Good Elijah,” my great-uncle Elijah Junior, an uprooting that worsened the tumult of his disposition and hastened the dissolution of our family.

For a few years we lived at Edgefield Court House, in a poor section off the Augusta Road. Our neighbors on both sides were freedmen whom Papa scarcely deigned to greet, not even old Tap, whose people had been black Watsons for a hundred years. Though good for nothing much when not on horseback, he felt humiliated because his wife asked Tap to help him find work as a common laborer, then lost this job in a matter of days for the same drunken insubordination which, according to his uncle Tillman, had gotten him in trouble throughout the War.

Beset by debt, Papa found work at the factory owned by Captain Gregg, whose father, in the first half of the century, had imported Europe’s industrial revolution to the Carolinas, constructing textile mills at Vaucluse and Graniteville, southwest of Edgefield. In these dark times when so many needed work, Papa took such pride as he could summon in his new employment, which favored veterans from Captain Gregg’s old regiment and was “closed to niggers.” At Graniteville he earned nineteen dollars a month, spent mostly in support of his own drinking habit and the brothels of Augusta. Or so his scrimping wife suspected, outraged by the pittance he brought home when he happened to turn up of a Sunday morning.

Papa would remind me how lucky I was to be working out in the fresh air and not in those “dark, Satanic mills” (Mama, quoting Milton) where children as young as eight or nine worked fourteen-hour days beside the adults. He described the pervasive darkness in that deep Horse Creek ravine, the cold, grim aspect that had scarcely changed since the time of the eighteenth-century outlaws and highwaymen who had murdered pioneer Watsons before the Revolution and were finally destroyed by our illustrious ancestor-

“Oh for pity’s sake, let us hear no more of Colonel Michael!”

For the fabled Captain Michael of the American Revolution, Mama had perversely substituted that inconsequential colonel whose widow Tabitha had hustled the virginal Ellen Addison into the clumsy embrace of young Lige Watson. In their early days, as a kind of wry flirtation, it had amused my parents to blame their fractious marriage on Aunt Tabitha, and it would be Mama’s lifelong view that Auntie Tab with her intolerable meddling had ruined a young girl’s life. She would state this grievance as plain fact, not in self-pity, and also as a torment to her husband, whom she pursued with sharp pecks on the head like a redwing harrying a crow. When not bruised blue from his latest drunken beating, I almost pitied him.