Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

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.

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 misshapen: how could it be that I still prayed this smelly brute might love me?