Peter Matthiessen - Shadow Country

Great-Aunt Tabitha (for reasons best known to herself, she had decreed that her name was to be spoken as Ta- bye -a-tha) was creeping up on sixty years of age. In her appearance, her daughter Laura, though still short of forty, wasn’t far behind. Cousin Laura habitually stood one step behind her mother, where both of them (this was clear instantly) thought she belonged. Both were horse-faced females in high collars and white aprons, neither plain nor pretty, but the daughter was only a dim copy of the mother, who had saved for herself every last dab of brains and character. Cousin Laura, Mama had warned us, was kindhearted but not bright. With her large eyes and soft brown hair and creamy skin, she had once passed for pretty, but that wide mouth (as Mama remarked with her customary charity) “lacked the firm jaw needed to control those flying teeth.”

“Aunt,” I said, holding my hat over my heart in sign of piety and respect, “I am your great-nephew E. A. Watson, at your service.”

“A for Artemas.” The old lady smiled. “Such a kind good man, for all his foibles. We called him ‘Bird’ because he sang with such sweet voice.”

“If you please, ma’am, it is Addison. Edgar Addison Watson.”

“Artemas,” she admonished me. “After your grandfather. That is Watson family custom, that is the name assigned you in our family Bible, and that is that.” My tart mama and this haughty personage were doomed to tangle, I saw that much, but I held my tongue.

Black Calvin Banks (as old “Cobber” had dubbed himself once he’d become a full-fledged citizen of the republic) told me all there was to know about the plantation, which consisted of four square miles of flat arable land. Originally called Ichetucknee, it had been bought by William Myers of Columbia, South Carolina, who had fled south in the first year of the War to start all over in north Florida, having boarded his ladies in Atlanta until he could provide them a few primitive comforts. Upon arrival, Colonel Myers set his men to girdling the trees to kill the encircling pine forest, and eventually three square miles had been cleared and fenced. By the time I came there, in the spring of ’71, five hundred acres had been planted in corn-“twenty-five acres per nigger and mule” was the way they figured, Calvin said-and three hundred and fifty in Sea Island cotton, which had been the cash crop in north Florida since the War.

“What corn we grow, dass mostly for hog and home. Bale up de shucks fo’ winter fodder, keep de niggers in cornmeal and hominy. Hog food, corn bread, hominy, sometimes sourins. Folks know about sourins in Carolina? Turn cornmeal sour by sun-cookin it? Pretty good to eat with chicken. Gopher, too. You folks like gopher?” Calvin hummed a little, his mouth working, savoring those tortoise feeds of yore.

Cousin Laura’s husband had returned each year to his family home in South Carolina, leaving the management of his plantation to his overseer, one Woodson Tolen. Most of his slaves had stayed on here as freedmen, having neither the wherewithal nor the ambition to find their way back home. Calvin Banks had served as Myers’s coachman and remained loyal to the family, knowing freedom was dangerous. During the War, when a Yankee detachment reached Olustee, thirty miles to the northeast, Colonel Myers had buried his gold in a secret place back in the woods. A few months later, just when he was drawing up his plans for the first real manor house in Columbia County, he was struck dead by lightning while standing beneath an oak during a rainstorm. After his employer’s death, the former Cobber bought a hundred-acre piece from Cousin Laura, paying $450 in cash. After the War, this land would go for $6 an acre, so he got it cheap, but even so, nobody could figure how that darn nigra had saved up so much money. Naturally the rumors spread that his coachman had been with Myers when the Colonel buried his gold out in the woods and that this black rascal had gone back after his death and dug it up. Aunt Tabitha believed that Calvin was a thief, Cousin Laura did not, which was typical of the differences between them.

Because Laura had no head for business (nor for much else, observed her loyal old friend, my mother) the young widow had been left out of her husband’s will. The Colonel had specified that Aunt Tabitha would inherit his plantation, which upon her death would be turned over to his Myers nephews, who were our first cousins on their mother’s side. (Aunt Cindy was almost “family,” too, since it had been the Myers relatives who had given her to Ellen Addison as a wedding present.) After Cousin William’s death in 1869, his ladies had traveled here seeking to break the will, and because wartime conditions were uncertain, Aunt Tabitha decided to stay on in Florida and manage this remote plantation which nobody in Reconstruction times could afford to buy.

Aunt Tabitha had soon discovered that cultivated or even educated people were very uncommon in this frontier county, and she and her daughter came to hate their isolation. Since Mama had been Laura’s friend and schoolmate (and since Aunt Tabitha was embarrassed-faintly-by her own role in Mama’s failed marriage), her plea for refuge in Florida had been granted. “The family at Clouds Creek informs me that you have done all you could to save the soul of my afflicted nephew,” read Aunt Tab’s letter, which Mama had shown us on those days on the Suwannee, “and suffered no end of abuse and sorrow for your pains. Forsake him, then, as God is your witness, and take shelter with us in Florida, for your children’s sake as well as for your own.” And for Aunt Tab’s sake, too, Mama was quick to point out. The plantation would need all the help that strong young Edgar could provide, not to speak of Cinderella Myers’s contributions in the kitchen.

Calvin Banks fetched our family from the river landing in a wagon. How threadbare the poor things looked when they arrived! I glanced at Aunt Tabitha, who shared this impression and did not trouble to hide it. I was glad of what Mama had confided, that she had hidden her jewelry from her husband from the very first day of her marriage, and had brought along her few small diamonds “to start us out in Florida.” She had always worn her hair in a big old rat’s nest suitable for hiding diamond rings-two beautiful rings, according to our Ninny, “not just little chips stuck onto something.”

On my first day, I jumped right in and labored mightily in the spring planting to show I was no mere poor relation but an able farmer, and that just because we had accepted Aunt Tab’s hospitality did not mean we sought her charity. Excited by the possibilities of this plantation and eager to understand its economics, I was up early and rode till late, helping out wherever I could learn something. Within months I felt confident that I could run this place as overseer, though it might take a year or so to prove it.

On Sundays, out hunting and exploring, I rode all over the south county. The forests were fairly trembling with deer and turkey, an almost unimaginable abundance after long years in the worn-out woods of home. As for robins, redbirds, orioles-those larger songbirds which I snared for our poor table in the War years-their peaceful choruses arose each morning from the oak trees near the house, intermingled with the ring of axes or the hammers banging on some new construction. Every shack had roosters crowing and hogs grunting and fieldhand families laughing and crooning in the evening, sounds which made Mama homesick for “the good old days,” by which she meant the antebellum days of cotton wealth and slavery. All that was lacking here, she whispered, with a wry glance at our benefactors, was amusing company. Oh how she missed her poor lost Selden, Mama sighed, still in hopes that one day her witty, educated cousin might reappear.