Peter Matthiessen: Shadow Country

In regard to Watson, reviewers of the original three books have cited D. H. Lawrence’s idea that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” To a degree, this may be true of Watson, but he is more mysterious than that. As best I understand him after all these years, he was neither a “natural-born killer” nor a man of stunted criminal mentality-such men aren’t interesting. On the other hand, he was obsessed, and obsession that isn’t crazed or criminal is enthralling; in thirty years, I have learned a lot about obsession from too much time spent in the mind of E. J. Watson.

– Peter Matthiessen

Spring 2008

HIS ANCESTORS:

John and William, sons of Lucius Watson of Virginia, moved to Edgefield District, South Carolina, in the middle of the eighteenth century. John’s son Michael, who became a renowned Indian fighter and hero of the Revolutionary War, married William’s daughter Martha, his first cousin. Their only son was Elijah Julian (1775-1850), who consolidated the large family holdings and left a plantation at Clouds Creek at Ridge, north of Edgefield Court House, to every one of his eleven children, including Artemas.

HIS PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS:

Artemas Watson (1800-1841) and Mary Lucretia (Daniel) Watson (1807-1838)

HIS PARENTS:

Elijah Daniel Watson (“Ring-Eye Lige”)

b. Clouds Creek, S.C., 1834

d. Columbia, S.C., 1895

Ellen Catherine (Addison) Watson

b. Edgefield Court House, S.C., 1832

d. Fort White, Fla., 1910

EDGAR ARTEMAS* WATSON:

b. Clouds Creek, S.C., November 11, 1855

d. Chokoloskee, Fla., October 24, 1910

1st wife (1878): Ann Mary “Charlie” (Collins) Watson, 1862-1879

Robert Briggs “Rob” Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1879-?

2nd wife (1884): Jane S. “Mandy” (Dyal) Watson, 1864-1901

Carrie Watson Langford, b. Fort White, Fla., 1885-?

Edward Elijah “Eddie” Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1887-?

Lucius Hampton Watson, b. Oklahoma Territory, 1889-?

3rd wife (1904): Catherine Edna “Kate” (Bethea) Watson, 1889-?

Ruth Ellen Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1905-?

Addison Tilghman Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1907-?

Amy May Watson, b. Key West, Fla., 1910-?

Common-law wife: Henrietta “Netta” Daniels, ca. 1875-?

Minnie Daniels, ca. 1895-?

Common-law wife: Mary Josephine “Josie” Jenkins, ca. 1879-?

Pearl Watson, ca. 1900-? Infant male, b. May 1910: perished in Great Hurricane of October 1910

EJW’S SISTER:

Mary Lucretia “Minnie” Watson, b. Clouds Creek, S.C., 1857, d. Ft.

White, Fla., 1912

Married William “Billy” Collins of Fort White, Fla., ca. 1880

Billy Collins died in 1907 at Fort White

The Collins children:

Julian Edgar, 1880-?

William Henry “Willie,” 1886-?

Maria Antoinett “May,” 1892-?

ALSO:

EJW’s great-aunt Tabitha (Wyches) Watson (1813-1905), 3rd wife and widow of Artemas Watson’s brother Michael: instrumental in marriage of Elijah D. Watson and Ellen Addison, d. Fort White, Fla. 1905

Her daughter Laura (1830-1894), childhood friend of Ellen Addison.

Married William Myers ca. 1867

Married Samuel Tolen ca. 1890

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.

In the wake of hurricane, the coast lies broken, stunned. Day after day, a brooding wind nags at the mangroves, hurrying the unruly tides that hunt through the flooded islands and dark labyrinthine creeks of the Ten Thousand Islands. Brown spume and matted salt grass, driftwood; a far gray sun picks up dead glints from the windrows of rotted mullet at highwater line.

From the small settlement on the Indian shell mound called Chokoloskee, a baleful sky out toward the Gulf looks ragged as a ghost, unsettled, wandering. The sky is low, withholding rain. Vultures on black-fingered wings tilt back and forth over the broken trees. At the channel edge, where docks and pilings, stove-in boats, uprooted shacks litter the shore, odd pieces torn away from their old places hang askew, strained from the flood by mangrove limbs twisted down into the tide. Thatched roofs are spun onto their poles like old straw brooms; sheds and cabins sag. In the dank air, a sharp fish stink is infused with the corruption of dead animals and overflowed pits from which the privy shacks have washed away. Pots, kettles, crockery, a butter churn, tin tubs, buckets, blackened vegetables, saltslimed boots, soaked horsehair mattresses, a ravished doll are strewn across bare salt-killed ground.

A lone gull picks at reddened mullet cast on shore, a dog barks without heart at so much silence.

A figure in mud-fringed calico stoops to retrieve a Bible. Wiping grime from its caked cover with dulled fingers, she straightens, turns, and stares toward the south. The fingers pause. From the black mangrove forest down the Bay, a boat motor, softened by distance, comes and goes and comes again, bound east through Rabbit Key Pass from the Gulf of Mexico.

“Oh Lord no,” she whispers, half-aloud. “Oh please no, Mister Watson.”

Along toward twilight, Postmaster Smallwood, on his knees under his store, is raking out the last of his drowned chickens. Hearing the oncoming boat, he groans in the putrid heat. Soon one pair of bare feet, then another, pass in silence on their way down to the landing. More men follow. He knows his neighbors by their gait and britches.

Over low voices comes the pot-pot of the motor. Three days before, when that boat had headed south, every last man on the island watched it go, but the postmaster had been the only man to wave. He, too, had prayed that this would be the end of it, that the broad figure at the helm, sinking below the tree line into darkness at the far end of the Bay, would disappear forever from the Islands. Said D. D. House that day, “He will be back.”

That old man’s Sunday boots descend the Indian mound, then the bare feet of his three sandy, slow-eyed sons. The oldest, Bill House, climbs the steps and enters the store and post office, calling to Smallwood’s wife, his sister Mamie. Bill House’s feet creak on the pine floor overhead.

In the steaming heat, in an onset of malaria, Smallwood feels sickly weak. When his rump emerges from beneath his house and he attempts to stand, he staggers and bangs heavily against the outside wall, causing Mamie to cry out in the room above. He thinks, This dark day has been coming down forever.