Shadow Country (70 page)

Told that his son lay dead in the swamp, he had set his jaw and turned his back on Claxton. “He's your'n, ain't he? Go get him,” Claxton barked. Facing him then, Tap Watson fixed the overseer with a baleful eye, not turning away even when Claxton pointed at the black man's yellowed eyes and lifted his whip by way of warning. Great-Uncle Tillman ordered him to leave that black man be, and Tap finished slopping the hogs before hitching a mule to the wagon to go fetch the body. Never again would he acknowledge the overseer's order, voice, or presence, which explained why Elijah Junior had been happy to be rid of him. Also, Tap had fornicated with Mama's slave girl, Cinderella, now the tall young woman whom we called Aunt Cindy, and when he came to us, Mama ordered them to marry.

When I told Papa, home from the War, how Z. P. Claxton had killed Joseph, Papa said roughly, “Runaway? Damn well deserved it.” Impoverished, now past thirty, Papa had to start all over as a poor relation of stern prosperous kin who prided themselves on self-sufficiency and independence. A tenant farmer on the Artemas plantation, he was paying a third of all crops raised to his uncle Elijah Junior, and in the lean aftermath of war, struggling to make a cotton crop with his wife and children, he slid into heavy debt to his own clan. As a war veteran, broke and disenfranchised, he would rail against the injustice of his fate, yet he would not tolerate Mama's criticisms of Elijah Junior. Indeed he acclaimed his uncle's “Watson thrift” even when this dour trait caused his own household to go hungry. (It was all very well about Watson thrift, Mama would say, but how did such thrift differ from hard-hearted stinginess?) With gallant optimism, my father pledged that one day, with God on his right hand and his strong son on his left, he would reclaim his family land, restoring the line of Artemas Watson to Clouds Creek. Carried away, he roughed my head with vigor. Though my eyes watered, I wished my brave soldier daddy to be proud and did not flinch.

For a time “Elijah D.” enjoyed oratorical support from his aunt Sophia Boatright, a big top-heavy woman with a baying voice whose favorite topic—indeed, her only topic, Mama would whisper—was the Watson clan, all the way back to the English Watsons (or Welsh or Scots or perhaps Ulstermen, sniffed Mama), those staunch landowners and men of means who had sailed in the sixteenth century to New York City, then traveled on to Olde Virginia to claim their tract of free and fertile land. The first New World patriarch was Lucius Watson Esquire of Amelia County in Virginia, whose sons moved on to South Carolina as early as 1735. Their land grants were registered at Charleston, Aunt Sophia assured us, well before the arrival of those Edgefield clans which gave themselves airs today.

A worthy son of those forefathers was Michael Watson, a fabled Indian-fighter who chastised the Cherokees and later led a citizens' militia against highwaymen and outlaws, the foul murderers of his father and a brother. Meanwhile, he acquired a tract of six thousand acres on Clouds Creek, which was consolidated as clan property when he married Martha Watson, his first cousin. (Here Mama dared roll her eyes for her children's benefit, screwing her forefinger into her temple in sign of inbred lunacy and sending our little Min into terrified giggles.)

During the Revolutionary War, Captain Michael Watson had served as a field captain of Pickens's Brigade, a mounted company armed with muskets for the deadly fight against the “King-Lovers” or Tories. At one point, he was captured and imprisoned at Columbia, where according to one reputable account—which Aunt Sophia enjoyed reading aloud at family gatherings—Martha Watson Watson, who was “small and beautiful, with wonderfully thick long hair . . . wound a rope around her body and carried files in her hair for the use of Captain Watson, [who] made his escape.” (Here my mother might pretend to struggle desperately with her own hair, risking what she called “the Great Wrath of the Watsons” with whispered parody:
Captain Michael, darlin? Mah handsome hee-ro? Here's a nice li'l ol' file so's you can saw those bars in twain and make good your escape! Just hold your horses, Captain dear, whilst I unsnarl this pesky thing from mah gloerious hay-uh!
)

In an early history of South Carolina, our famous ancestor had been described as “a determined and resentful man who consulted too much the counsels which these feelings suggested.” Freed from Tory gaol, the choleric Captain rushed straight into battle, only to receive a fatal wound in the forest swamps of the south Edisto. Having turned over his command to Lieutenant Billy Butler, our ancestor composed himself and “died for Liberty.”

“Those Edgefield families prate about their ‘aristocracy'!” Sophia Boatright scoffed. “How about our Clouds Creek aristocracy? Our Watson forebears held royal grants for two decades before Andrew Pickens came down out of the hills, and they owned more land besides!”

(“Even so,” Mama might murmur to my flustered father, who could not forcefully suppress her on a family occasion, “it was called Pickens's Brigade, not Watson's Brigade, isn't that true, dear? And that handsome young lieutenant who replaced Captain Watson became General Butler, father of General Matthew Calbraith Butler, who married the exquisite Maria Pickens, whose father, come to think of it, was a general, too. Has there ever been a General Watson, dear?” Such whispers were just loud enough to stiffen the black whiskers of Great-Aunt Sophia.)

Captain Michael's only son, Elijah Julian, would become the landed patriarch of the Watson clan. Through industry and force of character, the “Old Squire” acquired eleven plantations, one for each of his children, among whom “his favorite was always his first little daughter, Sophia,” said Aunt Sophia. In the presence of her brothers, Aunt Sophia referred to the late patriarch as “the ramrod of this family”; a shuffle and shift of bombazine and feathers would signal the onset of another anecdote establishing her own ascendancy as the rightful claimant to that title. One day when the Yankees ordered their black militia to drill on her broad lawn, the Ramrod's gallant elder daughter strode forth shouting, “Now you monkeys just stop all that darn foolishness and go on home!” which naturally they did.

We are no Eire-ish nor Sco-atch, nor are we Enga-lish—thus would the Old Squire tease his proud Sophia whenever she put on English airs, according to the recollections of her siblings. With Border folk, he would point out, who could determine who came from where, since none had agreed for seven hundred years where their domains lay? No, the Old Squire had declared, we are proud Borderers, the sons of Watt, and nothing more.

Mama's cousin Selden Tilghman, the young cavalry officer, war hero, and classics scholar, lived alone on his family plantation, known as Deepwood. Detesting the notorious history of violence in his Tillman clan, attributing their uproar to inbreeding and prideful ignorance, Cousin Selden had reverted to the ancestral spelling in order to separate himself from “those amongst my kinsmen who have grown so contemptuous of learning that they no longer know the correct spelling of their own name.”

In Selden's opinion, Mama told us, the early Watsons had probably arrived in the port of Philadelphia in the shiploads of Highland refugees from seven centuries of war and famine in the Border counties. These clannish and unruly Celts, as he portrayed them, had horrified the Quakers with outlandish speech and uncouth disrespect for all authority. Their women were notorious for short-cropped skirts, bare legs, and loose bodices, while the men mixed unabashed poverty and filth with a furious pride that hastened to avenge the smallest denigration or perceived injustice. Worse, they did this in the name of “honor,” a virtue which more mannerly colonials would never concede to such rough persons. Inevitably the Borderers were urged westward toward the backcountry of the Pennsylvania Colony, in the fervent hope that indigenous peoples even more primitive than themselves might do away with them.

The Borderers were a suspicious breed of feuders and avengers, cold-eyed and mistrustful of all strangers, or any who interfered with them in the smallest way. They fought their way through Indian territory with fatalistic indifference to hard faring and danger, spreading south like a contagion along the Appalachians into western Virginia and the Carolina uplands. Many were drovers of cattle and hogs, throwing up low cabins of wood or stones packed tight with earth, hunting and gathering the abounding game and fish, trading meat where possible for grain and iron, boozing and bragging and breeding, ever breeding. Scattering homesteads and ragged settlements south and west to the Great Smokies and beyond, massacring the aborigines wherever fortune smiled, they broadcast the seed of their headstrong clans without relinquishing a single dour trait or archaic custom. When times were hard, not a few would resort to traditional Border occupations—reivers and rustlers, highwaymen and common bushwhackers. The Border Watsons were of this stripe, Cousin Selden implied—quarrelsome ruffians disdainful of the law, obstreperous rebels against Church and Crown, as careless of good manners as of hardship and rude weather, not to speak of all the finer sentiments of the human heart. Or so, at least, Celtic ways were represented by Cousin Selden, whose mother had flowered amongst the Cavalier gentry of Maryland, and been chivalrously deflowered, too, her son supposed.

Selden's amused, ironic views, well spiced by Mama, were regularly quoted to her children in their father's presence. Though no match for his tart Ellen, Papa defended the Clouds Creek Watsons with a heartfelt rage. If the Watsons were mere Border rabble, he might bellow, then how would her precious Selden explain their prosperity in the New World? For whether by grant from the South Carolina Colony or Crown patent from King George, enlarged by enterprise, the first Carolina Watsons had acquired sixteen square miles—sixteen square miles!—of the best Clouds Creek country on the north fork of the Edisto River even before the muddy crossroads known as Edgefield Court House came into being. What was more, his late lamented mother Mary Lucretia Daniel for whom our little Minnie had been named was a direct descendant of President Jefferson's great-aunt Martha. “Children, you have a proud heritage to uphold!” he exclaimed with passion, tossing his head dismissively in his wife's direction as he spoke of her “traitorous” Tory antecedents and their “lily-livered longing,” as he called it, to be accepted by the Pickenses and Butlers and Brookses at the Court House.

“Spare your poor children these vulgarities, I beseech you,” his wife might protest, to hone her point that his credentials as a gentleman were suspect. Ellen Catherine Addison, after all, had been born into aristocratic circumstances, however straitened these might have become. It was scarcely her fault that her feckless husband had sold off all of her inheritance excepting her mother's set of Scott's Waverly novels, which was missing her own favorite,
Ivanhoe.
“How did I ever imagine,” she would sigh, “that this rough fellow would be my Ivanhoe!” Gladly would she play the piano for her husband—“to soothe your savage breast, dear,” she might add with a girlish peal—could such an instrument be found in a Watson dwelling, or fit into it, for that matter, since for all their prosperity, those Clouds Creek Watsons, eschewing the white-columned mansions of the Edgefield gentry, were content with large two-story versions of the rough-sawed timber cabins of their yeomen forebears.

“Yeomen?”

For his abuse and dismal failure as a father and provider as well as for her own exhaustion and privation, the erstwhile Miss Ellen C. Addison repaid her husband with sly mockery of those “darned old Watsons,” as she called them. Any Addison was better born, more educated and refined, and in every way more suited than any Watson to consort with the aristocracy at Edgefield Court House, not to speak of Charleston, far less England—thus would Mama prattle. We scarcely heard her, so frightened were we of the enraged and violent man in the chimney corner.

Mama blamed nothing on cruel providence but kept up her merciless good cheer in the worst of circumstances, as if otherwise our wretched family must go under. A topic that delighted her was the evangelical form of Protestant religion adopted by our country folk such as the Baptist Watsons, so unlike the discreet Episcopal persuasion favored at the Court House. In their “fellowshipping” at summer camp meetings, Mama had heard, the evangelicals lay about together in the grass, and not a few drank ale and wooed their females. Some might even take the time to be “born again,” said Mama, shaking her head. “When they've had enough preaching, the whole crowd joins in ‘the Great Shout,' as I believe they call it, and something called ‘the Feast of the Fat Things.' ” Winking at her children, Mama called out toward the porch, “Isn't that what Baptists call it, Mr. Watson? Does our dear aunt Sophia participate in the Feast of the Fat Things?”

“Love Feast,” Papa snarled, after a heavy-breathing silence. My sister, close to hysterics over the Feast of the Fat Things, would run away and hide while I, ever more frightened, stood my ground, dreading the oncoming cataclysm.

Mama would be laughing in delight. “The Feast of the Fat Things—imagine! These upcountry weddings, children, you never saw such carryingson in all your life. The bride is usually with child—she is the Fat Thing, I suppose! They play all sorts of games, dance reels and jigs, and some rush about naked. They sing, ‘Up with your heels and down with your head, that is the way we make cockledy bread.' Isn't that quaint? And all the men dead drunk on their Black Betty—”

“Dammit, woman! That's the name for the bottle—”

“—and after all this . . . love feasting? . . . these poor females settle down to their long, hard, dreary lives. To be sure, life is hard and utterly thankless for all women, children. But our backcountry women on dark isolated farms—‘too far away to hear the barking of the neighbor's dog,' as the old folks say—toiling like draft animals in the mud, with none of the culture and society of towns, nothing but silence and hostility and worse from brutish husbands—well, pagan or not, those poor creatures need that Feast of the Fat Things to bring a little light into their wretched lives, isn't that so, Mr. Watson?”