Shadow Country (80 page)

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.”

WOODSON TOLEN

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.

As a kinsman of the owners, I was disliked from the start by the overseer, Woodson Tolen, originally hired to keep the place running profitably in those months when Colonel Myers was away; almost certainly this man's designs on the plantation were born on the very day Myers was killed. He knew the old woman could not live forever no matter how hard she might try, and once sharp-eyed Aunt Tabitha was out of the way, Cousin Laura would cheerfully sign almost any piece of paper a conniving skunk like Woodson Tolen might set in front of her. He was already training his oldest boy, thin shifty James, to replace him at the trough when he retired.

A redneck from the Flint River country in the Georgia hills, this man Woodson—a man of the same ingrown breed as Z. P. Claxton—was a wiry small weasel with mean red eyes pinched too close to his nose and traces of ancient grime in every seam. From his vantage point, nose to the ground, this feller spied on my hard work, which he perceived as a sinister attempt to thwart his ambitions for his clan, and he never ever missed a chance to make me look as bad as possible in the eyes of Auntie Tab.

On those windless days in the long Florida summer, the earth slowed to a crawl and the air died, under a sky as thick and white as a boiled egg. On woodland trees along the white clay roads, the dust-shrouded leaves appeared exhausted. On such a day, out hoeing cotton, I stripped off my wet shirt, as all the fieldhands had the sense to do. And on this day the snooping W. Tolen came along on his woods pony with his second son Sam Frank Tolen up behind him.

Seeing my torso shining with sweat, Sammy jeered and stuck his tongue out. I ignored this. Determined to get along at Ichetucknee, I tolerated Fat Sammy's friendship, although he was younger and not much of a friend, having been tutored by his daddy in every little meanness he had not been born with. However, he was the only white boy close to my own age for a mile around, and I must admit that I sometimes enjoyed his comical and very dirty turn of mind. Or was it simply my discovery that I enjoyed laughing?

Woodson squinted across the fence, grinning that dog grin of his that had no fun in it. In his redneck whine he said, “Ah reckon Miz Ta-bye-a-tha won't care to hear how her nephy-yew was workin half-naked longside the niggers.” And he pointed his bony finger at my eyes to send me evil luck. (Old-fashioned folk of his mountain breed still wore a little bag around the neck containing a piece of their own shit, to keep evil at bay and decent people, too, but I had no such nostrum to protect me.)

Deep in this backcountry out of sight of Yankee law, our new black citizens were still treated like niggers, never mind what they might call themselves back in their quarters: Calvin Banks was the one nigra in that field who knew his civil rights under Reconstruction. Hearing Woodson's words, he stopped his hoe and the rest copied him. Those boys might not know too much about Reconstruction but they sure knew every last damn way there was to leave off working. When Woodson yelled, “Now y'all get back to work!” I hollered, “Mr. Tolen, sir? Why not send your fat kid over here to help out in the cotton 'stead of riding him around and giving stupid orders?”

That tickled the nigras, set 'em to whimpering, had to turn their backs for fear Woodson would see. I had gone too far and these men knew it and Sam knew it, too. But I will say for Sammy, he tried to help out with a humorous distraction. Shaking his fist at me, he hollered, “Put that shirt on like the overseer told you, Edgar Watson, or I'll come over there and put it on you!”

Laughing, I went back hoeing as if the whole thing was a joke, and Calvin and the other boys jumped to do the same, but Woodson was wound much too tight to let it go. Sammy was still giggling so hard at his own wit that he nearly shook his pap out of the saddle, so the overseer yanked that pony's head around and rode right out from under his own boy, dumping him onto the road like a sack of feed. He hollered at my back, “Just you do like I told you!” He rode on a ways as if that settled it, leaving his boy moping in the dust.

When his order was ignored, Tolen walked his pony back real slow, reined in, and sat there with one knee propped on the saddle horn. “Jus' sposin,” he drawled, after a silence, “I was to let on to Miz Ta-bye-a-tha how her nephy-yew never paid her rightful overseer no mind? Sposin I was to tell about them blast-pheemies you spoke, cussin out that self-same overseer while he was overseein?”

When I paid no attention, went on working, he nodded awhile, then spoke in a hushed voice—the cracker way of letting a man know he's in bad trouble. “Sposin she was to send you back to Carolina?” Since this was the third time he had threatened that, I was pretty sure he'd come by something from Carolina that he would use against me when the time came, to spoil my hopes of a fresh start at Ichetucknee.

My sister would whine about that “horrible Edgar mask” I sometimes wore stuck to my face—“like the real Edgar but dead.” At such times Edgar was “beside himself,” Mama once commented, more shrewdly than she knew. Had they glimpsed Jack Watson or merely the “somber hard-faced boy” Great-Aunt Sophia at Clouds Creek had disapproved of? These days, Jack only appeared at times of rage, out of that vertigo which sometimes blackened my brain until I fell. I'd never spoken of him, not to anybody, knowing I'd be called crazy. But I was never crazy and neither was Jack Watson. He was always cool, efficient, knowing just when to appear and when to go; since I couldn't summon him, far less control him, I, too, dreaded him a little. Good thing there was fifty yards and a split-rail fence between me and Woodson Tolen or Jack might have run and jumped and hauled that cracker out of the saddle and slit his stringy throat, and maybe his frogmouth son right along with him.

Jack Watson spat his words at Tolen like cold bullets: “You want my shirt on so damn bad, you haul your dirty ass down off that horse and come across that fence and put it on me.” Challenged him real clear and loud so there could be no mistake. “Trouble is, you white trash sonofabitch, you are not man enough to do that.”

Fat Sam shut off his moaning and picked himself up out of the road, and the fieldhands hurried back to work like bald-eyed demons.

Tolen climbed down off his pony and yanked his rawhide whip out of its holster. Seeing that plaited whip uncoil across his boots like a blue racer, the pony shied and the niggers moaned real low. Jack was gone. I came clear quick. It was much too late to undo such damage, and the overseer did not aim to miss his chance. Expecting me to beg for mercy, he curled that whip back in a coil and climbed the rail. When he jumped down and moved toward me, I called out, “Hold on now, Mr. Tolen!” But fear had rotted out my voice, and hearing that, he kept on coming with stiff, small steps like a mean hound.