CHAPTER 1
Oh Mercy, cries the Reader.
What? Old Edgefield again? It must be Pandemonium itself, a very District of Devils!
– PARSON MASON L. WEEMS
DISTRICT OF DEVILS
Edgefield Court House, which gave its name to the settlement that grew from a small crossroads east of the Savannah River, is a white-windowed brick edifice upon a hill approached by highroads from the four directions, drawing the landscape all around to a point of harmony and concord. The building is faced with broad stone steps on which those in pursuit of justice may ascend from Court House Square to its brick terrace. White columns serve as portals to the second-story courtroom, and the sunrise window in the arch over the door, filling the room with austere light, permits the elevated magistrate to freshen his perspective by gazing away over the village to the open countryside and the far hills, blue upon blue.
Early in the War, a boy of six, I was borne lightly up those steps on the strong arm of my father. On the courthouse terrace, I gazed with joy at this tall man in Confederate gray who pointed out to his proud son the fine prospect of the Piedmont, bearing away toward the northwest and the Great Smoky Mountains. In those nearer distances lay the Ridge, where a clear spring appeared out of the earth to commence its peaceful slow descent through woodland and plantation to the Edisto River. This tributary was Clouds Creek, where I was born.
On that sunny day on Court House Square my father, Elijah Daniel Watson, rode away to war and childhood ended. As a “Daughter of Edgefield,” his wife Ellen, with me and my little sister, waved prettily from the courthouse steps as the First Edgefield Volunteers mustered on the square. Her handsome Lige, wheeling his big roan and flourishing a crimson pennant on his saber, pranced in formation in the cavalry company formed and captained by his uncle Tillman Watson. On the right hand of Edgefield’s own Governor Andrew Pickens, who saluted the new volunteers from the terrace, stood Mama’s cousin Selden Tilghman, the first volunteer from Edgefield District and its first casualty. Called forth to inspire his townsmen, the young cavalry officer used one crutch to raise and wave the blue-red crisscross flag of the Confederacy.
Governor Pickens thundered, “May the brave boys of Edgefield defend to the death the honor and glory of our beloved South Carolina, first sovereign state to secede from the Yankee Union!” And Cousin Selden, on some mad contrary impulse, dared answer the governor’s exhortation by crying out oddly in high tenor voice, “To those brave boys of Edgefield who will sacrifice their lives for our Southern right to enslave the darker members of our species!”
The cheering faltered, then died swiftly in a low hard groan like an ill wind. Elijah Watson wheeled his horse and pointed his saber at Lieutenant Tilghman as voices cat-called rudely in the autumn silence. Most men gave the wounded lieutenant the benefit of the doubt, concluding he was drunk. He had fought bravely and endured a grievous wound, and all was forgiven when he rode off to war again, half-mended.
When the War was nearly at an end, and many slaves were escaping toward the North, a runaway was slain by Overseer Zebediah Claxton on Tillman Watson’s plantation at Clouds Creek. Word had passed the day before that Dock and Joseph were missing. At the racketing echo of shots from the creek bottoms, yelping in fear for Joseph, I dropped my hoe and lit out across the furrows toward the wood edge, trailing the moaning of the hounds down into swamp shadows and along wet black mud margins, dragged at by thorns and tentacles of old and evil trees.
I saw Dock first-dull stubborn Dock, lashed to a tree-then the overseer whipping back his hounds, then two of my great-uncles, tall and rawboned on rawboned black horses. Behind the boots and milling beasts, the heavy hoof stamp and bit jangle, a lumped thing in earth-colored home-spun sprawled awkwardly among the roots and ferns. The broken shoes, the legs hard-twisted in the bloody pants, the queer gray thing sticking out askew from beneath the chest-how could that gray thing be the warm and limber hand that had offered nuts or berries, caught my mistossed balls, set young “Mast’ Edguh” on his feet after a fall? All in a bunch, the fingers had contracted like the toes of a stunned bird, closing on nothing.
On long-gone Sabbath mornings of those years before the War, I ran with the black children to our games in the bare-earth yards back of the quarters, scattering dusty pigs and scraggy roosters. In cramped fetid cabins I was hugged with all the rest and fed molasses biscuits, fatback, hominy, wild greens. And always, it seemed, this sweet-voiced Joseph made the white child welcome. Yes, Joseph was guilty and our laws were strict. Alive, he would be cruelly flogged by Overseer Claxton, just as Dock would be tomorrow. Yet in my fear, I wept for poor, gentle Joseph, and pitied myself, too, in this loss greater than I knew.
CLAXTON
At daybreak Mr. Claxton, on the lookout, had seen a small smoke rising from a corner of the swamp and rode on down there with his shotgun and his dogs. The slaves had fled, obliging him to shoot and wound them both-so went his story. He was marching them home when this damned Joseph sagged down like a croker sack and would not get up. “Too bad it weren’t this other’n, seein he was the one behind it. I told him, ‘Shut up your damn moanin.’ Told him, ‘Stand that son-bitch on his feet, I ain’t got all day.’ Done my duty, Major, but it weren’t no use.”
Major Tillman Watson and his brother sat their big horses, chewing on the overseer’s story. The dead boy’s homespun was patched dark and stuck with dirt, and a faint piss stink mixed with hound smell and the sweet musk of horses. “Wet hisself,” the overseer repeated to no one in particular. He was a small, closed-face man, as hard as wire.
Uncle Elijah Junior complained angrily about “the waste of a perfectly good nigger” but his older brother, home from war, seemed more disturbed by Claxton’s viciousness. “Dammit, Z. P., you telling us these boys was aiming to outrun them hounds of yours?” Major Tillman was backing his big horse, reining its head away toward home. “Close his eyes, dammit!” He was utterly fed up. “Well? Lay him across your saddle, then! You can damn well walk him in.”
“I reckon he’ll keep till mornin,” Claxton muttered, sullen.
“You have no business here,” I was admonished by Uncle Elijah Junior-not because I was too young to witness bloody death nor because night was coming on but because I was certainly neglecting whichever chore I had abandoned without leave. Major Tillman, half-turned in the saddle, frowned down on me in somber temper. “You’re not afraid out here all by yourself?”
“Yessir. I mean, nosir.”
“Nosir.” The major grunted. “You get on home so you don’t go worryin your poor Mama.” Trailed by his brother, who would never be a horseman, the old soldier rode away through the dark trees.
“ ‘
“He’s hurt!” I protested. Claxton glared as if seeing me for the first time. “Hurt? What
