cracked his hide whip. In single file through the black trees, the two figures moved away along the moon-silvered water into enshrouding dusk, the black man pitched forward, the lumpish rider and lean hounds behind.
In dread of swamps and labyrinths, of dusk, of death-the shadow places-I called after the overseer, my voice gone shrill. “You fixing to leave him out here?”
In the dusk, the forest gathered and drew close. I stood transfixed. In its great loneliness, the body lay in wait. I wanted to go close his eyes, but alone with a corpse at nightfall, I was too frightened. Already that shining face with its stopped blood had thickened like a mask, and bloodied humus crusted its smooth cheek. At last I ran and knelt by Joseph’s side, tried to pull him straight, free his gray hand, fold the arms across the chest.
The dead are heavy, as I learned that day, and balky, too. He would not lie the way I wanted. I stared at him frantic, out of breath. The forehead, drained, resembled the cool and heavy skin of a huge toadstool. The brown eyes, wide in the alarm of dying, were dull glazed, dry. Trying to draw the eyelids down, my finger flinched, so startled was it by how delicate these lids were and how naturally they closed, as if he were drifting into sleep, but also by the hardness of the orbs beneath their petals. Who could have imagined that the human eye would be so hard! When one lid rose a little, slowly, in a kind of squint, I jumped and fled.
The overseer saw that I was barefoot and in tears. He did not offer to swing me up behind. He said, “I allus tole ’em they is such a thing as too much nigger spirit.” Not knowing what such words might mean, I stared back at the lump that had been Joseph; it was ceding all shape and semblance to the dark, subsiding like humus among roots and ferns. Z. P. Claxton, I knew, would be laid to rest in higher ground, in sunny grasses, in the light of Heaven.
The dead I had seen before but not the killed. Cousin Selden, home from war, had confided that the corpse of a human slain in violence and left staring where it fell looked like some being hurled down wide-eyed out of Heaven- nothing at all like the prim cadaver of the beloved in sedate sleep, plugged, scrubbed, perfumed, and suited up in Sunday best for the great occasion, hands crossed pious on its breast. Those who touched their lips to the cool forehead in farewell held a breath so as not to know that faint odor of cold meat. Or so said Cousin Selden, who composed dark poetry and liked to speak in that peculiar manner. Not that a darkie had been my “beloved,” but Joseph had been kind to me, he had been kind, and I had no other friends. How I would miss him! I was still young and could not help my unmanly feelings.
My grandfather Artemas Watson died in 1841 at the age of forty. His second wife Lucretia Daniel had predeceased him at the age of thirty, and his son Elijah Daniel Watson, born in 1834, was thus an orphan at an early age. Grandfather Artemas’s properties included sixty-eight slaves, with like numbers distributed to Great- Uncle Tillman and their several brothers. In 1850, my father inherited real estate and property in the amount of $15,000, by no means a negligible sum, but according to Mama he’d squandered most of it on gambling and horses by the time they were married five years later.
The marriage of a Clouds Creek Watson was duly recorded in the Edgefield marriage records: Elijah D. Watson and Ellen C. Addison, daughter of the late John A. Addison, January 25, 1855. Colonel Addison had commissioned the construction of the courthouse from which the crossroads village took its name (and in which his son-in-law, in years to come, would appear regularly as a defendant). Ellen’s mother had died at age twenty-five, but Ellen, as a ward in a rich household, was given her own slave girl and piano lessons until the day she was married off to young Elijah, with whom her one bond might have been that both had been orphaned when their fathers died in 1841.
THE CLOUDS CREEK WATSONS
Four years after his bugled glory on Court House Square, Private Lige Watson, having lost his horse, walked home from war. He told his family of the sack and burning of Columbia by the ruthless General Sherman, describing the capital’s lone chimneys, the blackened skeletons of noble oaks. “You folks at home know nothing of real war,” he said, astonished that Clouds Creek and Edgefield Court House had survived untouched.
His family had known something of real war, of course, having had to scour bare sustenance from our remnant of the Artemas Plantation. The rest had been bought or otherwise acquired by Uncle Elijah Junior, who early in the War had assumed our mortgage, extending but meager help thereafter to the absent soldier’s wife and children. As a precaution against his nephew’s well-known temper, Mama said, he let us remain in the dilapidated house and raise such food and cotton as we might; even so, my mother, burdened with little Minnie, could not manage alone, not even with my nine-year-old hard labor. Uncle Elijah Junior sent us the hardheaded Dock, knowing Dock would run off again at the first chance, which he did, this time for good. Next, he sent old Tap Watson because Tap, the father of the slain Joseph, no longer worked well under Z. P. Claxton. Ol’ Zip had been too quick on the trigger, sighed Great-Uncle Tillman, but he scares some work out of ’em, we got to give him that.
A small blue-black man of taciturn, even truculent disposition, Tap had not forgotten the kindnesses received from the late Master Artemas, that vague and lenient planter who had owned Tap’s parents and who remembered on his deathbed to set this stern man free. Unlike his son, Tap preferred orderly bondage to the unknown dangers of “freedom” and had cashed in his emancipation by selling himself to Elijah Junior for cold coin. “This way, I has my job, somethin to eat.” Slave or freedman, Tap had never missed a day of work-that was his pride.
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
