From the first year of the War, when I was five, until the age of fifteen, when I fled Edgefield District for good, I had very little to show for life besides the calluses and grime of endless seasons of hard labor, lice, mean dirt, and poverty. Every hour of every day not spent hacking a crop, I was trapping and snaring, fishing and gathering, even stealing from other gardens for our hungry family. We subsisted on clabber, that mix of thin milk, curds, and whey which looked like the source of Minnie’s pasty complexion.
Black Tap Watson, not my father, taught me how to hunt and gather, how to set fine horsehair snares and sturdy rabbit gums, where to find wild tubers and the gopher tortoise, when to fish the creeks. In the wake of war, the common game-bear, deer, coon, and turkey, dove, quail, and wild duck-had all but vanished from South Carolina. Only young squirrels and blundering possums, with a rare rabbit or robin, fell to my sling. In summer, I gigged frogs and pin-hooked little fish to eke out the clabber and dandelion greens, the hardtack biscuits, dusty beans, and mouse-stained grits in our meager larder.
Occasionally, in winter dusk, returning from my trapline out at Deepwood, I would wrench a few collards and cold muddy turnips from Tap’s patch next door. It was no sin to borrow vegetables from people “who had welcomed the Yankee bluecoats, then dared to lord it over their former benefactors,” as my father put it. Proudly would Papa have us know that Elijah D. Watson would never “accept charity from niggers,” while Mama, for her part, made certain he knew that his needy family was provided daily sustenance by his black neighbors.
One afternoon in the twilight gloom, Tap appeared from behind his cabin. I straightened, putting a bold face on it, bringing from behind my back my stolen greens. Embarrassed, Tap lowered his stave. “You gettin so big, I took you for your daddy.” That the irascible old man said nothing else made clear I’d never fooled him; he had ignored my raiding for some time. He disappeared then but his rasp came back out of the dark. “Take what you be needin, White Man, jus’ so’s you know dat Black Man gots to eat, de same as you.” My holler that we aimed to pay him brought a derisive hoot. I shouted, furious, “Think we need charity from niggers?” Hearing nothing, I called, “Tap? I was aiming to bring you folks a rabbit.”
“Rabbit?” Tap’s whoop came from his cabin door. “Some ol’ nigger must teached dat white boy purty good, he gwine cotch rabbits!”
I tossed those greens onto our table, telling Mama they had come from “the Black Watsons.” Though this was true, my sullen way of speaking told her they were stolen, for she banged her heavy pot on the iron stove. “Nigger greens,” I teased her. “Just toss ’em out if you don’t want ’em, Mama.”
In our poverty, waste troubled her far more than theft. “Hush,” she said, stoking the fire to boil water. “Our Lord provideth in our hour of need. To despise His bounty would be sinful.” Mama would set aside my sin until the greens were eaten; she never refused her share of my ill-gotten gleanings.
Coldly I said, “ ‘And the thought of eating came to her when she was wearied of her tears.’ ” She stared at me. “From Cousin Selden’s Iliad.” She held my eye a moment, then turned back to the stove. “Good,” she murmured, a response to insolence that made me nervous. (Only later did I understand that she was mollified because her son perused the classics.) Told that Tap had dared raise a stick to me, she said “Good” a second time; on Tap’s behalf she gave the stove another wallop, scaring weak-eyed Minnie, who was bent deep into her primer as if to inhale her lessons through her nose.
At supper, Mama reminded us that Tap, for all his gall and sour temper, had remained loyal all our lives and was therefore entitled to forget his place in certain minor matters. Old-time darkies, after all, often adopted gruff impertinence for want of a better way to express affection. Being well taken care of by their white folks, they had lost the fear that made most of their people mumble and shuffle and play dumb to get along.
Tap Watson was the old kind of church Negro, Mama said, proud as could be that Silver Bluff Baptist, founded before the Revolutionary War, “was de oldes’ nigger church in de whole of de whole country.” True, its first minister had been a white man, but back in those days, black and white worshipped together. (Tap had attended “white folks church” without much spiritual reward. “All dat preacher spokin about is niggers strickly mindin Marster and Missus cause dem is de kin’ly-hearted folks dat’s feedin you for Christ’s sweet sake, Amen.”)
Neither Emancipation nor Reconstruction had changed things very much, she said. The evil hostility between the races had begun in the first year of the War when the black faithful were banished to the church balcony. “Since the War, the poor things are not welcome at all, but mercifully they have their own nice church and their own Book of Genesis, too.” (Tap Watson preached that Adam and Eve had started out in life as darkies, but after their sin, they turned so pale with fear of the Lord’s wrath that they passed for white folks ever after.) These days, alas, the Negro churches were being harassed by the Ku Klux Klan, a mostly nocturnal organization founded by Major Coulter’s commanding officer, General Forrest, he who in the last year of the War had approved the slaughter of unarmed black Union prisoners.
Tap was proud of his citizenship, proud of his vote, yet he was still cautious, holding that progress must be nurtured slowly lest it perish. He had been stoic about Z. P. Claxton’s execution of his runaway son, and he had not protested the Black Codes, which flouted Reconstruction by discouraging blacks from leaving their plantations, owning land, or even leasing it. Though he understood that for the black man, this was a time of terrible danger as well as hope, he had no interest in emigration to Liberia. Edgefield, where he was born a slave, was where Tap aimed to die as a free man.
White folks pointed to Tap Watson as a fine representative of the Negro race, and because his loyalty was trusted, he was mostly forgiven his acid yellow eye and abrasive tongue. True, he was sour about whites, but he was just as sour about “Negroes.” Asked his opinion by the Edgefield Advertiser, he would neither repudiate nor approve a black man whose “genteel manner” and “good sense” had won high praise before the War but who was now denounced in the same newspaper for “swagger and bad character” because he had urged new “Negro” citizens to vote. As Tap intoned without a smile, “Them ‘Negroes’ gone to get us niggers killed.”
The Papa I had once revered was drinking so unstintingly that I feared not for his life but for my own. Pleading or protesting, seen as defiance, only fed his drunkard’s fury as with hoarse gasps of stinking breath he punched and clouted me about the head or lashed me raw with a green switch across the back and legs. At such times, that rufous face looked demented and misshapen: how could it be that I still prayed this smelly brute might love me?
“Mr. Watson, I beg of you,” was all Mama said by way of protest. I learned early to expect no help from my mother. As for Minnie, she wet herself at the first hoarse shout, and her panic when the moment came to flee often caused me to be caught and beaten while trying to save her. Worse, she betrayed me to Papa every time we quarreled, complaining that her brother had been mean. Mama, too, used the threat of Papa’s violence to twist me to her will; it was injustice more than burning pain and terror and humiliation which raised tears to my eyes and stoked the rage which made it possible to hide them.
I never let Papa see me weep and never yelped, just set my jaw and bit down hard on pain in the rigid way a dog clamps on another’s throat, forging my will like some fanatic in Hell’s fire until his demons wore out and his arm, too, all the while swearing secret oaths of vengeance.
“Oh, you poor boy! Are you all right?” Mama’s murmured concern always came too late to spare me. When I only gazed at her by way of answer, her eyes got jumpy and veered off. “Please, Edgar,” she might beg, “it scares me when your eyes shiver that way.” The show of derangement was a poor revenge but I knew no other; my voice would have broken if I’d said one word. Eventually I realized that the “crazy” eyes that scared her were the first manifestation of “Jack Watson,” a shadow brother I had conceived out of loneliness after black Joseph’s death, having had neither time nor opportunity for friendship. Though Jack came unbidden, I would know that he was there from the sudden uneasiness of others.
The first time Papa beat me to unconsciousness (perhaps I fainted from the pain), Mama fled across the yard to seek comfort on Aunt Cindy’s bosom rather than offer comfort to her son, who lay on the dirt floor in a dark realm from which all sun and color and all past and future had been struck away. In a dream, my mother’s figure pressed against a wall. Slowly she raised a fingertip to seal her lips, keeping God’s secret, bearing witness to His acts, not intervening.
One day Minnie crept out of her cranny to find her brother, his whole body shaking, hauling himself onto his knees, using the bedpost, intent on the father sprawled upon his mattress. I never noticed her until she whimpered. When I turned, that whimper turned to a whine of fear-not at my bloody face but because crazy-eyed Jack Watson peered out through that grimace. The child cringed back as from an apparition.
Though by no means deficient-she was bright-Minnie’s speech had become crippled by her fears, but like certain blind folk, she could apprehend what commonly escaped others, and she had been first to recognize an alien presence. “Oh Edgar please, I don’t know who you are!” she begged that first time, her voice seeming to call from faraway. Then the black bubble around brow and brain dissolved with a soft pop, and Jack was gone and time and space and sound and colors rushed back in-the thick rufous carcass in its fume of moonshine, the reek of broken dogshit boots, and the little girl shrieking as the body humped up in a great cough and thrash, fell off the bed, rose to all fours and then unsteadily erect.
Elijah D. Watson stared about him like a man emerging from his root cellar after a tornado, wondering if his loved ones have survived. Relieved to see me on my feet, he offered a loose salute and grin. “No man can say Lige Watson’s boy don’t stand up and take his punishment!”
Incredibly his stupid praise was solace. I could not know that one day soon I would vow to my shadow brother that when the time came, I would take his hidden musket from the rafters and blow that red-faced sweaty head clean off its shoulders.