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.
“Beg him, Mist’ Edguh, beg him!” Calvin whispered.
Scared sick, I drew my knife out of my boot, turning the blade up to the sun so the man could appreciate that quick glint off the tip. I took a good deep slow long breath, then crouched and circled with my left arm out the way my daddy taught me.
Tolen was good with that long whip; he could sit in the saddle and snap the raised-up head off of a rattler. Unless I caught hold of it, yanked him off balance, he would strip me to fish bait before I got in close enough to cut him. But maybe this feller had noticed how handy I was with my old Bowie, playing at mumbledy-peg with Sam, and he never got ten yards from the fence before he wavered. “A man don’t knife-fight with no boy,” he gasped-the same thing General Calbraith Butler told me on the square at Edgefield Court House except that out of the overseer’s rat mouth, it had no truth in it. Tolen backed away across that fence and clambered up onto his horse. “This ain’t finished, boy!” he yelled, all out of breath from dragging his fat son up behind him. Sammy looked back at me very upset as they rode away.
For a dirt-floor redneck, that vow of vengeance was an oath more sacred than six swears on the family Bible. A boy had backed him down and his son had witnessed it and the hands, too. No cracker could set aside that kind of insult far less forgive that dog name I had called him. These Tolens might lie low awhile, but revenge was the age-old way of mountain honor and they would never rest until they got it.
I worked my hoe a little while, to ease my breath and simmer down the field hands while I thought things over. Calvin was the driver on this crew when I was absent, and pretty soon he worked his way up alongside, eager to be seen imparting to the white boy the wisdom of his years at Ichetucknee. “Mist’ Edguh,” he warned, “From dis day on, doan you nevuh turn yo’ back no mo’ on one dem Tolens!”
Because he had brains and got things done, Calvin had been spoiled by William Myers even before he was a freedman. As Aunt Tab said, “Calvin knows his place but attaches too much importance to it.” I didn’t want to punish him for disrespect toward the overseeer because his warning showed loyalty to our family and took courage. Even so, he could not be permitted to disparage whites, even miserable po’ whites like these.
“Calvin,” I growled, “just you mind your business.” The others whooped at the boss nigger’s expense. I wasn’t laughing. I was remembering Clouds Creek and how I’d lost my chance. If I wasn’t very careful-if Jack wasn’t careful?-I might lose it here.