I rode across the backlands of America, south of the south border of Tennessee. The mountain folk were suspicious of lone riders, and I had to shoot more than one mean hound along the way. Hunting my supper from the saddle, I could not afford to waste my loads, and by the end, I rarely missed with that revolver. I took squirrel, turkey, and one fawn, a red grouse, here and there a rabbit.
Crossing the hinterlands, I took shelter in many a dirt-floor hut on nights of rain, but even where the people weren’t half-starved, I gagged down grub that would tumble the guts of an old turkey buzzard, sowbelly and grits slimy with lard, old corn bread dead as seed-bin dust, half-rotten potatoes boiled down to a reeking gruel. And even where these frontier folk weren’t too shiftless to step outside and trap or shoot, that wild meat was gulped down shiny purple raw or fried to a hard chip. Few troubled to catch the bream and trout that gleamed in every branch and pond throughout the backcountry.
One day, after twenty years of exile, I rode over the Great Smokies into Carolina. I was torn and filthy and outlandish, I was restless and excited, also unclear and uneasy about what I had come so far to do. However, as a Clouds Creek Watson, I still thought of myself as an honorable man who kept his word, and having promised my father I would take his life, I aimed to do it.
Years ago, arriving in Fort White, Florida, the Herlongs had brought word that Elijah D. Watson was still kicking up trouble around Edgefield Court House. Before tracking him down-probably I was stalling-I was curious to learn what that trouble might have been. Dismounting at the horse trough near the hotel, I crossed the courthouse square to the Archives Library, which kept records of our prominent county families. In these close quarters, in the stuffy air, I was offended by my own badgerish stink and beggar’s rags, but the elderly librarian, Miss Mims, quiet and courteous, pretended to take no notice of my condition as she came and went, fetching me documents.
From estate transactions in the county records and miscellaneous information in the Watson family file, I discovered that my father had pissed away far more inheritance than I ever knew. I had scarcely digested this when a very large lady came barging through the door, waving her cane at me even as she entered. From the librarian’s resigned expression, it was plain to see that this personage accosted every visitor she chanced to spot as they entered the library.
My great-aunt Sophia Boatright-for it was she-was elderly now, the last holdout of Grandfather Artemas’s generation. In pink bonnet and raspberry gown, she looked like a giant peony, and her perfume was no doubt powerful enough to block my scent. “It’s always gratifying to see manners, my good man,” Aunt Sophia snapped, as I hunched over my documents, “but you needn’t stand up on my account.” Laying her hand upon my shoulder, she pressed me down like a jack-in-the-box, the better to scan my reading matter. “Aha!” she said. “Since you, sir, no doubt”-she leaned to inspect me closer-“are a stranger in these parts, you might not know all that you should about some of our great Edgefield heroes, the earliest of whom was my forebear.” She tapped the page and there he was, the deathless Captain Michael. “Do you know who else was born in Edgefield? William Travis, hero of the Alamo, and Lewis Wigfall, who led South Carolina’s secession as ‘the flagship of the Confederacy,’ and almost every governor this state has had!” She drew from her large reticule a worn copy of an editorial from the Charleston News and Courier, which she spread on top of my reading matter on the table.
Edgefield had more dashing, brilliant, romantic figures, statesmen, orators, soldiers, adventurers, daredevils than any county of South Carolina, if not any rural county of America.
“You see? Right there in the Charleston newspaper! And General Martin W. Gary, ‘the Bald Eagle of the Confederacy,’ came from Edgefield, too: his good friend was my late brother, Major Tillman Watson of Clouds Creek, who sponsored General Gary’s wartime company of volunteers as well as his own. General Gary, of course, rallied the Red Shirts from his balcony right up the street at Oakley Park-‘The Red Shirt Shrine,’ men called it. General Gary and General Calbraith Butler and Miss Douschka Pickens, ‘South Carolina’s Joan of Arc.’ August 12, 1876! Redemption Day! They put on red shirts and marched with fifteen hundred volunteers down here to Court House Square!”
Dutifully I followed her commanding finger, which was pointed at the door onto the square. “Yes, indeed. The Heroes of ’76. Centennial of the American Revolution. Put General Hampton in as governor and cleaned the rascals out. So much for socalled Yankee Reconstruction!” She slapped a leaflet down upon my documents. “There,” she said. “This nice paper we got up for visitors tells all that history.”
In that dark period when South Carolina was prostrate, the honor of womanhood was imperiled, brutal insults forced upon citizens by foulmouthed freedmen were more than flesh and blood could endure and civilization itself hung in the balance.
“See that?” Aunt Sophia tapped the page. “Honor of womanhood.” Dutifully I read around that tapping finger.
All over the state, men organized Saber Clubs and Rifle Clubs in utmost secrecy. Even as Paul Revere had ridden for freedom’s sake a century before, South Carolina’s Red Shirts rode in grim determination, daring all for liberty… Danger lurked in ambush, shots rang out from the forests, and a riderless horse might go on its way alone, but the Red Shirts rode on.
“The Red Shirts rode on!” my kinswoman cried with emotion, standing erect and straight as any soldier. Her eyes shone bright and the feather in her cocked hat fairly bristled. No longer a giant peony, she resembled a very fierce old chicken.
Mildly the librarian remarked that Edgefield’s Red Shirts had surely been upstanding citizens, but elsewhere red-shirted vigilantes had terrorized black folks and burned the houses of the Radical Republicans who tried to defend them. On the long summer evening of July 8 of that year, in the town of Hamburg on the Georgia border, the birth of the Redemption era on Independence Day had been celebrated four days later by an assault on the black militia by a mob of red-shirted riders led by General Calbraith Butler: five black soldiers were killed and some twenty captured. That same evening, in the presence of their terrified families, according to one witness, these prisoners were hauled into the street and told to run, whereupon they were “shot down in the clear light of a brilliant moon.”
“ ‘Clear light of a brilliant moon!’ Isn’t that beautiful?” Aunt Sophia, starry-eyed, laid ringed fingers on her breastbone, the better to contain a fond, proud heart.
“So you see, Mrs. Boatright, certain Red Shirts had quite a violent reputation,” Miss Mims said, to caution me. Though genteel Miss Mims came from an old Edgefield family of more distinguished antecedents than her own, my great-aunt now inquired if perchance the librarian (whom she’d surely known all her life) had been raised “someplace up north? Otherwise, miss, you would have known that Calbraith Butler was the man who shouted out that the next patriot to shoot a nigger would be shot.”
“Some say, madam, that the halt was called because they’d killed every last black man, and shooting into the bodies was just wasting ammunition-”
“Personally, I’m proud of our violent reputation,” Aunt Sophia declared, turning her broad raspberry back on this naysayer. “The United States of America, as those Yankees dare to call it, could use a little more of our old Edgefield spirit. This darned country has gone softer than milk toast. Why, all around the world we are accepting any insult, and from any color!”
Perversely I said, “Madam, you appear to be just the person to advise me where to find a man who shared your views; he is the hero Captain Michael Watson’s great-great-grandson.” She cried, “Of course! Which one?” And I said, “Mr. E. D. Watson.” I raised my brows as if puzzled by her consternation. “Otherwise known, so I am told, as ‘Ring-Eye Lige.’ ”
Noticing my stink for the first time, Aunt Sophia recoiled and coughed and put her hand up to her throat. “Sir, this is our archives library, not an almshouse or some low saloon.” And firing a last furious glare that fixed all blame for the presence of this lowlife on the unfortunate Miss Mims, she swept out the door in a great waft of funereal perfume.
Still shaken by her own show of courage, Miss Mims ventured that the Watson file contained no recent record of Elijah D.; indeed, his name was absent from the county census after 1870. “Mr. Watson’s place in the community, you see…” Reassured by my smile of encouragement, she fetched a bound transcript entitled “Trial of the Booth and Toney Homicides,” an episode involving Ring-Eye Lige in which four men had died.
On August 12th, 1878, on the two-year anniversary of Redemption Day, with the entire county gathered to hear rousing speeches by Governor Hampton and other dignitaries, a shootout occurred inside and outside Clisby’s Store right down the street. Three men were killed, with several others seriously wounded. According to one account at least, Elijah D. Watson had been in the crowd at Clisby’s and had probably fired, after which he apparently took to his heels.
Burrell Abney called for the defense, sworn and examined by General Butler.
Q: Were you at Edgefield Court House on the 12th of August, 1878?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you see any of the difficulty that occurred there on that day?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Will you please state to the court and jury what you saw that day.
A: I saw Elijah Watson running toward where I was from Clisby’s store with a pistol in his hand.
Q: Had the firing stopped when you saw him running off?
A: It was just before the firing stopped, for I think there were three or four shots fired afterwards.
Had my father been fleeing the fray before it ended? Very likely. Was he a coward, then? Despite all his boasting, I had never been certain of my father’s courage. In any case, he and Will Coulter were among the four men indicted for murder. My father’s attorneys were Gary & Gary and also John L. Addison, my mother’s brother. In his summation, General Gary called these homicides “the most desperately fought combat that ever transpired in this dark and bloody region.” The Bald Eagle of the Confederacy would discount the testimony that placed Elijah Watson at the scene, whereas Ring-Eye’s old nemesis, Calbraith Butler, had passionately argued the reverse. All defendants were acquitted and sent home.
Where home might have been in my father’s case was a good question. The transcript established that within a few years after his family had abandoned him, the fallen Lige had wandered into dissolution, sharing a disreputable roof with the Widow Autrey. Being unacquainted with this lady, Miss Mims had no idea what had become of Mr. Watson. When she’d tried to inquire about him from one of the archive’s founders-and she nodded toward the door through which Aunt Sophia had made her getaway-she was told that in the eyes of his whole clan, Elijah D. was dead. “They just don’t talk about him. They had his name stricken from the census.” Miss Mims shook her head in pity. “He’s what the old folks used to call a ‘shadow cousin.’ ”
Edgefield’s long tradition of violence had actually worsened after 1877, when the new president, a Mr. Hayes, withdrew the Union troops, leaving the “darkies” to the mercies of white vigilantes. Miss Mims produced a contemporary account submitted by a local black attorney to the newspaper. Colored men are daily being hung, shot, and otherwise murdered and ill-treated because of their complexion and politics. While I write, a colored woman comes and tells me her husband was killed last night in her presence and her children burned to death in the house. Such things as these are common occurrences. In the same period, it had been established that only half of the two hundred and eighty-five black convicts in this county contracted out for road-gang labor on the Greenwood-Augusta Railroad had survived the job.
Those Herlongs had told Mama that not long before they left, Lige Watson had found work as a state prison guard. Had he also been a road-gang guard during the building of that railroad? An embittered Confederate veteran who had lost his land and reputation and was prone to drunken violence might have struck the authorities as just the man to oversee black convicts.
I caught Miss Mims observing me to see how much I knew. “Mr. E. D. Watson,” I said tersely. “Any record of illegitimate children?”
She located a handwritten note, dated 1879, in what looked to me like Colonel Robert’s hand.
E. D. Watson: Son Jacob, called “Jack.” Mulatto. U.S. soldier. Deceased ca. age 22 in Georgia, date and place unknown. Daughter Lulalie. Mulatto. Whereabouts unknown.
Aching with peculiar feelings, I went outside into Court House Square and gazed about me. The town seemed uninhabited, not one soul to be seen. At the place where the famous homicides had taken place, the name A. A. Clisby was fading on the sign over the door. Standing there, I could envision my red, sweating father, pistol in hand, reeling across these dusty cobbles on a stifling August afternoon. How many times since his family had fled had he been hauled up those courthouse steps and marched into those cells behind the courtroom?
Before riding onward to the Ridge, I made inquiries about my father at the tavern, where the older clients mostly concurred about Elijah D.
“You mean ol’ Ring-Eye? Lived with the widder, one we called Ol’ Scrap? I heard that feller lost his work gang job a few years back. He was usin up too many niggers buildin track beds for the Greenville railroad. Went through them niggers like goobers, worked ’em straight to death, ol’ Ring-Eye did. They told him, ‘Ring-Eye, dammit all, maybe them monkeys come down out of the trees, but they don’t grow on trees, goddammit, and good green money ain’t the same as leaves.’ And he had him a feud with the Booth boys before that, a real bad fracas right there by the courthouse, three, four men was laying dead by the time them fellers finished.
“Nosir, ol’ Ring-Eye could not stay out of trouble, he was givin his family a bad name. So finally them Watsons come to fetch him, put him to work in their boneyard tendin their dead, cause he sure ain’t welcome around any that’s alive. Ol’ Ring-Eye! Yessiree! Now there’s a feller could tell you a war story or two and never spoil his tale with the real truth of it.”