In the Territories, stealing horses was a crime far worse than murder, which was very common and mostly well-deserved. I could count my lucky stars, the lawmen told me, grinning like coyotes, that they hadn’t strung me from the nearest cottonwood. Perhaps these men felt merciful because they were in on the whole frame-up, which they hardly bothered to deny. On January fourth of 1890, in the county court there in Van Buren, I was given fifteen years at hard labor and carted off to Arkansas State Prison.
I will say this for Eddie Reed, he knew what he owed me for my friendly counsel. He moved my family into a good household in Broken Bow, in the Choctaw Nation, where Mandy would earn their room and board as cook and housekeeper. Reed did not live long after that, being even wilder than his father. A drunk at twelve, a moonshiner running likker into the Indian Country by age fourteen, he was a robber, gunslinger, and killer all of his short life. The following year, convicted of horse theft, he was sentenced to five years in prison. The story goes that his sister Rosie Lee pled with Judge Parker before sentencing to give that remorseful orphaned boy another chance, and the Hanging Judge told her it would do no good. Said, “That young feller was born ornery and he won’t quit so he’s better off right where he is. If I let him out, he’ll be dead within the year.”
But Rosie Lee wagered the judge he was mistaken, offering her own person as security, so he took the bet. Eddie received a suspended sentence on the condition that he quit drinking and go straight. He took a job as a railway guard, serving when needed as a deputy U.S. marshal. Eddie was always a crack shot, and in a brief gunfight in the line of duty, he killed Luke and Zeke Crittenden, halfbreed Cherokee brothers, who had resisted a routine arrest for shooting up the streets. (The Crittenden boys were also deputy marshals, having never been criminals or drunken troublemakers except in their spare time.) But Reed himself would be slain within the year under similar circumstances and so his little sister lost her bet. In arrears to the Hanging Judge and to her brother’s lawyers, the brave girl embarked upon her own career in show business. Under her professional name, Pearl Younger, she showed it all nightly at the Pea Green House in Fort Smith, a gorgeous whorehouse celebrated far and wide as The Pride and Joy of the Great American Southwest.
BLACK FRANK
I’d been in prison close to a year when a work gang captain at Little Rock told me he’d sure be sorry, Ed, if Florida claimed you before you boys go out in March to bust the sod because for a horse thief you’re a good man with a spade and an inspiring example to these other criminals. When no word came from Florida I was rented for hard labor. The leg chains were unshackled and the guards rode up and down with whips and rifles. The farmers worked the gangs like beasts of burden, gave us rotten grub and very little of it. The fields were mostly in the river bottoms, with no bridge nor ferry for many, many miles, so any man who could swim to the far side would have at least one day’s head start on the guns and bloodhounds.
Worried about my family, I was desperate to escape. One fine morning I saw my chance and ran off through the cornstalks, along with a bull nigger named Frank and a scrawny halfbreed, Curly. We had a good jump before the first guard yelled and started shooting. At the river I swam underwater, kept ducking as I angled across. Halfway over, Curly took a bullet under the shoulder but his natural-born viciousness gave him a kicking spurt that carried him to where we could run in and haul him out of range.
Curly was goose-bumped blue with cold and bleeding bad, in no shape to go further. “Should of left me drown in peace,” he snarled. His eyes darted, following our expressions like a card sharp, knowing we knew he was certain to betray us as fast as they twisted that bad shoulder up behind him. Curly’s life luck had run out, with nothing good headed his way—he knew that, too. We would have to silence him, as he would have done to us without hesitation. And so he jeered at what we must be thinking, and cursed us vilely while he still had life. He wanted to provoke us, get it over quick. “Fuckin idiots,” he complained bitterly, jerking his chin toward the shouts across the river, but he meant us, too, and all of humankind while he was at it, having the freedom of nothing left to lose. That mean skunk had grit.
Out of respect for Curly’s feelings, we went off a ways while we discussed his fate, and Frank said, “Boss, we just ain’t got no choice.” I said, “All right, go to it.” I knew how hard it was sure to be without a knife or club, and I did not have the character required to hold under the river current a man who had risked his life with us only minutes before. Frank looked surprised I would admit that but he felt the same. “In front of company, too,” I added, pointing at the knot of men across the river. What we decided was, we would duck this thorny problem—leave him where he was and keep on going. And so we said sorry and so long after trading a lot of jabber about panning for gold in Oregon, which never fooled ol’ Curly for a minute.
Our first job was to hunt up two good horses and some common clothing. That afternoon we scouted a big farm, waiting till dusk for our chance to jump the homesteader when he went out back of the barn to feed his hens. That German was real happy to saddle up both of his nags and fork over his fine German revolver and canvas kit for bullet molds and powder, since we all agreed he had no further use for ’em. When Frank frowned evilly, feeling left out, the farmer asked fearfully if “your nigra” might like a packet of smoked ham with some nice cooked grits thrown in. I had to smile at that. Scowling blackly, so to speak, my partner growled, “I ain’t nobody’s nigra,” but after all the horrible grub these tight-fisted farmers had been giving us, his stomach told him to shut up, take the damn packet. “He’s his own nigra,” I advised the German, who uttered a frantic bray not much like laughter. His nerves let go on him, I reckon.
In days to come we were to learn that while attempting our escape we had been struck by bullets in the head and drowned, according to “the wounded and recaptured convict, an accomplice of Watson and the Negro.” Maybe that’s what Curly told ’em (“Breeds can’t be counted on even to lie,” Frank said), but more likely the warden was trying to make us think no one was after us while alerting lawmen all over the West. I regretted Mandy’s grief over her husband’s demise but could not help it. There was no way to get word to my family.
Having cautioned our benefactor not to leave his farm until next day lest we return in ugly mood, we rode out at nightfall toward the west, having craftily mentioned in the German’s hearing that we were off to Oregon. We lost our hoof prints in a stream, then circled out wide and crossed a pinewood before turning back east toward the Tennessee state line.
Mostly Black Frank was silent as a knothole. When I asked him finally why he talked so much, he grinned, a little sheepish, saying he was grieving in advance for the faithless woman whom he meant to murder. He had tracked her “sweet man” to Arkansas—that was how he ended up in federal prison—and now he was headed home to Memphis to finish up the job. “Man got his honor to think about, Mist’ Jack,” he said. (For a fugitive, a new identity made sense. I had already changed my name to E. Jack Watson.)
“To err is human, to forgive divine,” I preached, thinking not to confuse this teaching with the news that I was on my way to South Carolina to kill my father.
“Well, maybe I might forgive that nigguh bitch after I got her good and dead but I ain’t promisin.” We chuckled a good while over that one.
Scavenging, traveling at night, we rode toward Memphis. But we were fugitives and one of us was white; in Memphis, we would draw too much attention. A nigra in a white man’s company was one thing but a white drifter in niggertown was quite another. Not that I didn’t trust this man. I did. All the same, my destination and my plans were my own business. If Frank got captured knowing where Watson might be headed, the law was duty bound to whip it out of him.
Frank and I had talked a lot about white men and blacks. If a black man sasses me—well, I won’t tolerate it, I told him. But as far as joking, passing the time of day, making sure he gets his feed and some fair treatment, I be
lieve I can say I have done better by the nigras—or coloreds or darkies, or whatever Mandy calls ’em—than most of those damn-Yankee hypocrites who agitated so hard for emancipation, then abandoned ’em after ’76 and got so many killed when they turned their backs on their own Reconstruction.
That detachment of Union soldiers quartered at Edgefield in my boyhood—hell, those bluecoats had no feel for nigras, besides being so scared of the hating faces of our home people. They wanted so bad to get along that they cat-called louder than the townfolks at those gussied-up blacks in yeller boots who had the vote and called themselves Americans. The bluecoats never raised a hand to stop the Regulators, not even after a sniper shot a bluecoat, left him kicking in the dust on Court House Square. Their officer never stepped into the square, much less organized his men to hunt the killer, although he probably knew as well as everybody else that it was Will Coulter.
We parted company at the Black River. “Well, Frank, good luck,” I said abruptly at the fork, turning my horse off toward the north. I always thought Frank Reese was pretty hard and I still do, but plainly I took him by surprise and hurt his feelings if he had any. He didn’t answer and he didn’t wave, just sat his horse in the deep shadow of the river woods and watched me go. He wasn’t sulking, either. He expected no better out of life. As he once told me, matter-of-fact, “I ain’t nothin but a damn ol’ nigger. I got nothin comin.”
But this man and I had escaped together, we had swum the river. He wasn’t just any old nigger, he was my partner. I rode back, stuck my hand out, wished him all the best. First time in my whole damned life I ever offered my hand to a black man. And he didn’t take it, not till he looked me over and even then there was an awkward pause. When he finally produced a limp cool hand, he let me do the shaking and that riled me.
I rode away but in a while I turned to see if Reese was still there under the trees. He hadn’t moved. His face looked like a block of hard dark wood. I waved but he never twitched, not even to touch his hat brim. I rode back. I warned him how that kind of insolence might draw attention in Memphis, where the law would be on the lookout for a fugitive. If he wanted a fresh start in life, he could ride southeast to Columbia County, Florida, where my friend Will Cox might find him work. I was careful not to say that I might turn up there myself before the year was out.
He nodded but he didn’t thank me, didn’t even answer. I had nothing more to say, yet I didn’t go. We sat our horses by the river in the cool spring wind, watching long strings of brown cranes coming up across the country from the south. I reckon we were awaiting something that might mend our mood. Finally, I said, “Well, so long, Frank,” and turned my horse away. I never looked back. Maybe that man lifted his hat, maybe he didn’t.
THE SHADOW COUSIN
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.”