Shadow Country (2 page)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

“The Watson Trilogy,” as the original has been called, came into being as a single immense novel which in its first draft manuscript must have been more than 1,500 pages long. Not surprisingly, my publisher balked at the enormity of what I had wrought and so, like a loaf of bread, this elemental thing was pulled into three pieces corresponding to its distinct time frames and points of view. The first part was then cut free and finished as
Killing Mister Watson (
the original title for the whole
)
, and the second and third parts were given new titles as each was completed and published—
Lost Man's River (
after a wild river in Watson's region of the remote southwestern Everglades
)
and
Bone by Bone (
from a beautiful strange poem by Emily Dickinson
)
.

Although the three books were generously received, the “trilogy” solution never fulfilled my original idea of this book's true nature. While the first book and the third stood on their own, the middle section, which had served originally as a kind of connecting tissue, yet contained much of the heart and brain of the whole organism, lacked its own armature or bony skeleton; cut away from the others, it became amorphous, reminding me not agreeably of the long belly of a dachshund, slung woefully between its upright sturdy legs. In short, the work felt unfinished and its wretched author, after twenty years of toil
(
the early notes, as I discovered to my horror, dated all the way back to 1978
)
, somehow frustrated and dissatisfied. The only acceptable solution was to break it apart and re-create it, to ensure that it existed somewhere
(
if only in a closet
)
in its proper form.

In a
Paris Review
interview
(TPR
#157, Spring 1999
)
, I confessed my intention to devote a year to its remaking, though I had no serious expectation that whatever came of it would find a respectable publisher. However, the year set aside for the re-creation of this work has grown to six or seven. This was because Mister Watson and the desperate people who shared his desperate life came alive again in the new pages and utterly reabsorbed me, and also because—in the necessary cutting and distilling that reduced the whole by almost 400 pages—their story has inevitably deepened and intensified.

In my original concept, the three books of the novel were interwoven variations in the evolution of a legend. In this new manifestation, the novel's first book would be analogous to a first movement, since the whole feels symphonic in its rhythms, rising and falling, ever returning to one man's obsessive self-destruction set against the historic background of slavery and civil war, imperialism, and the rape of land and life under the banner of industrial “progress.” Indirectly but perhaps most importantly, it concerns the tragic racism that still darkens the integrity of a great land like a cloud shadow.

Retained as prelude more or less intact and recurring variously throughout is the myth of Watson's violent and controversial death. By design, this “ending” is given away at once, to get the plot out of the way of the deeper suspense of the underlying mystery. A powerful, charismatic man is shot to pieces by his neighbors—why? It is the
why?
that matters. How could such a frightening event take place in a peaceful community of fishermen and farmers? Was it really self-defense, as claimed by the participants, or was it a calculated lynching? How will Watson's sons deal with the killing? And the lone black man in that crowd of armed whites—what was he doing there? Set against the horror of the Jim Crow era, Henry Short's strange story has endless reverberations. In
Shadow Country,
this enigmatic figure is given his own voice as an observer and also his own final accounting.

The present book draws together in one work the themes that have absorbed me all my life—the pollution of land and air and water that is inevitable in the blind obliteration of the wilderness and its wild creatures and also the injustice to the poor of our own species, especially the indigenous peoples and the inheritors of slavery left behind by the cruel hypocrisy of what those in power represent as progress and democracy.

E. J. Watson was an inspired and exceptionally able frontier entrepreneur in the greatest era of invention and advance in American history. He was also a man severely conditioned by loss, reversal, and ill fortune who became so obsessed with taking part in the new century's prosperity that he finally descended into lawlessness, excusing his ever more reckless actions by citing as precedent the corporate ruthlessness and murderous labor practices on the railroads, in the mines, and elsewhere—cold outrages common and flagrant in turn-of-the-century America that were indulged and even encouraged by a newly imperial U.S. government.

In the third book, we have Mister Watson's own version of events, from early boyhood to the moment of his death—the final word, since surely he knows better than anyone else who he has become, this “shadow cousin” whom no relative will mention. The reader must be Watson's final judge.

Though the book has no message, it might be argued that the metaphor of the Watson legend represents our tragic history of unbridled enterprise and racism and the ongoing erosion of our human habitat as these affect the lives of those living too close to the bone and way out on the edge, with no voice in the economic and environmental attrition that erode the foundation of their hopes and nothing with which to confront their own irrelevance but grit and rage. The ills of our great republic as perceived through the eyes of backcountry Americans might seem inconsequential, yet people who must deal with real hardship in the pursuit of happiness, not mere neurosis, can be bitterly eloquent and darkly funny, which is why I have always enjoyed their voices and enjoyed writing about them. In the end, however outlandish such characters may seem, their stories, too, are born of the human heart—in this case, the wild heart of a shadow cousin and so-called desperado.

In regard to Watson, reviewers of the original three books have cited D. H. Lawrence's idea that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.” To a degree, this may be true of Watson, but he is more mysterious than that. As best I understand him after all these years, he was neither a “natural-born killer” nor a man of stunted criminal mentality—such men aren't interesting. On the other hand, he was obsessed, and obsession that isn't crazed or criminal is enthralling; in thirty years, I have learned a lot about obsession from too much time spent in the mind of E. J. Watson.

—Peter Matthiessen
Spring 2008

E. J. WATSON

H
IS ANCESTORS:

John and William, sons of Lucius Watson of Virginia, moved to Edgefield District, South Carolina, in the middle of the eighteenth century. John's son Michael, who became a renowned Indian fighter and hero of the Revolutionary War, married William's daughter Martha, his first cousin. Their only son was Elijah Julian (1775–1850), who consolidated the large family holdings and left a plantation at Clouds Creek at Ridge, north of Edgefield Court House, to every one of his eleven children, including Artemas.

H
IS PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS:

Artemas Watson (1800–1841) and Mary Lucretia (Daniel) Watson (1807–1838)

H
IS PARENTS:

Elijah Daniel Watson (“Ring-Eye Lige”)

b. Clouds Creek, S.C., 1834

d. Columbia, S.C., 1895

Ellen Catherine (Addison) Watson

b. Edgefield Court House, S.C., 1832

d. Fort White, Fla., 1910

E
DGAR ARTEMAS
*
WATSON:

b. Clouds Creek, S.C., November 11, 1855

d. Chokoloskee, Fla., October 24, 1910

1st wife (1878): Ann Mary “Charlie” (Collins) Watson, 1862–1879

Robert Briggs “Rob” Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1879–?

2nd wife (1884): Jane S. “Mandy” (Dyal) Watson, 1864–1901

Carrie Watson Langford, b. Fort White, Fla., 1885–?

Edward Elijah “Eddie” Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1887–?

Lucius Hampton Watson, b. Oklahoma Territory, 1889–?

3rd wife (1904): Catherine Edna “Kate” (Bethea) Watson, 1889–?

Ruth Ellen Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1905–?

Addison Tilghman Watson, b. Fort White, Fla., 1907–?

Amy May Watson, b. Key West, Fla., 1910–?

Common-law wife: Henrietta “Netta” Daniels, ca. 1875–?

Minnie Daniels, ca. 1895–?

Common-law wife: Mary Josephine “Josie” Jenkins, ca. 1879–?

Pearl Watson, ca. 1900–? Infant male, b. May 1910: perished in Great Hurricane of October 1910

EJW'
S SISTER:

Mary Lucretia “Minnie” Watson, b. Clouds Creek, S.C., 1857, d. Ft.

White, Fla., 1912

Married William “Billy” Collins of Fort White, Fla., ca. 1880

Billy Collins died in 1907 at Fort White

The Collins children:

Julian Edgar, 1880–?

William Henry “Willie,” 1886–?

Maria Antoinett “May,” 1892–?

A
LSO:

EJW's great-aunt Tabitha (Wyches) Watson (1813–1905), 3rd wife and widow of Artemas Watson's brother Michael: instrumental in marriage of Elijah D. Watson and Ellen Addison, d. Fort White, Fla. 1905 Her daughter Laura (1830–1894), childhood friend of Ellen Addison.

Married William Myers ca. 1867
Married Samuel Tolen ca. 1890