Annotations to Blood Meridian: Chapter I

Page numbers are [bracketed] and correspond to the 25th Anniversary Edition of Blood Meridian, published in 2010 by Vintage.

[3] “See the child.”—The first line of the novel recalls the first line of Cormac’s favorite book, Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.”

[3] “scullery”—a small kitchen at the back of a house. The Kid’s home is like composed of two separate square cabins separated by a dogtrot.

[3] “the child the father of the man”—from William Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up”:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

[4] “flatboat”—a cheaply-made barge that was often used to carry goods down the Mississippi River to the port of New Orleans. On arrival, flatboats were disassembled and sold as lumber, as the Kid’s vessel is here.

[4] “a Maltese boatswain”—boatswain is a rank given to the most senior enlisted member of a ship’s crew, responsible for supervising the enlisted men on deck. This particular boatswain is from the island nation of Malta, south of Sicily.

[4-5] “the boat is going to Texas. Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are becomes remote as is his destiny…”—The move to Texas is transformative for the Kid as it was for his Tennessean author. McCarthy moved from Louisville, Tennessee to El Paso in 1976 and began work on Blood Meridian. After the appearance of Suttree in 1979 (the last of his “Appalachian novels”), his next five books would be set in Texas and the American Southwest.

[5] “Lighter”—a flat-bottomed barge used by larger ships to transport passengers through shallow waters to shore.

[5] “settlers with their chattels”—which chattel can refer to any personal property, this is most likely a reference to chattel slavery. Cormac reminds us here that Texas was a slave state in 1849 and that its Black residents lived in bondage.

[5] “narrow streets of the port”—the port mentioned here is Galveston, Texas’s primary port at the time and the first stop for American immigrants traveling by ship from New Orleans.

[5] “souls in want”—one of the novels many references to the damned.

[5] “rookeries”—a colony of bird nests

[5] “parricide”—a parricide is someone who kills his parents.

[5] “the man’s friends run forward and pull his legs”—while it seems strange for friends to behave in this way, it can take twenty minutes (or longer) for a person to die from hanging if his neck isn’t snapped in the process. This condemned man is given a much quicker death by his friends pulling on his legs.

[5] “latterday Republic of Fredonia”—on the first day of winter in 1826, the Edwards Brothers captured the town of Nacogdoches and declared it a free republic, independent from Mexico. Though the rebellion was quickly put down by the Mexican Army, the Edwards Brothers’ act of defiance anticipated the Texas Revolution (1835-36) by more than a decade.

[5] “the Reverend Green”—The Elder R.G. Green was a traveling Baptist minister in the Nacogdoches area who held tent revivals. John Sepich says the following about Rev. Green:

“A look at Green’s biography tends to confirm the judge’somniscience. J. S. Newman, in his History of the Primitive Baptists in Texas, Oklahoma, and Indian Territory, discovers that ‘Elder R. G. Green joined [the Baptist church on the outskirts of Nacogdoches] by letter in December, 1838, and was excluded for drunkenness in February, 1840.’ In the novel, Green’s tent meeting outside of Nacogdoches occurs nine years after this dismissal.”

There is no record of Green’s “congress with a goat” or pederasty.

[6] “teamsters”—the term was used for anyone who worked hauling freight by wagon.

[6] “An enormous man”—here, McCarthy introduces the greatest villain in all of Western Literature, Judge Holden of Texas. Holden appears in exactly one historical document: Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. Chamberlain went AWOL from the US Army during the Mexican-American War and rode, for a time, with John Joel Glanton’s scalp-hunters.

In his memoir, Chamberlain introduces the Judge thusly:

“In charge of the camp was a man of gigantic size called ‘Judge’ Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was [sic] blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation [now, the state of Oklahoma] and Texas; and before we left Frontreras a little girl of ten years was found in the chaparral, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, none charged him with the crime” (271).

I go into Chamberlain’s account of Judge Holden in Episode Two of this Substack:

[8] “guyropes”—a guy rope or “stay” is merely a cable meant to add tension to a free-standing structure like a tent.

[8] “two hats and a double handful of coins”—important to note that the Judge isn’t an agent of Chaos: he’s made it out of Reverend Green’s tent with the offering.

[9] “Toadvine”—For years, I assumed Toadvine was fictional. Then I stumbled upon famed Texas-chronicler J. Frank Dobie’s Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (Little Brown, 1939). Louis Toadvine is named as a known associate of John Joel Glanton (as is Grannyrat, Bathcat, David Brown, Tobin, Doc Irving, etc).

[9] “the jakes”—a 19th century colloquialism for “outhouse.” The jakes will make horrific return on p. 347 in the final chapter.

[10] “bowieknife”—a single-edged butcher knife with a clip point and cross guard, named after James Bowie who used a similar blade to defend himself in the Sandbar Fight in 1827. I wrote an entire episode about Jim Bowie and his famous knife which you can read here:

[10] “shillelagh”—an Irish walking stick, sometimes carved from a Blackthorn limb or sapling, used on occasion (as here) as a club.

[10] “They ain’t nobody done it yet.”—this line will be repeated (p.336) by another fifteen-year-old in the novel’s final chapter, right before our protagonist kills him.

[11] “dramshop”—a saloon or bar.

[11] “the letters H T”—Toadvine has been literally branded as a Horse Thief.

[14] “Nito. Venga. Hay un caballero aquí. Venga.”—“Nito. Come on. There is a gentleman here. Come on.”