Episode V: A Shadowed Agony in the Garden
On Slavery & Blood Meridian
1. Among the Bolls of Cotton
In the first chapter of McCarthy’s novel, the Kid runs away from his Tennessee home and “wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant on that flat and pastoral landscape” and sees “Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden.” (4)
This is the …