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 first reference to slavery in Blood Meridian; it will hardly be the last. The year is 1847 and the United States is at war in Mexico. When the Mexican-American War ends on February 2nd, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico cedes fifty-five percent of its territory to the US and America adds the present-day states of California, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, and Colorado to its “Empire of Liberty.”

The acquisition would lead to the Civil War a decade later, a conflicted that claimed the lives of 620,000 men, or roughly two percent of the nation’s population.¹

The issue of slavery caused this American Apocalypse. There are people who say otherwise, but those people have never opened a history book.

When the US acquired all this territory from its war with Mexico, the acquisition at first seemed a great boon. But with these territorial gains came an argument that unbalanced the Republic. As the new acquisitions were organized and admitted to the Union, political factions warred over which would be slave states and which will be free. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor almost ordered the US Army to invade Texas—a move which would have got the Civil War going then and there. But a new compromise was reached (the Compromise of 1850) and the can was kicked down the road for another decade: ten more years of ritual torture and mass murder for enslaved people in both Southern and Northern states.

Most of Blood Meridian occurs in those tinderbox years after the Mexican-American War (1849-51) when America sat atop a powder keg and was primed for detonation. Glanton's Gang rides along a meridian that is actually a lit fuse.

2. Four Things That Can Destroy the Earth

In the novel’s second chapter, the Kid wanders farther into Texas and encounters a hermit on the prairie living in a sod house “like a groundsloth” (17).

The hermit invites the Kid in to stay for the night, feeds him a questionable dinner, then begins to tell his story: “I come from Mississippi. I was a slaver, don’t care to tell it. Made good money. I never did get caught. Just got sick of it. Sick of [slaves]. Wait till I show you something” (19).

The hermit rummages through his meager belongings and hands the Kid “some man’s heart, dried and blackened.”

“They is four things,” says this unhinged recluse, “that can destroy the earth. Women, whiskey, money, and n*****s.”

The Kid has no response to this insanity and after a while, the hermit breaks the silence by referencing the heart: “That thing costed me two hundred dollars.”

“You give two hundred dollars for it?” the Kid asks.

“I did,” the hermit answers, “for that was the price they put on the Black son of a bitch it hung inside of.” (19)

Finally, we come to the truth: not only was this man a “slaver”—a slave-trader or a human-trafficker—he was a “slave-catcher,” a bounty hunter sent to track down enslaved men and women who tried to escape the hell of the Cotton Kingdom and make their way to freedom.

In his masterful history of American slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward Baptist discusses the way slave-traders were viewed in the South. Even among plantation owners who purchased human beings from the markets in St. Louis or Memphis or New Orleans, slave traders were persona non grata. These rough men reminded the planter aristocracy of the crass and cynical economics behind their “peculiar institution,” disguise it however they might with racist notions about noblesse oblige. The trafficking of humans is an inherently distasteful and debased business. Slave traders embodied everything about American slavery that planters wanted to deny—chiefly, that owning human beings is always and solely about power and money.

Even McCarthy’s hermit seems to understand this and now lives a solitary existence of abjection. But the sun doesn’t rise for Cormac until he gives one of his misanthropes a Gnostic monologue and so it is with this hermit:

“You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.” (20)

A former slave-trader is a curious vehicle for this screed about mechanized evil, but the man knows whereof he speaks. He was once a cog in that murderous machine—one with the great privilege of stepping away from it—but a cog nevertheless.

Of course, we must also wonder if this cog has really escaped or if he’s merely been cast away: here he sits alone in a sod house on the prairie, showing his unlikely visitor a desiccated human heart.

3. All Covenants Were Brittle

When the Kid joins Glanton’s Gang, he finds that two men named John Jackson are riding with the scalphunters: one Black, one white.

There’s bad blood between them and white Jackson badgers his Black counterpart with racist mutterings.

Finally, the situation comes to a head as the reader knows it must. One evening, after the Gang has made camp, Black Jackson “approached the fire and threw down his apishamore and sat upon it and fell to stoking his pipe” (111).

He’s chosen a spot next to white Jackson to bed down for the night and white Jackson takes exception to this:

“There were two fires in this camp and no rules real or tacit as to who should use them. But when the white man looked to the other fire he saw that the Delawares and John McGill [the Mexican man in Glanton’s Gang] and the new men in the company had taken their supper there and with a gesture and a slurred oath he warned the Black away.”

What is about to happen? Captain Glanton is a genocidal racist and Judge Holden is an amateur phrenologist and race-scientist (among other despicable things). The other members of the gang aren’t much more progressive in their racial views. Surely, thinks the first-time reader, Glanton or another Anglo member of the gang will side with white Glanton.

But, no:

“Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle. The Black looked up from his pipe bowl. About that fire were men whose eyes gave back the light like coals socketed hot in their skulls and men whose eyes did not, but the Black man’s eyes stood as corridors for the ferrying through of naked and uncertified night from what lay of it lay behind to what was yet to come.

Any man in this company can sit where it suits him, he said.

The white man swung his head, one eye half closed, his lip loose. His gunbelt lay coiled on the ground. He reached and drew the revolver and cocked it. Four men rose and moved away.

You aim to shoot me? said the Black.

You don’t get your Black ass away from this fire I’ll kill you graveyard dead.” (111-12)

Black Jackson looks over at Captain Glanton but neither Glanton nor anyone else will involve himself. He gathers his things and moves off into the night.

When Black Jackson returns, he had\s his Bowie knife in both hands and lops off white Jackson’s head in a single stroke.

Do any of the white men in the company intervene or even rebuke Black Jackson for this murder? They do not.

It has always fascinating me that Black Jackson decapitates white Jackson for the latter’s racism and no one speaks a word. What is this rough egalitarianism inside the Glanton Gang—a crew of genocidal murderers whose mission is to further empty northern Mexico and the Southwestern Territories of Apache people? There is no racial allegiance within this Gang—not as long as Glanton lives, anyway. If two men quarrel, no other member of the company will involve himself, no matter the disputants’ race.

This is a remarkable dynamic in a racially-stratified world. Ten years after Black Jackson’s murder of his comrade, the nation he hails from will tear itself in two over the issue of whether men, like himself, have rights that white Americans are required to respect.

4. Keep What You Kill

In its final chapter, McCarthy’s novel leaps forward in time from 1850 to 1878, jumping neatly over the biggest cataclysm in American history, the Civil War that swallowed the lives of almost one million Americans², 1861-65.

Blood Meridian never references this American Apocalypse, not even obliquely. The only survivors of Glanton’s Gang are the Kid and Judge Holden; both are Southern men (the Kid is from Tennessee and Holden is from Texas), and though their “animosities were formed and waiting” before they even met, the source of those animosities isn’t the institution of slavery.

When the Kid and Judge Holden have their final meeting, slavery has been gone for more than a decade and the country that built itself on the labor of enslaved people has been radically transformed:

Wild Bill Hickok is dead (1876).

George Armstrong Custer is dead (1876).

The Comanches are confined to the reservation at Fort Sill (1874).

The Lakota People have gone in to the Agency and will likewise be confined to life on reservations (1876).

Corporations have acquired the rights of American citizens (1873).

The cattle drives are ending; barbed-wire provides inexpensive fencing and the West is being quickly cordoned off. The buffalo are gone. The Wild West is over and its men of action will be replaced by lawyers, bankers, stockjobbers, and industrialists.

And yet, despite all this so-called progress, the Kid—now a forty-five-year old vagrant—will meet his horrific end in that Fort Griffin outhouse wearing a necklace of desiccated human ears, the scapular he pulled off the hanged body of his former companion, David Brown.

Like the former slave-trading hermit, he clings to terrible trophies of human flesh—both men doomed to keep what they’ve killed.

1. As of the writing of this entry—December 21st, 2022—COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 1.1 million Americans: less than 1/3 of one percent of the present US population.

2. To date, COVID-19 has killed more Americans, but a much smaller percentage of the US population.