Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (2 page)

McDowell also employs literary techniques that would be at home in the fiction of Balzac, Faulkner, or Welty. Elinor Dammert’s name, for example, is weighted with significance. Elinor, a variant of Eleanor, means foreign, alien, while Dammert is the third person present-tense form of the German verb “dämmern,” whose meanings encompass the coming of dawn or dusk, as well as the figurative dawning of an individual’s understanding. Elinor Dammert is thus the dawning of the other, the alien. Her name coincides with her discovery by Oscar Caskey at dawn on the day commemorating the rising of the resurrected Christ. At the same time, she is found amidst a watery landscape that recalls the dawn of creation at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, when all is water.

Water is one of the novel’s two major symbols; indeed, so important is the substance to the novel’s design that, McDowell tells us in his “Author’s Note,” he altered the courses of the Perdido and Blackwater Rivers to bring them together above the town. A look at the map that follows that note in the original Avon paperbacks reveals the reason for such a shift. With the “Grove of Live Oaks” positioned at their junction, the intersection of the rivers suggests the mons veneris, the female body written onto the very landscape. It is another way the novel associates water with the feminine, with Elinor. At the place where the rivers come together, there is a whirlpool, dangerous to even the most experienced boaters and swimmers. The swirling together of the red Perdido and the dark Blackwater presents an image of the cyclical, which finds embodiment in the plot, where events repeat themselves in the lives of successive characters, and where the very end of the novel wheels around to its beginning. The blending of the rivers also suggests the merging of Elinor with the Caskey family, as well as more abstract combinations, such as the joining of the female and the male, the supernatural and the natural, the Freudian eros and thanatos.

The other major symbol in the novel is that of the house, particularly a house within which a character senses something wrong. In his interview with Douglas Winter, McDowell discussed his childhood sense of his grandmother’s house as somehow a bad place, an impression he later found was shared by the rest of his family. He decided to incorporate his memory into
Blackwater
, where it becomes a leitmotif linking the experiences of a number of different characters. Time and again, a character is alone in a room and aware of a disturbance in the surrounding house, a series of sounds or lights or smells of inexplicable origin. Since the definition of house encompasses family, the disturbed house becomes a symbol for the intrusion of the supernatural into the Caskey line.

After
Blackwater
, Michael McDowell would not release another novel of supernatural horror until
Toplin
appeared via small press in 1985. He had lost his editor at Avon books, which had published
Blackwater
, and that change coincided with McDowell writing an increasing number of scripts for television and film—most famously, an early draft of what would become Tim Burton’s
Beetlejuice
(1988). Considering the accomplishment of
Blackwater
, not to mention his other books, it is hard not to wish he had written more novels before his untimely death in 1999. The body of work he left behind, however, remains and endures. Now that her story is once again available to a wider audience, Elinor Caskey, née Dammert, steps out of the red waters of the Perdido River, her eyes keen. Waiting for her on the shore, Howard Lovecraft and Eudora Welty take her hands and guide her towards the waiting reader.

Notes:

*
Exactly what Elinor becomes is never made clear. The strength and savagery she displays when transformed suggest an alligator, but while she possesses a tail in her changed form, the other details of her appearance do not suggest the crocodilian. If anything, she calls to mind the Gill-Man from the 1954 film,
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
.

Editor’s note:
Physical transformation aside, McDowell begins the series with an epigraph referencing a maenad, perhaps suggesting a thematic link between Elinor and the “raving women” of Greek mythology, followers of Dionysus known for tearing animals and people to pieces…and sometimes eating them.

**
In fact, near the end of
The War
, McDowell speaks of two of his characters watching the “cold moon over Babylon,” thus inserting a reference to one of his other novels as well.

Perdido, Alabama
pop. 1,200 SITE OF LEVEE WA

1.  OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEY'S HOME

2.  MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME

3.  JAMES CASKEY'S HOME

4.  DeBORDENAVES   HOME

5.  TURK'S HOME

TO GULF OF MEXICO
 

Author’s Note

Perdido, Alabama, does indeed exist, and in the place I have put it. Yet it does not now, nor ever did possess the buildings, geography, or population I ascribe to it. The Perdido and Blackwater rivers, moreover, have no junction at all. Yet the landscapes and persons I describe, I venture to say, are not wholly imaginary.

For Mama El

The maenad loves—and furiously defends herself against love’s importunity. She loves—and kills. From the depths of sex, from the dark, primeval past of the battles of the sexes arise this splitting and bifurcating of the female soul, wherein woman first finds the wholeness and primal integrity of her feminine consciousness. So tragedy is born of the female essence’s assertion of itself as a dyad.

Vyacheslav Ivanov, “The Essence of Tragedy”

Translated by Laurence Senelick

I will spunge out the sweetness of my heart,

And suck up horror; Love, woman’s thoughts, I’ll kill,
And leave their bodies rotting in my mind,
Hoping their worms will sting; not man outside,
Yet will I out of hate engender much:
I’ll be the father of a world of ghosts
And get the grave with carcase.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, “Love’s Arrow Poisoned”

At dawn on Easter Sunday morning, 1919, the cloudless sky over Perdido, Alabama, was a pale translucent pink not reflected in the black waters that for the past week had entirely flooded the town. The sun, immense and reddish-orange, had risen just above the pine forest on the far side of what had been Baptist Bottom. This was the low-lying area of Perdido where all the emancipated blacks had huddled in 1865, and where their children and grandchildren huddled still. Now it was only a murky swirl of planks and tree limbs and bloated dead animals. Of downtown Perdido no more was to be seen than the town hall, with its four-faced tower clock, and the second floor of the Osceola Hotel. Only memory might tell where the courses of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers had lain scarcely a week before. All twelve hundred inhabitants of Perdido had fled to higher ground. The town rotted beneath a wide sheet of stinking, still black water, which only now was beginning to recede. The pediments and gables and chimneys of houses that had not been broken up and washed away jutted up through the black shining surface of the flood, stone and brick and wooden emblems of distress. But no assistance came to their silent summonses, and driftwood and unidentifiable detritus and scraps of clothing and household furnishings swept against them and were caught and formed reeking nests around those upraised fingers.

Black water lapped lazily against the brick walls of the town hall and the Osceola Hotel. The water was otherwise silent and unmoving. People who have never lived through a flood may imagine that fish swim in and out of the broken windows of submerged houses, but they don’t. In the first place, the windows don’t break, for no matter how well constructed a house may have been, the water rises through the floorboards, and the windowless pantry is flooded to the same depth as the front porch. And beyond that, the fish keep to the old riverbeds, just as if they hadn’t twenty or thirty feet more of new freedom above that. Floodwater is foul, and filled with foul things, and catfish and bream, though they don’t like the unaccustomed darkness, swim in confused circles around their old rocks and their old weeds and their familiar bridge pilings.

Someone standing in the little square room directly beneath the town hall clocks, and peering out the narrow vertical window that looked west, might have seen approaching across that flat black unreflecting surface of still rank water, as out of what remained of the night, a solitary rowboat with two men in it. Yet no one was in that room beneath the clocks, and the dust on the marble floor, and the birds’ nests among the rafters, and the gentle whirr of the last bit of machinery that hadn’t quite yet run down, remained undisturbed. There was no one to wind the clocks, for who had remained in Perdido when the waters had risen so high? The solitary rowboat plied its stately, solemn course unobserved. It came slowly from the direction of the millowners’ fine houses that lay beneath the muddy waters of the Perdido River to the northwest. The boat, which was painted green—for some reason, all such boats in Perdido were painted green—was paddled by a black man about thirty years old. Sitting before him in the prow was a white man, only a few years younger.

Neither had spoken for some time. Each had stared about in wonder at the spectacle of Perdido—where they had been born and where they had been raised—submerged beneath eighteen feet of foul water. What Easter but that first in Jerusalem had dawned so bleakly, or stirred less hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the rising of that morning’s sun?

“Bray,” said the white man at last, “row up toward the town hall.”

“Mr. Oscar,” protested the black man, “we don’t know what’s in them rooms.”

The water had risen to the bottom of the second-floor windows.

“I want to
see
what’s in the rooms, Bray. Go on over.”

The black man reluctantly turned the boat in the direction of the town hall, and gave a hard, smooth impetus to the paddle. They sailed close. The boat actually bumped against the marble balustrade of the second-floor balcony.

“You not going in!” cried Bray, when Oscar Caskey reached out and grasped one of the thick balusters.

Oscar shook his head. The baluster was covered with the slime of the flood. He attempted to wipe it off on his trousers, but succeeded only in transferring some of the stink.

“Nearer that window.”

Bray maneuvered the boat to the first window to the right of the balcony.

The sun hadn’t got around to that side of the building yet, and the office—that of the town registrar—was dim. The water lay in a shallow black pool over most of the floor. Chairs and tables were scattered about, and a number of file cabinets had been toppled. Others, whose thickly packed contents had become sodden with floodwater, had burst open under the pressure of expansion. Thick rotting sheaves of official county and town documents lay scattered everywhere. A rejected application for voting privileges in the 1872 election lay on the windowsill, and Oscar could even make out the name on it.

“What you see, Mr. Oscar?”

“Not much. I see damage. I see trouble ahead when the water goes down.”

“This whole town’s gone have trouble when the water go down. So let’s don’t look in no more windows, Mr. Oscar. Don’t know what we gone see.”

“What could we see?” Oscar turned around and looked at the black man. Bray had worked for the Caskeys since he was eight years old. He had been hired as a playmate to Oscar, then only four; had graduated into an errand boy, and then to the Caskeys’ principal gardener. His common-law wife, Ivey Sapp, was the Caskey cook.

Bray Sugarwhite continued to paddle the little green boat down the middle of Palafox Street. Oscar Caskey gazed to the right and the left, and attempted to recollect whether the barbershop had a triangular pediment with a carved wooden ball atop it, or whether that ornament belonged to Berta Hamilton’s dress shop. The Osceola Hotel loomed up on the right, fifty yards farther on. Its hanging sign had been dislodged sometime on Friday, and probably by this time, was knocking upside of a shrimp boat five miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We not gone look in any more windows, are we, Mr. Oscar?” said Bray apprehensively as they got nearer the hotel. Oscar in the prow was peering this way and that around the sides of that building.

“Bray, I thought I saw something move in one of those windows.”

“That the sun,” said Bray quickly. “That the sun on them dirty windows.”

“It wasn’t a reflection,” said Oscar Caskey. “You do like I tell you, and you paddle up to that corner window.”

“I’m not gone do it.”

“Bray, you are gone do it,” said Oscar Caskey, not even turning around, “so don’t bother telling me you’re not. Just go up to that corner window.”

“I’m not gone look in no more windows,” said Bray, not completely under his breath. Then aloud, as he was changing course and paddling nearer the second floor of the hotel, he said, “Pro’bly rats in there. When the water ’gin to rise in Baptist Bottom, I see the rats come up out of their holes, and they run along the top of the fences. Rats know where it’s dry. Ever’body get out of Perdido last Wednesday, it was. So not nothing in that hotel but them smart rats.”