See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.
And so it is that we meet the kid, the protagonist of Blood Meridian. In the first chapter, all that is prologue to the main action of the novel and all of its thematic building blocks are established, and we are introduced to two characters who will play important roles later in the novel: Toadvine and the Judge.
In first two pages, McCarthy takes the kid from an “oddly innocent” 14-year old runaway to a 14-year old man whose experiences traveling and fighting have “divested [him] of all that he has been.”
Early on, McCarthy employs techniques of repetition that were first crafted by Gertrude Stein, then perfected by Ernest Hemingway:
“He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond…”
Through the repetition of “thin,” “rag,” and “dark,” McCarthy connects the Kid and what innocence he has remaining to the patches of snow, which contrasts to the darkness of the fields and the woods. Taken as a whole, this can be seen as a symbol of the shedding of his innocence, of his eminent embrace of “dark” over “light.” The images of dark and light repeat throughout the brief chapter.
It is the year 1847 when the Kid runs away. As he reaches Memphis, he passes groups of slaves picking cotton in a field, and it is worth noting here that the slaves are referred to as “blacks” (pg. 4), and not as “niggers,” as they are called two years later (pg. 11) once the kid has shed what remains of his youth. Because Blood Meridian deals in part with the racism attending the expansion of the West and the “taming” of that wilderness, it is important to begin tracking how “nigger” is used throughout the text — most modern readers will find its usage surprising and a bit different than commonly understood in a contemporary context.
After barely surviving a gunshot, the Kid flees New Orleans and heads west to Nacogdoches. Here, McCarthy references the “latterday republic of Fredonia,” which, for the observant or curious reader, presages events based on tensions between Mexico, Texas/United States, and local Indian tribes. It is during a continuous downpour in Nacogdoches in 1849 that the Kid, now 16, first sees the Judge while standing in a revivalist preacher’s tent:
An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close to seven feet in height and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God and he seemed to have removed his hat only to chase the rain from it for now he put it on again.
It is worth mentioning here that the Judge’s is later in the chapter described as “strangely childlike,” a description paralleling one of the kid two pages before: “The child’s face is curiously untouched behind the scars, the eyes oddly innocent.”
In one of the more humorous moments of the novel, the Judge confronts the preacher in front of the crowd, accusing him of being a fraud, being wanted in four other states for various crimes, including raping an 11-year old girl and having sex with a goat. “This is him,” the preacher calls out. “This is him. The devil. Here he stands.” I would suggest that most readers will spend the remainder of the book trying to determine for themselves just how much truth is in the preacher’s accusation. As often happens when the Judge is present, chaos soon ensues. The tent collapses in a fury as the crowd begins fighting in its attempt to kill the preacher.
A short time later at the saloon, the kid overhears various members of the crowd approach the judge and ask how he knew about the preacher. The judge responds that he’s never seen the man before.
A short time later, drunk, the kid runs into the character named Toadvine. Toadvine is approaching the saloon from the jakes (i.e., outhouse), as the kid is making his way to the bathroom. Neither man will move out of the way of the other, and the ensuing fight leaves both men unconscious. The chapter closes the next morning. The kid and Toadvine quickly make up, and then the kid assists Toadvine in burning down the saloon in an attempt to draw out a man Toadvine wanted to kill. As the kid leaves Nacogdoches on his mule, the judge watches him. Even a first-time reader will understand that we’ve not seen the last of the judge.
One question that I’ve always had about this chapter relates to Toadvine. He is first described as having had both ears docked and having the letters H, T, and F tattooed on his forehead. I’ve always been curious about this, especially the letters. I’ve read one person’s assessment that the H and T stand for “horse thief,” as in Toadvine had been caught stealing horses and had been subsequently branded as such. I would assume that’s also why his ears were docked. But what does the F stand for? These seem important details, but I’ve yet to find a certain explanation of either.
Bears that Dance, Bears that Don't 