Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  So: Our first evening back, and from a mile off, how clear we heard each set of chiming move across wide fields, plowing air. How plain we knew each steeple’s voice and what each meant beyond the time it told.

  Pink sunset sky made the green hill waiting up ahead look blue. Blunt hillside cast a shadow half a mile wide. And into this stripe of membership shade we kept straight to a straight road, our buggy aimed us right on home.

  It wouldn’t last. None of it. But did we know that on this balmy, palmy evening June of 1900? Those two open zeroes were wide eyes greedy to be filled by anything grand. Our town itself would not. Last. The hill itself wouldn’t. And us, least of all. So far, true, I have. But will not. For all that long. Take my word for it. The person herself knows.

  I’m using all my last-stand salt-lick energy on this and you.

  Even the churches I’ve mentioned as being on Church Street—they too have gone the way of all flesh. No fair.

  By late Truman/early Eisenhower, in there, suburban churches’ unlimited parking had begun to suck the faithful out their way—great space-age-looking buildings. Even the Baptists built one shaped like some science-fiction nun’s wide-flaring headdress. Don’t ask me why. First Baptist downtown lost its life to make way for the Church Street Sears store and its huge parking lot that only ever fills clear up at Christmas anyway.

  Them forlorn old Houses of Worship left standing downtown have been turned into (a) Belfry Decorators, AID—“with window treatment and interior advice for institutions and the discerning individual,” and (b) Stained Glass Disco Supper Club. (My favorite dancing orderly in here, Jerome, he calls it the very Stained Glass Disco.)

  Christ once drove certain money changers from the temples. Seems our temples drove out to be near our money-changing malls. Modren times!

  Of our great downtown Houses of the Lord, only All Saints stays in use (traditionalists still rule there and have long held potent seats on our City Council). Only their Tudor tower, where Daddy made the farting noises, stood long enough to qualify for a national landmark, it being brick and all. The bell is now rung just on Sundays, only for late service (nearby heathen sleepers complained about the 8 a.m. racket and put a end to that around the time poor John Kennedy got shot). Not even the Episcopals can afford to keep a bell ringer on duty round the clock every fifteen minutes—are you kidding? with these unions and all? Nothing’s what it was. Used to, a blind man could get the Falls time told him free all day!

  But not yet, not gone yet, thank you … it’s still the evening of our return. 1900. Here is the church, here is the steeple—I open my mouth and still hear its people.

  5

  TO FACE Castalia Marsden. I got out of the bed. At some point, you have to. Floor was cold under bare feet. I needed that. I stood at the mirror and, even to myself, looked like a sleepy kid—mostly bone. I just wanted Castalia (pushing three kitchen chairs back and forth across kitchen floor) to like me. Is this so much to ask? That, I’m afraid, child, has always been my particular cross to bear. Some folks don’t even notice who’s fond of them, who-all is staring daggers their way. But me? if a imported Yankee clerk at the Mall acts grumpy, I worry over it for weeks.

  I guessed Castalia’s life hadn’t exactly been no picnic of extras. The night before troubled me, finding her, arms locked across her davenport chest, ready to be sourly useful in the dim foyer. Castalia’d growled like some spoiled old house pet the day a new pup bounds indoors fluffy-frisky then stops dead.

  I now slipped into my simplest blue dress (“understate by two” was Momma’s final words of fashion and moral advice for her only child, bound into marriage—not a breath about biology). I used my new silver hairbrush—“M” engraved loopy as a bow across its back. In my washing-up room, for courage I sniffed violet-scented baby soaps saved from Atlanta’s Honeymoon Hotel of Horrors. I hung six prisms from the window sash. I breathed deep, made my mirror face: Try and look like Mrs. Married and Christian. Ready, you? Pinning up braids, I forced myself downstairs, I made as much noise as possible, not wanting to startle Castalia none, hoping to clear the coast. I even hummed, then worried this might just aggravate the woman.

  “Morning?” calls I down several hallways, not sure which leads to the kitchen. Spying a lino rug’s checkered corner, I tiptoed that way.

  Her body seemed arranged to offer me a hemorrhaging double-dare on first sight. She leaned far back against the front of a ten-burner stove, arms yet resting on the mighty bosom, lips pursed like the purest form of hard rubber. One gold dance slipper beat time, a steady clockly tap, irked silly. I smiled so hard I practically got a sore throat. “Hi” was about the best I could manage.

  Though bright, Miss Castalia’s clothes looked plainer than last night’s Indian blanket of a Joseph’s cloak. I now understood, she’d been dressed up special for Captain’s return. This worried me. For her sake, his, and yeah, mine. Saddening to think of Castalia’s liking Cap so much she’d bother helping him celebrate the arrival of unpopular me. Her face now looked the way burning wires smell.

  “Hi,” a child bride repeated. “Captain’s gone, I reckon?” (I knew this. Why’d I ask? Don’t you hate yourself sometimes? Why can’t we just keep quiet? Why can’t I?)

  No answer.

  Behind her, along the stove’s top and covering the wall beyond, dozens of ceramic and paper redbirds—figurines, picture cutouts from calendars and such.

  Castalia finally spoke. Her voice parted like dark fur. “You usually sleeps so late?”

  My smile got marked down to a grin. I pointed at the big Seth Thomas yonder. “But, Miss Castalia, ma’am, it’s six forty-six a.m.”

  A pause.

  “You usually sleeps so late?”

  She judged how I’d taken this. Then Castalia spun around with the unlikely buoy grace of a real sensitive fat person. She flopped a brick-sized hunk of butter onto hot griddle. “Over easy? Fried? What? Quick. Some us ain’t got the full day long to lounge in. Some us works.”

  Still on my feet, I pulled nearer. I found myself speaking to her back. Its shape buckled, frilly-edged as veal too long in a hot pan. I later credited the first day’s boldness to my yet being sore and half asleep. “Ma’am? Ma’am, we don’t even know each other. Please, I want us to be friends … or at least not to start out so doggone harsh. Really. Don’t mind my speaking too frank but I bet we’ll soon get used to things, our both staying here in his house. But doing like this, why, we’ll just wear each other down. It’d be such a waste. Let’s commence peaceable, umkay? You could teach me a whole lot. I’ve never onct harmed you, nor you me. So, ‘Peace.’ All right?” (Maybe what I said was shorter. But close to this.)

  Seen from behind, her apron straps made two X’s like the answer No doubled. “Do that be what she want! And on her first morning? Well, dreaming’s free, girl. But I been wanting all kind of things. Hoping to be, oh, say a angel made of light, with snow for she wings, and maybe hummingbird feathers for the nappy hair under the arms of her, why not? But I keeps wishing into one hand, spitting in the other, and Cassie can’t help but notice which one keep filling up the quickest. So what else you craves, skin and bones? How you wants these eggs? Get snapping here. Some us earns a living.”

  My mother often judged other people’s servants as being “insolent.” I always felt like if I ever personally saw this particular trend, I’d probably recognize it too. Well, honey, I felt like I’d just recognized it.

  Settling quieter at the table, I went, “Maybe sunny side up? That’s surely a fitting way to start so bright a June morning, ain’t it?” I sounded exactly like Momma on her rare disgusting “good days,” but I didn’t mind this once. False cheer is still about the best I can muster for company prior to 7 a.m.

  Butter, frying on the far side of this person, sounded like a snarl crackling in her very eyes and sinuses. “Sunny side? Do that be a remark from our Stick Bride or how she like her eggs, which? Fast.”

  “Whatever’s easiest for you, ma’
am.”

  Not turning, Cas told me she could make most anything I pleased. She’d whip me up a ten-ingredient omelette—fresh dill torn from out back—didn’t bother her one little bit. “Look,” she explained to the stove’s redbird gallery. “Look”—she stuffed a good-sized log into the firebox with no more strain than if handling kindling. “Look, you, one us might’s well be getting what she want. Seem like it ain’t ever gone be me. Your trouble is you ain’t learnt to boss folks yet. You best start. That you territory. Bossing stay one thing Castalia can’t train you in. Had no practice. Either white folks got it in that depart-ment or they don’t. You? don’t.”

  Grinding pepper in a mill, she sneezed with whiplash suddenness five times. Needing a hanky, she scuffed to her corner closet. Seemed the place she hung her coat and kept secret stuff. All this I guessed from how she worried I might look inside. She used her wide back as a natural barricade. I didn’t even try peeking whilst she stood there honking into several cleaning rags. I kept very still.

  Sitting in a clean and sunny kitchen of a strange man’s home—about to be fed by a woman even stranger—I felt one white-hot pinprick wiggle through the lining of my stomach’s lower left.—This, I figured, is how a young person’s crop of ulcers begins. Hi, history.

  6

  NIGGERTOWN. What was I to make of Niggertown? By now, the night of our luxurious honeymoon return, Falls’ streetlamps were all lit. (They’d been lit by our hard-drinking lamplighter—whose name and sad tale as a sixty-year-old momma’s boy it pleased but weighed on me to know.) Our hill town’s smoky bottom sat ringed by squat unpainted boxes. Oh yeah, I told myself as we pulled nearer, I’d clean forgot it in my ten days elsewhere: Niggertown.

  Shacks seemed dropped here by some landslide. Maybe mansions on high had leaned off Summit’s ritzy cliff and relieved theirselves. Such lathing mounds as rolled downhill and landed at bottom: these were where the colored people got to live.

  Odd, you had to pass through this poorest zone to get uphill towards Courthouse Square and our fashionable shopping district. At night, a visitor didn’t need to notice Baby Africa owing to its well-planned lack of streetlamps (City Council’s cleverness).

  To hide the eyesore during daylight, a windbreak of high trees got planted annually. Our Ladies’ Garden Club hoped to screen the colored district from Falls’ visitors but come February, when things grew coldest around here, the latest expensive trees always got chopped down for Baby Africa’s kindling. (Along with coal in bathtubs—this became a favorite local example of black folks’ shortsighted sloth.) But even I, even as a kid, figured this much out: residents of Baby Africa just liked to see out of Baby Africa. Quick-growing poplars prevented that.

  OUR RIG now passed a city-limits sign (Pop. 1103, Bird Sanct, 4 Mies Blw Sea Lvl, Wlcme). I twisted my carat-and-a-half diamond around so it’d show. Nervous habit, my palming it. The prize had been his mother’s. It had outlived the plantation fire. I imagined somebody seeing me and remarking, “Lucy has been off experiencing concerts in advanced Atlanta. She sure does look it too. But not acting the least little bit stuck-up, not our Lucille.” Instead, the dark, stillness, the odor of well water, two mosquitoes harmonizing near my ear.

  Cap clucked tired horses on through the colored district—eager to get beyond it. But all of Falls now seemed more mortally my Home. Every last inch of it would matter now. When a person returns, only this greedy first glance teaches her to see it all again.

  Ahead, ten black children ducked behind roadside weeds. Hearing our carriage, they giggled. I teetered forward, bottom crackling newsprint. A wallet had been tied to a long string, and as our buggy clopped nearer, one boy tossed the billfold in our path. Just as we drew even—he yanked his line. Billfold flopped across horses’ path. Horse hooves totally trounced the thing. I turned back just as kids rushed out, surprised, to study damage done their wallet. I wanted to explain: no, your passing sucker has to be on foot, sillies.

  (White boys ofttimes played this stunt on solitary black people hiking downhill after a day’s work as Falls’ maids or gardeners. White boys hoped some adult would spy the wallet, hang around whistling, finally bend toward it as the thing leapt like a frog in heat. Boys hoped the victims would bolt—superstitious, arms up—screaming straight downhill. But for what reason? why? By now, the trick had ceased to work. News got out. Black folks just stepped over the dozen or so dime-store diamond bracelets, ladies’ handbags left mid-sidewalk leashed and twitching in advance.)

  Kids grouped back yonder rubbing their trampled wallet, they sure worried me. They still had lots to learn. Embarrassed for and by them, I chose to repalm my show-off diamond.

  June being mosquito season, Baby Africa residents were burning rags to keep bugs out of homes lacking window screens. Smoke sealed off three hundred rusting tin-roofed shanties. On one porch, a granny woman lit her pipe, flame briefly showed a great nobbly crowd of dark heads, shoulders. Folks spoke from porch to porch like sampan owners docked close by.

  Conversation had this expecting kind of tone. Rising voices seemed to guess that something fine or terrible would happen soon. (A honeymoon return didn’t exactly turn no heads. And I admit that—vain, fifteen—I felt a wee bit disappointed.)

  Did folks expect some unpredicted hurricane, or white-hot heaven settling early? Something sure felt due, overdue. I heard it in folks’ rising tones tonight. Us Uphill whites spoke mostly in consonants, fencing t’s, hedging h’s. From porches yonder, black people’s mutterings ran more towards the honey marrow of old a, e, i, o, u. From darkness, the open hope of vowels made quite a music.

  We passed through this zone too quick. I held the rose-stitched satchel against me like I had some lapdog or baby or baby lapdog. I accidentally squeezed tomatoes too hard, then scanned a brown bag for signs of bleeding. I watched unlighted shacks drift past. In my chest and throat, I felt some edgy new attention gathering. Honeymoon travails had made me see these make-do huts afresh. They meant something new to me. I couldn’t yet say what.

  7

  PARSLEY jaunty off to one side, Castalia’s dill omelette turned out perfect. But, though the item had genius in its making, every mouthful beyond the first tasted exactly like ash and cat hair. Castalia watched me eat. She tilted back against her cast-iron locomotive of a stove, redbirds spiking its upper edge. She rested there, armed Xed, her whole shape bolted across stove’s front like she herself was some mammoth cowcatcher about to plow across the checkerboard floor and flatten me.

  I chewed. Rechewed. She’d made a four-egg omelette. Out of spite. I dared not leave one morsel. Waiting to wash my dish, she glared this way, then cleaned her fingernails with a huge handy butcher knife. When I finished, thirty minutes later, Castalia didn’t ask but told me, “Perfeck eggs, right? Say it.”

  I nodded, had to. “Perfeck.” My compliment pleased her in a grim way. Then the worst happened. She smiled, it proved the scariest part so far.

  Outside I heard our milkman jingle by. I wished I was a milkman or his horse or even white milk safe behind clear glass.

  What made her smile so poisonous was this: Beauty! Four square unexpected inches of it lingered. Two inches bracketed, witty and mild, the corners of her generous mouth. Two underlit her arched and hoppy eyes. True, only this much surface space had managed to stay beautiful. But that fraction sure upset a girl. Her ugliness, a person could get used to. I’d already started trying, child. But the shift toward something else destroyed my early progress. I slowly understood: Castalia’s Ugliness has been built brick by brick. She’s chose to look like this! But hints at what she’d been before still managed peeking over the self-made Ugly Wall. Could somebody this size, this bitter, have ever enjoyed beauty’s head start? If so, where’d it all gone? To be whose fuel? What was eating her? Did that make her eat so? Across the hundreds of monument pounds—four square original inches rode intact.

  But … those spoke volumes, even to a child my age.

  Darling, how can I put this?
I want to get it right. Imagine that all of ancient Greece got lost in a bad earthquake—every temple, column, scroll. All lost except one statue’s white marble kneecap. It is now placed, cool, into your open hand. That’s it—no more. And yet, holding this one clue, I believe you could someway feel all ancient Greece—its proportions, ideals, and rightness coming through your palm’s willing skin.

  Looking at her four sleek unlost inches, I knew: Lucy, you’ve come in at the end of something. It was once real complicated, it was a pageant big as the Grand Opera that your unwed aunts live and breathe, it was something readily silly as Opera because it was that game for being swamped by typhoon feelings. Overrun by Castalia-sized emotions, Castalia-sized reasons, Castalia-sized crimes. And you, Lucy, have slipped in for Standing Room near the finale of Act Five.

  But, child? oh, I wanted to know all of it. I did. I wanted in: for each clue of how Miss Cassie Marsden here had rode the boat from Adult Africa to her doing whatever a baby body servant/slave once did, to her settling downhill in Baby Africa, to her just making those perfect eggs for somebody as new to this and undeserving and scared as me.

  Behind her willed and bloated false front, glaring at my chewing over here, waited what? waited who? I felt like I would someday maybe drag that other out, unwilling, into local light—that first beauty, kicking, naked, African, intact. To live near me, safe and fun, in a white house.

  I might now be eating ash and cat hair. I might seem powerless so early in the morning but, my molars at grind: I knew, someday, I’d know.

  That’s all. That’s how it started.

  8

  LOOK, home from honeymoon bliss, are you ready to enter the commercial district proper? You feeling sufficiently ripe to greet Falls’ equivalent of Parthenons and “Ladies’ Mile” in New York City? Can you take the excitement? I can’t, hardly. We must pass the Courthouse Square’s unsavory side: Robinson’s Billiards for Gentlemen. Somebody at the piano playing one of the new rags. (My piano-teaching aunts have got hold of rag sheet music. Advanced, tolerant, unmarried, they have chose to praise said “rag’s antic architecture.” A smallish local scandal done resulted amongst the culturally clued in.)