Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  I sat bolt upright in the bed beside my snorfling rosy pudding of a spreading man. I whispered, “I’ll investigate.” I was picturing myself tiptoeing around Falls by night, a spyglass mashed against my fifteen-year-old’s oily nose. On the trail of—what? maybe that Moriarty Mastermind called Grief, Fate, or Luck or the slippery Past—you fill in the blank. What does make everybody be so much what they are? Rebs liked to ruin Yankee train tracks, crowbarring metal into silly airborne loops that soon got known as Sherman’s hairpins. What force is always making split ends of our earnest single necessary paths? That’s the very force I planned to trail.

  How could I of known that—right then—it was already trailing me?

  NEXT morning, chewing hard, I studied the woman. She sensed the change: “What you after, doughface?” I’d become Marse Audubon and her a wild turkey in a low tree.

  I understood at least one fact about Castalia of the clashy clothes worn like posters of petition gripes. She was the single person in all of Falls (Cap included) who’d forever let me know exactly where I stood with her. All over town, others talked dishonest about money or religion. They denied that their families were farmers new to Falls. Everybody—white or black—lived on the slant about something.

  But not her. Only that person yonder, bulldog mean, guarded as a walking fort, ruder than seemed possible in either Carolina—only she might be a fitting model for me—and why? Because she’d already showed herself to be—a genius of a enemy, child. Beloved enemy.

  The Civil War and the First World One, those were the last wars where the general of one side kept his opposite general’s portrait in his tent. When he mapped strategy—or even when just at supper by his lonesome, he turned up his oil lamp—he studied the sly and worthy features of his counterpart.

  When your enemy—like ours nowdays—ceases having a nose, two eyes, one mouth, then you got troubles. You’re up against a dervish and a ghost, a evil empire. Me, in my time, us in our time—we were lucky. We knew the shoe size of the opposition.

  Castalia tortured me in ways direct and sidelong. (She starched my pillowcase but not his.) And yet I told myself, Castalia never lied. Seemed she couldn’t. Even to save herself. I’d already sneaked a few truths out of Captain: how during plantation days a black girl’s backtalk ofttimes got her whipped, how his own mother loved Castalia best of all because of such steady sass and helpless dignity. And how this made things go way harder on the saucy girl child.

  I learned how Castalia ran away from home and managed to get clear to Pennsylvania and how she got brought home in irons and how she rode back to the farm between Yankee bounty hunters, how she rode up the lane past the Big House and how all the other slaves disobeyed stiff overseer Winch and ran to the field’s edge to wave and watch her and how she held her head high like queen Marie Antoinette (if poor Marie had been both noble and right). My husband—who I loved more the more he told me about his main slave girl—said how his mother had sent money downstairs—via Uncle Primus, the black butler, on a silver tray—for the bounty hunters but would not “receive” them. How she then called for Castalia at once and how Lady More Marsden ordered her own porcelain bathtub to be filled with hot water and fine oils and with all the gardenia blooms floating virgin-white on top and how she helped the silent sullen springy young black girl to undress and how Lady Marsden cried when the hot water—striking the pink flesh wounds around the young woman’s wrists and ankles—made the strict black girl to suck in air. They both cried—for different reasons, naturally. And finally how Lady Marsden, not caring that the sloshing grimy water had spoiled her own white satin wrapper, finally leaned toward a twisted little tar-black ear protected by its picket of braids, and how she whispered, “I’ll make you anything you like on this plantation. Anything you want to be, now you’re home with me, I’ll make you that, agreed? You desire to replace Primus as head of house slaves? Done. You want to be something other than my body servant? Done too. You care to be in sole charge of the herb garden or my cutting garden? What? Name it, Castalia mine, anything. I fear I perpetually fail to understand you. Don’t leave again. What is it you want me to let you be, girl?”

  Castalia’s wide mouth was suddenly where her homely little ear had hung and—neck-deep in suds and flowers and balms—her broad dark mouth breathed into the mistress’s pink slot mouth. “Free.”

  “That’s not in my power.” The lady of the manor rose from beside the steaming tub. “Anything else. But that, my dear one, is quite, you see, beyond my will. I cannot make you an exception. I can go right up to the very edge of that. But ‘free,’ you’ll understand … if I caved in on that, you see, my much-missed one, much-loved one … then where would it end? That’s Solomon blind in the temple. When that the keystone goes, it all falls. Bluntly put, it’s you or me, and much as I’ve pined for your company and much as I admire how far you got from me, I still choose in favor of moi-même, I fear. If and when that changes, you shall, I promise, be the very first to know, Cassie mine. Now—welcome home—such as it is, and do enjoy the remainder of your bath.”

  “Castalia,” Castalia said to the retreating white-satin back. “Castalia she appreciate you being blunt. That good. ‘You or me.’ That show you learned something from Castalia’s taking off and all.”

  A maid to us now, Castalia still expected all of this, and daily. Her redbird worship hinted at some long wait still honored. Sometimes, child, I’d catch her—arms crossed, head tilted, face glazed—but perked like listening to a sound starting from far off and maybe getting nearer. She’d be studying the big round kitchen clock. Something on her massy features told me she won’t listening to the past then—but was scouting for the future. Any future.

  So few folks I knew then (and even fewer now) believed in a future. I never did. My Sherman’s hairpin mind figured out that all the good clues really rested back yonder. I imagined over my shoulder back to Carolina 1840–80 as the source of anything we might expect ahead. But her? she yet believed that something good was due her, just around time’s bend. Next month, next decade.

  Here she was, waxing and sweeping for others. She was already in her early fifties maybe—though she looked decades younger than my man. But instead of feeling shortchanged, Castalia’s long, long wait seemed to half prop up her hopes. Sure, her doubts were plainly huge as these here hopes, both had long since widened like her body. Her hope upset me, like her four square inches of beauty did. I wanted to shake her, ask, “What are you waiting for? Don’t you see it’s over? Where’d you learn to believe like this? Notice what’s happened to you. Wise up.” Something about her holding out for the impossible reward—it made me mad for her, then at her. I seemed lucky but felt so little joy in it. She had so doggone little, and yet there was some quality like royalty waiting to return in glory to some deserved throne. I can’t explain it, not exactly. But I did notice, child.

  Not since I composed school papers for the late great Witch Beale at Lower Normal, not since those history assignments drove nosy kids like me into asking frenzies, not since then had Lucy so wanted to know a set of facts. And this much come clear as I sat up in bed that midnight staring straight at (and into) darkness: If I could figure out Castalia, I’d maybe know more about my husband here beside me. If I could ever get half under the rock of him, my own foreground would sure be a clearer row to hoe for life.

  So, beneath all of it, I had personal Lucy easement at heart. I don’t admit this, child, for apology—I mention it to brag. History is self-interest.

  Even then I saw that my own stake was with the others. Harry Houdini—lowered in some bank safe into a river—didn’t wait till then to figure out the lock. He’d worked on that while still safe on dry land. He did his homework before being lowered to likely death. I would now do mine. I had a hunch that us three—him, Castalia, me—Wynken, Blynken, Nod on this unlikely life raft, we all someway/somewhere overlapped. We would go down together.

  I felt it even then—a Mississippi of ice water wa
iting far, far ahead.

  I had my work before me. I had my wits about me. Now …

  12

  NEXT morning, my head full of her that day’s color scheme: salmon pink, cobalt blue, turquoise, and silver jewelry, the pale purple of a foxglove’s throat, I set about my crude detective work outside the home.

  And Nancy Drew Her Own Conclusions, sugar.

  Castalia always did marketing on Mondays. I announced I would be downtown and shopping too. “Do tell,” she muttered. She was putting on her tiniest hat, red. (The dressier the occasion, I noticed, the more Carter’s Little Liver Pill-sized did Castalia’s hats shrink.) I followed her outdoors, she hadn’t said I could but didn’t quite forbid it. Once, midstride halfway to the Courthouse Square, she spun around and stared my way. Basket looped over one wrist, she set heavy hands on stouter hips and rolled her overexpressive eyes, showed total disgust with tagalong me.

  “Free country,” I announced from thirty feet.

  “That what she think!” come the tired answer.

  Her wicker shopping basket looked suitable for carting home a living goose or John the Baptist’s head, unshampooed. When Castalia Marsden stormed into a shop, causing the door’s bell to ring with extra alarm, one moment’s silence fell among the salesgents in their boaters and aprons. Smiles faded, jokes hung open like drawbridges halfway there.

  She shut the door behind her like preventing any other customer from ever getting in here. Closing time, and she’d best be treated right. Castalia seemed to possess blackmail material on every white (and black) salesclerk in this town. (As a possible former beauty, as the total recall of all other maids’ gossip for three counties and fifty-some years, plus a darned good guesser, Castalia controlled whatever dirt could be dug up on most all males in buggying distance. Her first glance at salesmen said, “Who you kidding?” Her glance said, “All males are guilty until proven guilty.” Weird enough, I noticed, menkind sure seemed to agree. They gave back sheepish looks or tense ones. But innocence? they knew not of, to go biblical for a sec. And if the man hadn’t erred quite yet, Castalia could determine exactly what he’d do if allowed. This was power, darling. She carried a headful of which girls’ or even boys’ hindquarters this one strapping church-deacon dude at the counter had been known to check out whenever he believed—mistakenly in fishbowl Falls, North Carolina—the coast was clear. Castalia’s knowing this part gave her lots more clout. Was another way of believing in the future—her prediction of each upcoming crime and carnal fall. Her counting on his knowing that she knew!)

  This meant, among other stuff, that Castalia got—in stores, from such men—real deals.

  I learned this on my Monday number one.

  The white butcher served her before helping a waiting Caucasian lady—and all while he gave Mrs. Whitey a silent look that hinted, “I’ll explain later. You’ll thank me for getting her out of here first.”

  Clerks usually granted Castalia the prices that she named. Manliness meant a little wrangle—especially if white customers were present. But, by now, this late in her life (and fifty-odd seemed ancient to me at fifteen) Castalia pretty much got what she wanted. At least on the price of turnips. As I followed, respectful, store to store, it seemed turnips stood for other things she might get cheap from the world, eventually.

  She paid me no mind at all, she looked right through me. Which was fine with me. What I couldn’t get together: her power on one hand and, on the other, her being just a maid.

  She stormed into the sawdust of Harbison’s Day-Old Doughnuts and tried to bargain on account of her buying a gross of those. A gross of three-day-old cherry-jelly doughnuts! I should say so. “Gross” is one of Zondro’s favorite words. I told you about Zondro, with the Mohawk? She admits that none of her pals who hang around the Mall or at Falls Country Day High even use “gross” anymore. But she says she still relies on it and cannot quit, just feels loyal to it.

  I wondered: Was Castalia trying and save pennies for Captain or for her sake? If such cash was hers, what would it buy? A getaway to Liberia? Or New York City? Some new house built higher on this hill? Retirement? Her send-off funeral? Her surly sons’ weekend pleasures? What?

  This investigation I’d undertook owing to boredom soon claimed me like a fever. Falls Lower Normal had never considered me its prize pupil, but—restless, left with so many hours on my hands—I soon begun to find the England in my novels anemic compared to Castalia Marsden’s un-manners and her Afro color schemes. I soon followed this woman at distances both reckless and safe. I’d turned into Madame Curie and Jane Addams of Hull-House, mixed, all while staying as determined (and flat-chested) as either Hardy Boy. (Now, looking back, I see I won’t just being gumshoe to her history. What I was really looking into was, child, my own coming slavey wifely shopping cooking washing-up kid-bearing future. Now I see that. But who, even among great detectives stuck like ambered flies inside their own lives, can ever really know that at the time?)

  ONE night, Cap said without prompting, “So, how are you and Castalia getting on? Like a veritable house afire, I’d wager. I predicted great things, you’ll recall. But I’m deducing by your present facial expression, all the counties have not yet been heard from. Nobody ever called Castalia ‘sweetness and light.’ But I suppose she’s training you at certain chores around the house … little kitchen skills, what have you?”

  I give him a hard look. “I reckon she’s trying to teach me something. Ain’t clear just what. Maybe that it’s her turf here, and you are too some days.—No, it’s okay, basically. She cooks perfect. Even Momma claims to’ve never seen a house this size so clean and with a staff of one and you know how Momma is about black folks. Castalia and myself we’re here together all day long. Still, I don’t figure we’re quite ready to be stranded together on no life raft.”

  “She’d assuredly sink it,” he chuckled. I give him one stern-wifey clamp-mouthed look. (How quick I’d learned that, honey, a natural.) But, secretly, I admit it pleased me: hearing my old man speak somewhat ill of this woman he’d known for life. I hated feeling relieved by his joke at her expense. It won’t worthy of her, it won’t worthy of me. But I dreaded hearing him praise her at my expense. She could cook, I couldn’t. She knew the world, I was new even to not knowing it. And yet, scared as I felt around her, hard as I found facing Big Person (mornings especially), a new kind of pride kept me from whining to Cap about certain of her cruelties. He had owned her. I—on the slant—had just rehired her. Someway, my own code (one I was forever making up right in the minute) kept a black person’s present-day employer from complaining to her onetime owner. I had scruples from the start, my darling listener. Only a few reasons I’m worth listening to: scruples (and the woes they bring), plus what Jerome calls my “strong visual memory,” and one very dirty mind.

  Now, with my pillow beside Cap’s, I fought so hard to seem casual: I sounded almost exhausted.

  “There’s something about her, ain’t there?” said I, and waited, hoping I looked semi-cute. He didn’t help a bit. “You know?” I touched his quilt. He turned half away from me, one fist curled under his head and beard. But finally he nodded, almost shy. He told the ivy wallpaper, “Always has been … That’s the thing. It’s still hidden under all that weight someplace. It’s a secret the wench has always kept. Unfair. Used to drive my mother absolutely mad. I once heard Momma tell Castalia, both of them laughing over it too, Momma said, ‘No, darling, you’ve got things confused, I believe. You see, I am the aristocrat and you are actually here to help me.’ And Cassie said, ‘You the boss and I the slave? That it?’ They giggled, actually.

  “In some way no Yankee could ever catch, we all understood each other perfectly then—but that, I suppose, constituted the mystery of everything that Sherman burned. The invaders ended it. I can’t believe how much has changed in my short life.”

  “Short?!” I joked, fifteen.

  “Oh yes, that.” I made a mental note: no further age jokes, Luce.

&
nbsp; So I turned our topic elsewhere, asking after his business, some shipment of quarter horses he’d been waiting for (all to get his confidence, don’t you see?). Then, sly, I put in, “Now where exactly’d you say Castalia lived downhill?” I was in search of what I had to know. I had become the very sneak she’d called me, and all in service of her interesting me.

  Cap right off described her house, then, dozing, did half a double take. “Why?”

  “Case of emergency or something. Curious, mostly. I wish I knew a little more … I don’t feel like I’m really … benefiting from being around her. You know me, sir. I got to have all the facts on everybody.”

  He shifted my way then. “You’ve probably gathered quite a little file on your old man already, I daresay. God knows what you tell your intimates about me.”

  “What inmates?” I bent over, kissed his forehead, smirked. I did this to relax him mainly. I did it not out of any true love—but the odd thing, soon as I did so, I felt that. That other. I loved him because I’d learned how to loosen him up some. I could. I guessed that he would tell a few stray facts about a person whose mystery presently held me in some way my husband as yet did not.

  “Well,” he started, slow, ripe voice dark as dark Karo syrup, never more beautiful to me than it sounded just then. Under our shared covers, I took his closest hand, my intimate, my inmate. “One thing, she’s ever done precisely what she wanted. Cas caught absolute and total hell for it often enough, I can tell you. Which never seemed to stop her. That was part of her power, or a sign of it perhaps. Her family believed itself to have been the leading lights back in some African hellhole. Cas’s sense of herself must have come in part from that. We called her mother Queen Esther because the woman behaved like one. Doing scullery work with her nose higher in the air than Mother’s was—which was a stretch, my dear. Unlike Cassie, she was gorgeous, the mother. I mean, Castalia had something and got much masculine attention and enjoyed what my mother called ‘presence.’ But Queen Esther—you could dress her in a gunnysack and take her downtown and make her walk beside my own Lady Mother done up in her full satin and her white ostrich feathers. Every man, woman, and child would’ve stared at Queen Esther. Needless to say, she was not Mother’s favorite shopping companion. Esther never left the farm till she escaped. Our overseer blamed Cassie, Winch was forever gunning for Castalia. Queen Esther was caught. Then Castalia ran away, got clear to Pennsylvania. You had to hand it to her. Mother was so proud of how many state lines Cassie had crossed. Mother got out my father’s atlas and marked Castalia’s route in secret, proud. She forgave Cassie, reinstated her as body servant, though I’m not sure how Castalia felt about that particular honor. Cassie refused to be forgiven. She said Mother could either set her free or pay for it in Cassie moods. Mother needed her. Northerners would call it twisted and it was, I suppose. Love is always a kind of bondage anyway, is it not? Maybe that’s facile. Still, it was she who saved my mother. When the end came, I mean, at The Lilacs. But you know all this probably, know from that school paper you tried doing.”