Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  “Castalia wouldn’t talk to me then. Others told me she never spoke about Back Then. Won’t hardly mention it now. And you, sir, for my History Theme, you wouldn’t cooperate much either, remember?”

  “I didn’t know you then. I was less of a teller. When Castalia was out there on the farm, we were all something like in love with her. I certainly was. It must surprise you, hearing so—you, having only seen the woman in her present shape. I hope you won’t feel jealous. I only tell you this because, child, you must see by now just how central you are to me. You have my heart forever and that’s fixed. All this other is just ancient history. Put on the pounds over time, Cas has, and me too, Lord knows. As a boy who weighed a hundred and ten maximum when Lee signed—I should understand how size sneaks onto a person. The days are pounds. Still, with her it yet shocks me sometimes. I walk into our kitchen, yours and mine, I look at her—especially from the back—I marvel she can be the same person. I know I’ve changed and … thickened, Lucille, inside and out. But she was so quick and springy and such a fox. Resourceful, I mean. To look back on yourselves as kids, you cannot quite believe you’re the same ones. Difficult to properly express. To someone your age. But I almost grieve less for myself than I do for the person she was and what she’s settled into. You’ll say I had a hand in that, no doubt. And maybe that’s true. I do believe in free will. She chooses to work for me. You know I pay her very well, by the by? Yes, I must do so secretly or we’d throw off the entire pay scale on Summit. My friends would never let me live it down. I had the little cottage built for her not long after I got back from the war. They were living, our black people from The Lilacs, in absolute squalor down by the river. You should’ve seen the village they built out of scrap lumber and shipping crates, what have you.… Oh, I’m not so bad to her as you sometimes seem to think.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “You need not speak one word with those little ice-pick eyes of yours. Someday I’m afraid that the two of you, you and Castalia … someday I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you were to … almost as a revenge on me … might try …”

  “What? Gang up on you?”

  “Something. Something worse. She’s capable, don’t underestimate her perversity. She’s extremely negative. I should know.—We’ll continue this line of thought later. You asked about her then, remember? Mother couldn’t bear to be alone. When Cas ran off, Mother hired two white men to go find her—less as punishment, more to try enticing her back. Everybody out on River Road considered that my parents were far too kind to slaves, especially their house ones. Mother and Cassie squabbled constantly. But like family, it’s hard to make clear to anybody these days. The two were with each other all day long, at each other’s throats. Mother was a trial to us all with her headaches and her airs. Castalia was tough as nails through most of it, grumpy, though in a lighter way than the fat old thing is now. Not Old,’ she’s just my age. But she and Mother had an understanding of some sort. We loved each other then. You can’t tell that now to people who weren’t out there. ‘Slavery,’ ‘ownership,’ the moderns can’t get past terms that do, admittedly, look at best so-so on paper. That far into countryside, We were what we had. Given that, you find a way to mostly get along. To be amused by each other. And if one of you is the least remarkable, it’s noticed, she’s soon idolized almost. She became a cult with us, your present housemaid.

  “But to answer you, yes, I did love her then. Winch tried to, shall we say, ‘fix me up with her’ before I went off to war. Is this shocking? I don’t know anymore. But you asked. Winch planned ordering Castalia to come upstairs to my bedroom, at night … Does this upset you? Maybe this is tactically mistaken, laying all this out. She’d tell you, if she ever comes to respect you enough. Not that she won’t, mind you. Takes time: You have the goods but it takes absolute ages with her. No, Winch had worked for my poppa long enough to feel that he, the overseer, could not lay his hands on the younger black girls till my Owner Father had been given first dibs. Father availed himself fairly frequently. It might sound dreadful from here, to you. But we lived there on those two thousand acres side by side. You get to know people, often better than you’d planned.

  “She was sent to me. I was just a boy. It was two days before Ned and myself left Falls together. There’d been a birthday party for Mother. Winch told me, when the party ended, to expect Castalia would arrive upstairs in my bed. ‘What for?’ I asked in dead earnest, Lucille. He laughed his wild Irish laugh. He’d started as an indentured servant over from County Cork but it hadn’t given him much sympathy for our black folks. He had his pick of the girls. I got very scared. I wanted her to want to come and see me, not simply follow orders. She was as old as me but, unlike our other girls, physically she’d always kept to herself. On the farm, she fought off all interested gents, black and white, my father included. And my poppa owned her. But when you own a person, it’s not the best circumstance for being convinced of their free will in picking you, if you get my drift. Not like you choosing me of your own volition, you see. I said good night to our last guests. Mother had retired hours earlier though it was her party—one of her tricks, disappearing. She always got a migraine on her birthday. A tradition. I was so nervous I could hardly walk to my own room. I used the banister like some old man. I knew I’d soon be hiking clear to Virginia. I wanted something to remember, something extra. She and I had been pals all over the place. We played rafts down on the river. Mother saw that Cassie was released from work whenever we played—but it was typical of Cas that she never assumed in advance that we’d be playing on a given day. She was always in the kitchen, doing some chore. She never came to me. I always had to go to her. She was twelve and in lots of ways the most powerful person on the whole two thousand acres. How does one explain powerful people? You don’t know how they get this way, you just know they’re powerful because … they have the power! She did. Wonderful-looking then. Tall and springy and with her arms always crossed and her head back, judging, sort of judging.—Are you sure you want to hear this, child? You won’t mind? It happened so far back. I have nothing to hide from you. I want you in on everything. You’re sure?”

  “Sure,” I said but worried underneath. He was settling in now, looking not at me but towards the foot of our four-poster like she stood there, young and beautiful and sent up to his mansion chamber.

  Uh-oh.

  “Before I touched the doorknob I felt her in there, in my bed waiting. One just knew. I was exactly as innocent as she. That was part of it, I wanted this to be the first occurrence for both of us. It was my choice. But was it hers? if you catch my drift? I wasn’t quite old enough to truly do anything but wanted to start with her. We’d been picked for each other before birth, it seemed. Everything threw us together around the acreage. She was so obviously superior and bright and, as I’ve said, not beautiful exactly but, yes, beautiful, taken altogether, potent, somehow in charge of everybody though technically, of course, still a slave. Our slave.

  “Now I see she, in doing what she did, Castalia simply wanted to feel she had some control in this. A little control—especially for a girl convinced that she’d descended from royalty—even if that royalty was from some doodledy-squat Africa backwater. I think it’s true, her royal claim. At least she believes it to this day, which accounts for her carrying on like Catherine the Great all over this town—a town, to this day, absolutely terrified of her. Do you doubt I overpay her, my Lucille? Poppa always said that she and Momma got on like a house afire because they both believed in divine right and considered themselves its finest local proofs.

  “But I could feel her through the door, I could, waiting for me. She knew I’d leave for war on Friday, that I’d be back, if at all, quite changed. She knew this from experience. Hadn’t she got clear to Pennsylvania? I’d only make it to Maryland! I knew next to nothing except that she was in there for me, and that I wanted her a good deal. I think Castalia also wanted it to happen. I know she did.

  “But
she was so proud even then. She longed to have a choice in the whole matter. Winch had probably presented this tryst as partly my suggestion though it came only from him. Of course, he saw that she drove me up the very wall. So it was partly me. But what she did was ill-advised. Still, it meant she’d made up something for herself, she’d provided her own part in our meeting. At my present age, I understand that better and I like her for it. But at the time … no. I opened the door and whispered towards my oak four-poster I would inherit—actually, come to think of it, this four-poster we are in, Lucille. I was whispering to a girl I would have inherited—had not events intervened. (About those events I have mixed emotions. Owning most of the others was one thing I could probably stomach even now. But owning her? Even then she made us know she was un-owned.) Anyhow, I’m dawdling the way you do when you tell things, Lucy. I tiptoed over. Winch had provided her a nice white muslin nightgown and the older black women in the quarter—who loved the romance of this meeting of the twain, who considered it our actual honeymoon—had ironed the nightgown and teased her mercilessly all day long (she told me later). Instead, Cas had left the dress downstairs outdoors. She was hiding under the quilt—had covers pulled clear up over her head. You see, she was probably already embarrassed, she’d got herself up as the African princess she steadily considered she was. Castalia knew about as much about Africa and its rituals and how one conducted oneself over there as you and I do, Lucille. She’d made up her whole history from what she knew around The Lilacs. Which was all she knew, altogether. So, she’d daubed her face with stripes of red clay. She’d stuffed two cardinals’ worth of red feathers in her nappy hair, and in her pubic terrain (is this too much for a girl your age?) she’d put white chicken feathers so her … mound, what have you, was turned absolutely white. Like some Plains Indian, or some Falls child at Halloween. And I pictured her in this muslin dress I must’ve heard about in advance, with her long hair flowing down her back, except she didn’t have long hair and it was not about to flow anywhere but was pure wire … Anyway, I had one picture of the honeymoon bride, she had quite another.

  “I lit a candle by the bed. I held it up. She was under this tent of sheets. I said, idiotic but nervous, ‘Is that you, Castalia?’

  “‘Nope,’ came her answer. ‘It Princess Castalia in she native garb.’

  “‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, or something like that. I thought she meant ‘naked,’ ‘birthday suit.’ When I pulled the quilts aside and saw this Hottentot clogged with mud and chicken plucking, I screamed. She screamed, I dropped the candle. She jumped out of bed and dodged past me, out the door. She passed Mother in the hall, who really screamed and swore till her last days she’d seen the ghost of a Tuscarora goddess in our dark hall. That was our connubial bliss. That’s about the size of it. It’s almost as if we got the whole romance over with by hollering instead of doing any full deed. It took us twenty years to even mention this and then we practically expired laughing. But the moment was gone, our moment. Anyhow, you asked, Lucille.

  “What got me onto all this? I nearly forgot. Your asking? Why am I even telling you this—so few weeks into our marriage, if at all? Because I trust you and want you to know everything about me.

  “I don’t know about having you two together all day. Some nights, you’re glazed. I see you’re thinking of her. I was your age once and I recognize the signs. She respects you. She’s said the most ghastly things about you—a recognition. But, enjoy her food and cleaning, and learn from her, because, past a certain point, she’s absolutely out of here. I want you to think of me, Lucille. One of the pleasures of not owning them, Lucille, is—you can fire them.”

  How still I kept, listening for more. And when I heard him clearing his throat, already half regretting what he’d spilled, I at once faked sleeping—long steady breaths. I finally heard him snort, pleased to look down, find me shut-eyed, to believe he’d maybe bored me into darkness. This way, I’d get more from him, about her. Later. But all in time. I must never seem to press.

  He had told me where she lived. I now knew where to find her downhill. But, first, he woke me, a hand on my left leg under our sheets. I then understood, it was another form of the barter that Cap practiced at his stockyard. A tale of her for the tail of little me.

  Well, a deal’s a deal. I’d started the night with a maid at the stove and wound up with a real princess in my history.

  Seemed a bargain for just letting him again.

  13

  TRIALS and errors, some mornings after I ate her eggs like medicine administered, I rose up and said, “I believe I’m going out. If anybody asks for me please explain I’ll be back by one for Captain’s lunchtime.” Funny, ain’t it—though I’d grown up in a house without no servant, I still knew how to announce such things. The knowledge must be waiting—like a tasseled service bell pull—in the genes.

  I heard Castalia snorf, huff, doubting my mission. But it seemed I did have some appointment urgent as Cap’s daily dealings at his bustling livestock yard.

  Around the street corner, I stood buttoning on white gloves, nodding at ladies who’d been wandering downtown to look at the same clothes in the same fifteen stores for years of such mornings. I tried and appear busy but slowly knew what’d pulled me onto the street, what’d made me feel so excited since I woke beside the Cap at five.

  I wanted to play. I really wanted to just go somewhere and haul off and play. But how exactly? Seemed like in six weeks I’d clean forgot the method.

  Fifteen, I was. But kids stayed younger longer then. The week of my wedding I’d climbed every tree I could, guessing in advance that Mrs. Married in a Dress couldn’t exactly go with a monkey’s ease up any scary limb she picked.

  Now, stranded between running wild and sitting still in a guarded parlor, I moped around the corner from a house whose address seemed assigned to me for life. I counted lacy peaks in the Thorps’ cast-iron fence here. My white glove’s first two fingers pretended to be a human runner’s legs hopping from one point to the other. Aloud, I said, “Being grown’s no fun.”

  NEXT morning, Mrs. Married sat reading in the parlor when a flat-featured plump young white man walked right into the room. I jumped up, stood facing him. He held his hat and wore clean coveralls. I could see that he was shaking like a person joking about shaking. He had to lean against the doorjamb and was grinning to apologize. He mumbled the word “wife” and, ashamed at being barefoot, I admitted as how I was that … here … the wife.

  “Mid … wife?”

  “No, his first. Just plain wife.”

  “Because I was told she worked here and was a colored lady. The mid-one. Doc Collier is away from town and his girls they sent me here for a midwife and gosh but I’m in one terrible rush. This Captain Marsden’s place, right?” Then Castalia was behind him, blocking doorway, wiping broad dark hands on the tiniest of white tea towels.

  “How far along she?” Castalia asked.

  He just nodded Yes, almost a spasm—his head wagged up and down so much. “Thank you, oh, very far along, thank you, yes, please do help us.” He nodded so hard he nearbout knocked his own weight forward.

  “Where she at?”

  “My wagon’s out front.” Castalia hurried to the kitchen, preparing.

  He turned around and grinned wild-eyed at me. “Thank you for letting me have her.” Have? At first I thought he meant “have,” like “have a girl baby,” or even “have” like his wife. Then I decided he must mean my letting him have my maid, taking her off duty. I considered thanking him for that.

  She bobbed in under a red hat so small it seemed like something else. Castalia toted what looked to be a lunch pail. “Ready. Where we bound for?”

  “I got my wagon out front.”

  “So you say, but where that be heading us to, you?”

  “She’s in it. She’s way past walking. Please, please hurry, it’s started. I can’t seem to make anybody understand me here today, please.”

  “LONNIE!” A scream
cut our neighborhood to green ribbons. “One’s most out, LONNIE!”

  “Twins, Doc said it’d be.” But he spoke to where Castalia had just stood.

  He raced after her. Now, rushing, confused, barefoot, I followed them down Cap’s front-porch steps. I still held my novel, tight.

  Castalia moved like hot oil on glass. Never saw anything like it. Her jolt of speed—her running on tiptoe in gold dance slippers—it scared and stirred me. I speeded along our brick walkway after her. Maybe I could do something for a change! She straddled the wagon bed already, calm, looking down at something while she prodded through her lunch pail.