Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  SO LOOK, this much said: What is black and white and lilac? See, because—that’s what I got out of it. That’s how I come to finally organize my “Modern History” report.

  First, it seemed so neat:

  White’d be Lady Marsden’s plantation mansion, Greek Revival, six miles northeast of Falls, happy on its personal hill above our river. This home can still be seen in many paintings. Old Mall Antiques owns three, even as we speak (as I do). And, child, the prices dealers are asking scare me nearbout as bad as anything I’m going to tell you here.

  The mistress of the manor, number two in her class at St. Cecilia’s Christian Finishing in Richmond, encouraged artists to set up easels on her wide front lawn. Slaves brung picnic lunches to any painter smart enough to do the Marsden home. Marsden slaves did. White is the Anglo-Saxon-type lady that owned the two-thousand-acre spread and so loved the image of both it and her.

  Freed slaves—thirty-odd years later, rocking on their porch, looking out at a piano crate/chicken coop in the front yard—they claimed she hadn’t been all that bad. Hobbies kept her clear of the worst mischief. Her mansion’s seventy-odd rooms each housed a novelty clock—marble, bronze, quartz. All showed subjects from mythology. Swans mounted Leda ladies every quarter hour. Hercules’ flat tummy was a walleyed German pocket watch. Under Phaëthon’s chariot, pendulums swung, cheery as the hearts of peasants, solemn as famous necessary manly parts.

  Mrs. Marsden hand-cranked every cloisonné Apollo herself. “Somebody has to do it.” Thursday (the day that gear wound down) Lady would actually rise before noon, she’d string a opera jailer’s worth of keys around her neck. She’d tug on a green visor purchased from Falls’ one pawnbroker. “Something about it appealed to me.” Mrs. Marsden laughed at her own paleness tinted fishy green. “Hideous, no?” And off she’d scuff to wind parlors’ seven-day-movement masterpieces.

  —Lady’d taken a two-year correspondence course in horology. Slaves made fun of the word, though they knew their mistress’s chastity was total, dull. Strange that the woman, usually so professionally helpless, could fix most any timepiece. Neighbors brung Lady their stalled locket watches. She worked in her high bed, visor tugged low, black eyepiece screwed into her all but albino face. Favorite tools: sterling sugar tongs and her eyebrow tweezers. When, at the quarter hour, seventy-odd clocks chimed (scaring guests), Lady’s eyes would close. She seemed to sleep-talk at a handy slave, “Castalia, do run fetch me the bronze Hungarian Proteus, southeast parlor. It’s lately changeable as I. Six and a half seconds slow again.—Those Hungarians.”

  If slaves fell sick, was Lady Marsden nursed them. They got stretchered to a third-floor bedroom off her tower conservatory. Lady spoon-fed them broth, she’d read aloud from The Arabian Nights, she’d mop dark brows. And for a full week.—Local gentlewomen, learning about this, turned briefly coolish towards Mrs. Marsden. Lady just loved that. All the river crowd had heard how a Marsden slave girl onct admired Mistress’s diamond brooch—the thing was whipped off, pressed into a work-toughened hand, “Yours now.”

  Along with horology, knitting, piano, and doing jigsaw puzzles of Europe vistas, Lady fainted. Slaves noticed: Mrs. Marsden never collapsed whilst alone. She might drop from the strain of a week spent healing others but she forever toppled towards them slaves still strong enough to catch her.

  Anybody who’s ever nursed a not too sick patient knows how the first six to seven days—if you got nothing else to do—can be almost semi-engaging. Fluff their pillows, arrange the flowers. It’s that second Monday, child—grimness gets under the bed, sinks teeth into your ankles. But by then, see, Lady Marsden herself had fallen over, was reclining in her forty-windowed room in her canopied ivory four-poster, was recovering from the week spent helping others to recover.

  Lady’s Greek and Latin proved good enough to savor her husband’s puns, live ones in dead languages.—True, she could sometimes sound vain about her “attainments,” as she calt them. But Marsden freed folks later swore that when relaxed, Lady acted charming and unguarded as a child. She’d always felt easiest around her baby slaves. With grown ones, Lady considered herself friendly and confidential but she was ofttimes only flirting. They knew this. She didn’t. When men marched off to war, Lady used her female slaves for whetstones to keep Flirting’s blade edge keen. As flirting goes, hers was—everybody yet says—real good of its kind. Dry.

  ON RAINY days, Lady called her twelve youngest black children into the Big House for a homemade treat: Catacombs. This game meant servants’ lining up all tables from a single mansion floor—every lowboy, drop-leaf sideboard, candlestand. Sheets were then thrown overtop, both seams drooping clear to the Oriental rugs (Caucasians, mostly). Next, into this long hide-and-seek catacomb, one frail lady was seen to crawl on all fours. Lady always wore a white silk wrapper for both at-homes and state occasions. “At my present age, clothes decisions strike me as pure nuisance—uniformity so frees the mind for higher things.” Only when she’d hid good could her wee ones enter on their hands and knees, gigglish, tense, seeking It. She was always It. When you own sixty-one people—to them, you stay forever It. Thunder broke above slate-mansard roofing. Rain drummed window glass. All went blue white blue with lightning. Who cared? Hooray for Catacombs!

  A cloth cave stretched into and out of many a parlor, the cave dead-ended in closets then turned back, winding off along cool halls. Sheets glowed white as the life-sized statuary Caesars lined near it, gesturing. Hid in such shelter, serenaded by clocks’ godly foggy chiming, Lady Marsden and her children played for hours. They made up rules as they went.

  (The South before the war had mighty rigid codes: Slave owners, feeling none too firm on the Ethics end, got mighty interested in Manners. Manners made a kind of crucifying corset that promoted Lady’s perfect posture, that held her, chafed but upright, in her lofty place. So, ooh, but it must of felt good, honey—flouting rules, acting wild again, inventing a new ungirdled world beneath the chair rail.)

  Thunder brung baby shrieks. Catacomb players scared each other breathless. Inside the tributaries of sheets, players pretended that any outside noise was a Roman centurion come to torture them for worshipping correct. If you stomped your shoe near some busy percale crossroads, what grunts and scramblings you set off.

  On their feet, shut out of the game, slave women cleaned like usual—venturing to sheets’ very edges. From the white cave of monograms and table legs, women heard their owner: “I dare you to! You darling scamps, no shame, you would try to get me, would you not? Here they come. The tawny Lions of Rome. Oh no. I shall pounce upon you first. Beware, the Darkling Creature from the Roman Swamps Approacheth!” Babies yowled, scattering, palms and knees drubbed carpeted parquet.

  Slave women—rolling eyes at one another—must of felt glad at least to have their young ones brung indoors and spared a wet day’s duties.—Then ivory swans mounted sterling Ledas, then seventy-odd chimes hid within bronze wings, gold globes, and sterling clouds—all told four-thirty. (Was a unanimous vote, but hardly sung in unison.) Then tea and cake got slipped under one sheet’s hem. Refreshments were left in a different spot each day—just part of Lady’s Instructions: “Something about it appeals to me.”

  Good game of Catacombs could run you clear till dusk. You knew it was ended when dark children shot from under far-flung sheets. Kids acted giddied by their day of fun. It seemed a form of travel. Their mommas later recalled having a right hard time getting young ones to sleep them nights. Babies grew so sassy from the privilege of hours spent tickling and threatening It (all in fun, of course).

  Onct children scattered, the adult staff knew to strip draperies off all tables. In this way, at a new location each rainy evening, as time itself slaved away inside the Big-House excuse of mantelpiece gods and animals, servants found her, collapsed, sometimes grinning, sometimes drowsing already, sometimes pinching her nose’s bridge—hinting at future migraines. Black women then lugged Lady to a bath kept warm since noon. Though the gam
e tired her, though she often needed the whole next day to recuperate, Lady Marsden forever explained: “‘My children’ rely on me. With great gifts go great responsibilities. I would not disappoint my Little Xerxes, Diana, or Baby Venus for all the glories of the ancient world.”

  Her husband had received a classical education at John Harvard’s college.

  • • •

  FAMOUS for three-week headaches, three-day parties, and her perfect cream complexion (no peaches ever got mentioned as being allowed in or near that cream), Lady wore white silk year round. I said that, honey. It come from China. I probably said that too. Even the fine cotton raised on her two thousand acres, even if it barely touched her baby skin—gave Lady hives. True, she did knit wool—but only whilst wearing gloves and for others’ wear. She patiently explained, to touch it made her go right lilac-y with brocades of rashes. (Maybe this, I just thought of it, is why no shepherdess got shown as having a single sheep on any of her art or furniture.)

  While playing their game, slave children—in coarse homespuns—loved to tickle It. They loved to feel It’s perfect whispery gown. It believed they touched her to touch her. Since her husband’s death, since her boy went for a soldier—the Mistress of The Lilacs got touched right seldom. She was soothed only by the dark hands that—along with polishing imported furniture—maintained her beauty, famous in both Carolinas and three adjacent southeast counties of Virginia. Plus amongst sundry cousins. The South is mostly the South’s cousins, honey.

  Every fifth day, Lady Marsden’s hair—three and a half feet long—got oiled, its fine ends snipped. Each noon, at her waking, these fair locks were plaited through with roped pearls, real ones inherited by her late daddy, Judge More. He was a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More, the martyr—I put this in my school paper—linking ancient and modern history in a way that really tickled the Witch.—About Lady’s daddy, a local joke had run: “That man can judge more than any Judge More I know.” Which is another story.

  As for his only child, the heiress … born white as a new glove in a store box … Well, she planned to stay that way. White. Theme number one: White. As this here history paper of mine will try and show, she could not. Stay. White. But boy, she really, really wanted to.

  2

  THERE IS, you won’t be shocked, a story back of this.

  3

  BLACK (now we’re getting somewheres) means (as of April 7, 18 and 65) the tint of folks that Lady Marsden (so white) yet owned but won’t legally allowed to. She tried keeping her helpers as wound up tight as collector’s-item clocks, all tunnel-visioned in one unending game of Catacombs. Without black help, she would have been totally lonesome. She’d of starved. She didn’t know how to work the well to draw the water then build a fire to heat the bath to bathe in daily. Only a few of her staff hadn’t yet run off.

  By dawn, April 7, ’65, Sherman’s men (wearing blue) had crossed the Carolina border on horsebacks of all colors. Soldiers were headed here to plunder final Piedmont plantation-strongholds, including a certain grand white three-story home set on a green hill, river view. Yank torches planned to free the last black folks working this showplace.

  Till a month earlier, meaning March of ’65 (to be historical about it), the Marsdens’ two thousand acres had claimed sixty-one slaves. In midnight dribs and drabs, playing their own game of Underground Railway Catacombs, some crawled into the woods, they guided five stolen covered rowboats upriver, they traveled late-night post roads further north. Even Uncle Primus, the Marsdens’ courtly favorite, too old to run off, too loyal to … he run. Seemed he’d been saving up for years. Others—disgusted by his lifetime’s toadying—laughed to see him sprint.

  Just four women and six children still wash and fluff their Lady and her high white meringue of house. You’ll meet them presently.—Hey, Miss Beale, wherever you are, I’m really getting organized this go-round, I deserve a right good grade, hint hint. See: we’re already at Theme number two: Black = slave folks’ faces and bodies. Plus Black stands for the scorched-earth policy about to happen right here. But blackest of all (I learned from Castalia, Evidence Anne, and other ex-slaves I quizzed), blackest of everything might be the white heart dark enough to try and own lock, stock, and barrel another human. Some nerve.

  I should mention that Evidence Anne’s given name was Diana but her pale skin and gray Marsden eyes caused Cassie, her momma, to choose the self-explaining attention-getting Evidence.

  Our strict teacher drilled Who?What?Why?Where? into her pupils’ cloudy hookwormed heads. (She left out Which? maybe because she’d heard tell of her nickname.) At age eleven I filled twenty-six pages (way over the required fifteen) with every W but the crucial Why? That one, honey, this wrinkled question girl is gnawing over yet.

  MOST everything I learned concerning Whiteness and Mrs. Marsden (Lady was her given name because the Judge claimed she’d looked so perfectly prissy in her first organdied crib) I squeezed out of black eyewitnesses. The lady herself had been a serious talker till the major mishap, which this is. I later went and pumped many others about a day when the mistress’s boudoir’s white-brocaded walls come tumbling down around her eggshell-pale and ofttimes Humpty-empty head.—No, enough of that type talk. See, I’m trying and put a gag on the Flowery. That was Witch Beale’s biggest complaint concerning my “current events” report of 1896. I later got to know many of the people mentioned in my theme. That would change my history paper’s history.—And seeing as you are probably my last chance to tell stuff right, I want to get it perfect this go-round. I’m yet benefiting from certain harsh, if constructive, teacher comments wrote by lamplight in Beale’s garden efficiency at the Mangum Arms in late October of ’96. Child, concerning the Farfetched or the Flowery, remind me to muzzle myself. Just clear your throat, I’ll tamp it back. I’ll try.

  “TAKING the bare bones of historicity—not unlike those scholars who construct an entire dinosaur on the basis of some stray tibia—our young Lucille herein employs her own highly coloristic if rusticated narrative energy. Lucille indulges a willingness to chance others’ motives, to inhabit their very flaws. She can be borne along, despite a severe case of grammatical rickets, by her propulsive inventiveness, her own hapless mythomania. That said, what else might a reader seek in Lucille’s ‘national document? Alas, a great deal. We, of the Falls, NC, greater school system are not purists. In a town of Falls’ size and prideful backwardness, we cannot afford to be. This is not Richmond. This is not even Raleigh. Realistically put, I have lost two students in the past four years to death by tapeworm. In such a milieu, how foolish This Reader would be to expect any pupil gifted with the natural tonal grandeur of a Gibbon, say, or the chaste lucent prose of a Carlyle. That stated, and a good bit conceded already, the question remains, Is Lucille’s historic tale-told view even remotely authentic? Alas, if our little pupil does have a gift, it is, I fear, not a profound cerebral one, but perhaps a propensity ‘comique.’ If her grammar does not improve, she is, I fear, going to need this ready mirth, as the world in general and Falls in particular deals harshly enough with the articulate. Especially with the articulate. Folk wit, an asset, doubtless, is no substitute for assiduous intellection, my young Lucille. One thinks of Novalis’ advice, highly applicable in light of our Confederate topic: ‘After losing a war, one should only write comedies.’ However ultimately bogus they might be as period re-creations, one is caught up in these tawdry puppet masques Lucille stages with such typical bumptious joy. Having conceded our young friend’s knack at interviewing and her gift for remarking a oddity, we did find this paper a bit much. It has qualities in common with her September Ancient History thesis, ‘Pompeii—The Last Resort, or They Never Knew What Hit Them.’ This reader is still not clear how sardonically Lucille intended her flip subheading. If she did not view it as wildly irreverent, then she is in even worse intellectual jeopardy than I—grimly overqualified for this line of work, grotesquely underpaid by this anti-progressive school system—care to deal with here
. The present essay, I am pleased to remark, lacks an habitual slangy lowness. It partakes of Lucille’s narrative compulsion (remarked elsewhere, in her Citizenship report, as ‘talking in class’). That admitted, I fear that even with the rest of our year’s improvement, even with my own steadying and diligent help—help that has, at best, qualified certain local sows’ ears, if not for consideration as silk purses, then at least as more nearly wallet-quality pigskin—even given my Pygmalion to her home-carved Galatea, our Lucille will never a scholar make. An issue must be faced. Certain moments herein remain, no other word will do, cheap.’ Speak to This Reader after class for specifics as they occur to me. I appreciate, Lucille, that you are a child positively febrile with a story-telling mission. Isn’t there the old Genoese proverb that runs: ‘Light is half a companion’? Yes. There is. It literally refers, I believe, to the companionability of sunshine. But I apply it to my little locals who—from underneath the heavy bushel known as Falls—still somehow shine. It will, I fear, be all that This Reader ever really knows of luminous company. Your earnestness is dear and sometimes heart-wrenching. Why is it that the closer to historic truth your papers venture, the more they grieve me—the more I long to protect you from all you must discover? No one can say you haven’t tried. Given that, I must ask Where, oh where, Lucille, is the requisite ‘liberal sprinkling’ of our friend the semicolon? After everything that This Reader has attempted for your betterment (the sleepless hours uncounted), be truthful, can you even use a semicolon? And, past that, might you ever come to love, yes love a semicolon—one set in precisely the right spot, one bridging parallel ideas? ‘Love,’ in This Reader’s opinion, is not too strong a term. You already dote upon History. Now you must learn to embrace, yes, embrace Punctuation,/.;:!

  “Punctuation is, my young Lucille, quite probably all the control, weaponry, and, yes, the summa of allure that we more sensitive women of Falls will ever exercise. My dear, do learn to enjoy it.”