Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  4

  SO: finally, what is Lilac?

  Well, come late April/early May, lilacs are. It being spring in 18 and 65, these bushes begun popping open everywheres, unasked for yet exceptional as Nature’s been being since Adam served as first plantation gardener (Jan. 10000 B.C.).

  We’re talking eight-foot hedges of Marsden lilacs rolling downhill—stretching from the post road clean around farm’s lily ponds, skirting the mansion proper—edging its wide lawn and running flush to riverbank where some blooms—like privileged winners of a bushes’ race—tipped in and took a drink. (I’m making this part of our story be picture-book pretty in a semi-Woolworth’s way since the next stuff is right grim. Honey, that’s both a threat and a promise.)

  Yeah, lilacs, quite the spectacle for eye and nose, eleven hundred hybrid shrubs planted in 1821, fertilized with bonemeal, tended by slave labor, and doing just fine. Some jealous neighbor had teased Lady: She must be burying her dead slaves under them bushes, so burly did they grow.

  This plantation was called The Lilacs. The Marsdens pretended there won’t another such bush blooming for counties around. And true, none rose to being such Junior Trees. The six-hundred-yard-long hedge had been featured—with its own engraving—in Jennings’ Notable Curios and Vistas of the American South (1856). Its author, a English lady, believed her hosts at finer homes across the territory. She wrote of hearing contented slaves—after a happy day’s work—playing banjos in many a Quarter.

  If Uncle Primus, head gardener, bought lilac bushes from Rocky Mount’s best nursery, and if any one tried blooming white, well, into the fire went that pretender. White was Lady M.’s color. Black, her slaves’. Purple did her lilacs grow. Goal: keeping all three shades in place, no blending. Separate but separate.—You know the three-toned ice cream you see nowadays—lined like a contest, each tint trying to give them others the cold shoulder? Like that. But, hey, onct blurring starts, bye-bye to the total setup. Darling? Melting is real hard to reverse. Take the word of somebody my age.

  Ingredient number three: Lilac.—Now we’re cooking.

  Baked Alaska.

  DOES such plantation lore seem ancient history, lava cold as Pompeii’s? Listen, honey, even now, with a housing project and one corner of a mall sealed overtop The Lilacs’ former two thousand acres, some of its bushes yet survive.

  At the Big Elk Browse ’n’ Buy Mall’s parking lot’s east end, around a few of them stainless-steel lampposts stuck out lonely in the tar, come spring you’ll spy green heart-shaped leaves pushing up for air. The strength of things!

  Next year in early or mid April, please notice certain purple stunted blooms. A testament to … something. Maybe: How stubborn beauty is. Maybe: How this Yankee-operated Mall (my favorite orderly here, he just told me the whole shebang is owned outright by a syndicate from Japan) still can’t squelch the tints and odors of a region. Maybe it shows: How, onct you write you a fifteen-pager that runs overlong, you notice this here local topic ever after. Or maybe something else. You decide. I got my hands full, telling.

  “Cheap,” which part did she mean? Surely History itself played fast and loose to plunk a mall over the manor in question. History did, though. Look it up. Under acres of car lot, and rushing through titanic pipes, a river got corseted by cunning Northern engineers (or Nipponese ones). This now allows shoppers (my wheelchair among them, I’ll admit) to swarm through cheap boutiques set smack where shad onct swum, where lilacs by the dockside bloomed.

  And on this very spot, my darling history buff—in the spring of 18 and 60—you might have seen, out near what’s presently the off-ramp curving past Dunkin’ Donuts (I swear I’ve never set foot in the place—mainly because I’m on wheels), you could have seen one lady wearing white, studied by a army of shirtless black runners. They awaited her signal. The lady was deciding on her lilacs’ coming-out date. Escorted by white parasols edged with Brussels lace, wearing the first known pair of sunglasses at large in eastern North Carolina—called “smoked” (a prediction)—Lady M. strolled and finally nodded that, yes, her eleven hundred bushes would reach their cumulus peak on the Saturday forthcoming. Was then she give her royal hand-jiggle wave. Was then slave runners trotted off, bound up and down the river road towards your choicest farm-owning gentry twixt here and New Bern, practically.

  Whenever she required her strong male slaves to do showy chores like today’s Lilac-Time marathon run, Lady asked them to please go shirtless. Was due to one reason (her favorite). “Something about it appeals to me,” she tapped a fingertip to chin. The Lilacs owned fourteen blooded saddle horses and uncounted mules—but the dark young men scattered on bare feet, their fine chests showing.

  And on the proper Saturday morning, here come everybody by water. Guests had to. Lady More Marsden—owner of keys to clocks, to barns, to platinum lockets, to rental buildings—she always got her way. Well, almost always.

  WHEN a beautiful house burns, remember its last great party.

  BEFORE

  THE WIDOW Marsden’s Lilac-Time Gala was a beloved tradition hereabouts—but then too, so was slavery. White folks advanced in pale painted boats paddled by dozens of black men that they, whites, also owned. Swans from roadside lily ponds had been hog-tied (panicked wings could break a child’s arm) then set loose on the river Tar to “decorate and enliven.”

  Lady kept striving for what used to be called a Effect. When you own two thousand riverfront acres and the sixty-odd people to spiff them up proper, a Effect is lots more possible. The lawn (pride and joy of Uncle Primus, known for his dignity and for speaking a good bit of Latin and Greek, taught him by his scholar owner) was almost too green. From the pergolaed pier, you saw many white-clothed tables scaling a hill toward the mansion. Some had masterpiece clocks set on them, just for show. Tables were laid with cold pheasant, watercressy finger foods, sweets sufficient to give the Greater Raleigh Area sugar shock. Blown-glass swans and Venetian gondolas served as punch bowls’ centerpieces (some near big enough for a slave child to sail away in—and don’t think they hadn’t thought about it).

  Thirty hired musicians—boated south from Richmond and paid a pretty penny—drifted on the far bank in five covered rowboats (ones later stole by runaways, remember?). The band played a long liquidly suitable selection by Mr. Handel that—non-musical as I am—even I can guess. (Classical music makes me nervous as a cat. Does it you? Keeps going up and down, up and down. I want to tell it, Find a location you feel for and just stay.)

  Lady’s son, Willie, and his friend, Ned, begged to help servants with boat hooks when the crowds arrived. For boys aged ten, a boat hook means a good time. Slaves wore white livery today plus powdered wigs—leftovers from last century. Young fellows in stiff toupees with tails like comets, boys with brown chests bared, rolled one white carpet uphill: it’d cushion the six-hundred-yard promenade that Lady herself would soon lead.

  She now reached for a sip of water and, thanks to young Castalia’s watchfulness, the leaded-crystal glass was pressed in Lady’s hand. Our hostess, waiting for first boats, went to sit. A gilt Venetian chair poked under her just in time—Zelia’s work, despite the old woman’s sneezing: wig’s cornstarch.

  Guests saw their blanched hostess from afar, right out there on The Lilacs’ dock. She practiced her non-tiring wave, one learned from a ladies’ weekly article about crowned heads’ hardship (all that dreary crowd-waving). Considering Lady’s fragile health, guests murmured, “Bless her soul, she’s in the sun, she’s come right down near water.”

  Wearing white as usual, she was shaded by two white parasols held in strong black hands. Lady’s welcoming voice sounded husky, darker than her paper-white skin. From behind migraine-preventing smoked lenses, she forced a set of pleasant dimples into view, she seemed tipsy with such light, “I don’t care how many doctors warned against … I simply had to come out my-self.”

  Fine-boned as a child, wound in a colorless silk wrapper, she’d been—folks knew—something of the spitfire i
n her younger days. When Judge More refused her a dress she considered Life or Death, Lady took her riding crop to him—it was the start of her daddy’s deepest esteem. He loved to show off one lasting stripe across his neck, “Know who gave me that?” The strict Judge left her everything.

  Now at least seeming milder, Lady teased and scolded guests. Her favorite cousin, Mabry, suffered gout. He advanced by boat—one hugely bandaged foot propped before him in the prow like some great tribute ham he’d brung. Lady called everybody by name, by all their names. “Why, if it’s not my cousin Mabry Walter Scott Dumas More himself, you quixotic rogue, you.” (Hers was a family of readers, honey.) She accepted funeral-huge bouquets, she blew dry kisses at boats of late arrivers. She sent Little Xerxes paddling a raftful of juleps toward musicians yonder, men who—mouths full of reeds and hands full of bows—could only look longingly down at the sweating silver cups where mint wilted.

  All guests knew who would be here, who would not, and why. Everybody remarked—like polite company did then—on their hostess’s ageless beauty. In this case, pretty much true. Of course, Lady pooh-poohed each compliment, “Flattery will get you hardly anywhere, you shameless scallywag.” She was a gentleperson of her Class and Age, child. No worse than most.

  Folks considered her a firebrand liberal: She hadn’t hired a tutor for her son but let Will attend the Falls public schools. Willie, a awkward boy, refused to take advantage of his handsome parents’ position. Said he’d rather see his buddy, Ned, each day than be admitted early to John Harvard’s college.—Lady, bountiful, ordered whole crates of oranges sent to her slaves on Christmas Eve—oranges being a great rarity hereabouts in 1860. From her ivory four-poster she insisted on settling all plantation disputes herself. Odd, she was considered fairly fair-minded. The Judge’s daughter used a solid-silver hairbrush for her gavel, a breakfast bed tray as her bench. Sometimes, recovering from migraine, she wore a blindfold to spare herself daylight’s harm. She’d preside from her canopied bed, robed in white, listening—blind. Some wronged slave wife told all. Lady’s upper face stayed placid behind silky bandaging. She nodded like clockwork, adding many a human “Hmm.” “And when you found him behind the pig parlor kissing her yet again, cara mia, how must that have made poor you feel? Be specific.”

  Today, her braided locks—never seriously cut—ride high in the latticed chignon. All tresses pivot on crossed mother-of-pearl chopsticks (said to be “decidedly original”), those and two yard-long ropes of hog-tying heirloom pearls. Lady, just gone thirty-eight, can look nineteen in certain light. And safe under parasols, she totes that particular light all around the property with her. Leading first guests up a famous allée of shocking purple, her face seems innocent even of laugh lines. Though Mrs. Marsden is known as a Man’s Lady, she can befriend certain attractive young women. Now—calling over two—she squires them toward the lilac spectacle while offering beauty tips. “Remember, girls, nothing better emphasizes a refined complexion than a set of bare and preferably lightly oiled adjacent Nubian torsos. Happily, my Neptune and Marcus Aurelius here just adore this aspect of their work, the vagabonds. It shows, I believe. These young men are vain as Cousin Mabry’s peacocks, d’accord, you rascals? Oh, I see you smiling, Marc. See Marc smile, girls?”

  CHILD, this here’s brutal. But what’s the point of telling your in-laws truth if you can’t, like my favorite candy-striper says, “let a certain amount hang out”? This happened back when white was White and should’ve known better. Before Black thought to call itself beautiful (at least in public). When Lilac, three weeks per spring, meant eleven hundred uphill bushes busting a gusset on a fancy farm. When all three tones entwined their most wildly for this here party.—Same tints will figure in the April when everything burns. Each person I afterward quizzed about Lady’s peacetime galas—concerts and whist games running three full days (you slept over in her seventy-nine-room home)—they all mentioned how everything seemed so … well, so black and white and lilac. Which is why I brung it up.

  Now I’ve risked glutting you with three calendar-art tones. (Was it this part of my paper that Witch Beale held to be most cheap? Hope not, I like it.) Let’s simplify a bit, child—the way, say, fire does.

  2

  IN THE April of 1865, no such party done occurred. No food to serve, few slaves to serve it. The entire skilled band from Richmond had scattered into ragtag Secesh marching corps, drafted to be the front-line buglers so often shot. Not one guest boated upriver. No gent promised Lady that he’d sniffed her lilac allée’s perfume from the usual two miles upriver.

  This year only uninvited Yanks were expected. Due any hour, any minute. The post road out front was wired, so few folks dared travel it. People were scared of Sherman’s fire brigade. His company’s job, child, was to start the fires, not end them.

  Richmond, meanwhile, burned. (Miss Beale, I’m trying to offer some hard glittery facts no history lover can deny. But this, to my mind, could prove the cheapest part so far. Anybody can look up a fact, not everybody can make one up correct.) Yes, all records show—retreating Rebs torched Richmond’s last warehouses. Yanks, entering the handsome fallen town (so smashed by cannon lobs it appeared a dress rehearsal for Dresden eighty years later), fought flames—just to save the town they’d won. Fire is a franchise, honey. Like these new Yankee-and Japanese-owned Malls, fire wants to open branches everywhere.

  APRIL FOOLS’ DAY (’65) seemed a final prank on the Confederacy. (Sounds good, don’t it? Who says I’ll never be no scholar?) Virginia was a whoopee cushion and the boys in gray were way too tired to keep standing. (Oh well.) Lee—American history’s finest single mind for strategy (the North admitted it, even then)—was pinned by Sheridan, but good. One whole flange of infantry had stoppered Robert E.’s single exit.

  Lincoln, walking quiet within a big armed guard, was seen on the very streets of Richmond. Him here? Abe gangled upstairs and sat at Jeff Davis’ abandoned desk. History don’t tell us if one President, linking fingers behind his head, rocking back in the chair, groaned with pleasure, then clomped huge feet onto the other’s desk. But if so, who can blame him?

  Lincoln next headed to the home of General Pickett, CSA, a boy Abe hisself had squeezed into West Point years before the war. Knocking. Mrs. Pickett (who was kin to me on my mother’s people’s side—her name was LaSalle Corbett Pickett—you think Lady E. More Marsden is bad) was a harum-scarum mess that day. She’d been down to her last slave (breaks your heart, don’t it?) and that loyal maid had just run off like the rest. So Mrs. Pickett herself, holding the baby, was forced to open her own front door. “Is this the home of General Pickett?” “I am his wife and this is his heir.” Spoke like a heroine.

  First she seen a man so tall his clothes quit fitting about six feet up. Then she knew him. Imagine being the wife of a Confederate big shot and finding Lincoln—his presence in Richmond itself a secret—on your very porch. Well, she eased back, took in air (or so her memoir claims), and gasped, “The President!”

  “Not really,” said he, grinning that grin of his.

  Now, to my mind, darling, if the war had come down to choosing one leader’s face, that of Lee (perfect classic aristocrat dignity) or Lincoln (happenstance, insomnia, weather, everything that’s homemade in personal character), the North would still have won and won big. Lincoln owned two eyes, the usual number of noses and mouths, and yet—from his every picture: trial and error, History itself looks out at you.

  My favorite quick Lincoln fact is how: onct war quit, he invited the North’s leading hero-soldiers to the White House. Glory hounds—some on crutches, some on canes—arrived expecting medals, guns, or money. Or all three. After a few commending words, Lincoln led vets down the hall—into a room piled with toys, the finest and most costly baby amusements then made. “Each hero, please, take one home to a child.” Brave hurt men, disturbed, left carrying exceptional dolls, sleds, hobbyhorses. This is fact.—My Lee one’s even briefer: The handsomest of Virginians had retired to b
eing a college president. In town, one young mother held up her infant, she asked Lee for a philosophy of life to later tell her son. Without pausing, the great man said, “Teach him to deny himself.”—Different visions. You choose which suits you.

  So: True, Robert E.’s features shone perfect as the rosy Jesus in Sunday-school lithos. But Lincoln’s wins.

  Mr. Lincoln’s smile is like a muddy country crossroad that—when rain has stopped—dries to show you every single wagon, bird, and walker that has ever passed across it.

  “No, ma’am, not the President,” says a tall stranger of hisself. “Just one old friend of your husband’s, come to inquire after your health, to see if there’s anything you need.”

  Mrs. Pickett was naturally too proud for begging favors off this kingpin enemy. But her male-missing youngster reached right out—not knowing no better. The guest gladly took this ten-pound Confederate. Abe was, you saw, a father who could deny his own sons nothing. He asked Mrs. Pickett to please inform her husband that his old friend forgave Pickett’s maybe picking maybe the wrong side. And why? “No better reason than the color of this baby’s eyes.” See, they were blue, not gray. Grinning his crossroads of a grin, the caller handed back her child, said, “Good day, ma’am,” left.

  MEANTIME, Lee’s men scout amongst theirselves for something un-dingy enough—towel, shirt, hankie?—to be read by enemy as a White (in keeping with our theme, Miss Beale) flag of surrender. Sherman had just took Raleigh—eighty-nine miles southwest of The Lilacs and thirty-three from my bed right here. Honey, it should be pointed out that Sherman’s local foot soldiers hadn’t yet heard tell of Lee’s getting cornered. Little did they know that the entire Struggle would end in two days flat. Otherwise, men might’ve spared the mansion in question. But “mights” don’t belong in no national document testifying to what went on because it had to, honey, had to.