Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  A good percentage of Sherman’s fire-eaters were Westerners. They’d hiked East to fight—they’d walked East. Sherman’s supply quartermasters were forced to order larger-sized shoes for such pioneer boys, their feet run that much bigger than Eastern gents’. Fact. Sherm had some discipline probs. Frontier types would talk back to any pipsqueak officer—“You call West Point West, Lieutenant Lily-livered Boot Suck?” That type lip. Rough customers, see. And just such ragged homesteaders will soon burn The Lilacs—“cheap” or not—while you—if you choose—get a ringside seat.

  So, watch.

  3

  AROUND two o’clock, on April 7, ’65, the day it all come undone, rain happened hereabouts. To be historical and exact: a April shower done occurred. It would—history tells us—bring later, among other things, May flowers. The lilac hedge hung coated in raindrop. You’ve seen lilacs wet by rain? Perfect—a mingling of diamond bracelets and Concord grapes.

  My school paper puts the white lady upstairs at her usual morning spot. She’s playing the German concert grand piano that come upriver from Wilmington on a barge nearbout overattended as Miss Cleopatra’s own. Because something about it appealed to her, Lady had the Bechstein painted frost white.

  Being right melodic with aid from a Foster favorite, Lady—outliving one headache before bogging down in the next—banters at two slave women (one young, one old), both cleaning this huge upstairs bedroom. Castalia, 110 percent alive, just gone fifteen, hums, moves springy as a switch, keeps dusting a white mantel mobbed with Stratfordshire shepherdesses. She cleans them in spunky slaps (she never ever breaks one, knowing exactly how much force each can take). The older slave—one Zelia—trims tips from blooming lilac branches, makes a great arrangement meant to dress up this pale tower room. The owner talks. As ever. At day’s end, slave women—safe in the quarter—moan, “Ooh, she got some mouth on her, don’t she? Chaw you ear off, you let her.” Till today, they ain’t had much choice.

  Pitching into a piano reduction of a lush orchestra arrangement of the ever-popular “Last Rose of Summer,” Lady chatters at them across her own spilled music. Speaks of a son sent off to war, mentions her dead sainted husband, says peace is overdue. The only good local parties are wartime bandage rollings and everybody knows she’s allergic to cotton. Wartime food’s a bore. Plus, you can’t get sheet music by mail. Her black helpers nod for once, today acting almost interested. Neither woman listens. Both concentrate instead on a moving-day racket from downstairs.

  —The smell of smoke enters.

  One dark Z shape of fume poses midair, hard to miss in this upper room whose very walls are white silk brocade. With the boss lady safe in her floor-length silk, with music straining forth in perfumed clustered chords, considering the paleness of pearls wound artful in her hair and the chopsticks’ sheeny X behind her head, the only spots of color come from rolled wool in a coiner knitting basket (still showing red/white/blue used to stitch Willie’s farewell long Johns), the lilac branches bright with rain, plus two dark nervous women’s brown clothes, red head rags. And now this smoke.

  White ivory keys are literally darker than the player’s fingers. Head down, acting ignorant of Yanks’ upriver housewarmings, Lady appears about the whitest white woman on earth. I maybe said that. She will not allow her nose to twitch at sudden carbon. Mrs. L. E. M. Marsden plays on, pretending today ain’t the day it all ends. Cross-handing her keyboard—she watches the black women. From their sharp motions and sudden readiness to fake listening—Lady understands: Soon. She’s had a note from the plantation four miles upriver. “Lady, Prepare in whatever way you might, my dear. While Nero fiddles the pagans are probably already burning Rocky Mount. Knowing, my gout all but roars. May our cause and bloodline live. Your devoted servant, Cousin Mabry.”

  Changing pianistic selections for her maids’ sakes (she worries over their attention span), Lady tells herself, “I have always treated these and my other people fairly. I’ve nursed them through kidney colic and the toothache. And who hardly ever forgets a slave birthday? Yes, they will doubtless remember such an owner’s kindness.” One such favor: Lady has never allowed the word “slave” to be uttered within any slave’s hearing—not even by Winch, the former taskmaster charged with lashing them. Other owners along the river Tar call The Lilacs’ blacks “Marsden’s freedmen.” Lady is pleased to recollect how her late husband spoiled his “people” so.

  Clear back in ’59, he gave the staff their Sunday mornings off! It was, other owners saw, the beginning of the end hereabouts. Local slave morale went pure to pieces—others felt jealous of the privileged few. Whatever faint banjo music yet lingered in county quarters soon withered from hearing.

  “A vision befell me,” explained the quiet book-loving Dr. Marsden. (This happened during the Morning Prayers he required for his slaves’ religious instruction.) “Last night, your humble master was visited with a dream concerning many dark sheep and a single shining good shepherd. In this case: poorly portrayed by, well, me, Ours Truly. I don’t often interpret my dreams as being eo ipso true … Uncle Primus, would you perhaps care to translate eo ipso for our friends?”

  Primus, white-haired, courtly, rose up smiling, “Marse, why, eo ipso don’t hardly be worth no lingering over, do it?—mean just,” he shrugged, grinning, “… eo ipso, sir!” and sat back down. Other slaves stared at the old man.

  “Excellent, Primus,” Marse Marsden laughed cleaning his pince-nez. “Of course, that was beneath your skills … Forgive me.—So, in light of my dream, considering the bounty of last season’s cotton yields, which did our general coffers so fill, and admitting the ancient truth ‘Salve Lucrum’ … Care to bother with that, Primus?”

  “Now, that,” the gardener-butler saw fit to stand again, “that be the words what say … Oh, to make it go down easiest, might could run … ‘Profit mean joy’? Somethin long them lines. From de Greek.”

  Marse Marsden didn’t correct him.

  Castalia, vigilant, groaned. Primus never taught the others. Just hoarded facts. Cassie now mumbled, “Primus say: It from the Greek. I say: If it from him, it from de Geek.”

  Some giggling done resulted. Uncle turnt, give Castalia a spiked look, in English, signifying “Later.”

  “Excellent,” Dr. Marsden wore on. “At least to Yours Truly, the dream means this: Christus, in my revised opinion, would surely have given His ‘people’ a portion of their Sundays off. Ergo. To wit: Begone, Ours Truly. Fly forth, do as you wish till noon!”

  No translating needed, quite a scattering done occurred. Dr. Marsden was left behind his makeshift altar, feebly straightening papers. His lady wife set alone at the downstairs spinet she played for her “people’s” moral and artistic uplift. (These came to the same thing, Mrs. Lady liked to tell visitors.) Young Willie, bored out of his skull and dressed in a red acolyte gown that made him feel like a perfect circus monkey, stood holding the five-foot silver candlesnuffer before a great bank of religious flame.

  Suddenly the Marsdens, alone together, heard—in the whole house—no sound but Marsden breath. Gone the happy hobnailed bustle, the nice sense of audience that a big staff gives. Even the kitchen building out back got real silent. Marsdens looked at each other. Did this mean Sunday dinner would be delayed?

  “Alone at last?” Lady risked a little joke.

  “Now can I take off this doggoned tent?” young Willie asked.

  “In point of fact,” Dr. Marsden give a weakened smile, “I meant after the service, but no matter.”

  Slaves tilling adjacent acreage looked at the Marsden fields, unworked during a Sabbath’s whole first half. County production fizzled. Neighboring owners remarked it. Even Lady’s port-loving Cousin Mabry tut-tutted. Locals never quite forgave Dr. Marsden, with his smudged pince-nez and his breakfast-nook busts of eggshell-white philosophers. (People claimed he talked to statues in statue-languages dead as the statues.)

  At All Saints Episcopal, other bosses asked: Why’d Marsden go dragging Jesus o
ff His Pedestal-and-Cross down into muddy local labor questions? Besides, what’d Christ ever known about how to work folks? Only had a skeleton crew of twelve and most day He had to feed them (loaves and fishes) out of pocket.

  4

  IN 1859, Dr. Marsden started naming his babies after old-timey gods and generals. Before, he’d titled slaves for such Carolina cities as had elected his several brothers to be their mayors. Charlotte, she didn’t come out too bad. Castalia, the town, claimed fewer citizens than The Lilacs did before the first runaways run away. But the person everybody felt sorriest for was poor L.S. When she finally begged Dr. Marsden, he said, yes, she could just be called by the initials. Poor woman complained that—come suppertime—shouldn’t nobody have to hear her loved ones holler into evening air, “Oh, Leaksville-Spray, Leaksville-Spray!”

  Dr. Marsden died one Monday after lecturing slaves on the corruptions of the Greek style in Wedgwood decoration. His staff hadn’t exactly found this talk no laughfest, honey. He led house slaves up the spiral stairs, he pointed out one figure on a huge jasper vase niched there. Dr. M. reported Wedgwood’s saying, “Fig leaves are not enough.” Thanks to priggishness, Josiah Wedgwood made Priapus hisself wear a toga and flowers, undercutting all that god’s erotic oomph. Since slaves didn’t know who Priapus was, Dr. Marsden alone laughed at his own remark. No slave smiled till Little Xerxes—standing on stairs above the Dr.—exactly mimed the boss man’s blinky chuckling. Then slaves giggled. Causing their owner to chortle so hard his pince-nez fell, caught by its black grosgrain cord. The following morning, whilst translating yet more unappreciated Horace upstairs, the man hunched forwards, spilling ink across a hundred white lost pages.

  Lady called in all workers from far-flung cotton and indigo fields. “The tragedy, long-dreaded, has, my people, befallen us. His heart was ever a frail one. We must, now help, each other, to be brave.” She then offered her staff a full free day to mourn their fallen Leader. Twenty-four hours off!

  Slaves chose to grieve via picnics near the lily-pad ponds. Some expressed their loss by taking up abandoned bones and banjos. Others could only be consoled by pantry raids, by climbing the huge magnolias out front, by sitting up there chewing turkey drumsticks. It was, even Lady admitted, not a pretty sight. Children had the run of the place. Venus, Xerxes, and Baby Juno were seen bouncing on a imitation Roman chaise in the second-from-best east parlor. Such noise!

  Buggies full of other slave-owning whites soon clomped back and forth along The Lilacs’ post-road fences. A early form of traffic jam done occurred. Gentry studied the gardenia funeral wreath, big as a wagon wheel, hung from one of the mansion’s four solid-marble columns. This announcement seemed at odds with the perfect carnival tumbling everywheres.

  To owners parked on the highroad, grumbling in their dogcarts and covered phaetons—how strange it must’ve been to view slave children hobbling in the gallery’s twenty-four rocking chairs (and waving like from some resort hotel, the rascals!). Odd to see adult blacks sleeping on the ponds’ wet banks, collapsed upon Oriental rugs dragged from out the big house’s marble foyer. Some slaves sat fishing by the lily pools, hooking giant golden carp brought in vats from Richmond via China. Dozens of huge goldfish now thrashed on the red-lacquered Chinese footbridge. Off nearer woods, two bad boys were seen to roast a formerly white swan, one set free downriver for reasons of its showy whiteness alone.

  Even Widow Marsden—weeping at her upstairs window—found slaves’ single day off a curious and, to her mind, right increasingly pagan spectacle. She wanted to ask somebody nearby, “Is this how they’d utilize their so-called freedom?” But since she’d given even Castalia, her body servant, a holiday, since her son was presently away on some choir trip with his pretty friend Ned—there won’t nobody to hear the young widow’s questions.

  Would her slaves consider returning to the fields at dawn? And how might a person go about making them? Short of charging Overseer Winch to please get out the whips, please. (Dashing young Winch was presently on a buying trip to Fayetteville—slave buying—and Lady feared that, even considering her husband’s death, the taskmaster might act real cross about such liberality as her grief had inspired.) It was, she saw now, hard to offer them just the one day’s charity—packing your “people” from total license back to usual labor. Lady, weeping in her turret with its view of distant profitable fields, idly wished her people would work for one reason alone: their love of her. It would so simplify their lot. (And hers.) But even Lady wondered how much longer a certain pitch of service might could last.

  Widow Marsden compared the threat of emancipation with her own doubts about death itself. Yes, you heard how eventually everybody dies—but one somehow felt, privately of course, and even on the day of a young spouse’s passing—that perhaps with proper discipline and good rest, with a determined playing of one’s scales, with decent cheerful help from “one’s people” … that, well, maybe one wouldn’t. Die. Why should one? Must it end, this easy glide she’d known for life? Her duties weren’t far from the swan’s, a bird presently being rotisseried on the green stick out front. Profession: to be white and graceful in shape, to reign over a peaceful mirrored surface, to represent refined charm—and to glide, forever glide (weather permitting).

  Watching from her third-floor window, Lady felt disappointed that these, her people, had not chose to rue their master’s end a bit more actively. Lady E. More Marsden mourned. (Nobody knew her middle name and, despising it so, she’d burned her birth record and defaced a family Bible to hide the ugly thing.) She decided that slaves’ grief should be noisier, a tad more primitive. Alas, Lady now saw, her dear, if childish friends still had much to learn.

  So, hoping to help release their pent-up regret (it must really be pent up by now), remembering her own favorite phrase: “With great gifts go great responsibilities,” Lady ordered her grand piano shifted down three flights and placed on the first floor’s flagstone portico. Asked to supervise, Castalia took a quick, if grumblish break from spearfishing.

  Lady hinted: perhaps the young movers should go shirtless. Even today, even this borne down with woe, child, something about that yet appealed to her. The Lilacs’ rosewood spiral staircase had been carved by a family of imported Germans in just three weeks. (They even cleaned up after their-selves. “So German,” Lady had told locals—though she’d never met a native German before. She just wanted to sound knowledgeable. Surely we can forgive her that.) The stairs were fully wide enough to let twelve men (ten stubbornly wearing shirts today) stomp along bearing a clanging, seemingly grief-stricken concert grand. Lady felt that on the whole plantation, only herself and this precious instrument truly mourned.

  The piano was stationed at her porch’s very center. As the sun set, whilst sitting framed here amid overgrown magnolia boughs, torchlit by her only two shirtless workers, Lady offered funeral airs wrote at the deaths of English rulers. She’d refused to wear black clothes. She owned none. Besides he would’ve wanted her the way he’d known her—a White Woman—bleached even further by widow’s pallor. Playing for her gathered staff, head tossing so much (it was plain she’d never guessed at slave quarter’s Imitate How She Toss Her Head Around contests), with pearls agleam in torchlight, Lady felt moved by music’s gift for reaching all walks of life. All.

  Doing a piece called “Consolation,” the woman was stirred at a talent often praised by her subtlest houseguests. She felt every inch the artist, till noticing that out yonder on their rugs (fact is, her rugs), except for children scaling magnolias’ limbs and rudely beginning to toss red seeds into a white piano’s working parts, her slaves all slept. So much for a captive audience. She stared down from the stage-porch at her “people” who’d gorged all day on swan plus goldfish, deep-fat-fried. (Darling, like the time her two white Pomeranians disappeared one midnight, she hadn’t liked to say anything too critical at the time.) Lady studied snoring folks drunk on leisure, worn out by testing the limits of their only full day off, ever.
r />   Till now. Till right this second. April 7, 18 and 65.

  5

  AT A PIANO long since muscled back upstairs, Lady plays impromptus, “Royal Fireworks” reductions, whatevers, ballades. A smell of burning drifts (one octave stronger than before) through twenty windows on this round room’s river side. Today the mistress does all the repeats, hoping to slow this thaw toward Freedom. Castalia, her large face eager to be satisfied, moves in that wiry inspired way she has. Snitching sugar-coated almonds from a silver dish, she still swats her duster across froufrou figurines. Cassie’s shoulders are wide as a man’s. Cheekbones bow out in a style right regal. Her eyes are so alive they first seem a warning till you notice the deep joke, the wild pleasure burning in them today.

  Zelia—fleshless as a stick, older than some hills, spreads a lilac bouquet that has become, since we last checked, big as any mummer’s headdress. Both black women straighten now and—eyes fastened—sniff. Lady, working not to notice, plays a good bit louder.—We all got our ways of dealing with disaster, child. Some folks pace, some crochet. What’s yours?

  Since knee-high to nothing, Mistress has suffered migraines. I said so. She sure feels one coming on. A regular masterpiece. Her bedchamber’s forty windows hang muffled with negligee material. Filters let in only playful minor sunshine, and halt the rough stuff. Her bedside table is piled with silk blindfolds. Staring toward the pagan sun can give Lady Marsden a three-day blinder almost at onct.

  Now smoke—its source being, sad to say, Cousin Mabry’s mock-Gothic dockside “folly” at Shadowlawn—cuts bolder through gauze window shades.