Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  9

  WHITE and black, with Lilac looking on, are now alone together.

  Lady still plays something Spanishy, she slides over, bares a fresh section of warmed piano bench. The mistress is feeling feverish with the coming on of migraine, the coming in of Yankees, the coming out of her Servant Problem’s true start. These two young women, one white, one black, know so much about each other. It’s suddenly become a burden. Monthlies’ peculiarities, the men that both consider flirting with on weekly shopping trips, the allergies and prides and clashing moody woes of each. By now, one’s freedom from the other will mean dying or amnesia.

  “Please,” smiles Lady. “This time. Right here, close by me.” Her left hand pats white brocade three times.

  Cassie chooses to stand near the white instrument she keeps uselessly dusting. Her ostrich feathers cause thwunks among living wires. Cassie stares down at her owner’s profile.

  Lady, grinning, leaves off playing, tilts her noggin leftward (Xerxes has taught Cas to notice: for flirting it’s always left—for direct orders steadily right). Many men have found this real attractive. For Castalia it’s just “that old trick.”

  “What? You’re looking at … what? my hair, friend? Do you prefer it up like this? I am told that lifting it does give me some added ‘height,’ or at least the illusion of that—which I can certainly live with.—Don’t you find, or do you? Be candid.”

  “But you done always wore it like this. Why you axting Castalia today?”

  “Because, my dear, if you believed it to be wrong for a my-shaped face, I might … change it. I very well could, and just on your say-so. People consider me so fixed in my habits. But I’m capable of altering, even of improving. If you convinced me, I mean. Castalia? Simply show me how.”

  Women look at each other for a long while. Seems Cassie might now speak, might offer to save this lady from coming flames. Seems that Lady, a educated human person after all, is about to, what, apologize, repent?

  “No, ma’am—you done dressed your hair like this forever. Probably be too late. Folks wouldn’t rightly reco’nize you—you chop it off or let it run free down you back. Cassie figures you too far gone for changing nothing now.”

  Then Castalia can’t halt herself. “Know what you needs?—Spending about a half a hour watching Xerxes do you.”

  “‘Do’ me? I haven’t heard that since my poor husband died. Certainly Xerxes ‘does’ my shoes. But you probably mean ‘imitate.’ The scamp goes after everybody else, why shouldn’t he ape his mistress? I’m flattered, actually. He knows I dote upon him. So acute, our Xerxes—he even gets the voices, does he not?—I suppose … in simulating me … he’s frightfully accurate?”

  Cassie, grinning, nods. “‘Frightfully’ be bout right.”

  “Well, then,” Lady strikes a chord for effect, “that is something to anticipate. He’s certainly shameless when he does, oh, you, for instance. You’ve seen that, of course. No? Oh dear me, yes. First he wedges his elbows out, comme ça, then he frowns and smiles at once, like so.”

  Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

  To see oursels as others see us!

  —Burns

  Castalia has heard the Scottish poet quoted all her life. But today she chooses to say, “Burns? Burns?”

  White stares at Black. Smoke is a hammock pulled from one corner of this room to the other. Black/White—who will blink the first? Merciful, Castalia changes subjects. “I reckon you bout ready for you story, bout me?”

  “Oh, do, yes. Notice how my hands shake? Ivory from middle C on up is quite slick with dew.”

  A slave’s feather duster strikes piano’s rim. “‘Dew’! How come you always only ‘dews’ while Castalia here steadily sweats?”

  “I’m sure I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean. But, please, my story … concerning you, of course. Tell.”

  Cas is mindful how them others voted not to snitch. Still, she can’t help it, she commences her Slave’s Tale like so: “White folks’ Bible say, ‘In my father’s house is many mansions.’ But, Missy, for now, down here, this the only one you got. And, ma’am? It just about to burn. You ready?” Then comes a tale of pillage, strangers in a even stranger land.

  Smoke from upriver curls indoors, sharper gusts. Strange dry metal smells still can’t dent the sweetness of eleven hundred blooming lilac trees. Castalia will stay busy till the end of her story and of this plantation—they’ll last about the selfsame time.

  She calls her tale “The Tribe That Answers” and I will tell it to you later, God willing. Halfway through, Cas yells downstairs for scalding water, soap, a scrub brush. Dusting, she’s decided, just ain’t hard enough for your last minutes. On all fours, she serves the end of her life sentence. She refuses Lady’s offers: the whole piano bench, a garnet brooch, some candied almonds … On hands and knees, Cas feels she has—since age three—been locked into this crawl space minus headroom, a game of Catacombs that hides rooms’ beauty from the very person assigned for life to clean them.

  Lady Marsden, not sure what else to do at the end, amid the epileptic clinking of seventy-odd clocks (they begin to make her nervous), replays most all music she knows and somewhat up-tempo. Castalia scrubs around white silk slippers—blurring—frantic on brass pedals.

  THE CHAMBER door opens. Both women turn. Getting to her feet again after a good hour’s tale-telling, Cas appears winded. So does Lady, reduced to timider tinnier scales. And now, coming past a white onyx hearth and silver andirons, across Aubusson carpets faded almost white—Miss Zelia edges unannounced, on all fours.

  She checks over one shoulder like somebody being followed. Seems shots might soon pour through all forty filtered windows of this third-floor bedchamber. Leaning on the table where her mammoth bouquet now fans, the old woman gets to standing. Zelia, sometimes called just Z—which is how her name sounds spoken hereabouts—the onetime wet nurse and nanny to Lady, parts flowers. Her small face, a brown and beaten punching bag, is half hid behind purple blooms. Face announces, “They nearbout here. Best to hide youself, you.”

  Lady leaves off playing. Ain’t Castalia’s story just offered her a lesson in Marsden mistakes and the world’s unfairness? She knows full well who “they” are—so couldn’t Lady yield this once? But don’t you find, darling—the more cornered folks feel, the more rigid and rule-making they’ll grow? “You are speaking to me this way? You didn’t so much as knock. You’ve certainly had better training at announcing guests in using their full names, ranks, titles. I hate mentioning these little lapses of yours, but this is just not like you, Zelia mine.”

  “Z don’t know no names to nounce. Only come in here out the kindness Zelia heart. What I trying and say: They Here, Bitch!”

  The old woman flops back onto all fours, goes scuddling towards doorway. Lady, vexed, leans past the piano’s edge to watch. Crawling, Zelia growls, “Got a good mind to … I got me a good mind …” Then she scoots right back past the instrument, Z rises behind the seated player and, with one serious yank, Z tugs out the Xed chopsticks. Pearls spiral ackety-acking down, a whole hairdo flops around shoulders. Mrs. Marsden grabs at fallen braids, mashes pearls against her pale neck, yelling, “Tell me the meaning of this, you. What possible meaning?”

  Miss Z, shy again, staring all around, seems to hear something like cannons’ advance—collapses onto hands and knees, is quick past the great iceberg piano, eases out the door, closes it behind her, quietly. Polite.

  THIS ROOM smells of too much spring. You can hear the river running at the bottom of the lawn. Comes a scream from the foreyard. Cas pulls Lady’s limp hand from the hairdo it’s trying to resurrect. Clocks throb fire-drill bongs through all three stories. Cassie jerks her mistress onto slippered feet, gets the woman out into the corridor, scurries past a row of Caesars whose spears and rods of office signal toward the exit.

  Running, it’s Lady Marsden, “Meaning whom? Not Yankees on my land. We’re here. This is the South. Go tell them.”

/>   Once down her famous spiral staircase, she notices: rooms have been stripped. Ignoring all she’s just been told, Mrs. Marsden blames the enemy. Let her, Cassie decides.

  “Northern scoundrel hellhound thieves!” Lady screeches before even seeing one.

  10

  I AM pleased to say, I got my theme in by Tuesday, early. The schoolyard milled with others holding their “national documents,” some wrapped by mommas in waxed paper like fine foods. Even Bobo Kingston, sixteen years old, proudly showed his burlap binder, though his penmanship looked done in charcoal. “Lucy? My topic lost both legs and a pinkie fingertip at Vicksburg. Still got some mouth, though.”

  Myself, I did twenty accompanying watercolor sketches (India ink swirling wild to be tragedy’s smoke). I painted my report’s elm-wood binder the correct tricolors. Poppa helped me put the hardware-store brass hinges on. Then Pop claimed these looked too new to hold “history” (even the history of a war just thirty years past ending). So, Poppa, a Xerxes copycat artist in his way, took steel wool to them. “You’ll spoilt their finish, Samuel,” Mother complained. With a ball peen hammer, Pop was giving each hinge three to six goodly cracks.

  “There,” he backed off, squinting. “Damaged sufficient. Lucy, History always takes its cut. I did it for it this go-round. Now you can call yours History.”

  I WORKED in everything but a semicolon. Now explain to me again about semicolons.

  AFTER

  ON THE top step of the portico, both women go still. Out in the yard, six children and Zelia stand pointing, heads back, mouths open to the sky. Seems the North is coming down as hail, honey. By tiptoeing forward, by leaning past a solid-marble column, Lady notices the million flakes. Some are big as pillows, some are round as logs—all black. Down drift the ashes of plantations lost already.

  Countryside seals itself so quiet—exactly like the few times when true snow has fallen here. Children jump, snatching at dark crusts. Z wobbles over, grabs her mistress’s silk shoulders, shifts the other’s body in a useful new direction. First, Lady studies the woods apparently on fire, her woods. But past that, beyond four clotheslines’ soot-specked sheets, Lady finally sees: great cyclone shapes.

  Two miles up into the sky they go. Twisty, pitch-dark columns, contained, set miles from one another. Understanding the river’s distances and twists—every child can point to a pike of black smoke, can name the mansion that this smoke just was. Xerxes quotes now, in a almost unfamiliar voice (his own). The boy’s arm moves from one to one. “Be:

  Bynum Hall,

  Cool Spring,

  Ten Oaks,

  Ivanhoe Acres,

  Wisteria,

  Ashland,

  Greenwood.”

  And nearest, he names Cousin Mabry’s Shadowlawn, just four miles off but already up there in the sky for all to see.

  Old Zelia says, “And here we done started bleaching the spring linens yesterday. Wouldn’t you just know it?” Z lets go of Lady Marsden and, craning forward, pokes a drifting ball of ash. She grins, old blue-black gums exposed. “Why, Missy, looks to be you nice plump Cousin Mabry come a-calling,” then Z clamps one hand over her mouth, unsure should she risk this cackle. It’s all banked up—steam-pressurized—pending eighty years.

  2

  “WALKING PAPERS!” Three young black men wave from the post road. They’re rushing so towards Falls.

  “Ooh, now it done started, sure,” Zelia chances a one-step hop. The squinting mistress (new to sun) still gapes towards the great upriver fires. “There’s been a mistake,” Lady says, but to herself. Z again takes hold of pale shoulders, turns this wild-haired woman toward a road where ten more black folks hurry. Lady cups one hand to screen her eyes. For some reason, she belches. “Excuse me,” she says.

  More freed slaves bound along carrying sacks, chairs, babies, chickens. A great holiday chatter. Some folks stop near Marsden lily ponds. Drinking, they wave uphill at The Lilacs’ staff—shy and stunned here, unsure of Freedom’s etiquette. One old man points towards Lady, cries, “You-all gots her where you wants her?”

  “Sure do!” Zelia tightens the grip.

  Freed folks call, “Come on—before they burns you out. You can now. They be by here directly.”

  Miss Zelia hollers, “Listen. What they like?”

  One answer drifts up-lawn, “They gods.”

  • • •

  SOON you see local white folks in closed buggies, faces hid, whipping horses bloody in their hurry to get by. Lady has no one best female friend. She’s been admired and feared and “cultivated” but not too loved, child. Now, no white neighbor—in saving theirselves—even thinks to stop for this here self-sufficient beauty.

  Carriages cut past black people wearing former owners’ clothes. Dusky bare feet labor under white satin hoopskirts. Two fellows sport top hats, tipping brims at one another, linking arms then circling. A single file of children march with the graveness of Three Kings. They hold fistfuls of silver forks and knives clutched chest-high, strange nosegays. Bound for Falls, one girl tries guiding six white geese. But something’s changed. Holding her switch overhead, the child’s arms are raised, she backs before six red beaks taking lazy swipes at her dark legs.

  Mrs. Marsden watches. Her two small hands keep trying to become a generous sun hat. She half whispers, “Tea.—And a bath after.”

  Darling? Nobody exactly jumps. Near the road, two young men are tearing fencing from The Lilacs’ front gate. One tries to break a rail off Mrs. Marsden’s adored Chinese footbridge. He can’t do it, so instead he kicks a slat loose and, pretending not to have hurt his foot, hobbles back, laughing, to his friend.

  It’s now that Lady spies two older gents carrying the biggest grandfather clock anybody’s ever seen hereabouts. The thing has a pitched roof like a johnny house—appears near the size of one, even to its hinged front door’s swinging open. Just behind, a tiny girl wearing a mammoth feathered bonnet carries the clock’s brass pendulum directly before her face, stepping so very proud.

  Mrs. Marsden’s silks suddenly rustle alive. “But that’s Cousin Mabry’s. From the foyer at Shadowlawn. I worked on it myself, remember? Here, Cassie, run tell those two to report to me immediately. That’s our dear Mabry’s prized property. It came from England. Remember how he waited? Yes, instruct them to bring that here to me this instant.”

  Mrs. Marsden’s arm is out. Is pointing at the world of lawbreakers.

  Her own slaves give each other slow-burn looks. They commence to back away from her. Castalia’s face has never been more neutral. This scares Lady more than any bad-day rampage. Mistress, seeing her people change, falters back up her veranda’s stairs. Height will surely prove a advantage—even “height” will, the illusion. From the third step, Lady uses her child voice, “I’d just kill for a bowl of consommé. Even bouillon. I …” And waits.

  Nobody moves. Since the summer of ’61, they’ve lacked the needed chicken stock. When no soul budges to help her, Lady mutters, talks, then screams. Her headache swells with her own volume, child. What she yowls is what it all comes down to finally, it’s too blunt by half but we’ve each of us felt it at our laziest: She screeches, “You people will do as you’re told and now!”

  Her arm is yet extended. She points down, face to face. And yet her people, features impartial to the point of deadness, back off further. Some women call their children, babies Lady helped to name. Venus pulls aside. Evidence Anne—formerly Diana—runs to Castalia, hides her face in apron. Little Xerxes jogs away, stands panting, gaping back over his shoulder, shaking his head No so hard he nearly falls.

  Her voice smoothed musical and mild again, Lady asks who has nursed these youngsters through the croup, who offered them not inexpensive Christmas oranges, and who, pray tell, invented Catacombs just for their amusement? “Birthdays, who hardly ever forgets? Come here to me, my favorites.—At once,” and smiles, and tilts her whole head to the left, thinking this might help.

  Honey, it don’t seem to. />
  Take a second, child: Imagine her migraine.

  FROM this perch above the yard, Mrs. Marsden focuses on Xerxes. “I’ve been informed. I am prepared. You shall find your old friend just a terribly good sport.”

  His back is to her, the child’s face buckles. “Who tolt?” It’s a artless bleat from a child so skillful. Turning, he scans dark faces.

  Cassie confesses, “Go on, Xerxes baby. It gone do her good for you to do it of her. So … do,” but Cassie sounds unsure.

  “Yes, please. Now,” Lady claps onct. She arranges her long hem just so, like posing for a portrait. “Mr. Blake claims, ‘Imitation is criticism.’ I can withstand it. Which is why I’ve been such a good owner to you all for all these years. There, I’m quite prepared. Just see if I don’t do terribly well.” Smiling, she becomes a model of posture, it seems that some thorned corset is holding her in place.

  They all stare at the child. Others smile like they theirselves are now expected to perform. He’s three feet one inch tall and, out in brightness, seems a toy of hisself, so shy now. Somebody nudges him. Xerxes grins a shamed sickening grin—first at others, then, slow, on up to her. “Hi,” he says.

  First he straightens his famous hankie ascot. Xerxes faces Lady, takes some time to shake hisself limber, knees give a bit—warming up. Smiling, it seems like he has finally turned pro. This could be the moment he’s done waited on forever.

  The post road streams with runners, hollering. And yet here, in a separate slower side zone, this odd command performance rolls on. And something about that sure appeals to her.

  Midair, Xerxes settles, places fingertips, conjuring a keyboard. (Recognizing the activity, Lady nods, confident she always looks especially well at her instrument.) Xerxes gives his skull one spoilt sultry toss. Just one. And Lady, up yonder—still smiling at the phantom fingerings—cringes from this flung head, finds her mouth relaxed considerable. By accident, just for one second, and even before Xerxes can go on, Lady’s face distorts the way a dog’s will when you blow into its eyes.