Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  Freed women and children cannot quit holding one another. Their hiding seems done forever. Getting near as heat allows, don’t nobody cry. Ain’t one soul laughing. Out the mansion’s every white hole, a separate stem of darkness rises. This house is spoked like a black candelabrum. Children see the mansion playing Catacombs. It has started being un-adult, it is coming down onto its hands and knees. The Big House ain’t now.

  CASTALIA inches close enough to understand: the famous solid-marble pillars are only veneered. She stares right into a hollow post—four foot wide, its inner curve shows home-cast brick, round pine cross braces. Who ever considered there’d be shortcuts here? Who knew all this could end so easy, like any house would?

  Zelia points. Upstairs, on the former third floor, you can see the music room’s exposed white onyx hearth. Lady’s mantel still holds its French clock. The pink porcelain shepherdesses so recently well dusted are now lined like some minstrel show, all black-faced. Between the silver andirons yonder, almost comical, part of a ceiling beam must’ve dropped—a small fire burns just exactly where a fire should. All this happens eighty feet above you, held stark against the sky.

  For ex-slaves, seeing the great white place crack to pieces feels joyful, scary. It’s like the moon has died. (What good is the moon? And yet … you’re used to it.)

  In smoke, Old Zelia creeps nearer a particular tree, apron swaddling her mouth. Folks move like they onct tiptoed past the mistress’s bedchamber during migraine. Heat makes people get closer only in measured sidesteps. They hear a dying mansion suck and gobble on its self.

  “No,” says Little Xerxes, not yet able to believe.

  “Oh yeah. Be so,” one woman says.

  Then to make it truer for hisself, the boy tries mouth sounds copying so huge a housefire, “Ssnaffle, hump sheeee-crimpicle—poik.—Um-kay. More like it.”

  Must be four-thirty, the hour for high tea. Certain clocks—on fire and otherwise—still chime their duty. Xerxes then “does” time, too.

  Smoke this thick ain’t a mist, it’s a new place you might could stand on like a stage or staircase. Folks breathe through wet pillow slips grabbed off the line. Adults hold children’s hands, fearful that such whey-thick fumes will claim the wee ones as revenge. People risk the heat’s full brunt. They now stand grouped twenty feet from a tree all flames.

  IN EXODUS, Moses finds the bush that burns but ain’t ever quite destroyed. Ex-Marsden slaves study a magnolia busy consuming itself. But today, see, that’s the speaking miracle: Hers burns just like the four huge ones flanking it. She ain’t being spared a thing. Fire, turns out, won’t just another family friend that owed Judge More a favor.

  Her hiding place has lost its houseward side. Only a few silver-hot twigs stay put. Everybody scans these for the near-albino person Castalia hid. Nothing’s left but a charred trunk crisscrossed with fire’s favorite lizard-skin design. There’s one small flaking bulge, sheet’s top and bottom merged with smoking bark.

  Castalia moves to climb but—first branch up—burns her palm so bad she hops back down and dances—cussing, shaking fingers in the air. She wrestles off her apron, rips it, binds her palms with rags, then, well wrapped fingers to wrists, scutters right back up. Old Z, eyes shaded from the heat, stands quiet, staring overhead. Her untoothed mouth keeps opening and closing like a doubting extra eye. Maybe Z will now be punished for certain sassinesses earlier. She don’t yet understand: she’s free. Z could be flying to town. Honey, how long will it take her, greeting her own freedom?

  Children hold on to women’s skirts, needing company. If Lady’s body has gone to smoke—just another vapor in the black tower rising off this site—well, that’s one thing, that’s clean and fitting, if terrible. But to come across her bacon-strip remains—that, the children don’t want to see. Maybe when kids are aged eighty or even fifteen, when they have been snapped at and misused long as Zelia or Cassie, well all right. But not yet. Lady Marsden should’ve gracefully become, well, a dew. Resolved into a dew. Castalia goes on up hand over hand.

  At The Lilacs’ Galas’ end, Cas helped Lady plot ways of bidding guests adieu gracefully. Cassie’d seen it happen often: The hostess would go halfway up her famous spiral stairs, hurrying to fetch a poetry book for somebody in the foyer. Then a wave, a flash of white hem—the last this party’d glimpse of her. Woman hated goodbyes. Her specialty was pretty dockside greetings. She could not endure departures, even if she knew she’d see the folks tomorrow. Guests—staring up—were slow to understand they’d just witnessed another swift exit. “Well,” somebody’d say. “My,” they’d say. And Cassie would then order Uncle Primus to go fetch gentry’s hats, to wave down-lawn at bored slave boatmen. Oars up, fellows—party’s over.

  FLAPPING at tree smoke, Cas nears her ex-boss’s last known whereabouts. Blue billows still go hard on the eyes. Where Lady sat wound in soggy white, nothing’s left but a flaking tumor. Its outer shell catches light from the first floor’s continuous uproar. Heat keeps others backed fifteen feet into the yard, arms raised, palms flat to shield faces. Against the savage orange light (okay, Miss Beale, maybe “savage” is going too far) others see Castalia, in black silhouette, straddling a tree’s black prong, dramatic against a … savage orange.

  The lump Cas studies seems some tree-gall rising, three and a half feet long. Browned past crispness, it has turned the weathered steel blue you sometimes see on old hornets’ nests. “Look like she cooked,” Cassie calls down. Z hollers, “That be the first cooking she ever done.” Two children laugh, then cover their mouths. Everybody waits for news, everybody holds hands.

  Why are these people bothering to check? Couldn’t they be dashing towards a new life in Falls? Yeah, sure could. From a third-floor showcase, Lady’s art-glass collection—many rainbow-tinted Roman jars and medicine vials—busts, shooting-gallery sounds, ripe sweetish pops like notes strung on the hot air.

  This close, Cassie can study a baked cocoon. She’s catching sounds furniture flopping in three directions before diving through a burning floor’s best hole. But she listens hardest for somebody on the ground—somebody who’ll tell her what to try next.—Sharp and willful as this young woman is, she’s forever been instructed what to do. Since age three, since the long boat trip over: steady instructions. Who will give her orders now? Little Xerxes down yonder? Old Miss Zelia?

  So, instead—Cas takes in extra breath (her back’s so heated, homespuns stick against the skin, her red head rag is wet to black). Staring first at loved ones foreshortened in the yard—Cas—slow—lifts her rag-bound hand nearer ash. Up close, Lady’s sheet yet shows its every thread fused into a layered page of soot. Castalia touches. Ash topples a light gray crust across her thighs. Seeing what she sees, Cas draws back, all but loses her grip.

  She is posed on something’s face side. Ash, a fragile coffin lid, has dropped to show one dark mummy’s face—aimed at Cassie’s. The thing’s eyes seem melted shut. Firelight shows too much. Its skin is really oh Lord God so charred. Cassie just goes, “Ooooh!”

  “Wha …?” Zelia, below, jumps a single time, proves she means it. “Tell.”

  Castalia bends closer, dares to blow on the shape. Ash’s next layer clears, the exposed form seems made of pitch. Cassie’s breath shoots confetti flakes to all sides. She turns away, half choking. White bits drift down on the upturned features of black children and women. Folks now chance the heat at this tree’s very roots. Arms screening faces, folks are impatient at being so near a inferno. They’re too eager to stay back. Still, no soul feels willing to climb up, to settle beside Cassie, to stare damage in its face.

  One tarry arm winds around the trunk. It clings so. Heat has sheared away a silk gown’s front. Castalia must look at the ivory of exposed rib bones. Great glittery welts show where a person’s breasts once stood. Blisters rise big as brandy snifters, hang bottom-heavy with odd trapped liquors. Yellow firelight plays over the sheen of blisters.

  Its hair is lost. A skull shape is all homely
facets, crisped blacked ears poke out, unhid (the hairdo’s unpretty secret). Cassie sees six yard-long braids, turned white by such temperatures, drooping across branches below. Pearls in plaits have fused to wizened baby teeth. The diamond ring—still in place—looks bigger for such charring shrinkage all around it.

  The face of this oily carcass rests not ten inches from Castalia’s own. Cassie’s big features (so eager to be satisfied) wince but gape right back, unblinking at her mortal enemy and owner. Lady was always a hard woman to be owned by—but, child? maybe they all are.

  What now makes Castalia cry aloud ain’t fear. It ain’t rank happiness. It’s something she’s not counted on. Gaping at this punished shape forces forces forces her to yell, “Poor thing.” Cas screams this, trying to dodge a terrible and unexpected pity. Castalia yells to make herself feel safer from the sight. She’s furious at seeing all of this the first of anybody. “I just won’t,” she cries too late. “Answer’s no, you hear?” Mostly, she’s disgusted at her dizzy-making sympathy for ninety pounds of human scar. All this was supposed to end. Where’s the Freedom part? Who will Freedom be?

  HEARING Castalia scream, others back off for a better view. “Burnt alive, I reckon,” Zelia states, not asking.

  That magic word “alive” makes Cassie wonder.

  She draws even nearer to this husk. Trying not to fall, eyes clamped steady on the friends below, Castalia presses her right ear to a chest’s central blister. Her voice soon roars, competing with fire’s strong voice.

  “Be a miracle. But, you-all? she alive. And guess what else? Could be the most strange of everything. You know Lady Marsden? Well, she done been broilt as black as us!”

  From below comes cheers and clapping—maybe on both counts.

  SIX children trot over with the burled-oak George III library ladder. “Go easy up yonder,” comes a croaky warning. “Cause this, Old Zelia gots to see.” Takes many minutes—unlatching one bone arm from round its log. Working the toasted body down is like trying to unpin a brittle bird nest from a spot where it’s been built over many a weaving season. People clump onto/around/underneath the ladder. Black hands lift, black faces raise, all try lowering a helpless something—frail, dark, flaking.

  Z fetches damp sheets but Cassie warns that, raw as this crisp thing is, sheets’ll maybe stick to it. Little Evidence Anne hurries towards the stream, fishes out cheesecloth sacks of new butter sunk underwater to cool. Round yellow ingots have been made in a press, each embossed with fleur-de-lis lilac boughs hog-tied at bottom with a rope of pearls—the plantation’s crest.

  KITCHEN help, body servants, furniture polishers are all now basting it.

  “Go slow down there, you young ones. When a chicken cook too long, you know how the meat try and pull off them rubber bones?” Castalia watches children’s stub fingers smear ankles’ spurred points.

  Lady’s always been tiny. But without the broad and trailing extra yards of silk, without her fanning forth of culture and menace, minus flirting, missing zigzag moods, the constant orders, and especially without no hair, she looks—face up to sun, under so many dark ministering hands—like some charbroiled pullet, a nasty little antique idol, or (while I’m going in for the flowery—sorry, Miss Beale, can’t help myself) maybe a meteor what’s come light-years in one cannoned instant.

  Her attendants’ lives have been used up in brushing long hair before the pier glasses convenient on each floor (plus one hid within the dock’s lattice pagoda). Women have patted, smoothed, and dried her after bathing—but never with the interest of today—not never has Lady been handled with such relish, care, and tenderness.

  See, she is now black. It was ever their daydream. Xerxes’ wish made so. That being granted makes folks think this Freedom stuff is going to work just fine, right quick.

  How cheerful and bold they move—trying to revive her, doubting that they can.

  BY NOW, heat from three stories’ burning has fried front sides off the hedge’s eight hundred feet. Only lilac bushes down near river or out by post road have escaped withering. Lord God, the smell! Child, it clamped onto/over you like a sugar-watered felt glove—custom-made for your whole body. Smelled overly purple as the purple prose this is about to become, if I don’t tread more careful.

  The smell grew to such a heated pitch of Southern jasmined sugariness, you got nearbout sick. With today’s bonfire, flowers took on corpses’ tinge, worse for the famous terrible sweetness underneath. Made you wonder why anybody’d plant eleven hundred lilacs, and why you yourself had—on other such April days—bent your face into a foamy bush, pulled plush blooms against your nose, moaned over How Good Life Is Sometimes. Then sneezed.

  In twenty minutes’ heat, this has happened: the balance it has tipped. Everything’s changed. Bitter carbon now seems pure relief—some mascot. Of a sudden, smoke has turned into such a honest scent—proportions and a purpose to it. Lilacs planted in 18 and 21 for their scent now reek worse than any old run-over skunk. Compared with that, the purging swipe of ash has grown so elegant.

  Till smoke smell took over complete, freed slaves, smudging butter on a crusted body, gulped air through their open mouths. They did it partway from disgust at seeing the singed pubis of a lady what’d owned them, part it was from fear that all this sweetness-unto-sickness (O lilac, thou smell right sick) rose from out of her.

  Riding heat straight up, slave owning ends in a final honeyed glut. And ooh, child, it just stenched to highest heaven!

  9

  WHEN I first picked the title of this Modern History theme, I felt well pleased with its tidiness: three permanent colors. I figured they’d divvy facts up amongst theirselves, three corrals. Only halfway through did it strike me: tints’d have to change places. “Uh-oh,” said my overly organized eleven-year-old mind. “You won’t get no decent grade from Witch if you prop a whole paper around things that’ve got to trade off being one another. Ain’t near neat enough.”

  Now I see I was wrong. Like often happens, what shoves you into a simple idea is not what—when it grows way messier and complicated—keeps you rolling on with it. Marriage, for instance.

  To learn about White, go ask Black, vice versa. Each color is the brick beside/above/below/another, separate brick and yet all set in one wall.

  So: What is black and white and lilac?

  Well, the house and owner have lost any claim to Whiteness. Both’ve turnt glossy black as tar babies. Black folks still are, okay, but they’re feeling heaps cheerier about it now that river’s real estate and bosses are also signing on as black—a fad.

  Lilacs ain’t no more. That color.—And what smells good?

  Soot and ash now outstrip perfume.

  What is sweet and what is bitter?

  What is just and what is just not fair?

  Even the colors of the world can switch headquarters and meanings on you and in minutes. The right answer one second is such a wrong answer the very next.

  History’s one of them subjects requires regular questions to help a body stay abreast. Meaning: Let’s keep on our toes and remain dancing. Let’s not wait for others to grill us in advance for the right answers. We’ll prepare, revise, stay game for a little Ethics exam every second of our lives. Whenever Witch Beale pitched into some chalk talk about the Enlightenment, say, she’d smile, shielding from sight her huge dictionary of a mouth, she’d go, “You will be tested on this.”

  Tiring, but true of every moment of your life, darling. Experience is a pop quiz you ain’t ever quite prepared for. But you always pass by the skin of your teeth anyhow. Who ever gets held back?—Time itself is a social promotion.

  Maybe a better center-question might run: What’s ever just Black or White and Lilac for long?

  Q: According to Mr. Goethe, according to the Witch, why does one see-through prism bruise forth so easy with two dozen perfect jewelry-store tints?

  A: The deeds and sufferings of light make colors. By the time sunlight reaches us, it is beautiful old news. We get
tanned, healed, fed by the sun’s own long spent ricochet history.

  10

  ZELIA, house expert at furniture polishing, tries daubing the ebony victim (fetus-homely, fetus-slippery) with wet rags. Just like Cassie predicted—cloth gums onto/into it/her. Poor little critter seems fashioned of black shoe wax. Its legs, stretched out on a sheet, might be wavery twin licorices. Castalia smears grease along crackled limbs, across more blisters that’ve bloomed. Cas whips off her own red dew rag. With the headcloth, she hides a pate’s singed roots.

  “There go the last of our sweet butter,” Old Z says. “Six pounds, for this.”

  Children find a rosewood door. It’s been knocked flat by mounted Yanks. Folks plunk the mistress onto it. Off they cart her to a less smoky place, one that Sherman’s men have purposely spared: the slaves’ quarter.

  This got left—and, like a joke, so did the smokehouse. One precious ham yet hangs there. Zelia, remembering certain of her earlier rudenesses to Lady, now acts semi-scared of the burned one. Fact is, Z hides. Then, like trying and make up, the old woman reappears with a sample from the icehouse (great white hunks of it someway survived the hut’s very burning). Zelia presses coolness between the maimed one’s split lips, she wets the teeth and gums, blacked by inhaled soot.

  Quiet, children stay busy, studying. To see it naked, to see it bald-headed, to see it black—means seeing Lady truly helpless, not just playing-like. Odd, you can stare right at Mistress, without that helmet zone of sharp blue eyes looking ownership your way. Children linger close, their faces solemn. Winch the overseer used to scare them, using a marsh-dwelling mossy hag (excellent for keeping ghost-believing ex-Africans indoors at night). How strange—children’s finding that, right along, this threatened Bogey Demon of the Swamp was real. Was no animal or spirit or clockly goddess. All along, the farm’s monster won’t nobody but Her Ownership.