Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  THE SLAVE garden yet offers baby carrots, fresh greens, volunteer zinnias colorful here and there. After Marsden work dawn to dusk, black people tended this plot by lamplight. Seems a year ago, it’s been under a week. Slaves could keep whatever sprung from their own acreage—Winch often remarked how large their yield stood compared with Master’s. Now this food alone sustains them. The two-hundred-acre cornfield was set ablaze when woods did.

  Baby Venus spies a single smart chicken. It’s among the last uneaten ones at the end of the county. The hen is wandering among blacked stalks, seeking unsinged cobs. Hearing Venus, the bird hides itself, maybe hoping to be taken for a hefty sparrow. Then the chicken proves too quick for Venus’ short legs. Hungering after something not collards, the others later quiz Venus. Seems she’s sighted some white meat angel. “Were it fat?” “Fat as … a pig.” “And I reckon it looked to be a good-eating chicken?” “Look like one tasty bird, eyes already the color of giblet gravy. Be some kind of good eating, could I of catched it. But that thing run fast as …”

  “The wind?” Xerxes is excellent at physical likeness but language-wise he’s got to get better than that, child.

  For now, folks patrol the old acreage, quiet, hunting food, wondering who to try and be next. Some sleep long hours—never having got to nap before. It bores them pretty quick. Abraham Linking didn’t bust your chains so you could cut freestyle ZZZ’s all day. Seems you should at least be resting up for something. Even Xerxes ain’t hisself—meaning: he is only that. He forgets to be funny. Friends fail to force him. He’s just another big-eared watchful boy, eleven, no better. Evidence Anne finds a charbroiled piano keyboard, drags it back to the quarter, fakes playing. Huge chimneys still smokestack a factory’s worth of fumes. Freedom seems: the right to be bored.

  16

  SIXTH DAY after the fire, while everybody hunkers in the quarter’s foreyard making hike-to-Falls plans, while children weave clover garland around Lady’s scaly head (she now blinks awake for ten minutes of every hour), a shrill cry lifts from out the woods. In one second, everyone but Lady is well hid. Such ghosty screeking, “Heeere y’all, heeere y’all!” Cassie soon says, “It peacocks. Be one of Cousin Mabry’s, probly hiding out from all these fire.” Hungry freed people look at one another, are soon running over furrows brittle with last year’s cotton stalks, so useless to your empty stomach.

  Evidence Anne is first to spy the bird. Up a sycamore, all tinsel-tailed and heavenish with blues, the creature’s wingtips look right charred. Sounds like it’s weeping, screaming bad news, hoping for human help. When children shinny up, the bird flies straight down, flopping something pitiful and is soon being turned on a spit.

  The bird is studied by a underfed Lady. She’s been making do with greens stuffed into her mouth, jaw then held until, eyes watering, she swallows. “Tough,” Zelia admits, rechewing fowl. “Swanses, goldfishes, peabirds. Look like show stuff would be tender, don’t it? But maybe that why it just for show. Least this ain’t collards. When I gets my mansion in town, I never wants to taste another green or smell not one more lilac. Make Z sick. Now, don’t you all be bringing me none from you-all’s mansions, hear?”

  After the meal, feeling more than usually satisfied, wearing blue-green feathers jabbed among basket-perfect corn rows, folks again name which in-town home will be theirs. They say what mansion they’ll store firewood in, which they’ll chop up for firewood. They argue over what day of the week to use as their “at-homes.” “You all can’t have Mondays. Zelia here done claimed it. Something tells Z: streets ain’t none too safe that day. So, you all come see me. Six days left, fight among youselfs. Miss Zelia here’s too old to lose her first argument since sliding free.”

  Women describe the great dances in their homes and then, idle, feeling large and sure and safe, turn to watch their former mistress. Evening is here—a great spun-gold sky backs four uphill chimneys. One shape hunkers five feet off. Red-eyed, the creature keeps blinking this way, probably seeing but little. “And you,” Z calls. “Miss Cinder-ella gal, eavesdropping yonder, you ain’t invited to any of Zelia’s high teas, not never. For all you talk about manners, you been steadily so rude to your old Z here.”

  Children step over to check on Lady’s healing skin. First they shoo away the day’s last flies. Evidence Anne borrows Xerxes’ neckcloth, tries and blindfold the messed-up one. Now that Lady looks so bad, you’d think blindfolding might soothe her. But since fire, she just hates that. Whenever white swims down before her face, she screams, rips cloth away, eager to see whatever she can.

  Finally, tired of fanning bugs away, being just a kid after all, Evidence bends, pinches Lady. Tries it just to see what the mistress’ll do. What Lady does is: look back. Not even like saying, “Why’d you try that?” Instead: “You did that to me, didn’t you? All right. I noticed.” One way she’s still herself—old reflex—the head, coquettish, still tilts left like it did when she really wanted something out of you. A fraction of her is still in there trying to flirt all this out of being true.

  Lady’s eyeballs are splotched with brown papery scraps. Doesn’t bother her a bit. Castalia will stoop before her, daub at these, using skirt’s doubled edge. Lady’s head seems as clogged with crisp ash as that wasp-nest winding cloth they found her in. Xerxes, hearing how labored her breath comes, sacrifices one-third of his last ascot, holds it to her nose, “Blow, you. Your own good.” First, she fights him (weirdly strong, she is—a cornered swan can break your wrist with one wing’s swipe). When Lady finally does honk, the cloth shows not just color but enough black woody bits to start another fire. Mostly she just sets here—brittle arms stuck out to either side like some baby bird might (must hurt when a arm touches her bared ribs). In Winch’s burnt cabin one unbroken bottle of witch hazel is found. Women gather, try and clean Mistress’s skin. How richly black is she going to be for good? Lady’s face—onct described as “poreless”—now shows a million fine specks—each dent and eye fold plugged with fine blown soot. She battles, squeaking, head doubled against one shoulder. Layers of black then sepia then gray scrub off but women soon hit the dark unchanging underscars. They see that only on paper, only technically, child, will Lady E. More Marsden ever be a lily-white again.

  “We getting bout ready to,” Z tells young ones. She stands, stretching like somebody waking from a eighty-year snooze. Z means leave, leave here.

  This group has stayed on in the slave quarters a full ten days after the blaze. Folks’ve been pulling Lady out into fullest sunlight—thinking maybe it’ll heal her stickier burns. Though she has hid from sun for her whole lifetime, she seems to like it now. A little wizened bald-headed charcoal-colored crone, she looks ancient, shivery. She goes crawling on all fours towards a warm spot. She stays hid beneath her sheet like in a game of Catacombs played nude, played solitaire, and minus furniture. Around the yard, she knows where heat lives minute to minute. On hands and knees, she tags after it all day like some battered cat. Lady seems cured of the onetime nervous energy that made her such a fussbudget, gossip, and keyboard twinklefingers. She can now rest for whole hours, eyes shut, mouth sealed, face tipped up to meet whatever warmth Old Sol allows her. She soaks it in, nearbout like information, child—like finally accepting dictation, some lesson from the light.

  17

  THE MORNING before leaving, little ones pull over pine sawhorses. Kids wrestle sooty sheets off the lines and make a short draped tunnel. Castalia, washing a broken gravy boat, wanders nearer, curious.

  Do children think the burnt one might now crawl under their cloth, Catacombed into motion by memory? But she just slumps over there, studying whatever far-off blur the children make. Young ones soon grow tired of trying and improve It. They just climb into the tent. Onct clear from the victim’s birdy stare, their mischief starts sounding regular.

  Somebody (has to be Xerxes, feeling hisself again in trying out others) squeals, “Why, la-dee-dah, here come my dusky lions of de Roaming swamps. They after me, they dare
not. Uh-oh. Dey do dare! Well hush my li’l mouth. Planning and eat Me for they canapés?! You know not. Consommé moi? I bound to be tough as shoe leather. Just look at me today, with this headache and my hair a perfeck mess. I gone give somebody bad gas, sure.”

  Castalia, quiet, arms crossed, listens, notices the rules have shifted. Children, lost under sheets, have picked one “It.” Freed young ones still can’t imagine this game played among equals. Ain’t no fun without some feared and central It to hide from, then pounce upon. When children do crawl out, they slowly see her yonder, alive and somewhat in person. Disappointing: Lady’s homeliness, one raw breast exposed. Cover it, please. Did children think their game under percale might help and heal her? Almost unwilling, they mope towards her resting place, they group all round.

  “Ain’t she pitiful? She sure sadder than any we ever was.” Evidence Anne, Baby Venus, Little Xerxes covey right before her. Clover crowns from earlier have all dried flat. She looks up at them, no judgment in her former-judging eyes. Her head moves from face to face, holding on each for maybe a full half minute. Seems she’s hoping she can finally notice something. Seems that Lady guesses she should remember what these dark witty shapes might mean.—But she can’t yet. And, understanding this much, Lady blinks, breathes one breath deeper than the rest, then tips on back. She’ll wait. She accepts that. You can see her lose even the small earlier interest. You can read her like a child of one. She acts so willing to sit quiet till it all, at last, comes clear to her again.

  Ruined—how patient she has grown!

  Old Z cuts through clumped children. Her right foot prods the buttery percale. “We leaving, but what to do with this leftover?”

  Castalia rises, paces to and fro. Others watch. “All right. We gone try four things.” Using powerful fingers, Cassie counts. Behind her, pacing to and fro, Xerxes counts. “First show her how to get water up out the well. Then we points to where collards grows, teach her how and build a fire, how to cook her up a mess of greens. After that, we free and gone. All right by you?”

  A show of hands: agreed.

  So, pleased, folks drag the former mistress to her well. Xerxes and Venus act real proud in operating rope and pulley, going slow for her sake. Then Xerxes steps two feet aside, repeats it all—in air. Does Lady notice? Spirited, everybody rushes to the garden, where Cas pulls a few choice collard leaves. Being trained to build a fire (Fire!), Lady whimpers, she’s blocked from trying to scuttle away. Z, squinting through the pince-nez she often cleans on her apron, ain’t sure how she feels about these lessons. Arms crossed, she stands to one side, tapping a finger against her toothless mouth.

  Now that the ex-mistress is in love with sun, freed folks (for reasons all their own) try and keep her out of it. The sun still seems a African national. (Didn’t it follow their slave boat—serving as the guard, God, and sponsor?) They already loved Sun back when Lady, still sullen under parasols, yet snubbed it, fought to keep Sun in its place.

  18

  ELEVEN days after the fire comes the afternoon of leaving. Children make extra-secret jaunts to the woods. Like going to a zoo, or visiting some charming friend in jail. How strange the furnishings look resting out here, half under tarps. The brookside glade makes treasures seem more valuable and perfect. A test for beautiful furniture: Does it still look beautiful in a beautiful woods?

  Children coax canvas aside. They bounce on upholstery. Inlaid drawers, they fill with pinecones. For kids, it all seems some ghosty tea party they’ve finally been invited to. A red velvet footstool rests beside a clump of even greener velvet moss. Evidence has hung sixty apple-green Spode teacups by their handles from one thorn tree’s briars. Honey, a breeze convenes a banquet of clinking. Doubled Oriental rugs fly from boughs, patterned bold as flags of Africa.

  The coveted ham, now soaked, cooked, prepared, has disappeared from out the smokehouse. “Bet It got it,” Zelia nodded towards a silent one. “And don’t play dumb with me, you. I onto you tricks.”

  The neighbor’s chicken—glad Yanks are gone, maybe thinking a sacrificed peacock has sated folks’ hunger for fowl—sneaked out of woods, come pecking around a former mistress’s black little feet, her toe bones singed like a baked fish’s dainty fins. Chicken never knew what hit it. A farewell lunch.

  The hostess/mistress’s scars now bubble, crusted. Though naked, her body wears a tweed of scabs. First hair is sprouting back—it grows white. “Be from the shock,” Castalia tells children. They touch the fuzz, keep shooing away wasps and bluebottles that—working Lady’s eyes—bother her so little but sure annoy her former children. Castalia reties the red bandanna under the old owner’s chin. “O Lady,” Castalia gives a great luxurious sigh, “be so much I could tell you now. You done lost all you pretties, the house, you Europe clocks, the clothes. But what’s way the worst, you done forever lost you only Castalia. Cas been being so good to you, Cas never did get paid. Why so good, you reckon? I don’t know that my own self.” Cassie studies the thousand dark dots sunk into a tight forehead and neck, the strange comic raccoon mask framing onetime famous eyes. Eyes, half aware of being watched, shut hard, pleading maybe, Don’t notice me now.

  Watching, Zelia snaps her fingers. “I know what I plans giving her for my going-way present. Why Z didn’t think of it sooner? Getting old, seem like. Be right back. This gone to be rich.” And trudges off speaking fondly only to herself.

  Widow Marsden’s one-and-a-half-carat diamond ring has outlived heat’s tribulation. Pearls might’ve melted into popcorn kernels but the diamond glimmers more perfect than before. Mistress onct bragged on its winking tints: “Notice the ‘fire’?” Now youngsters—weaving her with farewell clover loops, decking the bandanna with crowns—shift Lady’s scarred hand, admire how the gem catches sun just so—how it squirts local rainbow (the long-suffering light) all over a mud-daubed ocher wall.

  Everybody hears a cotton cart come rattling from the woods, Zelia pulling like a coolie. She’s brung a needlepointed coat of arms—Lady’s maiden name, More. This item’s three feet square, finely framed. The old one unloads it easy enough but needs help with the hundred-and-fifty-pound mirror.

  Pre-fire, women rushed this out of Lady’s first-floor dressing room. Was her favorite pier glass. Lady always admitted to her women, “Only the profoundly vain, my friends, understand: no two mirrors are alike. And only we, the truly unapologetic, can name our especial favorites from over the years. I remember one beveled one in Charleston, five feet square it was and positively wasted, exiled on my aunt’s landing. A genius of a glass when it came to showing me the me I intend. You know I’ve rejected several. I will not be distorted by something I myself purchased. I just won’t, I tell you—fair warning.”

  This—her champion flatterer—is full length, oval. It rides a mahogany base and frame. Borders are inlaid: three shepherdesses lounge in one glen, holding ribboned crooks, no sheep in sight.

  Zelia oversees its being grappled to the ground then pulled nearer, rocked until it’s plunked right square before her. Lady rests tipped against the quarter’s outside wall. Glass swivels, locking down down. In its lower eight, there she sort of is—blacked like a stage comic’s blacked front tooth. Can she find a way to notice? Old Z reaches over, whips a borrowed head rag off Lady’s pate. Z grins, “Better. Much.”

  Castalia stoops beside her former mistress, nods at the reflection, half purrs to it, not the dark nub herself, “There you is. And here’s us ones, standing all round, see?” Xerxes, unable to resist the pleasure of greeting his own raw-material self, grimaces through eight test faces, fast. But he spares Lady his imitation of her face now.

  “We leaving,” Cassie explains. “You gone stay right here. You yours now. Satisfied?”

  “No kindness!” Zelia yells. “I ain’t having no mushy tone of voice. Where kindness been hiding these eighty years? Why it should pop out today?” And, squatting, Z elbows Castalia aside. “Lookie,” Old Z’s gnawed fingernail thumps glass. “Know who that be?—Thre
e guesses, first two don’t count. Missy? Do something about this toasted little muffin appeal to you?”

  Requires many minutes for two ruby eyes, their strange pale centers, to settle on the skin of silver glass. Z holds a pince-nez before these eyes. “Do that help?” Lady keeps checking others’ faces, hoping for instructions, knowing something is expected—not yet rightly understanding what. Children tilt closer. Kids make sure their faces (inside a shepherdess frame) register well above their old-time owner’s.

  (Black women watch theirselves, each one maybe wondering how this, her own fine face, will now aid or hurt her in downtown Falls. A female slave’s being beautiful only drew the Master then Winch and his crew—in that hand-me-down order. And yet, surely, for a freed lady, all this beauty’s going to help, right?)

  One mirror holds a row of interlacing faces, totem-poled.

  Lady checks from those higher in the glass to a little crisped one down here at the bottom. “Oh yeah, you catching on now,” Z nods hard. “Quit beating round the bush for that fussy other one. She gone. This all what left.”

  Lady blinks. Everybody strains more forward. Lady cocks her head like a challenged bird or animal. She swallows hard. Honey, it’s grown so tense and still here in the yard. Evidence Anne slips off into the garden, gets well clear of mirror’s sight and others’ hearing. She stands crying, not rightly knowing why. Then—wiping her face on one homespun sleeve—she hurries back. The child understands: This here’s her History happening. Mustn’t miss a time you know your folks are going to talk about forever.

  Evidence finds Lady bent more forward, Lady is about to touch the bluish glass. Something in her upper face has half unfastened. Others murmur, squatting now, heads a-bobbing. Through festered eyes, Lady studies them, she clearly wants to please. Finally she presses one blistered palm across this picture of somebody cooked. A diagonal of lost lanolin smears cold glass. She shifts her head one way then the other—like trying to catch the mirror at some mistake. Watchers recollect these same blue eyes fixing on any slave’s serving accidents at dinner parties, hard and strict. “Later,” blue eyes had said. This is later.