Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  She now levels the famous stare at her own self. She is seeing something. Next she squirms so, tries getting away. “Ooh noo you don’t. Yeah, folks. It happening,” Zelia rubs hands together then holds Lady fast. Everybody packs in closer. Dust under Lady darkens. Nobody mentions it. Bare feet sidestep sudden tributaries.

  Then, slow, like scared of being wrong—slouching lower—Lady gives off one questioning sound, checking others’ faces. You know the optimistic way a question rises at its end?

  “Yeah. It you. You now. Ain’t she smart?” Z slaps a thigh. And Lady—maybe troubled by being laughed at, maybe (thanks to pain) starting to understand she’s still alive—turns her head aside and does something strange.

  For the first time since the fire, whilst gazing up and around at the faces grinning down on her, leaning back against the quarter’s wall and twisting far aside in hopes of losing the mirror, she cries. But everybody later swore—what rolled out them tear holes was purest black—jet pearls tipping down either cheek. A matched set—one moving faster than its mate. Poisoned through and through with all that this plantation has become—blackness empties from her eyes, bitter half-pints just gushing.

  NOW FOLKS can leave. It’s the sign they’ve waited on.

  Freed people wander, a last tour of woods and the root cellar where certain punished kinfolk died. One yellow-headed Yankee boy gallops up on a sorrel, seeking provisions. He rides right past the blackened lady cringing away from a mirror’s plank of light. He sees a headcloth slipped back showing a pitiful stubbled dome. Boy calls from his horse, “How you faring, Mammy? Where’s the grub at?” Blinking, she don’t answer. “Now now, act nice to Robbie. After what my people did for your people, what’ll you give us?” Shrugging—he’s gone. Others, watching, can ease out of the woods again. They lift their bundles.

  “Time come, Mrs. We the last,” Castalia announces. “Off for to seek our fortune.” Cassie’s tone rolls out amber-sounding, round-edged. “Afterwhile, you ever come up to New York City town, New York the State? why, you and me can go riding on a red trolley car together, side by side, shopping, everything. By the time you get there, I gone know the whole map of streets. New York a island inside rivers. We go down look at the boats. Cas might save up for riding on one. Sail home to Africa, a garden that’d sure put this weed heap to shame. So, bye, place. We done lived here for White plenty long enough.—Lady, seems like I ought to tell you something. But now, Cas can’t for the life of her remember what that be. Oh well. Just … Bye.”

  Around Lady, children now pile tiny unripe fruit from her orchard.

  “Here,” says Baby Venus, “these you apples. Growing yonder, them’s collards. We trained you to cook greens, remember?—So long, good luck. Seem like you gone need it. Us too, probly.”

  The little ones have gathered pebbles. White rocks are held to be the rarest hereabouts. Pale pinks and yellows get lined up nearby—a circle, like for keeping back wild animals or spirits. Evidence Anne sets down one pet cricket in a jar. Propped nearby, the snaggletoothed keyboard. One framed family coat of arms is settled closer as a charm and badge. Two women, holding sacks, run over, aim the mirror more direct at Lady. A bright oval plays across her scrubby surface. With one hand, she shields her eyes. She moves to pad away from such glare. But the two women—easy as you’d block a toddling child—drag her directly back. They press their former owner face to face with glass.

  Old Zelia stubs off first, not saying bye to nobody. Halfway cross the red Chinese bridge, she pivots, drags clean back uphill to Lady, bends nearer, takes up Lady’s matted left hand. Seems Z is asking for some final handshake or a Lady benediction. “You all got my son drownded that time he try and run off. Your momma, her momma, and now you done kept Miss Zelia busy here for all these years. You all made me do what I wouldn’t of, could I of picked. Starting, I was smart. How you gone pay Zelia back for Zelia’s long life, Missy? You didn’t know it but, ma’am? you never could afford me. Well, Z gone hep you try. Them others got they whole young lifes left them. Zelia’s nearbout gone.”

  It’s the ring she’s after, twisting hard. She jerks this hand like it’s a glove she might could peel off, tote to Falls, and hock. But fire’s done got so close. Scar tissue is confused—gold band and diamond all scrambled with skin, scab, finger bone. Ring won’t budge. So, snorting, Z finally lets the wrist drop. Swearing, she stomps away. Lady, distracted, lifts that hand, studies where she’s just been touched.

  Then Old Zelia’s going for good. Judge More’s early mistress is seen to hobble over the bridge spanning soot-clogged ponds. On the far side, she stoops at a gardenia bush, takes up a missing ham. Under one arm—Z lugs the single prize she’s managed claiming (and only by cheating others). Lady Marsden ordered that this delicacy must be kept back till her soldier son marched home victorious. A hog would have to serve as Confederates’ fatted calf.

  Miss Zelia can barely hold on to the salted slippery thing. She hauls it tipped against her in one arm, crooked there like a infant. It’s what she’s got after eighty years—her severance-type pay.—Z onct diapered Lady. Zelia nursed the fretful pretty child (while Z’s own son, Lady’s half brother, cried in his hammock for what milk was left). Now, making a right turn, bound for Falls, Zelia only thinks to spit on the roadside. Hard. Twice.

  Castalia tells the children, “Hold hands, get ready.” Ex-slaves planned taking along the furniture but without no horse to pull a cart, with most of the saved things being such good size, you couldn’t lug enough today to make it worth your trouble. Only six miles to freedom, but six walked miles are still six miles. (Along the route to Falls, they’ll see Marse Mabry’s grandfather clock, heaved into a ditch and jumped on, splintered to matchwood.)

  Folks did save, from under tarps, one gold cigarette box shaped like a scallop shell, half heavy as a cannonball. They left the green enameled frog, them hand-blown swans and gondolas, the Turkey carpets yet flying in trees for any takers.

  • • •

  EACH PERSON’S brung along one green-banded demitasse and saucer of Spode: this stuff was always easier to clean than the silver. It is yet so pretty you can’t quite blame it for everything. People carry all the gifts Lady gave—busted castoffs and a few good birthday ones. Tucked into a tow sack, the Wedgwood gravy boat Castalia broke when she was ten and got so lashed for. It’s been mended with such care it looks less spoilt than Cassie’s back where the lashes’ curving marks still show. Rumors along the river claim: Lady onct handed a jewel to the slave girl that admired it. Cassie wears the item today—a small ivory brooch, a miniature: some English gent’s favorite hunting dog, and behind the hound’s bristled ears, a great house painted, half hid, in mist.

  Who can say what waits in Falls? Nobody here’s got a lick of money. Ain’t one person leaving now that’s ever held more than three coins at a time. In Falls, there’ll be no ready place to live. These people’s skills are whatever slavery’s trained them for. If they do have a genius, it might be their gift for necessary acting.

  Slaves leave because they can. Considering rumors of in-town hangings, of household guards and squatters’ villages, they’re scared to set off, sure. But, honey, they’re ashamed of having stayed out here this long.

  Castalia lifts Baby Venus to her shoulders. The group stares down on a certain little woman. Her upturned face is flaking like a pane of isinglass. “It gone sing come night,” Evidence Anne points at the cricket jar. “That might could help you through.”

  Then everybody moves away. Lady E. More Marsden is yet propped—her itchy back rests against stucco. She is left near a cook pot, a tin ladle for water, the busted keyboard, a glassed needleworked coat of arms, one overly life-sized mirror. Close by, the pebbles, a jar, some baby apples. This will have to be her kit for the world. She leans against the quarter’s chamber her husband used as his famous “nap” chamber. To this spot, he brought the young slave girls who helped him rest at midday.

  Honey, Lady’s “people” became, f
or a while, her people—the only ones. Now off they trudge. She squints, seems to try and concentrate. Her split lips work, trying parts of words. Some women on the Chinese bridge turn back, others won’t, two swear long curses against the place, its owner. All children wave, not knowing no better. Xerxes, feeling fully hisself again—the sieve that others elegantly pour through—signals at Lady in her own old manner. It is that spare-your-energy hand jiggle Lady learnt from a Godey’s magazine, proving: being royalty ain’t easy. You can say that again.

  Spying others’ exit, Lady goes even stiller. Her eyes are working better, more able to find middle distances. Slow, she shifts one bone arm, she lets that wrist rise. First the hand appears to point, accusing. Her brow knots. She then tries copying Xerxes’ copy of her. She’s trying hard to keep her people in view. She seems to partway guess she’s being left. She knows enough to want to stop it.

  Castalia looks back just in time to see the former mistress manage. Lady has specialized in lush hellos, quick exits. Does she think she can woo folks back to help her? Does courtesy always hide a command? Cassie tells the children, “She alone now.” Everybody understands, in Lady’s forty-three years the woman has never spent one solitary night here on these grounds. She’s now waving so careful. Arm held in place, only the wrist gives a sidelong clockwork jiggle. Zelia, a good ways off, shifts, spies this last try at grandness. Yelling nothing, but yelling it real loud, Z gallops back to the property line, nearly drops her ham, yanks up many blooming roadside tulips, bulbs and all. Others join her, carrying flowers off, tossing them down, jumping on them for good measure. Ain’t no horse to steal and furniture’s too heavy. A few road’s edge lilacs have stayed unsinged. But won’t nobody touch these. (Forty years from now, the scent of lilac sachet sold downtown at Lucas’ All-Round Store will still turn these women’s stomachs.)

  Children wave as long as they can, long as mommas’ll let them. Lady, noticing, tries to blow them the kisses she onct awarded guests arriving in white pleasure boats.

  The huddled group strides away in sun. Their heads are lifted, their shoulders set. They are taking broad steps with such sudden strength. Buttoning their tattered clothes to the neck (one way of getting formal for town), they help each other along. Folks march off double-file. Today they’re real particular about how they look. The post road twists then disappears into deep-shadowed evergreens. And on it, so do they.

  Uphill, alone, and until dark, Lady keeps steadily waving. Her left hand must soon prop up the right elbow. She continues trying. It’s a mechanical signal, only half understood even to itself. And yet she does it, does it.

  Soon, dew. The night gets her. She’s lost somewheres inside of that. And still she tries and wave. She nods off, exhausted, wakes, signals towards nothing for a while. As promised—that trapped cricket sings. But its icy noise gives little comfort. Locked up, the bug sings just one piping question, particular and familiar. It sings, “Why me? Why me? Why me?”

  19

  MAYBE it’s “cheap” to bust in here and say so, honey, but you know Little Xerxes? Well, he would become famous. He appeared as a vaudeville sand dancer/mimic playing the Albee circuit thirty-odd years down the pike. Taking full credit for inventing hisself, he dropped “Marsden” but kept the made-up-sounding “Little Xerxes.” (His moniker later trailed a REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. Famous for copying others, Xerxes didn’t plan on nobody’s doing that to him.)

  In Raleigh, during a museum trip when I was ten, my folks took me to see him. Xerxes was headlining at the Gold Leaf Theatre (named for tobacco, the quietly cancer-causing cash crop then). Small-town life is such that my own parents bought tickets just because this starring black man hailed from Falls or near it—just because they knew Captain Will Marsden good enough to speak to him downtown.

  Xerxes’ name run second from the top. Fine print claimed he was fresh home from entertaining the Crowned Heads, whoever they are. Riding a long drumroll, he twirled out dancing to beat all. By now grown to five foot even, he was a black/white pinwheel whirring/grinning inches off the floor. Now forty, his hair’d turned white as if cornstarched. His pointy child’s-sized white shoes were so shiny. White satin tails, white top hat, white bow tie, something to see. Only his hands and face showed very brown/blue/black.—Theater!

  Xerxes strewed his own danced path with sand from out his pockets, white sand—fine and store-bought as any Mall pet-shop aquarium’s. His whirligig entrance drew a great mild roar and sigh from black people in their separate balcony above us. They were invisible but tremendously heard, being our immediate roof.

  Xerxes talked straight at us—confiding, leering—all while pinching yet more friction-cutting whiteness from deep pockets. He tossed it like Diamond Jim flinging fat-man tips—like we were the ducks and swans floating on our dark pond and he was feeding us from up yonder on that lighted shore. Soft white dance slippers did continuously whisper over powder—easy, sleepy, skillful, secret. My. He soon commenced to imitating all the big politicians and show folks of our day.

  Unlike your usual show-business whitey (black-faced to mime blacks), Xerxes, doing whites, never stooped to paint his black face pale. Didn’t need to. Where was the art, the sport in that? Ooh, his white folks made you want to cry, “Yes, but …” Made you feel worse than blacks must of done, seeing some half-drunk cracker in burnt cork play Uncle Happy-Go-Lucky.

  Xerxes’ whites were locked and vain and limited, not meaning to be, hardly noticing. He did “The Belle,” floppy as a fileted perch, and yet … half dignified, dry. Commercial gents in our audience—the prewar gentry’s loud moneyed replacements—howled, “Just like them.” As if the old-time landowners had already become a strange and comic race all to theirselves.

  Xerxes’ paleface copies were dead accurate—a good surgeon that’s already cut you and is washing up across the room when you ask, “Sir? uh, has it started yet?” Xerxes kept each portrait small and short, a wicked series he lined up, like a row of perfect clocks. He left grandness for his own hostly manner that framed each weak white subject. Little Xerxes never mimed one black person, funny or not. Some white folks claimed that, when it came to doing colored people, Xerxes couldn’t. Black folks said he wouldn’t.

  Since I was only ten, Xerxes’ impressions of famous whites stayed Greek to me. But I did notice that even my momma giggled (a accomplishment), though she did it into a hankie (like being sick). Poppa, a amateur-hour comic hisself, sat shaking his head, muttering, saddened, “It’s beyond anything. He’s way better’n me. A whole different class. How does he do it, you reckon? Mirrors? Don’t you figure he must just live in front of mirrors?”

  “Practice,” Momma whispered from behind her white hankie nested in a whiter glove. “And remember, Samuel, he needs this. Both for a living and as possible revenge. I mean, he has to be better than a contented, privileged person such as yourself.”

  “Is that what I am? Well, hot dog. You know, I been wondering!”

  A braid-chewing child remembers this best: At stage’s right and left stood the American flag and a North Carolina state one. Dancing, mid-imitation, nearing his act’s smooth end, Xerxes seemed to suddenly notice the Stars and Stripes. He sand-skated hippety over alongside the flag. Seemed he’d sneaked up on a live vain white person who’d most hate being copied.

  One broad sandman grin widened Xerxes’ face—you seen Idea flare off over his head. His act won’t a bit like your usual banjo and bones high jinks from them days. His dignity was such—it seemed he’d paid admission to see and giggle at us white ticket holders. (Unlike Poppa and me, Xerxes always underplayed.) For him, in black and white, every motion seemed ink-brushed, shorthand, semi-Japanese.

  He straightened beside red/white/blue. One cheap-gilt eagle set atop the varnished pine stave. You seen Xerxes check out a flag entire, then—tip to bottom—copy it one feature at a time. He froze, by half-inches. His head went Eagle—big old ears sticking forth like wings almost. Doing slanted stripes, one shoulder canted high, the
other flagging, slackened. Tuxedo tails hung twin pennant-dividends behind. He went onto a single foot and stuck there, face being eagle, chest a proud tired angled cloth, leg the pole of all. What is a flag but a sheet, percale, appliquéd? Just a sheet, but it expects you’ll go to war and die over its three simple colors. Well, honey, by the end, I was ready to Pledge him Allegiance.

  Sure, there’d been other flags on other stages—but someway you felt this was the first night Xerxes had noticed. Seemed like the two of you had thought this up together. He’d become It. And his being It so perfect made you wonder all the more who He must be!

  Closing—Xerxes tippy-tapped over, spilling diamondy glitter like the tracks his wit left. He did the state flag, fast—making it the shyer local wife of a bolder better-traveled national one. Then off the stage he pinwheeled, spotlit, spinning.

  Someway you knew he’d learnt this the way the best things get learnt—by using all of it to stay alive as hard as a body can. Try learning to tap-dance on the edge of a windy cliff. Either you really will, child, or you really won’t.

  AFTERWARD, my folks and me hurried to the stage door. Though this happened in December, we willingly waited outside for what—to a child—seemed ages. Everybody’s winter breath showed white—even black folks’, kept off to one side. Momma uncapped her best pen so Mr. Xerxes Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. might sign our 5¢ souvenir program. Eighty people milled around, one wit in each group feebly trying and imitate His recent imitations.

  Underlings bustled out first, clearing the way. A silence done resulted. After a goodly sobering wait, the star attraction finally appeared. He looked the size of a serious child. He wore one ice-creamy Cheshire-cat white fur coat tossed casual around his shoulders. His neck trailed a white silk scarf, its fringe almost touching alley’s cinders but not quite, not quite.