Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  And she pounds a child’s back, pounds, she pounds it.

  AT HOME: Schubert continuous, Caucasian Jesus wades in dreams.

  As for personal property during such valor—the Collier twins arrive at Lucas’ to buy rickrack for edging a round felt tablecloth. Finding the Ail-Round Store empty of every last Lucas for the first time in human memory, these stalwart girls choose to stand guard and are actually sweeping up already. Tending the counter, they’re acting like this is their usual shift—Doc Collier’s twins, who’ll never have to sweep their own place, are really loving playing store. They even sell a little marked-down cheese to a good-looking colored fellow in from Apex. They even offer to wrap it.

  A shorn head is finally opening to sun, free of hair—a child mouth, breathing at last, allows a scream to fountain out of it. Scream cuts past and over the fat woman, whose own breath stops dead. Bianca is a siren that stills the action of eleven hundred souls—napping, lovemaking, piano playing, store minding. First: The scream brings Maimie L. Beech out of sleep and onto her shoes and into the act of running—Bible held against her chest like a shield for discouraging bullets. She is bound the six blocks toward the sound, she feels capable of going headfirst down into the troubled mouth of her beloved Bianca. All this before Maimie even understands why she’s moving and toward what and who she is and how she is not Jesus on some pond promenade but one employee, mortal—before she knows what her beloved job is, was, and why she has just lost it.

  TO MAKE a long story less gory and more short, the swelling finally commenced to shrink after three weeks of what sickroom lingo still calls “touch and go.” Puffiness slacked, but not before it’d made a independent gargoyle-type beast out of just the head of one small girl. Bianca’s face had widened to the width—gossips said with their genius for citing things’ dread sizes—of a beehive—“face spread that broad till skin actually tore from the insides of either eye, or so one hears.” Bianca’s hands—from trying to save the head—were near as swollen as the head was.

  Downstairs, well-wishers arrived each afternoon and evening. They spoke in low voices, many wore black. Mrs. Doris Lucas herself turned up, rouged, fists bandaged, saying, “Anybody would’ve. Lucky to’ve been there, really,” a heroine. The cook had given word that no more donated casseroles would be allowed into her kitchen. “They think I don’t know my job here?”

  In the parlor, instead of lying, offering the usual story improvements granted Falls’ sick and perishing—folks told true tales. About the languishing Bianca, they recalled her spunk. No angel, her. They skipped all recent advances Maimie’d brought about. They told of serious former naughtiness. Vandalism they called High Jinks. Arson they named Playing With Matches. They made up hymns to the Calamity Jane momma I might’ve got. Quiet elder sisters, longing for keyboards—secretly mourned their young Mozart and Schubert along with the family baby. Sisters now heard of fresh Bianca crimes. Confused, they risked minor-key smiles. News: Several occupied privies suddenly in flame—cats granted hairdos, dogs found tied in human clothes. The time Bianca sat on the brand-new maroon velvet church pew cushion and smiled a strange smile and said, “A test. P.U.,” and you know she had peed on and deeply into it. Why? Shyness? You ever try removing pumpkin meat (and later its smell) from seven hundred piano wires? Well, don’t if you can help it.—Folks today made her brattiness a litany. Their stories of her brilliant no-no’s tried to pull Bianca back from dimness. Folks wished they had been way worse when young.

  “Nice” seemed counties closer to Dead than “Bad” was.

  WHEN BABY Bianca finally opened her blue eyes, everybody rejoiced. Maimie most especially. (If prayers were books, Maimie would’ve been through every library of the Western world since her child got stung.) Afro Gethsemane Baptist had steadily petitioned for the life of its recent fresh-mouthed visitor. True, that girl had lived, but she’d brought bad stuff out of her three-week nightmare in the dark. Maybe she confused the color of her coma or the darkness of wasps with skin tones of poor Maimie Beech. When that loving nurse finally got squired upstairs for a first viewing, when she stood in the open door, ashamed, hopeful, grinning, holding out a scentless bouquet bought with her own money, the child took one long look. The child swallowed hard then went straight up over the back of her carved bed, clawing wallpaper, trying to get away. The girl, covering her puff-pastry eyes with puff-pastry hands, screamed a scream that again cost people three heartbeats apiece for blocks around. Even birdsong lost its place. “Black!” is what Bianca shrieked. “Black!” was the first word of her scared new life. Black, child, is the presence of all colors. Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.

  Poor Maimie’s one mistake had been dozing off whilst hired to guard. The white girl (white is naturally the lack of all color) blamed a black nurse for that—and through it, child, for all the pain on earth. No fair. But wee Bianca felt it was this simple and this fixed. Angus McCloud gave Maimie L. Beech a large chunk of severance pay. He handwrote five pages concerning her sterling character (a letter Maimie carried home stuck in her Bible and later learned, with help, was maybe her all-time best). So then—nicely taken care of—she sat in her small clean house by the river and slowly understood she had been fired, if verra genteelly. Since her livelihood had forever been tending rich white troublesome children, since news traveled for as far as she could walk to work, her single nap had cost Maimie L. Beech a good deal. She could afford to retire but—without work—she had no baby of the moment. Without that, what use in wearing starched whites, in staying up to iron? Alone at home, there was no need to fake daily Bible reading—this made the Secret Weapon feel less worthy. She knew she couldn’t read. God, all-knowing, all-sight-reading, surely knew. Still, Maimie missed going through the motions.—So much of the grandeur in our lives comes, strangely, from certain loving daily habits. “Here I am, doing this again.—Amen.” Yeah, grandeur. In a second, I’ll explain her chancy later life.

  —I now want to mention how the L in Maimie L.’s name stood for Lucille. Odd, that young Bianca—not remembering just where she’d learned to love that name so much—later came to call me, her only child, after the sad nanny she’d got fired. Another story.

  Little Bianca McCloud, now age five going on forty, no longer needed a zookeeper. Before the accident, fear meant nothing to her except a nice taste in her mouth. Like Poppa’s secret blue, she manufactured it. Fear trailed her everywhere, a wake of knee-high calamity. Cats scattered. Neighbors shut the lids of their spinets and, for good measure, sat on the shut lids. Now it had her. Fear did.

  People change. Even children do. Especially kids. Catch them young enough, you can twist a poor baby to most any bentwood shape you choose. To make a violin, you wet the wood and hold it there till dry. What did a five-year-old believe about her perfume accident? Maybe she thought it was a punishment for all her early mischief? Did she see it as the dark race’s revenge on white folks’ strutting—all blackly visited upon young doughy her? Considering this version (a child’s, fairy-tale simple, fairy-tale wicked), I reckon it’s no surprise: Bianca never again exactly cottoned to residents of Baby Africa. That’d be putting it mild, honey.

  She’d no longer go downtown on Saturdays when the Courthouse Square was most swarmingly “mixed”—sixty-some percent colored. If a big black dog ran across the McCloud lawn, the little girl stiffened with something like shock. Her body temperature dropped and Angus had to rush her in the house, rubbing at her pink toes and fingers.

  After the accident, whilst Bianca convalesced in bed, her sisters—working shifts—did just what the un-brat asked. They taught her to read. Her early favorites? How-to books on Manners. She soon demanded that her plain upstairs nursery be re-covered in the very best of polished chintz—but only patterned in flowers—no birds or butterflies and certainly not no bees. She said she wanted a Steinway concert grand, and sighed, and did they come in white? She was soon scolding her big sisters for their wallflower ways, pasty complexions, hours spe
nt practicing in shaded rooms, their murksome dowdy clothes and social panic. Bianca had once speared her way through a neighbor’s populated goldfish pond while farmers, in a wagon parked on Summit, watched. Now, head shaved wholly bald (that way it’d grow out even and not clumpy), she observed high tea at age five. For Bianca, everything had to be just so.

  Before the perfume, her poppa’d secretly loved paying off the grumblers who brought in items she’d broke or accidentally set afire. For Angus—the former up-and-coming cabin boy from Glasgow, a man who had his tartan vests and kilts made only of “hunting” plaids, not “dress” ones—Baby Bianca’s every shredded frock once seemed some flag of victory.

  “Just like me,” a parent’s fondest prayer, a parent’s worst fear.

  Now he mourned his wild child’s passing. (Secretly, he felt his son had died. He hadn’t known he had one till that imp got stung out of this world, drowned in a blackness Angus felt to be as cold as the North Sea around 3 a.m. on some off-night, midwinter.) The Indigo Baron now noticed: His Bianca was just a girl, just like the others, was she not? He missed being the weest bit afraid of her, that was it. It’s how the truly strong recognize each other. “Uh-oh” turns to “Ah.” Fear can be the start of truest love.

  10

  HAVING CHANGED into a hedge that clips itself, Bianca McCloud later tried teaching her rude Baby Lucille such personal topiary. With me, darling, it didn’t really take. Back of Momma’s misshaped character stood what she considered one oversight made by one servant, black. And Momma never tired of blaming. A terrible destiny. To think: Others did it to you. To know the others’ color, to live in a hamlet whose citizens are sixty-odd percent that shade.

  Adult Mrs. Bianca ofttimes criticized our neighbors’ gardeners and maids as “exceedingly insolent.” She claimed that the verra rarest commodity on earth was something called: good help. Momma swore she wouldn’t trust black servants far as she could throw them. And Castalia later told me: In Baby Africa, Bianca stayed the one white blacks loved to hate—turnabout being fair play.

  Alone amongst the white ladies of Summit Avenue’s better end, Momma did her own housework. Something of a union buster. It just embarrassed everybody. Me, too. Others’ maids—bound for work—clucked, saddened to see so finely made a white woman out washing her own windows, hanging perilously off the side of our house, her head wound in a ugly-making indigo cotton rag and sweating like … a stuck pig, waving down to all and calling, “Hot day, nasty job. Must be done, though.” And basically loving it, child.

  She’d grown up in that showplace home based upon some idea of order in Edinburgh (Angus McCloud hisself hailed from less tony Glasgow, but stocked his place with huge oil paintings of Edinburgh Castle, aiming in everything he did to be Edinburgh fine-grained, Edinburgh worthwhile). Someway, knowing that Bianca McCloud Honicutt was his heiress made our neighbors find her willful clumsy housework all the sadder.

  “Lucille, it’s a race that does not mean to steal.” (In 1900, this view made my momma a liberal by local standards.) “They simply take a shine to something and the next thing anybody knows (themselves included) a person’s signed Paul Revere silver sugar bowl, my dear dead poppa owned one, is in their handbag, soon to be displayed on some pine mantelpiece downhill. One doesn’t blame a magpie for hoarding certain bright items in its nest. So, we mustn’t blame them, is how I see it.”

  The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

  —Poor Momma.

  AND, oh yeah, what of Maimie? What about my Bible-believing namesake who—in her day—had made so many white children “straighten up and fly right”? She could not get work. Not anywhere. In six months, nothing. Once she was put in charge of a promising new bed wetter but, second day she turned up, news had struck. Beech was asked to leave at onct, please. Nothing personal. People now claimed she was just bad luck. Sleeping on the job, they said. Luring harmful Nature to the one whose nature she’d been hired to iron out.

  Finally a committee of five black ladies from her church took a train, then hired a wagon, arriving unannounced at the flagship indigo plantation of Angus McCloud. High walls surrounded his headquarters: Angus—with two chemistry majors’ summer help—had concocted the secret formula for making semi-colorfast indigo dye. Others wanted it. The trip cost Sisters a two-day journey. Showed how much they meant it. Maimie’s onetime employer recognized this, asked ladies to sit down, please.

  “She ain’t set foot in church since the day it happen,” one woman started. “Which ain’t like Maimie,” one lady added. “We been worried sick,” a third chimed. “Over her,” the first put in. They talked like this, such tag-team sentences. Though not related by blood, at Afro Gethsemane they called each other Sister and were. They’d belonged to one choir since childhood and now seemed to think and move the way they’d sung forever four times weekly: one harmonized, quietly fiery unit.

  The group let on as how Maimie sure pined to see her little girl. Angus said that just won’t possible. Doctors’ orders, another scare could set Bianca off. Unfortunate but true.

  “Maimie ain’t just sad.”

  “She running out.”

  “Of cash money.”

  These friends knew better. Maimie lived alone, she’d saved for life, she only spent on church tithing and treats for her former children. (Beech hand-delivered a gift on each’s birthday. She carried presents in person, hoping to see how another year’d changed each lapsed child. This also spared Beech having to address the package, write a card. Maimie’s first brats were nigh into their sixties now. “Well, look who’s here,” they’d say to shy smile. “Like the proverbial elephant, never forgets, does she?”)

  During the long trip to the coast, Sisters decided: If they couldn’t get Maimie rehired, if they couldn’t get her back on visiting terms at McCloud’s Mansion, they’d at least try squeezing more retirement funds from Person County’s third-richest man.

  “Cash,” that man now admitted, “might be forthcoming from me. Lord be praised. Especially considering my family’s feelings for Maimie. Terribly devoot. Starling character. Ever sa prompt. A genius with children, Beech was, is.” He took out a checkbook big as a Bible. The Sisters noticed: Twelve joined checks made up every page.

  “Lord be praise,” ladies answered, a solemn breasty sigh rolled forth. What’d made these women travel so far and act this bold? Maimie’s absence from their midst. It felt killing. She used to move and breathe and speak with them like this. Downtown with her on Saturdays, Sisters grew flustered, pleased and troubled when fancy white folks, knowing Maimie from the McClouds’ very dinner table, nodded, touched hat brims, said without a whit of question in their voices, “Beech.” They said it like you’d factually say “Day” or “Night” in greeting. Maimie took this as her due. Made the Sisters feel a bit more visible and Maimie-famous. Beech’s memory for scripture was much admired at church. Her absence from these oldest friends felt like a amputation.

  She’d been the unit’s single skinny one. Sisters loved carrying food to Beech’s house, forcing her to eat it while they watched. She stayed their only unmarried member, the one un-mother.—First they’d tried matching her up with their Bible-believing brothers and flashy brother-in-laws, horse salesmen for Captain Marsden. But the men came back, sat down real hard, rubbing their tired eyes, whistling, “I already finished school. She only talk about some cute wicked rich white twins uphill. Do I care? She din’t notice me not all night long.” So be it, lady friends decided—Maimie’d stay more truly theirs. These five appreciated Beech’s refined ideas—they loved her unlikely spying news from the great homes. Mail-order bees! Though two of these Sisters taught school, they felt like Maimie’s years uphill made her almost their educated equals—whether she could technically read or not. Maimie had no family. These friends were her age or younger but forever treated her as something of pet, their secret child. Odd, Maimie let them. She knew just how to sulk and give way after years of white brats practicing on her. To Sis
ters it now seemed their oldest dearest child was fading quick. This made them fearless. They’d do anything to revive a woman who could be prissy and had real high standards but—if in the mood—might make low-down grumbly jokes with the best of them.

  “Does this seem fair?” McCloud had written a check for eleven hundred dollars.

  “Lord be praise.”

  He told ladies that their own food and carfare should come out of this. He stood and thanked them for their trouble, for being such good friends to Maimie L. Beech. Angus said he personally missed her verra much but that it couldn’t be helped after what’d happened, which was nobody’s fault, was it? Who’s surprised that wasps are drawn to sweetness? So much awfulness in this world just cannot be blamed, can it? On hearing this, four women cleared their throats. One friend held the blue check, others grouped around. Soon one fingertip of each Sister touched a part of it. The unit didn’t seem disposed to leave McCloud’s office yet. A board meeting waited, mumbly, in the antechamber.

  Angus leaned back against his desk. He didn’t say, “Ladies, I am, I fear, quite a busy man, I fear …” Instead he grinned his ginger grin: “This has been a fine visit. I believe you’ve got everything?” They then looked at him, they did so very hard and very neutral. The center woman spoke alone, slowed by trying to become others’ choir and quorum all her self. “This gone probably seem like a lot to Maimie. But she ain’t herself no more.”