Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

by Allan Gurganus

  “You feel my amount’s insufficient?”

  The speaker got nudged by four soft shoulders from behind. She shrugged then, but left her own blank check of a look aimed Angus’ way. He thanked the women, hard. A gent fitted to do well in this world—Angus chanced adding, “Lorrd be prraised?”

  “Lord be praise,” the unit sighed. And left.

  MAIMIE’S friends were headed home, not unpleased, taking turns holding a blue chit. Their preacher was knocking at Miss Maimie’s door. Smiling, the elderly gent explained: He’d found a way of easing Maimie’s mind. God had whispered it to him after supper last night. Hat off, Rev. stepped in, uninvited. There were, he said, so many black children hereabouts who might could benefit from MLB’s years of uphill practice. In Baby Africa, so many youngsters were flat starved for Maimie’s one-at-a-time kid-glove-type care. Why didn’t she cheer herself by tending them, us, ours? Beech’s plaits had come unfastened and dangled like risky laces trailing a untied shoe. She’d lost weight you never knew she’d had. She looked more pure and vertical. Less a virgin, more a warrior.

  “God,” Beech said, “whispered you that? Free babysitting from me?” She had not offered Preacher tea or even water. She stood, proving this’d be a short visit. On the table behind her, partly wrapped presents: fifteen leather pen wipes and twenty bath talcs. Hat bunched in hand, Pastor said: His job was delivering God’s word. What folks did with it was their business.

  “Well, sir.” Maimie rubbed her eyes like a reader burned steadily by the world’s finer print. “One thing is, I real used to being paid for it. Got pretty good money uphill, too. You should know—I been tithing right along, paying you.’ She explained she’d steadily worked for “quality.” Maybe that’d ruined her, who knew? But these ragged weedy little young ones from down around here? Well, they just didn’t rightly mean as much to Maimie, you know? Did that surprise him, had she gone and hurt his feelings? “Not to boast none,” she went on wrapping gifts, “but I been called a genius at getting the Spoilt to do right. Could be, all my time around the Spoilt has done spoilt Maimie, too. But, way I see it, if I can’t cure me of my being ruint by spoilage, then can’t nobody else. As to my doing for these little black ones, free of charge? Noo, that don’t really draw Maimie unto it all that much, sir, but thank you.”

  He turned to leave. “Sister,” he tried a last time. “You know this, but … Charity begin at home.”

  “Fine,” Beech snapped. “Go start at your place. In this house, my remembered babies keep me steadily busy, sir. I believe they calling Maimie right now. Good day.”

  She saw him ease down her porch steps, the man looked caved in, that disappointed with his old favorite who knew the best 100 from the Book of Psalms’ 150. She grabbed up her Bible (dust was on it—troubling, the strange deadly feel of grit there). She ran to her porch, didn’t even bother opening the Book but mashed one hand across its cover. Then—like receiving telegram knocks—she quoted aloud at his bent hurrying back: “Preacher? We all ‘discipline problems.’ You, too. Who is ever going to take us in hand? Psalm 14 it say, ‘Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand and seek God. They all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.’—Everybody a brat underneath. Maimie ain’t the only one spoilt rotten.”

  Three children (one of them Castalia’s) were playing with a wagon wheel on the dusty street. They went still, watching. Miss Maimie’d once been this neighborhood’s example. Some mothers told brats, “Get out that lazy bed and come to this window and notice our Sister Beech.” There she strided, stern uphill in virgin white, Bible clutched against her, bound daily toward making children of the grand do godly. She now knew from street kids’ faces—one-half year out of work and she’d become a witch. Beech touched her untended hair. This uniform seemed soiled. “You so ill-bred to stare,” she shook her Book at them. “You bad.”—She hurried indoors, leaned against the wall. It crackled with hundreds of children’s yellowing drawings.

  How could she ever tell her preacher and Sisters what it meant to eat alone, a meal without one living child nearby to stroke and cleanse and stuff? Food interested her none at all now—Maimie by herself hardly seemed worth cooking for. She was accustomed to dining at the Governor’s fancy table or else lolling in a sunny nursery alongside her darling—or even sitting at the staff lunch, Bible opened before her so she wouldn’t have to talk to simple under-gardeners and such. Sent to her home downhill, Beech first struggled to make one nice meal a day, she’d tried amusing herself. She uselessly ironed her uniform at night. All day, she wore the nurse’s cap around her kitchen. She told herself kiddie stories—the one about a king that turned everything he touched into refined genteel gold—a king that couldn’t keep his mitts off of his favorite little girl—that made her too be valuable, twenty-four carat and dead, dead.

  Bored of food (a rich person’s ailment caught uphill), Beech used tricks perfected on five decades of fussy eaters. This woman alone at a table in a house, lifted a spoonful of hominy grits. She held it before her own resisting mouth. The mouth called singsongy, “Knock knock? It me. Open up, Maimie’s Sweet Flower. Cause here come big fat old Marse Bumber Bee.”

  Then she heard herself. The woman, alone at a table in a house, lightly set her spoon aside. She mashed both palms flat against wood. She stared ahead.

  FIVE SISTERS, returned to Baby Africa, brought McCloud’s blue check direct to Maimie’s home. She didn’t look so good. Her face was ashy as she thanked them. “I hopes,” she said, her back turned toward these dearest friends, “you didn’t beg him for it or nothing. I right fixed, money-wise. It ain’t the money so much. I hopes Mr. McCloud give it free-will-like.”

  “He seem real glad to.” “He tell all kinds nice things on you.” “We figure he got off mighty cheap.” Maimie thanked them but cried again. They all prayed together, holding hands, hoping to regain their nice old working unit. Traveling ladies then dragged on home, exhausted. Wilmington’s “True Blue Unltd. Indigo Camps, Inc.” was as far from Falls as many of them would ever go. Only on account of loving Maimie had these Sisters made the sacrifice of distance.

  Towards their houses, women scattered to pray for Beech whilst bathing, steeping. (Water can be a form of prayer—a lightning-luring conductor even for the Spirit.) Tonight was Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. Again Preacher would mention Maimie’s health. For nearbout seven months, he’d kept her on the “Favored Shut-in’s Church-Pillar Prayer List.” Secretly, while praying under a flutter of Amens like pumping wingbeats, all of Afro Gethsemane sat, eyes closed, blaming blaming one white child.

  Sisters back from duty found their home porches alive with husbands unworthy or overworthy. Their sinks were piled with days of dirty dishes. The back yards were littered and too loud with children less refined than their chosen mascot Maimie. But after her bare box of a house, a person did feel joy in greeting loved ones’ noise, the pleasure of this much friction waiting to welcome a body room to room. Just another soul’s saying (without even being real deeply interested), “So, how was it?” That helped. You compared your life to Maimie’s choices—walls coated in baby scrawlings, total silence, one big calendar Xed grand with bigwigs’ birth dates. Maimie—and her kindergarten of white ghosts—ghosts that hadn’t even held the door or waited for her. Ghosts that’d betrayed her—not staying baby ones but growing up on her and coarsening, forgetting.

  • • •

  MAIMIE L. BEECH, alone now, paced. She appeared to seriously read one upside-down piece of blue paper—indigo blue for purposes of advertising and as a little joke. To her, the amount seemed huge. Embarrassment ran just that size. This, stashed with her own savings, meant she’d have enough to live comfortably forever. Why did that now seem a endless jail term? McCloud’s gift felt rigged, each dollar had a stinger hid inside it. Money meant to slowly numb her, hush her, keep her calm downhill and minding rowdy children her own color
. Once Maimie turned McCloud’s blue paper into hard yellow gold, she would sign away her last true claim. She tried and calm herself with scripture, “Psalm go: ‘If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgements, if they brook my statutes and keep not my commandments, then I will visit their transgressions with the rod and their iniquity with stripes.’” To the blue check, Beech explained, “I been famous. Fa-mous.” She kept pacing.

  The “secret weapon” they’d called her. This payoff meant goodbye to remembered French at table, so long the Book of Palms. Bye even to the scary half-fun of smelling smoke, dashing toward it, screaming, “Sugar, sug, what now?” Beech was being asked to cash in her Bianca like a stack of soap-smooth ivory chips.

  “No way,” said famous Maimie Beech. “No way in this world.” She walked back and forth, the check pulling nearer her long face and weak eyes. She pictured what gold this paper’d draw her at the bank. She imagined it: a head-sized pile of rattly yellow light, coins that someway rhymed with all the thousand gold/brown/yellow ringlets sprouting off pink babies for all those uphill years. Around her finger, she’d created them from fluff, from nothing much—the definite and separate curls, proud years of them. Baby ringlets seemed a type of coinage, too, maybe this earth’s tenderest denomination. Rich folks, out all day earning still more money, had onct felt proud to leave the costly Maimie Beech guarding their true treasures. Even as a slave girl decades back, Beech’d understood: The hellions, her chosen specialty, were oftentimes their parents’ best-loved. Everybody considered that being bad—wild, willful—meant both a sadness and a luxury. There was heat in badness. Beech knew. The homes might change, the children might look different, but out of baby blues and baby browns one thing scoffed at her. It made house calls and so did Maimie Beech. “How you hanging, Marse Satan?” she said with a silent nod. And He snarled back, “You again?” They were old enemies. She was His Laundress. He was her filthy livelihood.

  Beech had onct felt so in charge when big spenders called her in, tried bribing her to come and tame their lively worsts. She felt she’d pulled a fast one all these years—loving the brats had been her trick—it was that simple, that cheap. (McCloud believed a person got what a person paid for. Beech now saw—a person surely did. And she wanted it back, fifty-nine years of it. Might be a seller’s market but she’d regather all of it she could afford.)

  Everybody got issued a certain amount of love per household—even residents of Baby Africa found their rightful share. But hers? Oh, she’d been real clever, she’d rushed uphill and squandered it on sets of thankless twins, she’d spread it—gilding powder—over idle little clumps of strangers’ babies. Her share went to end their fevers, to hush their stammers, it’d urged their first steps. She’d burned her share in reading kids the finest things a hired head could make up. Years of it—sunk into scoldings and Bible lessons, the changing of those million diapers, all the rubber sheets.

  No gentleman caller ever returned to her home after visit number three—not even when local gossip hinted how much cash old Beech had squirreled away. To her, no gent ever buzzed, “Open up. It’s me.”

  Pacing, Maimie wondered: Was she one bit better than the women who accepted white men into their houses for a fee? Name the difference between loving these men and loving these men’s brats? At least the other act was over with lots quicker. Even if nobody quite meant it, that deed was at least called “love.” Wouldn’t it have been a faster, more honest livelihood than her years of patience—this gallery of scribbles, a few bronzed baby tokens, her tended calendar of honored births, and for what? Her birth date was now nine weeks gone. Who had honored her?

  She’d been whites’ “secret weapon.” Love had seemed her secret weapon against them. Now she saw, love had been their secret weapon—against her.

  Beech studied his blue check. It was, she understood, a polite white uninvitation. Marse McCloud was taking back that time he’d held her hand. A genius with children—kept far from children—why, she ain’t no genius no more. Mostly she has sunk to being a bleachish watered ghost. The bank is broke.

  Maimie shut her Bible on the check. She tucked both underneath a pile of white hand-me-down plates. But even from the far side of her room, a tongue of indigo showed. She dressed to go out, she chanted verses Bianca’d liked: “Enter into His gates with singing. King in his countinghouse counting out his honey. Know ye that the Lord He is God. Queen down in she parlor eating bread and money.” Maimie pulled the check out, weighted it with the salt and pepper. These shakers: metal-plated baby booties—fitted with clear-glass inserts. Beech fetched her own unopened bottle of perfume—just like one she’d given to a birthday girl. Instant of Joy had been Maimie’s mirror-image gift to herself. She slipped into her best white governess outfit, one kept back in case she ever got offered work again. She pinned on her crispest cap. Beech stowed the perfume in one pocket, clutched her Bible big as a Welcome mat—hiked off to Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. She was greeted with screams like the dead returned to life.

  I’VE ONLY heard this next part third-hand, fourth-hand. Still, especially if such events changed your coming life, especially if you’re named for the person, you try and understand what went on in her head that evening. We know the service ended around eleven. Sisters walked Beech home. They all kissed her good night. They kissed each other. Friends felt they’d saved Maimie’s life. They were grateful she’d allowed them the excellent, justly famous sensation of doing right. (Wrong-doing is exceptional, too, and maybe has more variety, but right-doing’s pleasure lasts longer. Or so somebody as old as me must tell herself, darling.)

  Maimie waited till loved ones meandered home. She already missed them. They’d always admitted envying her uphill reputation, amazed at how whites kowtowed. Friends forever acted kind to her but, in the end, they always left to join their real families. Beech knew: If she got sick, they’d tend her. If she died, they’d carry on proper and noisy at her funeral. But—even after years of kindness—Maimie knew what her Sisters knew: For a whole lifetime, it just won’t enough. The tally wouldn’t do.

  Maimie—richer now—figured maybe she should haul off, hire herself a nurse and stranger (maybe even a white one). This person would come and stay with Beech tonight. The lady professional would bring along her knitting or letter writing but she’d first tuck in Maimie’s covers, she’d say, “I’ll be right here if you need anything,” she’d say, “There there,” or whatever honey-tongued hired comfort said.

  The nurse wouldn’t have to mean it. Fact is, her words’d help Beech more for having nothing personal in them. For being bought at the going white rate, pricey.

  FIRST BEECH embarrassed herself by hiking uphill to the McCloud home. She guessed this was a humongous social mistake in the making. She couldn’t stop. Being “bad” was suddenly of major interest to her. “You again,” she muttered, and knew she was greeting Satan, Satan stationed on-duty in herself. If Beech set her mind to being bad—considering the years of observing little wicked geniuses—who might be better at it?

  A party was underway. Chinese lanterns lit the trees. Lanterns drooped from a harem of palms dragged onto the porch. Every pastel lantern glowed with one squiggled Chinese letter. Maimie had learned: No McCloud could translate these. Each character looked like Beech’s vision of Oriental-Bible-English writing. Each looked written by some ink-dipped wing in flight.

  Folks packed and jammered all over the McCloud lawn. You heard so many clinking glass ladles against glass punch bowls filling glass cups—sounded like the Caucasians were made, mouth and hands, of glass. Maimie mingled easy enough at first. Two young women asked her to please go get them some extra napkins. When she looked hard their way, one said, “Sorry. We thought …”

  Three pianos sounded from indoors. The visiting Collier twins played flute. Music leaked through open windows with the candlelight. A gatecrasher moon looked on through tree limbs. The mansion’s hundred points and edges showed black against a sunset. This sunset
was the color of cut-rate foreign rubies or the best local berry jams.

  All in white, the second gardener stood carving rare roast beef on a banquet table dragged outdoors. The smell of food made Beech feel giddy. Seemed she hadn’t eaten for the longest time. How many days made a week and what was her day off? The nearer she wandered to the churchlike home, the weaker did her legs feel. Finally—bumped and milling among glazed white strangers—Beech sat down on the lawn. She had to. She’d been staggering.

  Waiting here in dewy grass, Beech held more tight to her Bible. (People would see the Book and know her.) She touched her scalp, was the hat on straight? Facing the three-story uphill home, its stained glass burning from inside like with a fever, Beech spoke as to some choosy eater …”Open up. It’s me.”

  She only wanted rest. She felt like she deserved to rest right here. To someday be buried in this pretty grass—a gravestone white as a salt lick. Soon Bianca would know Beech was here, Bianca would dash out holding tailor-made clover anklets, a five-strand clover crown.

  Guests—though busy admiring, addressing, and fondly criticizing each other—did slowly notice the curious sight: a black woman wearing a white uniform—sitting in grass as if stationed here for some useful chore, to read “fortunes” from her big black book, or to bodily plug the yard’s worst geyser, or give guided tours of clover. Nested among the pretty open-toed shoes of white ladies, shiny summer shoes of gents, the seated woman was careful to keep her long neck stretched in a way half grand—her pleated face wide open with a look of full entitlement.

  Out-of-towners’ fancy shoes first edged away from her. Then one pair of white suede oxfords did come nosing nearer. “Might we be of service?” The shoes had a young white male voice helping them from high above. “You’re feeling a tad woozy, I take it. Well, welcome to a fairly largish club. My friends were just asking what our Presbyterian Angus uses to spike this stuff. Certainly sneaks up on one. Not that you don’t look perfectly at ease down there, but, listen, should you ever care to stand, I consider myself still steady enough—possible mistake of mine—to maybe assist a person. Say, are you a nurse? We were just wondering over there. Couldn’t help notice your tidy little hat. Young lady in my group, see the one? she was admiring it. Look at her giggling. Definite drawback. Don’t you hate it when they giggle?” “Tell Marse Angus my name. He know me. I used to help around this place. Set right at the table. Tell him Maimie L. Beech back on the job. See what he say do.”