Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (25 page)

Clerks usually granted Castalia the prices that she named. Manliness meant a little wrangle—especially if white customers were present. But, by now, this late in her life (and fifty-odd seemed ancient to me at fifteen) Castalia pretty much got what she wanted. At least on the price of turnips. As I followed, respectful, store to store, it seemed turnips stood for other things she might get cheap from the world, eventually.

She paid me no mind at all, she looked right through me. Which was fine with me. What I couldn’t get together: her power on one hand and, on the other, her being just a maid.

She stormed into the sawdust of Harbison’s Day-Old Doughnuts and tried to bargain on account of her buying a gross of those. A gross of three-day-old cherry-jelly doughnuts! I should say so. “Gross” is one of Zondro’s favorite words. I told you about Zondro, with the Mohawk? She admits that none of her pals who hang around the Mall or at Falls Country Day High even use “gross” anymore. But she says
she
still relies on it and cannot quit, just feels loyal to it.

I wondered: Was Castalia trying and save pennies for Captain or for her sake? If such cash was hers, what would it buy? A getaway to Liberia? Or New York City? Some new house built higher on this hill? Retirement? Her send-off funeral? Her surly sons’ weekend pleasures? What?

This investigation I’d undertook owing to boredom soon claimed me like a fever. Falls Lower Normal had never considered me its prize pupil, but—restless, left with so many hours on my hands—I soon begun to find the England in my novels anemic compared to Castalia Marsden’s un-manners and her Afro color schemes. I soon followed this woman at distances both reckless and safe. I’d turned into Madame Curie and Jane Addams of Hull-House, mixed, all while staying as determined (and flat-chested) as either Hardy Boy. (Now, looking back, I see I won’t just being gumshoe to her history. What I was really looking into was, child, my own coming slavey wifely shopping cooking washing-up kid-bearing future. Now I see that. But who, even among great detectives stuck like ambered flies inside their own lives, can ever really know that at the time?)

ONE
night, Cap said without prompting, “So, how are you and Castalia getting on? Like a veritable house afire, I’d wager. I predicted great things, you’ll recall. But I’m deducing by your present facial expression, all the counties have not yet been heard from. Nobody ever called Castalia ‘sweetness
and light.’ But I suppose she’s training you at certain chores around the house … little kitchen skills, what have you?”

I give him a hard look. “I reckon she’s trying to teach me
something
. Ain’t clear just what. Maybe that it’s her turf here, and you are too some days.—No, it’s okay, basically. She cooks perfect. Even Momma claims to’ve never seen a house this size so clean and with a staff of one and you know how Momma is about black folks. Castalia and myself we’re here together all day long. Still, I don’t figure we’re quite ready to be stranded together on no life raft.”

“She’d assuredly sink it,” he chuckled. I give him one stern-wifey clamp-mouthed look. (How quick I’d learned that, honey, a natural.) But, secretly, I admit it pleased me: hearing my old man speak somewhat ill of this woman he’d known for life. I hated feeling relieved by his joke at her expense. It won’t worthy of her, it won’t worthy of me. But I dreaded hearing him praise her at my expense. She could cook, I couldn’t. She knew the world, I was new even to
not
knowing it. And yet, scared as I felt around her, hard as I found facing Big Person (mornings especially), a new kind of pride kept me from whining to Cap about certain of her cruelties. He had owned her. I—on the slant—had just rehired her. Someway, my own code (one I was forever making up right in the minute) kept a black person’s present-day employer from complaining to her onetime owner. I had scruples from the start, my darling listener. Only a few reasons I’m worth listening to: scruples (and the woes they bring), plus what Jerome calls my “strong visual memory,” and one very dirty mind.

Now, with my pillow beside Cap’s, I fought so hard to seem casual: I sounded almost exhausted.

“There’s something
about
her, ain’t there?” said I, and waited, hoping I looked semi-cute. He didn’t help a bit. “You know?” I touched his quilt. He turned half away from me, one fist curled under his head and beard. But finally he nodded, almost shy. He told the ivy wallpaper, “Always has been … That’s the thing. It’s still hidden under all that weight someplace. It’s a secret the wench has always kept. Unfair. Used to drive my mother absolutely mad. I once heard Momma tell Castalia, both of them laughing over it too, Momma said, ‘No, darling, you’ve got things
confused
, I believe. You see, I am the aristocrat and you are actually here to
help
me.’ And Cassie said, ‘You the boss and I the slave? That it?’ They giggled, actually.

“In some way no Yankee could ever catch, we all understood each other perfectly then—but that, I suppose, constituted the mystery of everything that Sherman burned. The invaders ended it. I can’t believe how much has changed in my short life.”

“Short?!” I joked, fifteen.

“Oh yes, that.” I made a mental note: no further age jokes, Luce.

So I turned our topic elsewhere, asking after his business, some shipment of quarter horses he’d been waiting for (all to get his confidence, don’t you see?). Then, sly, I put in, “Now where exactly’d you say Castalia lived
downhill?” I was in search of what I had to know. I had become the very sneak she’d called me, and all in service of her interesting me.

Cap right off described her house, then, dozing, did half a double take. “Why?”

“Case of emergency or something. Curious, mostly. I wish I knew a little more … I don’t feel like I’m really … benefiting from being around her. You know me, sir. I got to have all the facts on everybody.”

He shifted my way then. “You’ve probably gathered quite a little file on your old man already, I daresay. God knows what you tell your intimates about me.”

“What inmates?” I bent over, kissed his forehead, smirked. I did this to relax him mainly. I did it not out of any true love—but the odd thing, soon as I did so, I felt that. That other. I loved him because I’d learned how to loosen him up some. I could. I guessed that he would tell a few stray facts about a person whose mystery presently held me in some way my husband as yet did not.

“Well,” he started, slow, ripe voice dark as dark Karo syrup, never more beautiful to me than it sounded just then. Under our shared covers, I took his closest hand, my intimate, my inmate. “One thing, she’s ever done precisely what she wanted. Cas caught absolute and total hell for it often enough, I can tell you. Which never seemed to stop her. That was part of her power, or a sign of it perhaps. Her family believed itself to have been the leading lights back in some African hellhole. Cas’s sense of herself must have come in part from that. We called her mother Queen Esther because the woman behaved like one. Doing scullery work with her nose higher in the air than Mother’s was—which was a stretch, my dear. Unlike Cassie, she was gorgeous, the mother. I mean, Castalia had something and got much masculine attention and enjoyed what my mother called ‘presence.’ But Queen Esther—you could dress her in a gunnysack and take her downtown and make her walk beside my own Lady Mother done up in her full satin and her white ostrich feathers. Every man, woman, and child would’ve stared at Queen Esther. Needless to say, she was not Mother’s favorite shopping companion. Esther never left the farm till she escaped. Our overseer blamed Cassie, Winch was forever gunning for Castalia. Queen Esther was caught. Then Castalia ran away, got clear to Pennsylvania. You had to hand it to her. Mother was so proud of how many state lines Cassie had crossed. Mother got out my father’s atlas and marked Castalia’s route in secret, proud. She forgave Cassie, reinstated her as body servant, though I’m not sure how
Castalia
felt about that particular honor. Cassie refused to be forgiven. She said Mother could either set her free or pay for it in Cassie moods. Mother needed her. Northerners would call it twisted and it was, I suppose. Love is always a kind of bondage anyway, is it not? Maybe that’s facile. Still, it was she who saved my mother. When the end came, I mean, at The Lilacs. But you know all this probably, know from that school paper you tried doing.”

“Castalia wouldn’t talk to me then. Others told me she never spoke about Back Then. Won’t hardly mention it now. And you, sir, for my History Theme, you wouldn’t cooperate much either, remember?”

“I didn’t know you then. I was less of a teller. When Castalia was out there on the farm, we were all something like in love with her. I certainly was. It must surprise you, hearing so—you, having only seen the woman in her present shape. I hope you won’t feel jealous. I only tell you this because, child, you must see by now just how central you are to me. You have my heart forever and that’s fixed. All this other is just ancient history. Put on the pounds over time, Cas has, and me too, Lord knows. As a boy who weighed a hundred and ten maximum when Lee signed—I should understand how size sneaks onto a person. The days are pounds. Still, with her it yet shocks me sometimes. I walk into our kitchen, yours and mine, I look at her—especially from the back—I marvel she can be the same person. I know I’ve changed and … thickened, Lucille, inside and out. But she was so quick and springy and such a fox. Resourceful, I mean. To look back on yourselves as kids, you cannot quite believe you’re the same ones. Difficult to properly express. To someone your age. But I almost grieve less for myself than I do for the person she was and what she’s settled into. You’ll say I had a hand in that, no doubt. And maybe that’s true. I do believe in free will. She chooses to work for me. You know I pay her very well, by the by? Yes, I must do so secretly or we’d throw off the entire pay scale on Summit. My friends would never let me live it down. I had the little cottage built for her not long after I got back from the war. They were living, our black people from The Lilacs, in absolute squalor down by the river. You should’ve seen the village they built out of scrap lumber and shipping crates, what have you.… Oh, I’m not so bad to her as you sometimes seem to think.”

“What’d I
say?”

“You need not speak one word with those little ice-pick eyes of yours. Someday I’m afraid that the two of you, you and Castalia … someday I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you were to … almost as a revenge on me … might try …”

“What? Gang up on you?”

“Something. Something worse. She’s capable, don’t underestimate her perversity. She’s extremely negative. I should know.—We’ll continue this line of thought later. You asked about her
then
, remember? Mother couldn’t bear to be alone. When Cas ran off, Mother hired two white men to go find her—less as punishment, more to try enticing her back. Everybody out on River Road considered that my parents were far too kind to slaves, especially their house ones. Mother and Cassie squabbled constantly. But like family, it’s hard to make clear to anybody these days. The two were with each other all day long, at each other’s throats. Mother was a trial to us all with her headaches and her airs. Castalia was tough as nails through most of it, grumpy, though in a lighter way than the fat old thing is now. Not Old,’
she’s just my age. But she and Mother had an understanding of some sort. We loved each other then. You can’t tell that now to people who weren’t out there. ‘Slavery,’ ‘ownership,’ the moderns can’t get past terms that do, admittedly, look at best so-so on paper. That far into countryside,
We
were what we had. Given that, you find a way to mostly get along. To be amused by each other. And if one of you is the least remarkable, it’s noticed, she’s soon idolized almost. She became a cult with us, your present housemaid.

“But to answer you, yes, I did love her then. Winch tried to, shall we say, ‘fix me up with her’ before I went off to war. Is this shocking? I don’t know anymore. But you asked. Winch planned ordering Castalia to come upstairs to my bedroom, at night … Does this upset you? Maybe this is tactically mistaken, laying all this out.
She’d
tell you, if she ever comes to respect you enough. Not that she won’t, mind you. Takes time: You have the goods but it takes absolute ages with her. No, Winch had worked for my poppa long enough to feel that he, the overseer, could not lay his hands on the younger black girls till my Owner Father had been given first dibs. Father availed himself fairly frequently. It might sound dreadful from here, to you. But we lived there on those two thousand acres side by side. You get to know people, often better than you’d planned.

“She
was
sent to me. I was just a boy. It was two days before Ned and myself left Falls together. There’d been a birthday party for Mother. Winch told me, when the party ended, to expect Castalia would arrive upstairs in my bed. ‘What for?’ I asked in dead earnest, Lucille. He laughed his wild Irish laugh. He’d started as an indentured servant over from County Cork but it hadn’t given him much sympathy for our black folks. He had his pick of the girls. I got very scared. I wanted her to
want
to come and see me, not simply follow orders. She was as old as me but, unlike our other girls, physically she’d always kept to herself. On the farm, she fought off all interested gents, black and white, my father included. And my poppa owned her. But when you own a person, it’s not the best circumstance for being convinced of their free will in
picking
you, if you get my drift. Not like you choosing me of your own volition, you see. I said good night to our last guests. Mother had retired hours earlier though it was her party—one of her tricks, disappearing. She always got a migraine on her birthday. A tradition. I was so nervous I could hardly walk to my own room. I used the banister like some old man. I knew I’d soon be hiking clear to Virginia. I wanted something to remember, something extra. She and I had been pals all over the place. We played rafts down on the river. Mother saw that Cassie was released from work whenever we played—but it was typical of Cas that she never assumed in advance that we’d be playing on a given day. She was always in the kitchen, doing some chore. She never came to me. I always had to go to her. She was twelve and in lots of ways the most powerful person on the whole two thousand acres. How does one explain powerful people? You don’t know how they get this way, you just know they’re powerful because … they have the power! She did. Wonderful-looking then.
Tall and springy and with her arms always crossed and her head back, judging, sort of judging.—Are you sure you want to hear this, child? You won’t mind? It happened so far back. I have nothing to hide from you. I want you in on everything. You’re sure?”