Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (48 page)

Lady had banished the thing. “It fattens. Considerably. Here I had it shipped from France via Boston, I expected a soupçon’s loyalty. But what does it see fit to do? Add seven pounds. Per arm. I simply won’t have it.”—Passing the hut, you’d hear Lady’s nearly lifelike voice asking Lady’s mirror, “What?
What?”
in forty different mothy ways.—Darling, if you watched Little Xerxes long enough he could almost teach you how to love her.

DURING
private wee-hours sessions, long after Winch and his underlings were off drinking in far cabins, why did black folks keep going over Lady’s fussbudget extremes? Would they ever reclaim a smidgen of their lifetimes’ time spent humoring Judge More’s only child?

Xerxes could copy whatever he saw or imagined (which means: Anything). But the child never considered any slave—hisself least of all—half so much fun to do as Lady. His hit parade included:
Lady gives away jewels and oranges
. In Xerxes’ strange imitation, these gift items were always someway stitched to Lady’s silk wrapper. In saying, “Here—just for you,” she had to tear shreds off of her clothes. Soon she tried screening bad rips with one hand while passing on more treats. Dipping far into her capital, she was soon left jaybird naked.

Tonight—his last unfree one—Xerxes stayed mighty wound up. He fairly chugged. For once, our imp of talent overdid. Hey, nobody’s perfect. Laughing just encouraged the famous migraine trick.

Standing, Xerxes mashed the bridge of his nose. Others spoke a chorus, “Uh-oh, look like she getting one her blinders, sure. Poor canary bird. Reckon it a bad one?” Xerxes, eyes closed, nodded Yes, give off a single peep of pain.

Folks drew into a circle, like preparing to catch this Lady bound to fall. But when Xerxes’ staggering begun—nose and forehead bunched, free arm trailing in a comic goldfish-graceful way—wouldn’t nobody save him. Xerxes give each person a chance. Each sidestepped helping. He just reeled on to
the next, next. Finally, run out of help, he collapsed, but only by getting down real slow onto the stone floor, careful not to muss clothes or the imaginary eighteen-inch-high hairdo he kept touching, organized air.

Safely fallen, the big-eared Lady pitched a real conniption fit, coming around just long enough to fret with pearls and say, “What? I
is
shocked!” Finally it did die, but with many comic froggy kick-spasms. You had to of been there, probably. Everybody laughed. Slaves practically had to.

Honey, after such fun, couldn’t nobody sleep. Felt like the night before Christmas/Sunday mornings off/plus Marse Marsden’s deathday—all combined and spiced. Winded from celebrating in this windowless dormitory, lit by one candle, folks finally grew silent. They settled on corn-husk mattresses, turned away from each other, and commenced by degree to mumbling quiet prayers. Slaves’ beliefs smoothed African memories with handpicked Christian leftovers. Mud-and-blood tones bled through pastel Episcopalian hymns. Slaves had made up the necessary religion. Who else would do it for them?

FOLKS
chanted a favorite ditty only when alone together:

Recipe: take one part strong tribe lore—shades of red and black. Stir in dainty candy colors from the Big House’s paintings of the Jesus Man. Mix to taste.

The Lilacs’ Slaves’ Hero and Liberator would look a bit like that well-known stripped bachelor painted on a tree (one of the pictures Castalia, now fidgeting with her ostrich-feather duster, waited to see hauled from out the northwest parlor).

Slaves’ expected Saint would also favor the missing Master Willie—innocent but guilty—a boy who’d trooped off towards Virginia, battling so inherited slaves might stay here and his years longer. Seemed odd that
his
freckled face had someway got into the home-brewed picture of today’s Freeing Agent. But there it was. (Will’s first toddler steps had been aimed toward the bathhouse on mornings when dark women all scrubbed. At age three, he loitered around outside—stripped bare, escaped from his white nurse, trying and act real casual while—behind cupped hands—his boy’s part stood at honorary attention. Black men shook their heads, “Take after his poppa. Already know what
he
like.” Mrs. Marsden later tantrumed to prevent her son’s sleeping alongside young friends in the quarter on non-school nights. Oh, but he begged.—All this got remembered.)

Black folks at The Lilacs didn’t think of Northern forces as separate
soldiers. No, a single useful giant seemed likelier. In 18 and 60, the predicted Savior’s swart limbs had lengthened. His beard blackened. The farm’s workers had just seen their first engraving of Marse Lincoln.

They’d learned about Him from Mabry’s valet. But everybody’d misheard the name as “Abraham, Linking.” The Lilacs’ ex-African blacksmith repeated his own version. Had to do with busting chains, with being soldered in the elsewhere place where you belonged. Slaves all knew how a olden-days Abraham had been the sourdough starter culture for a great line. Seemed this new Abe would found another tougher tribe. He’d link the from-around-here freed folks with some Balm of Gilead strengthening to the North. Your chains’d return to being African bauble jewelry. The Lost Tribe, found, would be spared, heated, coupled, annealed—Today.

Child, it all stayed vague as that, and—for these folks—as powerful.

CLEANING
, using ostrich plumes abducted from Africa for decoration and duty, Castalia now awaits His striding in. He’ll come cleansing a lighted path. He’ll be bare, dusky, tall as any plains-dwelling African but bound in a semi-Tuscarora semi-Jesus loincloth. He’ll smile safe and sweet behind a boy’s untested face. He’ll arrive on long stilt Abe legs, high-stepping over lily ponds eaten free of goldfishes and swans. He’ll come to set this house in order—and how? with one accusing finger’s Lordly touch, to set the house afire.

Off towards waiting carts down there (“Castalia, I believe I am speaking to you. I
have
been. You daily grow more absentminded, more like me, my dear. I do feel a Weariness setting in, I need distracting. Might I hear about
your
coming out—from Africa,
mia cara
Scheherazade?”), down there and out into daylight marches a George III library ladder, six pitted convex mirrors from Revolution days, a stained-glass fire screen that only slaves seem to find beautiful. There goes a hand-blown punch-bowl gondola.

Off to the safety of the woods marches a family oil portrait—Little Xerxes’ barefoot strut beneath the white male ancestor. This puritan’s stiff white collar is padlocked in a halo of gold frame. The face seems none too pleased about them stubby black legs saving it. Xerxes, spying Cassie in this high window, peeks around the painting’s gilded edge. He makes his own features go fish-mouthed/sniffy as the picture. The child’s free arm crooks, bracketing his real face—one now shaped like the fake face he makes seem more real than his born own. Next, shrugging, moving off, in one instant he’s forgot it all.

“I hears you. I on my way. So you wants your Cassie’s Africa, hunh?—Zelia, sug, them flowers looks fine enough for now. You may to be adjourn.” And the fifteen-year-old winks at the eighty-year-old, who nods, purses her mouth, tiptoes out, apron corners lifted between fingertips, making a joke of her own exaggerated courtesy, maybe Zelia’s last.

WHITE
and black, with Lilac looking on, are now alone together.

Lady still plays something Spanishy, she slides over, bares a fresh section of warmed piano bench. The mistress is feeling feverish with the coming on of migraine, the coming in of Yankees, the coming out of her Servant Problem’s true start. These two young women, one white, one black, know so much about each other. It’s suddenly become a burden. Monthlies’ peculiarities, the men that both consider flirting with on weekly shopping trips, the allergies and prides and clashing moody woes of each. By now, one’s freedom from the other will mean dying or amnesia.

“Please,” smiles Lady. “This time. Right here, close by me.” Her left hand pats white brocade three times.

Cassie chooses to stand near the white instrument she keeps uselessly dusting. Her ostrich feathers cause thwunks among living wires. Cassie stares down at her owner’s profile.

Lady, grinning, leaves off playing, tilts her noggin leftward (Xerxes has taught Cas to notice: for flirting it’s always left—for direct orders steadily right). Many men have found this real attractive. For Castalia it’s just
“that
old trick.”

“What? You’re looking at … what? my hair, friend? Do you prefer it up like this? I am told that lifting it does give me some added ‘height,’ or at least the illusion of that—which I can certainly live with.—Don’t you find, or do you? Be candid.”

“But you done always wore it like this. Why you axting Castalia today?”

“Because, my dear, if you believed it to be wrong for a my-shaped face, I might … change it. I very well could, and just on your say-so. People consider me so fixed in my habits. But I’m capable of altering, even of improving. If you convinced me, I mean. Castalia? Simply show me how.”

Women look at each other for a long while. Seems Cassie might now speak, might offer to save this lady from coming flames. Seems that Lady, a educated human person after all, is about to, what, apologize, repent?

“No, ma’am—you done dressed your hair like this forever. Probably be too late. Folks wouldn’t rightly reco’nize you—you chop it off or let it run free down you back. Cassie figures you too far gone for changing nothing now.”

Then Castalia can’t halt herself. “Know what you needs?—Spending about a half a hour watching Xerxes do you.”

“‘Do’ me? I haven’t heard that since my poor husband died. Certainly Xerxes ‘does’ my shoes. But you probably mean ‘imitate.’ The scamp goes after everybody else, why shouldn’t he ape his mistress? I’m flattered, actually. He knows I dote upon him. So acute, our Xerxes—he even gets the
voices, does he not?—I suppose … in simulating me … he’s frightfully accurate?”

Cassie, grinning, nods. “‘Frightfully’ be bout right.”

“Well, then,” Lady strikes a chord for effect, “that
is
something to anticipate. He’s certainly shameless when he does, oh, you, for instance. You’ve seen that, of course. No? Oh dear me, yes. First he wedges his elbows out,
comme ça
, then he frowns and smiles at once, like
so.”

Castalia has heard the Scottish poet quoted all her life. But today she chooses to say, “Burns? Burns?”

White stares at Black. Smoke is a hammock pulled from one corner of this room to the other. Black/White—who will blink the first? Merciful, Castalia changes subjects. “I reckon you bout ready for you story, bout me?”

“Oh, do, yes. Notice how my hands shake? Ivory from middle C on up is quite slick with dew.”

A slave’s feather duster strikes piano’s rim. “‘Dew’! How come you always only ‘dews’ while Castalia here steadily sweats?”

“I’m sure I haven’t the faintest notion what you mean. But, please, my story … concerning you, of course. Tell.”

Cas is mindful how them others voted not to snitch. Still, she can’t help it, she commences her Slave’s Tale like so: “White folks’ Bible say, ‘In my father’s house is many mansions.’ But, Missy, for now, down here, this the only one you got. And, ma’am? It just about to burn. You ready?” Then comes a tale of pillage, strangers in a even stranger land.

Smoke from upriver curls indoors, sharper gusts. Strange dry metal smells still can’t dent the sweetness of eleven hundred blooming lilac trees. Castalia will stay busy till the end of her story and of this plantation—they’ll last about the selfsame time.

She calls her tale “The Tribe That Answers” and I will tell it to you later, God willing. Halfway through, Cas yells downstairs for scalding water, soap, a scrub brush. Dusting, she’s decided, just ain’t hard enough for your last minutes. On all fours, she serves the end of her life sentence. She refuses Lady’s offers: the whole piano bench, a garnet brooch, some candied almonds … On hands and knees, Cas feels she has—since age three—been locked into this crawl space minus headroom, a game of Catacombs that hides rooms’ beauty from the very person assigned for life to clean them.

Lady Marsden, not sure what else to do at the end, amid the epileptic clinking of seventy-odd clocks (they begin to make her nervous), replays
most all music she knows and somewhat up-tempo. Castalia scrubs around white silk slippers—blurring—frantic on brass pedals.

THE CHAMBER
door opens. Both women turn. Getting to her feet again after a good hour’s tale-telling, Cas appears winded. So does Lady, reduced to timider tinnier scales. And now, coming past a white onyx hearth and silver andirons, across Aubusson carpets faded almost white—Miss Zelia edges unannounced, on all fours.

She checks over one shoulder like somebody being followed. Seems shots might soon pour through all forty filtered windows of this third-floor bedchamber. Leaning on the table where her mammoth bouquet now fans, the old woman gets to standing. Zelia, sometimes called just Z—which is how her name sounds spoken hereabouts—the onetime wet nurse and nanny to Lady, parts flowers. Her small face, a brown and beaten punching bag, is half hid behind purple blooms. Face announces, “They nearbout here. Best to hide youself, you.”

Lady leaves off playing. Ain’t Castalia’s story just offered her a lesson in Marsden mistakes and the world’s unfairness? She knows full well who “they” are—so couldn’t Lady yield this once? But don’t you find, darling—the more cornered folks feel, the more rigid and rule-making they’ll grow? “You are speaking to me this way? You didn’t so much as knock. You’ve certainly had better training at announcing guests in using their full names, ranks, titles. I hate mentioning these little lapses of yours, but this is just not
like
you, Zelia mine.”

“Z don’t know no names
to
nounce. Only come in here out the kindness Zelia heart. What I trying and say:
They Here, Bitch!”