Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (58 page)

She later admitted: The only name that’d come to her when challenged: Marsden. Telling this to Castalia and the rest, Zelia cried while laughing—swearing, cackling, angered, striking her own upper legs. Others sat watching, surprised.

Z had been forever famous for her absentminded mistakes. Early on, she figured: Lady would love owning somebody even more forgetful than herself. But nobody could rightly remember Zelia’s ever
admitting
to a slip-up, much less crying over it. Now, some strange perfectionist was showing up in their slouchy toothless Z. This awed them others. They studied Zelia’s torment over speaking “Marsden” when cornered. They watched bony fists beat fleshless thighs. Cassie reached out, stopped her, “It ain’t just you, Z. Don’t
blame
youself so bad, gal. You didn’t cook all this up.”

Getting to Falls, Z had refused speaking to The Lilacs’ other black folks. Walking quick, she’d led them down the road, not onct glancing back—not helping to shepherd the children, tending only her own excellent mood and heavy ham. Onct arrived downtown, others had seen Z shuffling back and forth in front of high-priced shops, avoided by white and black passersby, talking vividly at herself, peering into the braggart windows of Lucas’ All-Round Store, seeking what? Something new to buy? But after two days, the old woman finally did sidle over, join them. Z threw down scrappy leavings of the home-cured ham. Children sure pounced. Seemed Zelia’d already eaten about sixteen pounds’ worth in forty-eight hours. Freedom’s mighty hungry-making.

Was then, flopping down, Zelia told them how it burned her up: offering Lady’s password name to them first guards. Others felt pleased to try and soothe her. She’d never permitted that before. Maybe she had acted different as a girl. Everybody’d heard tell how handsome Z’d onct been during Judge More’s youth (meaning her own). But it sure seemed doubtful—with no tintype nor oil picture to prove her beauty. (Some poor folks’ tragedies is having no more proof of early looks and health than what their present bodies show. Which, honey, speaking for my own photo album of ouches here, don’t seem near evidence enough.)

Miss Z explained: she’d already found work, cleaning a funeral home.
Others give each other side glances. How quick their oldest one had got her city bearings! Seemed Z was finally coming to, growing up—at eighty-one. When praised, she only shrugged, made a mouth. “In Z’s mind, Z been getting steadily ready right along. Sure done had sufficient
time
to. Anyhow, you can’t grow your wings while you up in air using them, can you? No, a body wants to sprout her set some seasons before. Get them like you wants them. Grow you some that’s stiff as buckram, smooth as ice, as looking glass. Then, airy time come on, you holler, ‘Don’t
push
me no more,’ and off and up you goes. By then you got forty ostrich-feather dusters corn-rowed under you either arm, helping to row you properly up.—Oh yeah, I had to molt a many a mountain of feathers before I got to use this last fine set. You looking at one old bird what has
flown,”
and she made elbows do like wings. Z rocked back laughing (ackle-ackle) as others stared hard at her—understanding, not understanding—but laughing along. Children jumped up, ran circles with their strong young arms out straight. “I right high up. How high up is you?” Venus asked Evidence.

OTHER
freed slaves kept wandering in from sundry county plantations. Hundreds of ragged folks unseen till now, hundreds that you’d someway felt were out there, being owned on other farms. The sense of them yonder had given ballast to your every lunge and hunger, each irk and chore matched yours. They shared your secret craving for this finally flying free.

Most now camped in a single riverside marsh. Odd how geography can say the same thing to so many promised-land strangers at onct:
“Here.”
Was a place somebody must own but didn’t nobody claim. Nobody but mosquitoes. The joke here run: One ex-slave was woken by hazy whisperings in her shack’s corner—she seen two bugs as big as German shepherds and smart enough to talk that over. The one bug buzzzzes, “Should we ought to eat her here or carry her back?” Other one goes, “Here. Cause you know what’ll happen if we tote her home? Them big ones’ll get her.”

The very day black folks arrived in Falls, they scattered, seeking jobs downtown and along fancy Summit Avenue. They used many a polished brass door knocker: ones shaped like pinecones, ladies’ hands with rings on, Greek goat gods’ smirky horny heads. Some of these showplace homes hired up to three laundresses to primp a family of four. One heavy-bodied Christian black woman with a good singing voice and steady disposition, age fifty-one, mother of eight—her duty: ironing four daily changes of puff-sleeve crinolines for a white child, three.

Little Xerxes auditioned as third-to-the-top shoe-clean boy at Stark’s Scissor Tonsorium. For starters, entering the place, he tugged out his hankie ascot so it’d serve as a funny little sudden barber bib. Right hungry, eager to be hired, he told a joke (about mosquitoes), then he done some sailor hornpipe steps (God know where he learnt
that
on The Lilacs—maybe from his folks who’d seen the boatmen what had brung his kin from Africa?).
His jig occurred among tile floor’s dark and white and blondy curls. His jig swept white-man fleece into a tidy pile—artful, useful.

Little Xerxes then offered imitations of the two barbers presently clipping. Since one of these fellows was fat and loud, the other all boned and prissy, Xerxes’ deeper skills won’t really called into play (nor will Lucy’s, sugar). The child ventured copying each barber in ways that brung cheap if ready laughs. And Xerxes done it all without offending them too mortally. (A art in itself, getting folks to recognize theirselves without your forcing them to go jump off some bridge.)

Xerxes wisely refrained from “doing” Old Man Stark. The boss, appreciating such tact, went, “I reckon this little blackamoor just copied
you-all
to a tee, hunh, Shep and Edgar? Be a fine one to have around if we can keep it from aping the customers. Little joke there. You’re hired. Stay this cute and you’ll earn your way, Shinola.” If Little Xerxes ever planned to quit being funny, he figured he couldn’t exactly afford to try that just yet, child, not quite yet.

Cassie, already fighting to save up her New York City fare, soon done extra ironing (piecework) for the Mayor’s second cousin. By nights she helped scrub and sweep the understocked aisles of Lucas’ Ail-Round Store. Castalia found a dwelling place for The Lilacs’ skeleton crew. It was well made, pine. It’d housed First Baptist’s new grand piano when that got shipped from Philadelphia before the war. Cas and Zelia and three other women and all their children carried, dragged, and rolled the crate end over end (with rest breaks) from back of Lucas’ clear to the river encampment one mile downhill. They decorated it with the late Cousin Mabry’s late peacock’s tail feathers. Emerald-green Spode demitasses and a Wedgwood gravy boat hung from nails (bent just so) hammered with Z’s shoe sole.

Was here, at the base of a hummock topped by famous Summit Avenue and its thousand elm saplings, ex-slaves gathered. Here they’d someday build their real-life houses. (Once such homes looked done, the owner of this tract—quiet for so long—would arrive to collect back rents.) And right here, ex-Marsden slaves would one day use the same piano crate to coop fat chickens while I, a child of eleven, rocking a porch rocker, asked some hard strict questions.

This riverside community got known, even in its camptown squatter days, as Baby Africa. Whites in passing wagons studied the heavy mist from evening rags burnt to keep your biggest mosquitoes away. Whites studied the settlement’s thatch and boxes—huts set into three wide circles amongst high grass. They saw black women washing white folks’ clothes on river rocks, they saw naked babies running unsupervised, spearfishing all day for dinner. Whites claimed it looked like their idea of something pretty doggone tribal, some kind of Africa, but a baby one. And freed slaves, set loose to reinvent who-all they’d be (at least whilst alone together), refound certain habits long considered clean forgot. One ancient blue-black man grabbed
some reeds at random, said, “I’m gone weave us a fish trap,” and he did and it worked perfect—letting fish in, but leaving no room for their turning around, slipping out. The old one then sat gaping, shocked at his yet having in him: the whole first person he’d been from the whole first nation he had known. History’s a raffle. History’s a Fire Sale.

Nights, folks gathered near huge burning logs—listening to seasoned ancient ones tell all. Each farm boasted its own genius talker. Some really were. (Ex-slaves from one plantation would promote their own tale-teller as Baby Africa’s very best.) The Lilacs’ freed folks chose Castalia.

Ex-slaves’ stories remembered the Other World. They were right quick to forget a bondage just ended. Stories swarmed with upright animals—clever ones enjoying human traits, beasts forever getting out of terrible binds, like having not no food now, no steady place to live. Even the plaguing mosquitoes got turned real quick into jokes. To stand them: You give the bloodsuckers extra comic credit. You let them fly
and
talk—so when a non-speaker bites you, you can say, “Oh, only this.”

Strange that a white man should get famous for first writing down these freed-slave animal tales. But no, not strange at all. Look at young Mr. Elvis, God rest his soul. At age nineteen, and after being born into the cracker race, that child got full credit for personally inventing a hundred and fifty years of black folks’ blues. Smart boy.

THE WINDOW
of Cuthrell’s Jewelry/Pawnshop (the very store where Lady’s bought spare cogs and her green visor for clock repair, the store where Cap would later find his platinum Swiss replacement watch) it was now a pyramid of treasures bought mighty cheap. Here rested a gold scallop-shaped cigarette box half heavy as a cannonball. Venus, Xerxes, and the others would stop here with new little friends, would point through dusty glass whilst saying, low, “That ours.”

Seeking extra odd jobs, you soon learnt: In-town bosses had to know who’d owned you till last week. Your old owner’s name served as a letter of reference. Didn’t matter if your particular bigwig, like Lady out yonder doing God-knows-what, was beyond writing a note concerning your work ways. The black folks who’d hiked from farms too far off, they couldn’t find no work till others coached them—offering names from plantations closer in.

Felt shaming for Castalia and Z to get their first paid jobs by mentioning the formerly flashy Lady E. M. Marsden. In town, the woman was disliked and admired because of how few city dwellers ever got invited to her lilac boating parties. Odd, the more snobby your old owner’d been considered, the quicker did in-town whites hire you. Of course, Falls’ whites also craved
good gossip, juicy news about what-all off-color had gone on in a Greek Revival castle of that size.

Lady’s name always brung a nod. “Well, well … Judge More’s little girl? Spitfire, good skin. Gave each slave a crate of oranges, so we hear. Handed a hen’s-egg diamond to one of her girls. Still, a demanding person to work for, I bet. I remember one time she pitched a temper tantrum right in church. Her poppa must’ve finally whispered about it’s being God’s house, she yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘I don’t care
whose
shack it is. I’m p-ssed.’ Look, you ain’t expecting fruit and jewels on
this
job, are you? And, miss, do you just iron shirts, or do you just
love
ironing shirts? Your old boss make it through the sadness out there?”

“Well, sir, far we know, she ain’t dead.”

NIGHTS
, Zelia straightened reception rooms at Falls’ second-best white funeral home. Place smelled of tuberoses, floor wax, and mice. Maybe only a premises-owning mortician can love a darkened funeral parlor at 3 a.m. Zelia’s African aunts had filled her head with lore about ancestor ghosts, the nasty dispositions of the dead. “They jealous.” Z forever brung along Evidence Anne and Baby Venus to keep her noisy company. These children wouldn’t stay out of them display-room coffins. (Girls called the boxes boats. Girls had ofttimes heard Cassie’s tale of the big one what’d delivered their relations to this, the Un-world.) Z finally gave up trying to scare kids clear of coffins. She just made them take off their shoes before climbing into white-satin-lined barges. Girls had the natural good taste to prefer the highest-priced ones down at the end—lots more tassels, your extra quilting, and Belgian lacy foot pillows. Comforted by sounds of kids’ playing, Z closed the door, scuffed off to dust and polish the heavy thankless receiving-room furniture.

Miss Zelia had refused to clean them tile-lined back chambers where the unhappy “work” got done. “Ain’t enough money in all Falls,” she crossed her arms. Hearing this, the white owner’s spoilt son chose to play a trick on her. One night, he set up this freshly dead fat man on a parlor love seat, nude. About to clean in there, seeing the shape propped yonder, Zelia waited. From the hall, she finally screamed for him to wake right up, get some clothes on, go home. Or else. She finally used her broom with the longest handle. “You drunk? sick? what?” she prodded the sleeper. When he flopped forward onto the marble floor face-first with such a rancid smack, Zelia screamed, “Z knew it, Z been tricked again.” She grabbed all personal cleaning gear and, cussing, ran clear to the river, pulling along two little girls who squealed, “What happened? Tell, Auntie Z.” Next morning, the prank player was there rapping knuckles on a certain piano crate’s top. His daddy’d forced him to come apologize to a cleaner as good as Miss Zelia. Boy’s daddy had threatened to make him call on the distinguished dead man’s wife, personally explaining how a body, considered extremely deceased since last Wednesday, had hauled off and broke its nose. Z crossed her arms, “Never.
Only if you was to ask me back extra
nice.”
“Okay,” the boy bent nearer, whispering. “Just don’t tell, ma’am.”

By day, The Lilacs’ children helped do wash. (Shirts 20, skirts 40, dresses with two or more darts and/or lace sleeves and collars 7¢. Not no exceptions, neither.) Girls strung clotheslines near the riverbank. They stood guard whilst white gentlemen’s ghosty business shirts took forever to wave dry. For now, ex-Marsden workers lived in the piano crate. They pulled a tarp over its leakiest end, they found painters’ drop cloths to serve as blankets and felt grateful that Freedom had seen fit to find them in mild April. Looking toward coming cold months, they were happy at least for each other’s warmth.