Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All

Winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize
from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

It’s a joy to thank my friends and most constant readers, people who greeted this work one chapter at a time: Eric Ashworth, Daisy Thorp, Jane Holding, Edmund Apffel, Andrea Simon, William Gurganus, Amanda Urban, Daniel Kaiser, William Carl Walker, Brian Zeger, Steven Cole, and especially Joanne Meschery. The work was midwifed by Elisabeth Sifton, its brilliant godmother.

Time is freedom. Freeing me during spans of this novel’s writing were the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. My colleagues at Sarah Lawrence College lovingly covered for me during a long absence. Many thanks, friends.

The Corporation of Yaddo gave me refuge years ago when I had only a Hermes portable, a clean face, and fairly good work habits. I began this book at Yaddo and am grateful for the place’s kindness, its perfect sanctuary.

Books most often consulted: King James Bible,
A New and Complete Concordance of the Holy Scripture
by John Eadie (Glasgow, 1850),
All God’s Dangers, Pissing in the Snow, The Children of Pride
. Shelby Foote’s brilliant narrative history of the Civil War.
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Patriotic Gore, The Country Scrapbook, Children of Bladensfield, Aunt Arie, A Civil War Treasury
, The Federal Writers’ Project Collected Slave Narratives,
Slave Life in Georgia
, newspapers and diaries of the period. Family letters. And, perhaps most useful for evoking the past,
The Montgomery Ward Catalogue of 1888
and
Images of War
, a complete photographic history of the struggle.

A word to the reader about historical accuracy
. In testimony collected from former slaves during the 1930s’ Federal Writers’ Project, many recalled seeing Lincoln in the South during the Civil War. Fanny Burdock, ninety-one, of Valdosta, Georgia, remembered, “We been picking in the field when my brother he point to the road and then we seen Marse Abe coming all dusty and on foot. We run right to the fence and had the oak bucket and the dipper. When he draw up to us, he so tall, black eyes so sad. Didn’t say not one word, just looked hard at all us, every one us crying. We give him nice cool water from the dipper. Then he nodded and set off and we just stood there till he get to being dust then nothing. After, didn’t our owner or nobody credit it, but me and all my kin, we knowed. I still got the dipper to prove it.”

In reality, Lincoln’s foot tour of Georgia could not have happened. In this book, it can. Such scenes were told by hundreds of slaves. Such visitations remain, for me, truer than fact.

History is my starting point.

D
IED ON ME
finally. He had to.

Died doing his bad bugle imitation, calling for the maps, died bellowing orders at everybody, horses included, “Not over there, dunderdick, rations go here.” Stayed bossy to the last. He would look down in bed, he’d command the sheets to roll back. They didn’t.

—My poor husband, Captain Marsden, he perished one Election Day. Children were setting off firecrackers on our vacant lot. Cap believed it was Antietam flaring up on him again like a game knee. So he went happy, yelling March! to his men (all dead) and to me (not dead yet, thank you very much). It’s about what I expected I reckon.

He’d been famous for years around here. The longer he lived the more he got on the local news, then the national noticed, black and white and in color. They brought cameras South and all these lights walked right into our home and his bedroom. Folks put TV makeup on him. He thought it was poison-ivy medicine. He hit the girl doing it.

I had to prime the Captain, make him tell his usuals. By then it was like getting your parrot going for company, you would say a key word and he’d chew it over, then you’d see it snag way in, and out whole favorites would crank—battle by battle—like rolls on some old player piano.

Strangers kept filing through our house, kept not wiping their feet, come to see the final vet of the War Betwixt States propped up. All them boys in blue were cold in Yankee earth. Captain had tricked the winning side by holding on the last, too proud to quit, maybe too cranky. Oh he was a sight—gray uniform bunched over his pajamas, beard wild as a hedge and white to match his cataracts grown big as ice cubes. Above the bed he’d hung a tintype of his missing buddy, he kept a rusty musket within easy reach. From a nail, one child-sized bugle dangled on its blood-red cord. Plus he had a dried twig off this tree where something bad happened.

A neighbor child brought Captain a fistful of dogtooth violets. I thanked her, set them in a bedside water glass. All day my old man kept squinting violets’ way, smiling, swallowing—acting strange. Finally he waves me over, makes a scared face, nods towards blue flowers, whispers, “Lucy, baby spies!”

•   •   •

ESPECIALLY
after that big Civil War moving picture come out in ’39, folks couldn’t get enough. I had strangers pumping me for aspirins and change of a dollar, and I offered everything. No spring chicken myself. A bookseller brought in every history of the war for Cap to sign, like he’d written it: The War. And you never knew which name my man would autograph next. One minute he was General P. G. T. Beauregard, next minute he’d be Captain Butler. And the bookdealer sold every last signature as real.—Honey, I had Yankees asking me for coffee, tea, and where was the bathroom. Got so I tacked up paper arrows in our hallway. Wrote out “Oldest surviving,” etc., like pointing tourists to Mount Rushmore. Wrote “Toilets—men’s and women’s—please use same one—so you’d best lock the door, and gents, please do keep seat
up
when not needed, thank you. Only fair. Signed, Mrs. Marsden—wife of oldest surviving,” etc.

One day I hear muttering on our third floor. I find a Northern newsgirl setting right on the bed alongside our blind son. “Wrong room.” I hold open the bedroom door, “Our boy’s a bit shy of strangers.” She could probably tell. He had his head poked clear under the blankets. Says she in a voice like Brasso, “But we investigative types like to cover all the bases, madam.” Her skirt was shorter than most decent panties used to be. I just bet you do, thought I, but, leading her back downstairs, I didn’t like to say nothing at the time.

Captain Marsden was thirteen when the Confederacy called. You think he knew enough to stay home safe in civvies? No way. The only male mammals still at large in Falls, North Carolina, were either livestock or babies or our geezers left over from the 18 and 12 one, men still mighty big on John Paul Jones. My husband and his pal felt right overlooked. “We’re ready,” says the boys. Thirteen, and didn’t even have to lie about their age. They had trigger fingers and some eyesight, didn’t they? Was enough.

So Marsden trooped off with his best friend, a boy way prettier. The pal was Willie’s age but older-seeming. Name of Ned Smythe. You could look him up. Both of them hailed from here, from Falls. Pressed into service in ’62 when General Lee was already running out of living bodies to put the gray on and get shot at.—Those boys left town holding hands like girls that age would.

Their mothers had chose going-away gifts. My man’s momma knitted him a Union Suit you couldn’t call that in the South then, but it was. She brung along five wagonsful of slaves for saying goodbye to young Master Marsden. Knitting long Johns she’d used patriotic colors, but instead of gray and red the woman picked red, white, and blue. Poor Lady Marsden didn’t even understand secession and here she’d sent off her favorite to fight for it.

Ned’s mother carried her best canary to the parade ground. She owned thirty-some, bred them. Wanted Ned to take a caged bird along for company. The head officer, polite as you please, wondered if battle conditions would be (folks later claimed he asked) “canary suitable.” They were gentlemen
then. Most of our Southern gentlemen got killed. For a while it stayed the polite thing to do and they couldn’t not be polite. Being a gent in them times was like being a Catholic priest—more about what you couldn’t do than what you could.

Mrs. Marsden asked the officer if these boys would have to fight in rainy weather. You know what he told her? “It depends.” Now won’t that tact? Honey, them days are gone.

Little Marsden dropped his home-knit long Johns by the side the road not ten miles from home. Somebody brought them back. Was like that then. A stranger miles off would know who’d knit what for who and in which colors by mistake. Mrs. Marsden took it as a sign her boy’d been hurt and stripped already. She’d grown up overly rich. Still owned cooperative slaves. Lady Marsden had been encouraged to act batty-brained. She played piano like a pro, lived in a church-sized cupola-bedroom lined with white silk damask. Poor woman thought the North was nothing but icebergs. She pressed the brung-back long johns up against her throat, she told her favorite body servant, “My child’ll freeze.”