Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (21 page)

Settling quieter at the table, I went, “Maybe sunny side up?
That’s
surely a fitting way to start so bright a June morning, ain’t it?” I sounded exactly like Momma on her rare disgusting “good days,” but I didn’t mind this once. False cheer is still about the best I can muster for company prior to 7 a.m.

Butter, frying on the far side of this person, sounded like a snarl crackling in her very eyes and sinuses. “Sunny side? Do that be a remark from our Stick Bride or how she like her eggs, which? Fast.”

“Whatever’s easiest for you, ma’am.”

Not turning, Cas told me she could make most anything I pleased. She’d whip me up a ten-ingredient omelette—fresh dill torn from out back—didn’t bother
her
one little bit. “Look,” she explained to the stove’s redbird gallery. “Look”—she stuffed a good-sized log into the firebox with no more strain than if handling kindling. “Look, you,
one
us might’s well be getting what she want. Seem like it ain’t ever gone be me. Your trouble is you ain’t learnt to
boss
folks yet. You best start. That you territory. Bossing stay one thing Castalia can’t train you in. Had no practice. Either white folks got it in that depart-ment or they don’t. You? don’t.”

Grinding pepper in a mill, she sneezed with whiplash suddenness five times. Needing a hanky, she scuffed to her corner closet. Seemed the place she hung her coat and kept secret stuff. All this I guessed from how she worried I might look inside. She used her wide back as a natural barricade. I didn’t even try peeking whilst she stood there honking into several cleaning rags. I kept very still.

Sitting in a clean and sunny kitchen of a strange man’s home—about to be fed by a woman even stranger—I felt one white-hot pinprick wiggle through the lining of my stomach’s lower left.—This, I figured, is how a young person’s crop of ulcers begins. Hi, history.

NIGGERTOWN
. What was I to make of Niggertown? By now, the night of our luxurious honeymoon return, Falls’ streetlamps were all lit. (They’d been lit by our hard-drinking lamplighter—whose name and sad tale as a sixty-year-old
momma’s boy it pleased but weighed on me to know.) Our hill town’s smoky bottom sat ringed by squat unpainted boxes. Oh yeah, I told myself as we pulled nearer, I’d clean forgot it in my ten days elsewhere: Niggertown.

Shacks seemed dropped here by some landslide. Maybe mansions on high had leaned off Summit’s ritzy cliff and relieved theirselves. Such lathing mounds as rolled downhill and landed at bottom: these were where the colored people got to live.

Odd, you had to pass through this poorest zone to get uphill towards Courthouse Square and our fashionable shopping district. At night, a visitor didn’t need to notice Baby Africa owing to its well-planned lack of streetlamps (City Council’s cleverness).

To hide the eyesore during daylight, a windbreak of high trees got planted annually. Our Ladies’ Garden Club hoped to screen the colored district from Falls’ visitors but come February, when things grew coldest around here, the latest expensive trees always got chopped down for Baby Africa’s kindling. (Along with coal in bathtubs—this became a favorite local example of black folks’ shortsighted sloth.) But even I, even as a kid, figured this much out: residents of Baby Africa just liked to see
out
of Baby Africa. Quick-growing poplars prevented that.

OUR RIG
now passed a city-limits sign (Pop. 1103, Bird Sanct, 4 Mies Blw Sea Lvl, Wlcme). I twisted my carat-and-a-half diamond around so it’d show. Nervous habit, my palming it. The prize had been his mother’s. It had outlived the plantation fire. I imagined somebody seeing me and remarking, “Lucy has been off experiencing concerts in advanced Atlanta. She sure does look it too. But not acting the least little bit stuck-up, not our Lucille.” Instead, the dark, stillness, the odor of well water, two mosquitoes harmonizing near my ear.

Cap clucked tired horses on through the colored district—eager to get beyond it. But all of Falls now seemed more mortally my Home. Every last inch of it would matter now. When a person returns, only this greedy first glance teaches her to
see
it all again.

Ahead, ten black children ducked behind roadside weeds. Hearing our carriage, they giggled. I teetered forward, bottom crackling newsprint. A wallet had been tied to a long string, and as our buggy clopped nearer, one boy tossed the billfold in our path. Just as we drew even—he yanked his line. Billfold flopped across horses’ path. Horse hooves totally trounced the thing. I turned back just as kids rushed out, surprised, to study damage done their wallet. I wanted to explain: no, your passing sucker has to be on foot, sillies.

(White boys ofttimes played this stunt on solitary black people hiking downhill after a day’s work as Falls’ maids or gardeners. White boys hoped some adult would spy the wallet, hang around whistling, finally bend toward it as the thing leapt like a frog in heat. Boys hoped the victims would bolt—
superstitious, arms up—screaming straight downhill. But for what reason? why? By now, the trick had ceased to work. News got out. Black folks just stepped over the dozen or so dime-store diamond bracelets, ladies’ handbags left mid-sidewalk leashed and twitching in advance.)

Kids grouped back yonder rubbing their trampled wallet, they sure worried me. They still had lots to learn. Embarrassed for and by them, I chose to repalm my show-off diamond.

June being mosquito season, Baby Africa residents were burning rags to keep bugs out of homes lacking window screens. Smoke sealed off three hundred rusting tin-roofed shanties. On one porch, a granny woman lit her pipe, flame briefly showed a great nobbly crowd of dark heads, shoulders. Folks spoke from porch to porch like sampan owners docked close by.

Conversation had this expecting kind of tone. Rising voices seemed to guess that something fine or terrible would happen soon. (A honeymoon return didn’t exactly turn no heads. And I admit that—vain, fifteen—I felt a wee bit disappointed.)

Did folks expect some unpredicted hurricane, or white-hot heaven settling early? Something sure felt due, overdue. I heard it in folks’ rising tones tonight. Us Uphill whites spoke mostly in consonants, fencing t’s, hedging h’s. From porches yonder, black people’s mutterings ran more towards the honey marrow of old a, e, i, o, u. From darkness, the open hope of vowels made quite a music.

We passed through this zone too quick. I held the rose-stitched satchel against me like I had some lapdog or baby or baby lapdog. I accidentally squeezed tomatoes too hard, then scanned a brown bag for signs of bleeding. I watched unlighted shacks drift past. In my chest and throat, I felt some edgy new attention gathering. Honeymoon travails had made me see these make-do huts afresh. They meant something new to me. I couldn’t yet say what.

PARSLEY
jaunty off to one side, Castalia’s dill omelette turned out perfect. But, though the item had genius in its making, every mouthful beyond the first tasted exactly like ash and cat hair. Castalia watched me eat. She tilted back against her cast-iron locomotive of a stove, redbirds spiking its upper edge. She rested there, armed Xed, her whole shape bolted across stove’s front like she herself was some mammoth cowcatcher about to plow across the checkerboard floor and flatten me.

I chewed. Rechewed. She’d made a four-egg omelette. Out of spite. I dared not leave one morsel. Waiting to wash my dish, she glared this way, then cleaned her fingernails with a huge handy butcher knife. When I finished, thirty minutes later, Castalia didn’t ask but told me, “Perfeck eggs, right?
Say
it.”

I nodded, had to. “Perfeck.” My compliment pleased her in a grim way. Then the worst happened. She smiled, it proved the scariest part so far.

Outside I heard our milkman jingle by. I wished I was a milkman or his horse or even white milk safe behind clear glass.

What made her smile so poisonous was this: Beauty! Four square unexpected inches of it lingered. Two inches bracketed, witty and mild, the corners of her generous mouth. Two underlit her arched and hoppy eyes. True, only this much surface space had managed to stay beautiful. But that fraction sure upset a girl. Her ugliness, a person could get used to. I’d already started trying, child. But the shift toward something else destroyed my early progress. I slowly understood: Castalia’s Ugliness has been built brick by brick. She’s
chose
to look like this! But hints at what she’d been before still managed peeking over the self-made Ugly Wall. Could somebody this size, this bitter, have ever enjoyed beauty’s head start? If so, where’d it all gone? To be whose fuel? What was eating her? Did
that
make her eat so? Across the hundreds of monument pounds—four square original inches rode intact.

But … those spoke volumes, even to a child my age.

Darling, how can I put this? I want to get it right. Imagine that all of ancient Greece got lost in a bad earthquake—every temple, column, scroll. All lost except one statue’s white marble kneecap. It is now placed, cool, into your open hand. That’s it—no more. And yet, holding this one clue, I believe you could someway
feel
all ancient Greece—its proportions, ideals, and rightness coming through your palm’s willing skin.

Looking at her four sleek unlost inches, I knew: Lucy, you’ve come in at the end of something. It was once real complicated, it was a pageant big as the Grand Opera that your unwed aunts live and breathe, it was something readily silly as Opera because it was that game for being swamped by typhoon feelings. Overrun by Castalia-sized emotions, Castalia-sized reasons, Castalia-sized crimes. And you, Lucy, have slipped in for Standing Room near the finale of Act Five.

But, child? oh, I wanted to know
all
of it. I did. I wanted in: for each clue of how Miss Cassie Marsden here had rode the boat from Adult Africa to her doing whatever a baby body servant/slave once did, to her settling downhill in Baby Africa, to her just making those perfect eggs for somebody as new to this and undeserving and scared as me.

Behind her willed and bloated false front, glaring at my chewing over here, waited what? waited who? I felt like I would someday maybe drag that other out, unwilling, into local light—that first beauty, kicking, naked, African, intact. To live near me, safe and fun, in a white house.

I might now be eating ash and cat hair. I might seem powerless so early in the morning but, my molars at grind: I knew, someday, I’d know.

That’s all. That’s how it started.

LOOK
, home from honeymoon bliss,
are
you ready to enter the commercial district proper? You feeling sufficiently ripe to greet Falls’ equivalent of Parthenons and “Ladies’ Mile” in New York City? Can you
take
the excitement? I can’t, hardly. We must pass the Courthouse Square’s unsavory side: Robinson’s Billiards for Gentlemen. Somebody at the piano playing one of the new rags. (My piano-teaching aunts have got hold of rag sheet music. Advanced, tolerant, unmarried, they have chose to praise said “rag’s antic architecture.” A smallish local scandal done resulted amongst the culturally clued in.)

We see the giant gilded horseshoe over Marsden’s Livery Estab. and Livestock. Here’s the town square (thirty streetlamps lit to serve those shoppers of all races with hard dollars to spend). At the latest attraction, a single water fountain, the line of county thrill-seekers is short. You’ll note the central statue “To Our War Dead.” (A economy move, four words meant to make one marble upright cover all past and any future wars we might survive.) Now look down the incline off on your left, Falls’ single pink stucco structure not in Baby Africa: Lolly’s Palais de Beauté Féminine de Falls. (Lolly was in love with the Prince of Wales and had corresponded with him. I got to tell you more about that precious homely Lolly later.) There goes Harbison’s Baked Goods—fresh (plus day-or week-old discount doughnuts).

Next door down, in the window with one draped dummy:

A coal oil lamp burns in back. Hear the busy foot-treadle Singer? It could have hiked him clear home to China by now. He wishes! Bent there, a elf-sized man wearing very round eyeglasses, black hair seamed with a white center part, a fellow mild to the point of appearing terrified full-time.

“Red” can stitch any garment to fit anybody, perfect. He made Cap’s adult war uniform. Ball gowns he sewed the titanic Mercer twins made them look no worse than statuesque. A miracle, art! But Wong Chow works just as hard at altering hisself to suit our edgy local will. Fifteen years ago, he got off the train nine stops early. Wong had already rented his storefront yonder when he discovered Falls won’t Raleigh. (To him, they sounded alike.) Local wits claimed he’d got the Wong station. They flattered him with local-yokel nicknames meant to help the shy outsider seem more “human.” Afraid to offend, Wong accepted all pet names. Called “Shortstop,” did Wong really know what one was? Local rubes yelled insults, he smiled anyhow. Having shelled out his only cash for rent-deposit (not refundable),
he stayed put for forty years. Many people do, for reasons much less good. The Chinese invented firecrackers, and bad boys gave Wong many reasons to feel homesick. Frequent cherry bombs exploded down the chimney of his shop/home. Lots of laughs. “You
scare
poor Riceyman,” Riceyman smiled, shaking. Boys said, “Yeah, that was the general idea.”

Jake Wade’s prices are so reasonable, somebody really should
tell
him, but nobody quite has yet. He’s a local success story. Whenever folks mention how ours is sure a land of opportunity okay, they call over Riceyman as their best handy example. He slinks nearer, low to the earth like a whippet ofttimes whipped. He comes over, wary, grinning very wide. Keeps pointing to his eyeglasses like these’ll stop harm. Tough to understand him through teeth, smile, accent. Shortstop says, “How you doing, Jake Wade’s good buddy? I your buddy still, hunh? hunh?” Stranger in a even stranger land, Red showed up once at First Baptist and tried singing hymns and couldn’t really, and made members feel real weird. So did his eating off the café’s plates and briefly seeking a non-Chinese girlfriend (horsey Lolly, of the Palais de Beauté). Silent glares sure cut down on Shortstop’s social life.