Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (47 page)

The piano was stationed at her porch’s very center. As the sun set, whilst sitting framed here amid overgrown magnolia boughs, torchlit by her only two shirtless workers, Lady offered funeral airs wrote at the deaths of English rulers. She’d refused to wear black clothes. She owned none. Besides
he
would’ve wanted her the way he’d known her—a White Woman—bleached even further by widow’s pallor. Playing for her gathered staff, head tossing so much (it was plain she’d never guessed at slave quarter’s Imitate How She Toss Her Head Around contests), with pearls agleam in torchlight, Lady felt moved by music’s gift for reaching all walks of life. All.

Doing a piece called “Consolation,” the woman was stirred at a talent often praised by her subtlest houseguests. She felt every inch the artist, till noticing that out yonder on their rugs (fact is,
her
rugs), except for children scaling magnolias’ limbs and rudely beginning to toss red seeds into a white piano’s working parts, her slaves all slept. So much for a captive audience. She stared down from the stage-porch at her “people” who’d gorged all day on swan plus goldfish, deep-fat-fried. (Darling, like the time her two white Pomeranians disappeared one midnight, she hadn’t liked to say anything too critical at the time.) Lady studied snoring folks drunk on leisure, worn out by testing the limits of their only full day off, ever.

Till now. Till right this second. April 7, 18 and 65.

AT A PIANO
long since muscled back upstairs, Lady plays impromptus, “Royal Fireworks” reductions, whatevers, ballades. A smell of burning drifts (one octave stronger than before) through twenty windows on this round room’s river side. Today the mistress does all the repeats, hoping to slow this thaw toward Freedom. Castalia, her large face eager to be satisfied, moves in that wiry inspired way she has. Snitching sugar-coated almonds from a silver dish, she still swats her duster across froufrou figurines. Cassie’s shoulders are wide as a man’s. Cheekbones bow out in a style right
regal. Her eyes are so alive they first seem a warning till you notice the deep joke, the wild pleasure burning in them today.

Zelia—fleshless as a stick, older than some hills, spreads a lilac bouquet that has become, since we last checked, big as any mummer’s headdress. Both black women straighten now and—eyes fastened—sniff. Lady, working not to notice, plays a good bit louder.—We all got our ways of dealing with disaster, child. Some folks pace, some crochet. What’s yours?

Since knee-high to nothing, Mistress has suffered migraines. I said so. She sure feels one coming on. A regular masterpiece. Her bedchamber’s forty windows hang muffled with negligee material. Filters let in only playful minor sunshine, and halt the rough stuff. Her bedside table is piled with silk blindfolds. Staring toward the pagan sun can give Lady Marsden a three-day blinder almost at onct.

Now smoke—its source being, sad to say, Cousin Mabry’s mock-Gothic dockside “folly” at Shadowlawn—cuts bolder through gauze window shades.

Lady Marsden has a pet remark, one that Cassie picked up early on. Lady uses it to explain the hardship of widowhood, the sadness of having her only child—thirteen—sent off to soldiering, the pain of running so huge a plantation alone, trying to do right by her “people” whilst living through this tacky needless war and eating so poor—okra done in every sauce invented by God or Frenchmen. She says it again, massaging the bridge of her nose. The free hand plays on, right valiant: “With great gifts go great responsibilities. ‘To whom much is given, much shall be required.’”

The Good Book mentions this, and so did the Widow Marsden right often.

Lady tells Castalia she’s getting an especially dreadful one. She feels that famous burning sensation in her nostrils, the first sign and one that has, she believes, been described to Cas before.

“My dear, you cannot imagine these—you, who are health itself. I hear that Yankees are actually
in
our state, the verminous infestations (oh—don’t you two gape so. Your little friend here picks things up from out of the very air). Sherman seems a poison in one’s own bloodstream. I fear the onslaught of a grand mal that will outdo even my worst. Who can ever forget the one last June?—At the start of even a typical spell the world resembles perhaps a white dinner plate—clean, round, shiny with Spodey light playing all across its surface. But then, oh dear, from one edge—usually the lower left—single black mouthfuls gobble at brightness till all is bitten into, bitten away. Till I must rest here as my whole life is eaten in veritable plugs. Plugs, I tell you.—At the end, there remains but a single mouthful of perfect whiteness. Mightn’t that be spared me? Well? Might it not? Don’t just stand there mooning, you two. No! I am spared nothing. A black jaw swoops down upon even that and when this final wedge is ingested, well,
you’ve
attended me often enough, Castalia, you know all too well what happens next, my child. After so many years as my handpicked confidante, you
should
know.”

“You faints,” Cassie cuts her eyes at the older serving woman. Zelia
smirks, hacking lilacs’ stem ends with a new right surgical energy. “You faints into somebody’s arms,” Castalia adds. “And you gets so weak you can’t even hardly … talk. Now that be
weak.”

Missing the little joke, Lady rolls on,
“Justement
. And yet, as I always say …”

“To who much got givened, much gone be required.”

“You speak my mind. My very mind, child. Castalia, there are times when you open your mouth and I hear the music of the spheres. I hear exactly what I would say.”

Today, Castalia laughs in swallowed rushes, moves with jumpy turns, the elbows angle out. Her head tilts on its smooth axis, eyes are quick to flutter closed. Cas wants to keep her senses steeplechasing over eleven hundred lilacs’ perfume. That heavy smell now seems the enemy, a kind of cage slung up around this vast white house.

Fumes grow thicker. Cassie perks to usual sounds, acts eager to miss the new knocks and odd draggings from downstairs. Making music in this chamber’s center, Lady Marsden don’t quite see the great evacuation underway.

BY PEELING
back one window’s migraine strainer, Cas looks down onto quite a parade. Other slaves are emptying best things from The Lilacs’ first floor. Last night, Castalia herself ordered the job done, “Gone be our nest egg in the next world.” She promised—if others would help unload the mansion—her and Zelia’d try keeping Lady Busybody busy. Busy with Cassie’s famous true and semi-true tales of the crossing from Africa—busy with spanky-new lies, with anything that worked.

Old Zelia had said, “Let fire gobble every nasty stick of it.” Castalia snapped, “We ain’t been cleaning this fine mess for all these years just to see it fry for being Hers. We Hers too. And
we
couldn’t help it.”

House slaves upriver have sent news: Silver is already being buried. At places like Mabry’s Shadowlawn, this could mean digging a all-day trench. Last night, Marsden slaves voted: This house’s silver will be left to Inferno’s happy-go-lucky elbow grease. Women had spent so much of their lives keeping blackness off the julep cups, salvers, fish platters for two hundred. Well, not no more! Only shy Baby Venus asked that one thing not be polished off by fire—the silver service used on rainy days to send tea towards players of Catacombs.

Baby Venus got voted down.

CASSIE
now studies workers filing across the lawn—greenery commencing to sprout first dandelions since Uncle Primus and his six garden helpers trotted North last month. Castalia—way up here, seeing what others choose
to save—longs to shout orders. (Ain’t often you get warned that your place will burn at 3 p.m., letting you pick from amongst what’ll otherwise soon be soot.) Through the window, it’s clear to Cas—the women left downstairs might’ve lemon-oiled these items for thirty years, but they sure don’t understand what Best means. She wonders, Maybe I been made a monster snob like her,
by
her. Castalia has served as Lady Marsden’s body servant for ten of her seventeen slave years. And during all the days of standing behind Mistress at the oval pier glass, long evenings of brushing the famous pale brown hair two hundred strokes a thick handful, Castalia has someway picked up (like a disease) more stray facts than she’s ever needed knowing. Till today. By heart, she’s got the words that Lady speaks with such reverent boldness. Things ours: Wedgwood. Sèvres. Majolica. Aubusson. Ormolu. Why should such syllables chime so in a young head kidnapped out of Africa at age three? Why do these words—ones Cassie can’t rightly recollect ever
not
understanding—sound to her someway tribal? personal? African?

“I knows just what wants saving.” Pretending to dust, Cas settles her forehead nearer gauze drawn drum-tight over the third floor’s splendid view.

Meanwhile, Little Xerxes is lugging a busted cuckoo clock from out the back scullery. And here comes Baby Venus with one dented copper coal bucket worn over her head. She’s most stomping on the heels of two older women who tote a dead-ordinary oak hall table. Why
that?
Cas goes to yell a whole litany of things worth salvaging, then recollects last night’s other show of hands.

Question: Since Freedom would be theirs today, should folks run off early or serve out last hours by playacting through usual routines? Should they tell Mrs. Whitey or keep her in the dark a little longer? Well, everybody chose to carry on. Being slaves of a self-styled lady actress—having lived for years in this imagined pageant play, the drama part appealed to them. Anyhow, their mistress stayed at such a pitch of regular hysteria, especially since Marse Marsden died and Will marched off, if she knew the end was near, she’d only make the final minutes of unfreedom harder on everybody. Herself included.

Castalia had announced today’s schedule: “Fire gone get here round three o’clock if we to believe what we been told from upriver. And I, for one, do. I ready to try and trust all kind of things. This house gone be cooked medium to well done by teatime. After that, please call me: Young Miss New York City-bound!”

Following last night’s vote in the quarter, everybody talked loud, they waltzed around. Baby Venus rode grown women’s shoulders. Using a broom handle and tin basin, Zelia done some right spunky percussion. Little Xerxes copied Uncle Primus’ formal butler-bowing from the waist. But then,
anybody
could do Primus.

LADY
counted Xerxes among the all-time favorite slaves she’d ever inherited or personally purchased. And that made quite a crowd. Of all her black children, only Little Xerxes got invited to high tea on odd days between white visitors. Local gentry called him the best copycat living, boy had more lives than nine. The lad could imitate other people imitating him imitating other people. (Odd, at a glance you’d know all parties and only later wonder
how.)

Though eleven years old, Xerxes stood just one inch taller than a yard. Ain’t too many gentle ways to say it, sugar: He was semi-funny-looking. Skin and bones, the quick-moving boy had sizable ears and a studious indoor glee that reminded Lady Marsden of her dead husband, Xerxes’ likely poppa.

Everybody (including Lady’s guests) asked the child to please mime so-and-so. A slave, he obliged. Black folks claimed: to see Xerxes “do” you meant courting your own death. In the quarter, the child was real good about warning friends so’s they could shut their eyes, could sit real still, braced, suddenly surrounded by hacksaw laughing, shoved a bit yet never daring to peek. Was like your looking in the mirror with your eyes closed.

After midnight, in the safety of the quarter, performing by a single candle, Xerxes most often did Lady. With oh such fierce attention. If the jumpy boy was her novelty-clock possession, she was sure his masterpiece. (As a prod to action and a reason for rising, child, Revenge should not never be underrated.) Xerxes caught her rich surprisingly deep voice, her precise tiny hands, the way she tossed her head—now finicky, now with passion.

One morning Xerxes overheard her say, “Gentlemen always wear neckties.” Next day and ever after, the child sported a ascot made from three of Master’s cast-off hankies. Wearing this, he turned up at the Big House for his usual cleaning of Marsdens’ shoes. Others teased Xerxes till Mistress called his little neck gear “valiant.” Then others muttered instead.

The child had finally quit entering slaves’ Toss You Head Like Her contests—giving the adults a chance. Unlike me, Xerxes rarely exaggerated. This dryness made his imitations start off scarier and soon get funnier. Castalia spent the most time alone with Mistress. Cas had all kinds of secret noticings and she tried passing these along to the boy wizard.

Begged to do Mistress, Xerxes would sometimes sulk, refusing. (All comics, child, want to be took
partway
serious—I should know.) Cassie bribed the child—offering her own meal rations.
“Please
first do Mistress play the piano slow, then Mistress reading verse while eye-deep in too bubbly of a bubble bath. You know the one. Then to wind up with Mistress Gets June’s Big Old Headache. In that order, boy.” And thin Cas, stomach growling—having sacrificed tonight’s fried okra—would rock back like royalty,
arms crossed, her face already practicing its ready grin, so eager to be satisfied.

When slaves pleaded for Xerxes’ choicest, they didn’t call, “Do her.” They begged, “Do it. Do
it
now.” Cassie felt sad that Lady’d never get to see Xerxes’ version of Her Ownership. “The Mrs. might could learn so much from it.”

Some nights, the boy’s act was good enough so, next morning, slaves stared extra hard at their mistress. (Smiling, she checked her hairdo’s linchpin chopsticks, she stood whispering, “What?”)

Uncle Primus—usually right hard and strict—gave the little actor time off from slave garden duty. A artist, Xerxes never took no shortcuts, boy stayed busier than anybody. So much to know and notice!

In one outbuilding used for harness tack, a large mirror was kept locked. It won’t chipped or broken. Seemed like some political prisoner: harmless except for its views.