Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (53 page)

Its hair is lost. A skull shape is all homely facets, crisped blacked ears poke out, unhid (the hairdo’s unpretty secret). Cassie sees six yard-long braids, turned white by such temperatures, drooping across branches below. Pearls in plaits have fused to wizened baby teeth. The diamond ring—still in place—looks bigger for such charring shrinkage all around it.

The face of this oily carcass rests not ten inches from Castalia’s own. Cassie’s big features (so eager to be satisfied) wince but gape right back, unblinking at her mortal enemy and owner. Lady was always a hard woman to be owned by—but, child? maybe they all are.

What now makes Castalia cry aloud ain’t fear. It ain’t rank happiness. It’s something she’s not counted on. Gaping at this punished shape forces forces forces her to yell, “Poor thing.” Cas screams this, trying to dodge a terrible and unexpected pity. Castalia yells to make herself feel safer from the sight. She’s furious at seeing all of this the first of anybody. “I just
won’t,”
she cries too late. “Answer’s no, you hear?” Mostly, she’s disgusted at her dizzy-making sympathy for ninety pounds of human scar. All this was supposed to end. Where’s the Freedom part? Who will Freedom be?

HEARING
Castalia scream, others back off for a better view. “Burnt alive, I reckon,” Zelia states, not asking.

That magic word “alive” makes Cassie wonder.

She draws even nearer to this husk. Trying not to fall, eyes clamped steady on the friends below, Castalia presses her right ear to a chest’s central blister. Her voice soon roars, competing with fire’s strong voice.

“Be a miracle. But, you-all? she alive. And guess what else? Could be the most strange of everything. You know Lady Marsden? Well, she done been broilt as black as us!”

From below comes cheers and clapping—maybe on both counts.

SIX
children trot over with the burled-oak George III library ladder. “Go easy up yonder,” comes a croaky warning. “Cause this, Old Zelia gots to see.” Takes many minutes—unlatching one bone arm from round its log. Working the toasted body down is like trying to unpin a brittle bird nest from a spot where it’s been built over many a weaving season. People clump onto/around/underneath the ladder. Black hands lift, black faces raise, all try lowering a helpless something—frail, dark, flaking.

Z fetches damp sheets but Cassie warns that, raw as this crisp thing is, sheets’ll maybe stick to it. Little Evidence Anne hurries towards the stream, fishes out cheesecloth sacks of new butter sunk underwater to cool. Round yellow ingots have been made in a press, each embossed with fleur-de-lis lilac boughs hog-tied at bottom with a rope of pearls—the plantation’s crest.

KITCHEN
help, body servants, furniture polishers are all now basting it.

“Go slow down there, you young ones. When a chicken cook too long, you know how the meat try and pull off them rubber bones?” Castalia watches children’s stub fingers smear ankles’ spurred points.

Lady’s always been tiny. But without the broad and trailing extra yards of silk, without her fanning forth of culture and menace, minus flirting, missing zigzag moods, the constant orders, and especially without no hair, she looks—face up to sun, under so many dark ministering hands—like
some charbroiled pullet, a nasty little antique idol, or (while I’m going in for the flowery—sorry, Miss Beale, can’t help myself) maybe a meteor what’s come light-years in one cannoned instant.

Her attendants’ lives have been used up in brushing long hair before the pier glasses convenient on each floor (plus one hid within the dock’s lattice pagoda). Women have patted, smoothed, and dried her after bathing—but never with the interest of today—not never has Lady been handled with such relish, care, and tenderness.

See, she is now black. It was ever their daydream. Xerxes’ wish made so. That being granted makes folks think this Freedom stuff is going to work just fine, right quick.

How cheerful and bold they move—trying to revive her, doubting that they can.

BY NOW
, heat from three stories’ burning has fried front sides off the hedge’s eight hundred feet. Only lilac bushes down near river or out by post road have escaped withering. Lord God, the smell! Child, it clamped onto/over you like a sugar-watered felt glove—custom-made for your whole body.
Smelled
overly purple as the purple prose this is about to become, if I don’t tread more careful.

The smell grew to such a heated pitch of Southern jasmined sugariness, you got nearbout sick. With today’s bonfire, flowers took on corpses’ tinge, worse for the famous terrible sweetness underneath. Made you wonder why anybody’d plant eleven hundred lilacs, and why you yourself had—on other such April days—bent your face into a foamy bush, pulled plush blooms against your nose, moaned over How Good Life Is Sometimes. Then sneezed.

In twenty minutes’ heat, this has happened: the balance it has tipped. Everything’s changed. Bitter carbon now seems pure relief—some mascot. Of a sudden, smoke has turned into such a honest scent—proportions and a purpose to it. Lilacs planted in 18 and 21 for their scent now reek worse than any old run-over skunk. Compared with that, the purging swipe of ash has grown so elegant.

Till smoke smell took over complete, freed slaves, smudging butter on a crusted body, gulped air through their open mouths. They did it partway from disgust at seeing the singed pubis of a lady what’d owned them, part it was from fear that all this sweetness-unto-sickness (O lilac, thou smell right sick) rose from out of
her
.

Riding heat straight up, slave owning ends in a final honeyed glut. And ooh, child, it just stenched to highest heaven!

WHEN
I first picked the title of this Modern History theme, I felt well pleased with its tidiness: three permanent colors. I figured they’d divvy facts up
amongst theirselves, three corrals. Only halfway through did it strike me: tints’d have to change places. “Uh-oh,” said my overly organized eleven-year-old mind. “You won’t get no decent grade from Witch if you prop a whole paper around things that’ve got to trade off
being
one another. Ain’t near neat enough.”

Now I see I was wrong. Like often happens, what shoves you into a simple idea is not what—when it grows way messier and complicated—keeps you rolling on with it. Marriage, for instance.

To learn about White, go ask Black, vice versa. Each color is the brick beside/above/below/another, separate brick and yet all set in one wall.

So: What
is
black and white and lilac?

Well, the house and owner have lost any claim to Whiteness. Both’ve turnt glossy black as tar babies. Black folks still
are
, okay, but they’re feeling heaps cheerier about it now that river’s real estate and bosses are also signing on as black—a fad.

Lilacs ain’t no more. That color.—And what smells good?

Soot and ash now outstrip perfume.

What is sweet and what is bitter?

What is just and what is just not fair?

Even the colors of the world can switch headquarters and meanings on you and in minutes. The right answer one second is such a wrong answer the very next.

History’s one of them subjects requires regular questions to help a body stay abreast. Meaning: Let’s keep on our toes and remain dancing. Let’s not wait for others to grill us in advance for the right answers. We’ll prepare, revise, stay game for a little Ethics exam every second of our lives. Whenever Witch Beale pitched into some chalk talk about the Enlightenment, say, she’d smile, shielding from sight her huge dictionary of a mouth, she’d go, “You
will
be tested on this.”

Tiring, but true of every moment of your life, darling.
Experience is a pop quiz you ain’t ever quite prepared for
. But you always pass by the skin of your teeth anyhow. Who ever gets held back?—Time itself is a social promotion.

Maybe a better center-question might run: What’s ever
just
Black or White and Lilac for long?

Q: According to Mr. Goethe, according to the Witch, why does one see-through prism bruise forth so easy with two dozen perfect jewelry-store tints?

A: The deeds and sufferings of light make colors. By the time sunlight reaches us, it is beautiful old news. We get tanned, healed, fed by the sun’s own long spent ricochet history.

ZELIA
, house expert at furniture polishing, tries daubing the ebony victim (fetus-homely, fetus-slippery) with wet rags. Just like Cassie predicted—cloth gums onto/into it/her. Poor little critter seems fashioned of black shoe wax. Its legs, stretched out on a sheet, might be wavery twin licorices. Castalia smears grease along crackled limbs, across more blisters that’ve bloomed. Cas whips off her own red dew rag. With the headcloth, she hides a pate’s singed roots.

“There go the last of our sweet butter,” Old Z says. “Six pounds, for this.”

Children find a rosewood door. It’s been knocked flat by mounted Yanks. Folks plunk the mistress onto it. Off they cart her to a less smoky place, one that Sherman’s men have purposely spared: the slaves’ quarter.

This got left—and, like a joke, so did the smokehouse. One precious ham yet hangs there. Zelia, remembering certain of her earlier rudenesses to Lady, now acts semi-scared of the burned one. Fact is, Z hides. Then, like trying and make up, the old woman reappears with a sample from the icehouse (great white hunks of it someway survived the hut’s very burning). Zelia presses coolness between the maimed one’s split lips, she wets the teeth and gums, blacked by inhaled soot.

Quiet, children stay busy, studying. To see it naked, to see it bald-headed, to see it black—means seeing Lady truly helpless, not just playing-like. Odd, you can stare right
at
Mistress, without that helmet zone of sharp blue eyes looking ownership your way. Children linger close, their faces solemn. Winch the overseer used to scare them, using a marsh-dwelling mossy hag (excellent for keeping ghost-believing ex-Africans indoors at night). How strange—children’s finding that, right along, this threatened Bogey Demon of the Swamp was real. Was no animal or spirit or clockly goddess. All along, the farm’s monster won’t nobody but Her Ownership.

CASTALIA
, usually the ablest of talkers, suddenly says next to nothing. She is full of glares and misgivings. Others feel her watching everything, a grave new trying-it-out manner. Since Cassie turned ten, one of her bodyservant chores has been attending Lady’s monthly needs. With Mistress so allergic to cotton, only silk would do for her home-rolt napkins. Before wartime, all the used monthly rags got burnt. But lately—what with silk become so scarce—Castalia’s dutifully washed out and rerolled each one. You take a eighteen-inch pennant of white silk, you (yeah, I mean you), you trim it to five inches wide. You twirl this tight as possible, doubling many absorbing layers whilst you spin and spin the thing. Set aside a goodly supply by the twenty-sixth.

Question: Should one able-bodied person (you, for instance)
have
to
take another’s furled bloodied silk and unroll the monthly banners into a bucket of boiling water, lye, bleach, blueing? (Harder if this lady boss ain’t even no blood kin to you.) Is Castalia remembering all this whilst setting staring at the newly blacked one yonder? Is Cassie deciding the date when her and the others should leave here, leave it?

Dr. Marsden onct mentioned how in olden Greek days certain unwanted girl babies got “exposed”—meaning left naked on mountainsides. If a girl child was someway rescued (by a shepherdess or such), well, more power to her. Most didn’t. Civilization, child!—Exposed at last, either Lady E. More Marsden will live or no. Whatever happens, that’s now
her
job.

Lady weighs so little, even the children can drag her on that door. Roped to the makeshift sled, pressed inside a buttered sheet, she is pulled all over—still unconscious. Describing the spoilt acreage, wee ones jatter back her way. They give Mistress a tour of her personal ruins: blacksmith forge, dovecote, pierside pergola. Just the way Lady onct fussed over new black babies, bouncing and spoiling them, loving to dance them around—young ones now use her. They set her down near this gateway, try itching her awake with clover stems. From the post road, it must look like young ones have gone and dug up some ancient black woman’s corpse. Kids are being real artful with the body, arranging it curled here, propped humorous over yonder.

In the days of Catacombs, kids tickled Lady just to feel her yards of silk, a guardian cloud. Now, Xerxes dares the other children to press even one of their fingertips onto certain crusts congealing—like tree’s sap—round her chest and head. From the dead magnolia, using a bamboo fishing pole, Xerxes pries loose a single whitened braid. The black pearls chittering brittle in it are cooked tear-shaped. Just a child after all, Little Xerxes chases other kids, them shrieking from the snaking hobbling thing—a life—at the stick’s springy end.

THE FIRST
night is real hard. Ex-slaves sleep just inside the edge of the fire’s wide beacon. A corner of far woods glows orange-pink. From downhill lily pools, frogs go crazy piping piping. On the post road—all night long you hear strange buggies rattle closer, stop, somebody gaping uphill toward the great pile of molten third-floor newels, stairways hotfooting it nowhere—then such buggies clatter off. People sleep in shifts. Like the house needs company. Like they do.

Dawn cheers everybody considerable. Waking folks file over, one by one, to check on a nude woman glazed black. Even children stumble first to her—just the way gardeners in late April, say, will trot, still half asleep, out to their dewy patch. Anything come up yet? In one night, Everything
Can Change. This, honey, we all partly and continually believe. Otherwise, could we stand it?

That first morning, Lady is tugged into the sun she’s always dreaded. Might help to dry the worst places on her arms and chest. Ex-ownees settle in a powwow horseshoe to examine her up close. Why? Because they can now. For the first time in her thirty-eight semi-invalid years, others listen at her heart’s beating with cheerful peasant steadiness. Makes a body feel bitter, recalling her years of so-called frailness. She ain’t opened either eye. “It sure do
look
dead,” Evidence says.