Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (43 page)

When in doubt concerning a password, child? try “Yes.” Door swung open on a rental room heaped with a mansion’s furniture. The serving girl, about my age, called at somebody hid under piled ormolu, bronze, brocade, “Mrs. Lady? We must be living right.—Comp’ny!”

Then I got handed a paint chart, samples of whites and off-whites. The maid passed me this like some everyday ticket of admission. I noticed: it was grimed from others’ nervous handling.

“Thank you.”

The room had no room in it. Sixty gilt ballroom side chairs were stacked to the ceiling, like a family of skinny Chinese acrobats. Before me, Biedermeier apple-wood lowboys, busts of emperors looking white and in need of seasoning as hard-boiled eggs. One huge dead palm plant failed to notice it’d browned in 18 and 65. On the far mantel, a glass gondola big enough to sail Baby Moses through bulrushes, clear enough to show him bottom mud. Nearer by, in two rows like army surplus, six marquetry armoires (each offering a different frolic activity of three shepherdesses in one glade—with not no sheep in sight). A narrow path wedged, broken-backed, betwixt. Seemed if Lucy didn’t know the next password, she’d be mashed by wardrobes. Inside such closets, great chandeliers dangled, lead crystal idly clinked. Against yonder hearth, a dozen family portraits tipped any old way, puritans scowling at the undignity of doing ramshackle headstands.

“You visiting the hallway, comp’ny?”

I tried a star reporter’s winning smile. Stepping in, I found a floor paved with Turkey rugs twelve inches deep, some muddy. Felt like the unasked-for luxury of walking on a stranger’s bed.

This wallpapered warehouse stunk of lemon oil, of cloves nailing oranges, some elegant underlying ash. Each knickknack smelled smoke-cured as any Smithfield ham. The maid in a lace cap, stepping on her own long apron, slammed the door, locked it, led me along armoires’ narrow avenue. I already missed the hallway. We seemed bound towards the farthest end of this collection, a corner where the burned collector was herself collected—so much cornered dust.

•   •   •

HALFWAY
to my topic, the guide disappeared. I might of known. She’d dodged rightwards, either between armoires or into one. Across my path, the mirrored door of one chifforobe swung open. This room was pretty dim. Mirror creaked closer, blocked my way like some great unlatching wing.

I remember stepping aside to let the approaching stranger pass, then seeing a bowlegged girl do the same. I studied a scuffed pigtailed child clutching her pad, a list of questions, pencils, the paint chart like her underworld passport. Eyes bulged, the jaw slacked open in a way her mother would call “defective-appearing, Lucille.”

How crude the outer husk of your own intelligence shows up. From deep indoors, your mind can feel so glassy, quick, and rare. (Even with me up to this age, with my outside edges slacked and melting—still, in
here
, child, it’s ofttimes yet all mercury, a dance!)

—I peeked past armoire hinges, I saw my black Virgil wink then crook her finger. The door clapped shut totally behind me. I regretted that.

In a smoke-and-cedar-smelling box, blind, I backstepped onto quilts and—of a sudden knew—“The maid sleeps here. They consider it to be her room.” Which broke my heart. I figured: Miss Beale? God love you, with your bucked back and humped teeth, I believe your Lucy’s
onto
something.

From outside, a shrillness first seemed wind-down-chimney, tooting, “Who, who?”

Honey, by now I had goose bumps big as pearl tapioca. The maid opened our door just long enough to answer: “Be somebody bout wallpapering you mansion’s third-best parlor, silly, if you gots to know. A question girl come to axt you all bout colors.”

Onct our armoire was locked shut, I heard whispering. Listening, I pretty much had to. A mouth this close left mist in my ear’s conchy turnings. One free black hand fumbled cross my shoulder, stroked my left braid. In hisses, I learnt, “Sshe sstill look right bad. Sshe sstill think we out yonder at The Lilacss. Sstill think that Ssherman’s menss was Englissh, wass Cornwalliss’ oness. Sstill think the housse they burnt, the dresss they torched been her momma’ss, not herss. Sshe think thiss room so crowded cause the resst sshe house yet being redid by you decoratorss from Charlesston. Gotss to be mosst careful what you ssay. Wantss to know how sshe got hurt so bad? axt after sshe momma.—Lady Marsden don’t alwayss know her’s
her
yet, sssee?”

“OH,” I said in a street voice, then, ashamed, shushed, “oh.”

Honey, I had no more idea what she meant than the man in the moon. But I figured—it’d be like on-the-job training, you fake it till you know it so good that it’s soon faking
you
.

She touched my hand: If I agreed to these here terms, I could put any question I liked to the hurt one yonder. If not, this’d be a fine time to pleasse leave.—Well, I agreed, sugar. Wouldn’t you? Took gumption—being as I was just eleven in 18 and 96. But what choice? When a body’s this nose-deep in the scent of Story, why get shy? To this day—dead-elm-leaf brown
as years’ve turnt me—I still love the ring of that:
“Is you the question girl?”

Oh yeah, child. Time has bent me double as hairpin. Time’s twisted me out of a statement and into a request. But—Lord knows, I’m the question girl yet.

SO LOOK
, this much said: What
is
black and white and lilac? See, because—that’s what I got out of it. That’s how I come to finally organize my “Modern History” report.

First, it seemed so neat:

White’d
be Lady Marsden’s plantation mansion, Greek Revival, six miles northeast of Falls, happy on its personal hill above our river. This home can still be seen in many paintings. Old Mall Antiques owns three, even as we speak (as I do). And, child, the prices dealers are asking scare me nearbout as bad as anything I’m going to tell you here.

The mistress of the manor, number two in her class at St. Cecilia’s Christian Finishing in Richmond, encouraged artists to set up easels on her wide front lawn. Slaves brung picnic lunches to any painter smart enough to do the Marsden home. Marsden slaves did. White is the Anglo-Saxon-type lady that owned the two-thousand-acre spread and so loved the image of both it and her.

Freed slaves—thirty-odd years later, rocking on
their
porch, looking out at a piano crate/chicken coop in the front yard—they claimed she hadn’t been all that bad. Hobbies kept her clear of the worst mischief. Her mansion’s seventy-odd rooms each housed a novelty clock—marble, bronze, quartz. All showed subjects from mythology. Swans mounted Leda ladies every quarter hour. Hercules’ flat tummy was a walleyed German pocket watch. Under Phaëthon’s chariot, pendulums swung, cheery as the hearts of peasants, solemn as famous necessary manly parts.

Mrs. Marsden hand-cranked every cloisonné Apollo herself. “Somebody has to do it.” Thursday (the day that gear wound down) Lady would actually rise before noon, she’d string a opera jailer’s worth of keys around her neck. She’d tug on a green visor purchased from Falls’ one pawnbroker. “Something about it appealed to me.” Mrs. Marsden laughed at her own paleness tinted fishy green. “Hideous, no?” And off she’d scuff to wind parlors’ seven-day-movement masterpieces.

—Lady’d taken a two-year correspondence course in horology. Slaves made fun of the word, though they knew their mistress’s chastity was total, dull. Strange that the woman, usually so professionally helpless, could fix most any timepiece. Neighbors brung Lady their stalled locket watches. She worked in her high bed, visor tugged low, black eyepiece screwed into her all but albino face. Favorite tools: sterling sugar tongs and her eyebrow tweezers. When, at the quarter hour, seventy-odd clocks chimed (scaring guests), Lady’s eyes would close. She seemed to sleep-talk at a handy slave, “Castalia, do run fetch me the bronze Hungarian Proteus, southeast parlor. It’s lately changeable as I. Six and a half seconds slow again.—Those Hungarians.”

If slaves fell sick, was Lady Marsden nursed them. They got stretchered to a third-floor bedroom off her tower conservatory. Lady spoon-fed them broth, she’d read aloud from
The Arabian Nights
, she’d mop dark brows. And for a full week.—Local gentlewomen, learning about this, turned briefly coolish towards Mrs. Marsden. Lady just loved that. All the river crowd had heard how a Marsden slave girl onct admired Mistress’s diamond brooch—the thing was whipped off, pressed into a work-toughened hand, “Yours now.”

Along with horology, knitting, piano, and doing jigsaw puzzles of Europe vistas, Lady fainted. Slaves noticed: Mrs. Marsden never collapsed whilst alone. She might drop from the strain of a week spent healing others but she forever toppled
towards
them slaves still strong enough to catch her.

Anybody who’s ever nursed a not too sick patient knows how the first six to seven days—if you got nothing else to do—can be almost semi-engaging. Fluff their pillows, arrange the flowers. It’s that second Monday, child—grimness gets under the bed, sinks teeth into your ankles. But by then, see, Lady Marsden herself had fallen over, was reclining in her forty-windowed room in her canopied ivory four-poster, was recovering from the week spent helping others to recover.

Lady’s Greek and Latin proved good enough to savor her husband’s puns, live ones in dead languages.—True, she could sometimes sound vain about her “attainments,” as she calt them. But Marsden freed folks later swore that when relaxed, Lady acted charming and unguarded as a child. She’d always felt easiest around her
baby
slaves. With grown ones, Lady considered herself friendly and confidential but she was ofttimes only flirting. They knew this. She didn’t. When men marched off to war, Lady used her female slaves for whetstones to keep Flirting’s blade edge keen. As flirting goes, hers was—everybody yet says—real good of its kind. Dry.

ON RAINY
days, Lady called her twelve youngest black children into the Big House for a homemade treat: Catacombs. This game meant servants’ lining up all tables from a single mansion floor—every lowboy, drop-leaf sideboard, candlestand. Sheets were then thrown overtop, both seams drooping clear to the Oriental rugs (Caucasians, mostly). Next, into this long hide-and-seek catacomb, one frail lady was seen to crawl on all fours. Lady always wore a white silk wrapper for both at-homes and state occasions. “At my present age, clothes decisions strike me as pure nuisance—uniformity so frees the mind for higher things.” Only when she’d hid good could her wee ones enter on their hands and knees, gigglish, tense, seeking It. She was always It. When you own sixty-one people—to them, you stay forever It. Thunder broke above slate-mansard roofing. Rain drummed window glass. All went blue white blue with lightning. Who cared? Hooray for Catacombs!

A cloth cave stretched into and out of many a parlor, the cave dead-ended in closets then turned back, winding off along cool halls. Sheets glowed white as the life-sized statuary Caesars lined near it, gesturing. Hid
in such shelter, serenaded by clocks’ godly foggy chiming, Lady Marsden and her children played for hours. They made up rules as they went.

(The South before the war had mighty rigid codes: Slave owners, feeling none too firm on the Ethics end, got mighty interested in Manners. Manners made a kind of crucifying corset that promoted Lady’s perfect posture, that held her, chafed but upright, in her lofty place. So, ooh, but it must of felt good, honey—flouting rules, acting wild again, inventing a new ungirdled world beneath the chair rail.)

Thunder brung baby shrieks. Catacomb players scared each other breathless. Inside the tributaries of sheets, players pretended that any outside noise was a Roman centurion come to torture them for worshipping correct. If you stomped your shoe near some busy percale crossroads, what grunts and scramblings you set off.

On their feet, shut out of the game, slave women cleaned like usual—venturing to sheets’ very edges. From the white cave of monograms and table legs, women heard their owner: “I dare you to! You darling scamps, no shame, you
would
try to get me, would you not? Here they come. The tawny Lions of Rome. Oh no. I shall pounce upon you first. Beware, the Darkling Creature from the Roman Swamps Approacheth!” Babies yowled, scattering, palms and knees drubbed carpeted parquet.

Slave women—rolling eyes at one another—must of felt glad at least to have their young ones brung indoors and spared a wet day’s duties.—Then ivory swans mounted sterling Ledas, then seventy-odd chimes hid within bronze wings, gold globes, and sterling clouds—all told four-thirty. (Was a unanimous vote, but hardly sung in unison.) Then tea and cake got slipped under one sheet’s hem. Refreshments were left in a different spot each day—just part of Lady’s Instructions: “Something about it appeals to me.”

Good game of Catacombs could run you clear till dusk. You knew it was ended when dark children shot from under far-flung sheets. Kids acted giddied by their day of fun. It seemed a form of travel. Their mommas later recalled having a right hard time getting young ones to sleep them nights. Babies grew so sassy from the privilege of hours spent tickling and threatening It (all in fun, of course).

Onct children scattered, the adult staff knew to strip draperies off all tables. In this way, at a new location each rainy evening, as time itself slaved away inside the Big-House excuse of mantelpiece gods and animals, servants found her, collapsed, sometimes grinning, sometimes drowsing already, sometimes pinching her nose’s bridge—hinting at future migraines. Black women then lugged Lady to a bath kept warm since noon. Though the game tired her, though she often needed the whole next day to recuperate, Lady Marsden forever explained: “‘My children’ rely on me. With great gifts go great responsibilities. I would not disappoint my Little Xerxes, Diana, or Baby Venus for all the glories of the ancient world.”

Her husband had received a classical education at John Harvard’s college.

•   •   •

FAMOUS
for three-week headaches, three-day parties, and her perfect cream complexion (no peaches ever got mentioned as being allowed in or near that cream), Lady wore white silk year round. I said that, honey. It come from China. I probably said that too. Even the fine cotton raised on her two thousand acres, even if it barely touched her baby skin—gave Lady hives. True, she did knit wool—but only whilst wearing gloves and for others’ wear. She patiently explained, to touch it made her go right lilac-y with brocades of rashes. (Maybe this, I just thought of it, is why no shepherdess got shown as having a single sheep on any of her art or furniture.)