Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (44 page)

While playing their game, slave children—in coarse homespuns—loved to tickle It. They loved to feel It’s perfect whispery gown. It believed they touched her to touch her. Since her husband’s death, since her boy went for a soldier—the Mistress of The Lilacs got touched right seldom. She was soothed only by the dark hands that—along with polishing imported furniture—maintained her beauty, famous in both Carolinas and three adjacent southeast counties of Virginia. Plus amongst sundry cousins. The South is mostly the South’s cousins, honey.

Every fifth day, Lady Marsden’s hair—three and a half feet long—got oiled, its fine ends snipped. Each noon, at her waking, these fair locks were plaited through with roped pearls, real ones inherited by her late daddy, Judge More. He was a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More, the martyr—I put this in my school paper—linking ancient and modern history in a way that really tickled the Witch.—About Lady’s daddy, a local joke had run: “That man can judge more than any Judge More I know.” Which is another story.

As for his only child, the heiress … born white as a new glove in a store box … Well, she planned to stay that way. White. Theme number one:
White
. As this here history paper of mine will try and show, she could not. Stay. White. But boy, she really, really wanted to.

THERE IS
, you won’t be shocked, a story back of this.

BLACK
(now we’re getting somewheres) means (as of April 7, 18 and 65) the tint of folks that Lady Marsden (so white) yet owned but won’t legally allowed to. She tried keeping her helpers as wound up tight as collector’s-item clocks, all tunnel-visioned in one unending game of Catacombs. Without black help, she would have been totally lonesome. She’d of starved.
She
didn’t know how to work the well to draw the water then build a fire to heat the bath to bathe in daily. Only a few of her staff hadn’t yet run off.

By dawn, April 7, ’65, Sherman’s men (wearing blue) had crossed the Carolina border on horsebacks of all colors. Soldiers were headed here to plunder final Piedmont plantation-strongholds, including a certain grand white three-story home set on a green hill, river view. Yank torches planned to free the last black folks working this showplace.

Till a month earlier, meaning March of ’65 (to be historical about it), the Marsdens’ two thousand acres had claimed sixty-one slaves. In midnight dribs and drabs, playing their own game of Underground Railway Catacombs, some crawled into the woods, they guided five stolen covered rowboats upriver, they traveled late-night post roads further north. Even Uncle Primus, the Marsdens’ courtly favorite, too old to run off, too loyal to … he run. Seemed he’d been saving up for years. Others—disgusted by his lifetime’s toadying—laughed to see him sprint.

Just four women and six children still wash and fluff their Lady and her high white meringue of house. You’ll meet them presently.—Hey, Miss Beale, wherever you are, I’m really getting organized this go-round, I deserve a right good grade, hint hint. See: we’re already at Theme number two: Black = slave folks’ faces and bodies. Plus Black stands for the scorched-earth policy about to happen right here. But blackest of all (I learned from Castalia, Evidence Anne, and other ex-slaves I quizzed), blackest of everything might be the white heart dark enough to try and own lock, stock, and barrel another human. Some nerve.

I should mention that Evidence Anne’s given name was Diana but her pale skin and gray Marsden eyes caused Cassie, her momma, to choose the self-explaining attention-getting
Evidence
.

Our strict teacher drilled Who?What?Why?Where? into her pupils’ cloudy hookwormed heads. (She left out Which? maybe because she’d heard tell of her nickname.) At age eleven I filled twenty-six pages (way over the required fifteen) with every W but the crucial Why? That one, honey, this wrinkled question girl is gnawing over yet.

MOST
everything I learned concerning Whiteness and Mrs. Marsden (Lady was her given name because the Judge claimed she’d looked so perfectly prissy in her first organdied crib) I squeezed out of black eyewitnesses. The lady herself had been a serious talker till the major mishap, which this is. I later went and pumped many others about a day when the mistress’s boudoir’s white-brocaded walls come tumbling down around her eggshell-pale and ofttimes Humpty-empty head.—No, enough of that type talk. See, I’m trying and put a gag on the Flowery. That was Witch Beale’s biggest complaint concerning my “current events” report of 1896. I later got to know many of the people mentioned in my theme. That would change my history paper’s history.—And seeing as you are probably my last chance to tell stuff right, I want to get it perfect this go-round. I’m yet benefiting from certain
harsh, if constructive, teacher comments wrote by lamplight in Beale’s garden efficiency at the Mangum Arms in late October of ’96. Child, concerning the Farfetched or the Flowery, remind me to muzzle myself. Just clear your throat, I’ll tamp it back. I’ll try.

“
TAKING
the bare bones of historicity—not unlike those scholars who construct an entire dinosaur on the basis of some stray tibia—our young Lucille herein employs her own highly coloristic if rusticated narrative energy. Lucille indulges a willingness to chance others’ motives, to inhabit their very flaws. She can be borne along, despite a severe case of grammatical rickets, by her propulsive inventiveness, her own hapless mythomania. That said, what else might a reader seek in Lucille’s ‘national document? Alas, a great deal. We, of the Falls, NC, greater school system are not purists. In a town of Falls’ size and prideful backwardness, we cannot afford to be. This is not Richmond. This is not even Raleigh. Realistically put, I have lost two students in the past four years to death by tapeworm. In such a milieu, how foolish This Reader would be to expect any pupil gifted with the natural tonal grandeur of a Gibbon, say, or the chaste lucent prose of a Carlyle. That stated, and a good bit conceded already, the question remains, Is Lucille’s historic tale-told view even remotely authentic? Alas, if our little pupil does have a gift, it is, I fear, not a profound cerebral one, but perhaps a propensity ‘comique.’ If her grammar does not improve, she is, I fear, going to
need
this ready mirth, as the world in general and Falls in particular deals harshly enough with the articulate. Especially with the articulate. Folk wit, an asset, doubtless, is no substitute for assiduous intellection, my young Lucille. One thinks of Novalis’ advice, highly applicable in light of our Confederate topic: ‘After losing a war, one should only write comedies.’ However ultimately bogus they might be as period re-creations, one is caught up in these tawdry puppet masques Lucille stages with such typical bumptious joy. Having conceded our young friend’s knack at interviewing and her gift for remarking a oddity, we did find this paper a bit much. It has qualities in common with her September
Ancient
History thesis, ‘Pompeii—The Last Resort, or They Never Knew What Hit Them.’ This reader is still not clear how sardonically Lucille intended her flip subheading. If she did not view it as wildly irreverent, then she is in even worse intellectual jeopardy than I—grimly overqualified for this line of work, grotesquely underpaid by this anti-progressive school system—care to deal with here. The present essay, I am pleased to remark, lacks an habitual slangy lowness. It partakes of Lucille’s narrative compulsion (remarked elsewhere, in her Citizenship report, as ‘talking in class’). That admitted, I fear that even with the rest of our year’s improvement, even with my own steadying and diligent help—help that has, at best, qualified certain local sows’ ears, if not for consideration as silk purses, then at least as more nearly wallet-quality pigskin—even given my Pygmalion to her home-carved Galatea, our Lucille will never a scholar make. An issue must be faced. Certain moments herein remain,
no other word will do, cheap.’ Speak to This Reader after class for specifics as they occur to me. I appreciate, Lucille, that you are a child positively febrile with a story-telling mission. Isn’t there the old Genoese proverb that runs: ‘Light is half a companion’? Yes. There is. It literally refers, I believe, to the companionability of sunshine. But I apply it to my little locals who—from underneath the heavy bushel known as Falls—still somehow shine. It will, I fear, be all that This Reader ever really knows of luminous company. Your earnestness is dear and sometimes heart-wrenching. Why is it that the closer to historic truth your papers venture, the more they grieve me—the more I long to protect you from all you must discover? No one can say you haven’t tried. Given that, I must ask Where, oh where, Lucille, is the requisite ‘liberal sprinkling’ of our friend the semicolon? After everything that This Reader has attempted for your betterment (the sleepless hours uncounted), be truthful, can you even use a semicolon? And, past that, might you ever come to love, yes
love
a semicolon—one set in precisely the right spot, one bridging parallel ideas? ‘Love,’ in This Reader’s opinion, is not too strong a term. You already dote upon History. Now you must learn to embrace, yes, embrace Punctuation,/.;:!

“Punctuation is, my young Lucille, quite probably all the control, weaponry, and, yes, the summa of allure that we more sensitive women of Falls will ever exercise. My dear, do learn to enjoy it.”

SO
: finally, what is Lilac?

Well, come late April/early May, lilacs are. It being spring in 18 and 65, these bushes begun popping open everywheres, unasked for yet exceptional as Nature’s been being since Adam served as first plantation gardener (Jan. 10000
B.C.
).

We’re talking eight-foot hedges of Marsden lilacs rolling downhill—stretching from the post road clean around farm’s lily ponds, skirting the mansion proper—edging its wide lawn and running flush to riverbank where some blooms—like privileged winners of a bushes’ race—tipped in and took a drink. (I’m making this part of our story be picture-book pretty in a semi-Woolworth’s way since the next stuff is right grim. Honey, that’s both a threat and a promise.)

Yeah, lilacs, quite the spectacle for eye and nose, eleven hundred hybrid shrubs planted in 1821, fertilized with bonemeal, tended by slave labor, and doing just fine. Some jealous neighbor had teased Lady: She must be burying her dead slaves under them bushes, so burly did they grow.

This plantation was
called
The Lilacs. The Marsdens pretended there won’t another such bush blooming for counties around. And true, none rose to being such Junior Trees. The six-hundred-yard-long hedge had been featured—with its own engraving—in
Jennings’ Notable Curios and Vistas of
the American South
(1856). Its author, a English lady, believed her hosts at finer homes across the territory. She wrote of hearing contented slaves—after a happy day’s work—playing banjos in many a Quarter.

If Uncle Primus, head gardener, bought lilac bushes from Rocky Mount’s best nursery, and if any one tried blooming white, well, into the fire went that pretender. White was Lady M.’s color. Black, her slaves’. Purple did her lilacs grow. Goal: keeping all three shades in place, no blending. Separate but separate.—You know the three-toned ice cream you see nowadays—lined like a contest, each tint trying to give them others the cold shoulder? Like that. But, hey, onct blurring starts, bye-bye to the total setup. Darling? Melting is real hard to reverse. Take the word of somebody my age.

Ingredient number three: Lilac.—Now we’re cooking.

Baked Alaska.

DOES
such plantation lore seem ancient history, lava cold as Pompeii’s? Listen, honey, even now, with a housing project and one corner of a mall sealed overtop The Lilacs’ former two thousand acres, some of its bushes yet survive.

At the Big Elk Browse ’n’ Buy Mall’s parking lot’s east end, around a few of them stainless-steel lampposts stuck out lonely in the tar, come spring you’ll spy green heart-shaped leaves pushing up for air. The strength of things!

Next year in early or mid April, please notice certain purple stunted blooms. A testament to … something. Maybe: How stubborn beauty is. Maybe: How this Yankee-operated Mall (my favorite orderly here, he just told me the whole shebang is owned outright by a syndicate from
Japan)
still can’t squelch the tints and odors of a region. Maybe it shows: How, onct you write you a fifteen-pager that runs overlong, you notice this here local topic ever after. Or maybe something else.
You
decide. I got my hands full, telling.

“Cheap,” which part did she mean? Surely History itself played fast and loose to plunk a mall over the manor in question. History did, though. Look it up. Under acres of car lot, and rushing through titanic pipes, a river got corseted by cunning Northern engineers (or Nipponese ones). This now allows shoppers (my wheelchair among them, I’ll admit) to swarm through cheap boutiques set smack where shad onct swum, where lilacs by the dockside bloomed.

And on this very spot, my darling history buff—in the spring of 18 and 60—you might have seen, out near what’s presently the off-ramp curving past Dunkin’ Donuts (I swear I’ve never set foot in the place—mainly because I’m on wheels), you could have seen one lady wearing white, studied by a army of shirtless black runners. They awaited her signal. The lady was deciding on her lilacs’ coming-out date. Escorted by white parasols edged with Brussels lace, wearing the first known pair of sunglasses at large in eastern North Carolina—called “smoked” (a prediction)—Lady M. strolled
and finally nodded that, yes, her eleven hundred bushes
would
reach their cumulus peak on the Saturday forthcoming. Was then she give her royal hand-jiggle wave. Was then slave runners trotted off, bound up and down the river road towards your choicest farm-owning gentry twixt here and New Bern, practically.

Whenever she required her strong male slaves to do showy chores like today’s Lilac-Time marathon run, Lady asked them to please go shirtless. Was due to one reason (her favorite). “Something about it appeals to me,” she tapped a fingertip to chin. The Lilacs owned fourteen blooded saddle horses and uncounted mules—but the dark young men scattered on bare feet, their fine chests showing.