Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (54 page)

For onct, mothers quit fussing at their noisy little ones. Seems that Behaving has sprung from Lady’s white Spode and from the overseer’s whip. With these gone, with Lady so past caring, laws feel like runaways gone North. But, honey, rules are really just circling back, tiptoeing. Comes around, goes around. Revolutions do like that, don’t you know. And freed folks—beginning to suspect this—sure quiet down. You see women looking over shoulders. They seem fearful that one person’s happiness might someway leach all others’. They’re used to Lady’s airy comfort being fueled by their own cellar lack of it. Now every time somebody grins or seems to have a minute’s fun, others turn her way, “What
she
planning?” Daylight here must mean it’s night back home in Africa. “Where was Moses when the lights went out? Standing in the corner with his shirttail out.”

EVERY
black person in Marsden ownership long ago got sized up, if lazily. Castalia: quick, bossy, sharp, hard. Zelia: a cloud in a pocket—half again too vague. Xerxes … etc. Judged, each slave then turnt into a canny actor, determined to get along by playing out the owner’s decision. Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light.

These parts got perfected above nearbout any other Lilacs skill. Lady was such a genius at her own tender temperamental role, she forever expected a good show from others.

So, what happens when the landlord that called you “handsome” or “featherbrained” slides past noticing? With your audience and management gone—you can start over. But how, honey? Maybe this is why these folks keep so still and sulky two days past the fire. They act worried: what if friends make them
continue
whatever disposition they choose to try out first. Used to working for a single lady, seems like one of them must now rise up, try taking over Lady’s role.

Old Miss Zelia appears to suddenly want the job. Z keeps stick-figuring to and from the woods, face caged in with plans, hands fisted, pouchy eyes alive. Castalia, a young woman who’s been the group’s main steady opinion, acts semi-disgusted, watching Z want it so bad. Others figure: the head-honcho-ette job should only go to somebody that wouldn’t ever choose it.
Only then will you be safe from your own kind becoming a worse copy of Lady.

One thing’s sure: The first Freedom is Insomnia. What’s the second Freedom? When does the Flight part come? Where’s the fun?

USED TO
doing everything in groups, even having dormitory married relations in sight and earshot of each other, folks now start stealing off by theirselves. One by one, women and children trail toward the woods like seeking whatever answers are stowed out yonder with the furniture. In the Big House, these items just meant a set of chores. But finding them out here, it’s magic, like stumbling onto Pompeii’s stopped-clock luxury made into preserves for you.

Old Zelia, alone, in woods, turns back the tarp, chooses a fine salmon-pink wing chair. Once in it, she pulls tarp’s canvas back over her gray head. It’s like Catacombs—she’s listening, cynical but interested. A wood thrush sings nearby. Z hopes the wild bird and this satin chair will whisper some secrets, offering strengths she now needs. Z is onto eighty-one. Seems her chance has finally found her. Nights, she can’t hardly sleep for the ambitions working in her head—wishes whining, noisy as a market Saturday in Falls. Alone now, under the cover, touching her own beef-jerky face and bagpipe throat, Miss Zelia cries. From the excitement. It’s a pink wing chair. She daydreams of flying.

“
WHEN
we leaving?” Xerxes asks that midnight.

Cassie answers, “When we knows how.”

FIRST
black stragglers are seen wandering the post road, headed
out
of Falls and pretty doggone quick. Castalia spies folks that traipsed to town three days before. Now here they come lugging a small fellow on a stretcher. Strangers hint, he has been shot for stealing bread. But when The Lilacs’ group draws near, asking about Freedom, wanting some of liberation’s How To’s, the group is plainly laughed at. One man says, “Ladies, I invites you to hike in, try it for youselfs. You has to make it up while you goes. Seem like that what Freedom mean. I dearly hopes you-all is better at it than this winged baby brother mine done been.”

Studying the downhill road, Baby Venus later asks, “Where do that Young Linking Man be?” Grownups stare her way. No adult has ever described the holy bearded giant they’ve been waiting on. Venus—honey-colored, with Evidence’s own big gray Marsden eyes—has siphoned news from nowhere, the way kids do. All servants here have specialized in asking questions whose answers they well know. Each now suspects that this child is putting them on.

Cassie’s neutral face sure worries her friends. One noon, she suddenly rises and goes kicking a dried pumpkin up and down the farm road till there’s little left of pumpkin. She’s grumbling to herself. Others see her squat then, making water in plain view the way children will, ignoring a nice privy still out back. She daubs her cheekbones with chalky mud from the riverbank, like Tuscarora war paint. “You sick?” Xerxes calls.

“I a pure-blood African princess. Who you, mongrel?” For some reason, he laughs at this. Then so does she. Which makes the others feel only a little easier.

I said how, before the fall of the House of Lilacs, Castalia got along by being semi-rude, flirting with danger, her back a cat-o’-nine-tails’ copybook. How Old Zelia inched through by clowning, blinking then scratching her grizzled head, seeming charmingly forgetful all these years. In Z’s early days, with Lady’s sensible mother in charge, rumor claimed Zelia was somebody else—sharp, ordered, fine-looking—her role was then more like Cassie’s under pre-burn Lady. Questions: Has the main thing a body’s been known for at The Lilacs now been proved as wrong as slavery? How much gumption will it take for, say, Little Xerxes, just gone eleven, to decide he ain’t naturally the crafty actor Lady noticed at age three (and, by noticing so grandly, part-invented)? And if the child picks to sober some, will he be doing that only out of spite?—Honey, which talent of yours, praised and shaped by your bosses, got sized up correct? Does the basic cruelty of a lady’s owning you cancel everything she’s ever guessed, predicted, or loved about you? Can you love a owned one? Can you own a loved one?

Now it’s Cassie who seems ready to sit in one sunny spot and go blank. The young woman acts bone-tired. Odd, she ain’t even noticed her exhaustedness till right now.

Zelia, suddenly faster-moving, begins directing others about. She sweeps the quarter (first person since the fire to touch a broom by choice). Nobody acts on Z’s commands but everybody watches her. “Miss Zelia, who
you
now?” Xerxes asks, meaning it, ready to revise his imitation of the overly easy-to-copy old-time Z.

WOMEN
watch their children pull back Lady’s cloth. Women let them. It’s day four after the mansion’s fall. Kids scan a scarred shape—they act saddened by such damage. Children stare hard at each other, then back at her. Venus soon gets to giggling. Next, young ones are just rolling all around. One child quits laughing long enough to huff, “She … sure … got … one … nappy pussy.”

This just doubles them up. But, hooting, they run off quick. Each feels scared the boss is only playing possum. Maybe the fire’s been staged, a test of loyalty. If so, they’ve surely flunked. She’ll wake, she’ll have them lashed,
she’ll shut them in the root cellar, where slaves once got weeks of solitary punishment, where some died.

Three days after torches left their mark on her home and person, whilst ex-Marsden helpers set cooking greens here in the sun, Lady—with long frightening tearing sounds—opens one eye, then the other. Children, turning, scream. Whites of Lady’s eyes have been so seared by heat they show the exact color of her blood. It’s like looking through the side of a clear gondola punch bowl at whatever liquid it guards. Eyes’ centers have stayed their own pale whitish blue. Her face is red, black, gray like the head of a ugly hybrid duck Mabry kept on his lily pool—one that folks felt sorriest for, one they threw extra bread and cake. She now studies a cooking pot, sees people scrambling away from her, then—straining so hard to focus or to understand—her whole head topples forward. She is snoring like a sailor. Even Zelia laughs, relieved. “Whoo,” goes Z. “Look like she done drawed in bad fumes from all them jewels in the vault, see. Rubies flown, for punishment, to she very eyes.” Zelia checks to see how many appreciate her explaining.

Squatting, Castalia snorts, shifts to one side, won’t add nothing.

BY DAY
, Xerxes scrubs his hankie ascot, preparing for town like it’s some show he’s willing to do but only if properly begged. Z, prodding through charcoal at the Big House’s edge, finds a copper cask holding relics of the master: his pince-nez—glass intact, grosgrain ribbon burnt. Z now puts specs on the way a teacher might, pinching the end of her flat nose. Children sashay around her, asking (hoping—like all of us—to finally be discovered), “Can you see me clear? How I look?”

But farsighted Zelia only squints towards the Big House’s hazy foundation. Z scratches her head, then points. “Hey, wait. What that stuff between the bricks?”

It’s been Z’s duty for the last thirty years, rising first on Thursday mornings, to light the breakfast fire. (The kitchen outbuilding has burned to the ground four times before. It sets a safe sixty feet behind the mansion to spare grease fire’s spreading.) Since Sherman killed the clocks, don’t nobody remember just what day of the week it is. (Sunday mornings off gave slaves their one weekly drop stitch.) But even so, early this Thursday morning (Z’s duty day), when the light hangs sour and gray over pinewoods due east, one crabbed body does stagger from the quarter. Rubbing sleep from eyes, she sets the suddenly necessary spectacles in place.

Half asleep, she’s edged toward the cook shack. Z is hoisting two big logs and some kindling off a unburned pile.

Then Old Z notices. Gone. It’s all of it gone.

Die-hard frogs still croon from ponds. Rags of mist soften the woods’ far edge. Every sooty blade of grass looks glassy with dew. And right then, from six spots all across Nash County, six surviving roosters offer peaked and rusty songs towards the sun. (They think, if birds
do
think, that they
sound pretty good. Males, they hate each other’s songs. Each believes he ain’t just announcing the day but he’s personally carving it, by voice, by will. Like me, someway hoping that everything I can rest here in my bed and try describing is therefore someway
so
. Poor birds, they’re a lot everybody else, child.—We all think life is
for
us!)

Well, Zelia sure tosses down that heavy firewood, she twirls on one ankle broomstick-thin. She crooks a thumb under either arm like for to pull at new suspenders, and—head thrown back, arms flapping like stunted bantam wings—yodels her own creaking “EEE err eee err eeee.—Z Be Freee!”

Then, hand holding the pince-nez in place, head lowered like a person on some mighty major mission, Zelia nearbout runs, determined, back to bed.

YOU MIGHT
could wonder, darling, why these folks ain’t yet hightailed it. They could. But from their hillside, looking down onto the river road, they’ve already seen twenty-odd more black folks who dashed to Falls three days before come drooping, raging back.

Retreaters, noticing Marsden freed folks still huddled near a uphill fire, try and make their strides appear more sure. One spiffy young fellow stops for water. Using a stick, he skims the ashy lid off one lily pond’s corner. He was owned by Mabry—a gent who chose to stay high in his burning mansion’s cupola, a gent who shouted benedictions on his land while, somewhat late, giving his slaves their freedom, then (believing hisself to be captain of a great white-tiered sinking ship) rode to the ground in Shadowlawn’s great house.

Mabry’s ex-valet now claims: center-city Falls is one ripe mess. Black folks, expecting their due, keep meeting white folks busy being bad losers. Whites are now hiring armed guards (freed slaves seeking work). Guards patrol white porches. They sleep in white-owned garden houses, preventing such white/black blurring as fires out this way have unloosed. Falls’ commercial street is prone to pushing and stealing, with outsized punishments for both. Two hangings took place in the Courthouse Square last Monday alone. Was the sheriff’s day off.

“If you does move to town? and should you walk on the street? and do it be a Monday? don’t you even take the time of day from nobody. Hear?”

“They owes us.” Zelia’s head swings southwest towards Falls. The young man laughs. “If
anybody
do, them what owned you owes you.” He points uphill to snaggled steaming columns, planks yet smoldering these days later. Lady Marsden snoozes against a sunlit stuccoed wall nearby. Nobody mentions how “they” still live close by—in her, it. Nobody much remembers.

News of the hangings naturally scares folks here. Anyhow, they’ve always
wondered what this farm would feel like without chores to make a body hop. They vote to stay on till Lady changes: either by getting well enough to understand or by dying. Whichever comes first.

Many post-road walkers are headed North, bound for what? the President’s promised linking? But Castalia guesses most are wandering right back to woods around the plantations they know—spots where possums are slow enough to stone or club, where bright sunfish bite real quick. Freed folks require a good feeding before gallivanting toward New York City town.

Seeing the Falls exodus, free folks on this hill stare at one another and then over to their sleeping mistress—like blaming her. Maybe they’re still seeking Lady’s permission to clear out. Maybe they’re waiting to take a rock and crush her skull but just ain’t learned that yet.

THE SLAVE
garden yet offers baby carrots, fresh greens, volunteer zinnias colorful here and there. After Marsden work dawn to dusk, black people tended this plot by lamplight. Seems a year ago, it’s been under a week. Slaves could keep whatever sprung from their own acreage—Winch often remarked how large their yield stood compared with Master’s. Now this food alone sustains them. The two-hundred-acre cornfield was set ablaze when woods did.