Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (57 page)

Children wave as long as they can, long as mommas’ll let them. Lady, noticing, tries to blow them the kisses she onct awarded guests arriving in white pleasure boats.

The huddled group strides away in sun. Their heads are lifted, their shoulders set. They are taking broad steps with such sudden strength. Buttoning their tattered clothes to the neck (one way of getting formal for town), they help each other along. Folks march off double-file. Today they’re real particular about how they look. The post road twists then disappears into deep-shadowed evergreens. And on it, so do they.

Uphill, alone, and until dark, Lady keeps steadily waving. Her left hand must soon prop up the right elbow. She continues trying. It’s a mechanical signal, only half understood even to itself. And yet she does it, does it.

Soon, dew. The night gets her. She’s lost somewheres inside of that. And still she tries and wave. She nods off, exhausted, wakes, signals towards nothing for a while. As promised—that trapped cricket sings. But its icy noise gives little comfort. Locked up, the bug sings just one piping question, particular and familiar. It sings, “Why
me?
Why
me?
Why
me?”

MAYBE
it’s “cheap” to bust in here and say so, honey, but you know Little Xerxes? Well, he would become famous. He appeared as a vaudeville sand dancer/mimic playing the Albee circuit thirty-odd years down the pike. Taking full credit for inventing hisself, he dropped “Marsden” but kept the made-up-sounding “Little Xerxes.” (His moniker later trailed a
REG. U.S. PAT. OFF
. Famous for copying others, Xerxes didn’t plan on nobody’s doing that to him.)

In Raleigh, during a museum trip when I was ten, my folks took me to see him. Xerxes was headlining at the Gold Leaf Theatre (named for tobacco, the quietly cancer-causing cash crop then). Small-town life is such that my
own parents bought tickets just because this starring black man hailed from Falls or near it—just because they knew Captain Will Marsden good enough to speak to him downtown.

Xerxes’ name run second from the top. Fine print claimed he was fresh home from entertaining the Crowned Heads, whoever they are. Riding a long drumroll, he twirled out dancing to beat all. By now grown to five foot even, he was a black/white pinwheel whirring/grinning inches off the floor. Now forty, his hair’d turned white as if cornstarched. His pointy child’s-sized white shoes were so shiny. White satin tails, white top hat, white bow tie, something to see. Only his hands and face showed very brown/blue/black.—Theater!

Xerxes strewed his own danced path with sand from out his pockets, white sand—fine and store-bought as any Mall pet-shop aquarium’s. His whirligig entrance drew a great mild roar and sigh from black people in their separate balcony above us. They were invisible but tremendously heard, being our immediate roof.

Xerxes talked straight at us—confiding, leering—all while pinching yet more friction-cutting whiteness from deep pockets. He tossed it like Diamond Jim flinging fat-man tips—like we were the ducks and swans floating on our dark pond and he was feeding us from up yonder on that lighted shore. Soft white dance slippers did continuously whisper over powder—easy, sleepy, skillful, secret. My. He soon commenced to imitating all the big politicians and show folks of our day.

Unlike your usual show-business whitey (black-faced to mime blacks), Xerxes, doing whites, never stooped to paint
his
black face pale. Didn’t need to. Where was the art, the sport in that? Ooh,
his
white folks made you want to cry, “Yes, but …” Made you feel worse than blacks must of done, seeing some half-drunk cracker in burnt cork play Uncle Happy-Go-Lucky.

Xerxes’ whites were locked and vain and limited, not meaning to be, hardly noticing. He did “The Belle,” floppy as a fileted perch, and yet … half dignified, dry. Commercial gents in our audience—the prewar gentry’s loud moneyed replacements—howled, “Just
like
them.” As if the old-time landowners had already become a strange and comic race all to theirselves.

Xerxes’ paleface copies were dead accurate—a good surgeon that’s already cut you and is washing up across the room when you ask, “Sir? uh, has it started yet?” Xerxes kept each portrait small and short, a wicked series he lined up, like a row of perfect clocks. He left grandness for his own hostly manner that framed each weak white subject. Little Xerxes never mimed one black person, funny or not. Some white folks claimed that, when it came to doing colored people, Xerxes couldn’t. Black folks said he wouldn’t.

Since I was only ten, Xerxes’ impressions of famous whites stayed Greek to me. But I did notice that even my momma giggled (a accomplishment), though she did it into a hankie (like being sick). Poppa, a amateur-hour comic hisself, sat shaking his head, muttering, saddened, “It’s beyond anything. He’s way better’n me. A whole different class. How does he
do
it, you
reckon? Mirrors? Don’t you figure he must just live in front of mirrors?”

“Practice,” Momma whispered from behind her white hankie nested in a whiter glove. “And remember, Samuel, he
needs
this. Both for a living and as possible revenge. I mean, he
has
to be better than a contented, privileged person such as yourself.”

“Is
that
what I am? Well, hot dog. You know, I been wondering!”

A braid-chewing child remembers this best: At stage’s right and left stood the American flag and a North Carolina state one. Dancing, mid-imitation, nearing his act’s smooth end, Xerxes seemed to suddenly notice the Stars and Stripes. He sand-skated hippety over alongside the flag. Seemed he’d sneaked up on a live vain white person who’d most hate being copied.

One broad sandman grin widened Xerxes’ face—you seen Idea flare off over his head. His act won’t a bit like your usual banjo and bones high jinks from them days. His dignity was such—it seemed he’d paid admission to see and giggle at us white ticket holders. (Unlike Poppa and me, Xerxes always underplayed.) For him, in black and white, every motion seemed ink-brushed, shorthand, semi-Japanese.

He straightened beside red/white/blue. One cheap-gilt eagle set atop the varnished pine stave. You seen Xerxes check out a flag entire, then—tip to bottom—copy it one feature at a time. He froze, by half-inches. His head went Eagle—big old ears sticking forth like wings almost. Doing slanted stripes, one shoulder canted high, the other flagging, slackened. Tuxedo tails hung twin pennant-dividends behind. He went onto a single foot and stuck there, face being eagle, chest a proud tired angled cloth, leg the pole of all. What is a flag but a sheet, percale, appliquéd? Just a sheet, but it expects you’ll go to war and die over its three simple colors. Well, honey, by the end, I was ready to Pledge
him
Allegiance.

Sure, there’d been other flags on other stages—but someway you felt this was the first night Xerxes had noticed. Seemed like the two of you had thought this up together. He’d become It. And his being It so perfect made you wonder all the more who He must be!

Closing—Xerxes tippy-tapped over, spilling diamondy glitter like the tracks his wit left. He did the state flag, fast—making it the shyer local wife of a bolder better-traveled national one. Then off the stage he pinwheeled, spotlit, spinning.

Someway you knew he’d learnt this the way the best things get learnt—by using all of it to stay alive as hard as a body can. Try learning to tap-dance on the edge of a windy cliff. Either you really will, child, or you really won’t.

AFTERWARD
, my folks and me hurried to the stage door. Though this happened in December, we willingly waited outside for what—to a child—seemed ages. Everybody’s winter breath showed white—even black folks’, kept off to one side. Momma uncapped her best pen so Mr. Xerxes Reg.
U.S. Pat. Off. might sign our 5¢ souvenir program. Eighty people milled around, one wit in each group feebly trying and imitate His recent imitations.

Underlings bustled out first, clearing the way. A silence done resulted. After a goodly sobering wait, the star attraction finally appeared. He looked the size of a serious child. He wore one ice-creamy Cheshire-cat white fur coat tossed casual around his shoulders. His neck trailed a white silk scarf, its fringe almost touching alley’s cinders but not quite, not quite.

Following Xerxes was a tall beauty, a high-yellow boy carrying white calfskin valises, plus two tissue-paper megaphones binding dozens of white roses. Black admirers, rowdy earlier, hushed as if some spirit had drifted by. The sandman glided in a private party of local whites, rich-looking Raleighites joking overloud to entertain him. The star smiled a lidded little Buddha smile but sure seemed bushed from what he’d just offered us. By now, even Xerxes’ ugliness seemed another angle in his smart exotic plan. He appeared a person made milder, kinder by a lifetime’s steadying respect. You saw he expected years more of it.

He floated by, all foamy fur, the armada of whites setting off Xerxes’ rare dark. He was being escorted to Black Bottom’s Chitterling Palace, Raleigh’s one colored gin joint where your wilder wealthy white folks sometimes slummed.

Poppa jammed our program forward but too late. “Maestro would prefer not.” The flower-bearing boy sure sounded Yankeefied and pure. Others near us seemed disappointed too. One rawboned white man called, “Who
pays
for it?” then whispered a bad word. The fellow seemed to forget he’d just waited thirty-odd minutes to see this particular wizard of that particular race. “Now now,” my mother let the rude man hear her scolding.

But to us she said, “Well, I like
that.”

“No, we mustn’t mind,” Poppa told her. “He’s a real busy man, he’s earned the right to be.—I think it’s definitely mirrors. Yeah, instead of a mind he’s got him a … magnifying mirror. Can’t
start
stuff, just gives back. It’s a service he pervides us.—Still, truth is, some mirrors are better’n others.”

I probably picked the wrong place to break in and tell this, Miss Beale, but at my advanced age a body can get so artful in waiting for the perfect opening, she forgets to recall it ever again. So—slid in on friction-cutting sand, here, pinwheeling—it is, was, is. Taa-daa.

A MANSION
takes weeks burning to the ground. Fire, that superior unworkman, leveled the Big House two years and one month faster than sixty skilled slaves had took to build it. In The Lilacs’ quarter come night, Lady (if we can still call her that and we can, child, can’t we?) would hear another
wing of the house finally give way—one uprushing splinterish din. Red sparks spiraled far above the litter. Then, head moving so slow, long after all uplifted ash had settled, minutes past new kindling dumping onto red coals for yet more chatty burning—Lady would register the sound, her scarred face slowly turning that way four minutes late.

She stayed sane enough to find a walking stick, to search out staples, to gimp around the place on her burned soles. She’d crab her way from the quarter where she felt safest—out into a weedy slave garden. She’d been left to get along on greens her slaves had grown to feed theirselves. White cabbage butterflies (one black spot per wing) daily made lace of collards. Lady accepted them as fellow diners, her company, co-workers.

Most hours, she just sat, her eyes closed, trailing sun around the quarter’s foreyard. In olden days, except for clock-winding Thursdays, she rarely woke before noon. Now, wrapped in grimy percales, Lady M. would climb the hill above the former barn to wait for dawn’s first heat. When it found her, she made sated back-of-the-throat sounds—greeting. Times, she waved due east. Times, she seemed to think that Day itself, a gentleman caller, had come here just to see her.

She sometimes noticed the sheets’ embroidered overlapped initials. She mistook these for a spider, she’d whimper, twist aside, use a handy stone to beat at her name’s letters. Exploring, lost in the woods, she onct found a cave. In the poplar grove, Lady happened on a great green tarp. When she saw—poking out from under the cloth—a blond claw holding a brass ball—she went crying off splashing across the brook. Smoke from the mansion’s foundation always helped lead a person home to her slave’s quarter.

Lady’s burned feet soon grew infected, she learnt to get around by walking on the sides of them, by depending more on her stick, partly crawling on all fours. Her hands and knees, tops of feet and fronts of ankles, soon grew nicked then callused. Afternoons, she’d settle in daylight (like a duty) picking at the scars. Her features seemed caulked almost neutral by such burns. The surface of her face was like ceramic, a clay mask some half-talented child might make—the usual two eyes, one nose, one mouth, but recognizable mostly as a pounded
try
at looking human.

Lady’s drinking water has always been hauled from the artesian well yonder. Till children showed her, she didn’t know how such a thing quite worked. She still doesn’t rightly know. Just onct—while courting young Dr. Marsden—she’d paused here long enough to throw some coins down its cool stone mouth. Her black folks, piqued and moody, watched good money fall, hoping a penny or two might find the bucket.

Now, instead of fretting with well’s rope and pulley, Lady just caned herself downhill, moving almost on ankles to spare her soles. Giving up on the stick, she then crawled the last sixty feet. It could take her twenty minutes getting to the nearest roadside lily pond. She would settle at one edge, she’d ease her lower face into dark water, sipping sipping, a mind not much bigger than its present thirst. Her mouth in, bloodshot eyes moved—constant—
side to side across the water’s surface. Like expecting to be prevented even from this comfort. Drinking with great slurping sounds, not aware of offending anybody, she just bent here drinking—watchful, animal, innocent.

THIS SIDE
of Falls, Castalia and them others found refuge by the river. They soon discovered: Whites who’d owned best houses still owned those, and pretty well planned to continue, thank you very much. When Zelia, ham under one arm, creaked up the front walk of the downtown mansion she’d chose as the site of her at-home Mondays—when she got rudely stopped by two young black fellows holding rifles—the old woman quick invented the name of some local white family she was seeking. Then, hoisting salted pork, old Z about-faced, fast.