War Starter

By Jordan McClung

Novel of pre and post Civil War fiction much of the time viewed through the diaries of an island plantation girl as she grows up against violent and irrational backgrounds, finds different understandings.. Lots of internal dialogue, because that seemed a good sharing device.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728314426

Jordan McClung

The author claims to be a tarnished product of coastal South Carolina white old family culture; southern (South & North Carolina) by education and experience. For better or worse, little of that culture took deep root. He has long been happily married and resides in North Carolina.

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© 2019 Jordan Mcclung. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/31/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1430-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1429-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-1442-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019907167

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

I. Miss Mac and Beatrice

II. Tilda Starts Her Diary

III. Back at Twa Corbies

IV. Men of Mark and Ladies of Evening

V. Goodness and Mercy

VI. Sermon

VII. Carrying On

VIII. Billy

IX. Farewell, Twa Corbies

X. Job’s Echo

XI. Christ and War

XII. Like Minds

XIII. Coastal Adventures

XIV. Back to the War

XV. Inter Bella

XVI. 1886

XVII. Ending Road

XVIII. Vale, Pater

XIX. 1894: A Jim Crow Anecdote

XX. New World Dawning

CHAPTER 1

Miss Mac and Beatrice

A person, a very old white lady, a bit tall for her generation and very thin for any generation, lived alone and waited for her days to end in the small, simple house her father had left her in a very small town on the South Carolina coast. Decades before, she had affixed a wooden shingle to her front door. It displayed words from one of the favorite poets of her youth:

Some are born to sweet delight

Some are born to endless night.

That thought had dwelt in her heart more urgently in years past. Now it had faded but was not gone entirely.

She awaited also the outbreak of a great, incomprehensible violence, at least the third such in her lifetime, if she should live to know about it. There had always been waves of violence and savagery. She ought to have grown inured to it. She was now ninety-four years old, and for most of that time, she had waited in apprehension of violence to come, lived in the violence around her, or was remembering violence that had seemingly spent itself but in fact was resetting to happen again in a different place.

As a French person might say: reculer pour mieux sauter. In her remote past, this old lady had known French fairly well, for a person who had never traveled to France or even to Canada; she owed it to a good teacher, who had likewise never, as far as she knew, crossed our nation’s borders. But now her language skills were largely eroded; she didn’t even get to speak much English on some days. She was not sure how well she remembered the olden times, although she had maintained a diary sporadically over some of those years. One or two tattered and dusty handwritten volumes may still have lain in some dusty cranny in her dusty little house. This venerable lady no longer had sufficient curiosity to dig them out.

She now kept Tar, an ordinary-looking elderly black dog with a silvering muzzle, and several cats, mostly lacking names, who sometimes disappeared for short or long periods or for good. She fed the cats what she could and was kind to them. Birds patronized her backyard feeding stations where they in turn were often patronized as such by the cats. A colored lady named Beatrice (pronounced Be-AT-us by most local people but not by Miss Mac), perhaps two decades younger than the white lady, came in two or three times a week to help clean, to do errands, and sometimes to cook a little. For a brief while, her employer had done similar service for an old lady long before—service that had left her heart darkened ever since.

In winter, when it got dark early or the weather was bad, the servant lady might spend the night with her employer and sleep under blankets on the well-worn but comfortable settee. Beatrice addressed the older white lady as Miz Mac or ma’am. The two ate at the same kitchen table, which was not entirely normal for their time and place. Miss Mac couldn’t possibly pay much, and Beatrice accepted the prevailing rate of a dollar and a half per day, partly because she could not get more anywhere else. And, mainly, because she was very fond of Miz Mac. The two comforted each other when life seemed especially bleak and sad. Their sentiments and opinions did not always coincide, but they never quarreled seriously. By May of 1940, seventy-five years after the American Civil War, twenty-two years after the Great War in Europe, and about eleven years after the stock market crash, they had been together four years.

Their lives together were simple. Beatrice did most of the work on her days and, for an extra seventy-five cents, took home Miz Mac’s soiled clothing and linens to wash, boiling them in a big black cast-iron pot in her yard, hanging them out to dry, and then pressing them with a heavy, woodstove-heated iron. The local grocery store, run for many years by the nice Gray family, employed a white or colored boy of about eighteen years or so who would deliver food items in a noisy old pickup truck, if you telephoned in your order. But you had to belong to the small minority who had both telephone service and charge accounts. Miz Mac had some credit but lacked a telephone. So, Beatrice, as the younger and somewhat spryer of the two, was obliged to trudge the modest distance to the store when supplies got low. The boy with the truck eventually delivered. Beatrice purchased an occasional pouch of Peach sweet snuff out of her own money. Miz Mac disapproved of the tobacco habit but said nothing.

Miz Mac had long years ago known—indeed, been born into—considerable wealth and privilege, during which time she had been mostly unhappy. Later she experienced the discontent of poverty and diminished privilege. Beatrice had been poor and without privilege her whole lifetime and seldom thought much about happiness one way or the other. She came from the South Santee region.

Beatrice, if you don’t mind, tell me again, please, were you born free or …? the ancient white lady asked in a louder voice than was strictly necessary. Each assumed the other was deafer than she really was and spoke accordingly. The two sat in the smelly heat of the cumbersome and temperamental kerosene cookstove in the white lady’s cluttered kitchen on a very warm afternoon in late spring.

In my mama belly when first shot fired at Fort Sumter, Beatrice shouted. She had been taught to believe that, but it may not have been true. She nodded and looked grave. She had long tried to visualize a fetus in utero but lived some decades too early to satisfy that curiosity.

Oh, yes, I remember that, Beatrice. You told me. Where is my mind? The white lady rubbed her hands together. Different fingers hurt from arthritis at different times of different days. Her left hand was dominant, but in terms of hurting, both seemed about equal. Some days nothing really hurt much. She rhetorically thanked the Lord for such times, though she had no idea who, what, or where this Lord was or how he brought about whatever things he was credited with or blamed for. Papa, a professional clergyman as well as a planter, had not been able to explain. Saint Paul said or implied that if you don’t believe now, you will never learn to believe. That didn’t make sense to her now any more than it had eighty years before. The maxim It takes money to make money has a certain cynical truth to it, she conceded. But the Pauline dictum was different.

My, my, said Miss Mac as she continued to rub her hands together. That war was such a dreadful thing! I remember those days. I wanted to die then and always expected to. I lost one brother that I know of, Christopher James. Not my best brother. Still a brother, nonetheless, or half brother, anyway. But Papa lived till near the year 1900, and he at some point claimed that he had played a part in starting the war. He had grown rather sad about that. Each morning I am surprised that I’m still alive. I never expected to be. I thought I would not live to any age at all. She pronounced both syllables in at all distinctly, though long, long ago, her mother and some other, mostly female, adults had told her that only unrefined people or Yankees said it that way, and Southern aristocrats should say uh-TALL. Everything is so strange. She used to cry sometimes when thinking about those distant times, but of late, the well of her tears had been drying up. Some emotional chapters had been partially or wholly deleted from the book of her life—or never been clearly written.

Yes, yes, war a awful thing. But some time it just got to commence. Some time. Beatrice pronounced war and thing as waw and t’ing, according to her region and culture. Miz Mac said waw-uh according to her own culture. Yankee final-r endings had not yet made much progress in the postwar Southeast. Beatrice had lowered her voice to a more normal level.

You got much family still around, ma’am? Beatrice gathered her strength to shout again. She had asked that question a number of times in the past and received responses but kept forgetting what the responses were.

Some down around Charleston still. A niece and maybe a nephew still on the little bit left of the old plantation. We don’t correspond much, just out of the habit, I guess. Brother was a doctor up in Georgetown, been dead for years now—before the big war in Europe. I seem to get a letter or even a telegram when somebody dies. Some of my people still own part of the old plantation, but I don’t really know them too well. Papa remarried and had even more children after Mama died—down to the midseventies. I don’t know too much about them now. Some others live in the North, I think. One half sister is a doctor up north, thirtysome years younger than me—smart lady, I assume, though I’ve seldom seen her. Don’t go to funerals anymore and don’t get invited to weddings. So many children Papa had, besides me! From three wives! Scattered now, all scattered or dead. Miz Mac removed her thick-lensed glasses and laid them atop the wobbly utility table. Her faded blue eyes gazed on nothing that needed much focus or magnification.

Am I talking too much? she wondered.

Miz Mac sometimes made the Sunday trek to attend the town’s tiny Episcopal church, both to be sociable and to listen to the music as a change from radio music and radio afternoon stories and talk. One or two of the oldest congregants retained memories of Miz Mac’s father as pastor of the pretty little church, but they seldom talked about him with his aged daughter. He had acquired a reputation for eccentricity over the years—well, he had always been eccentric from some points of view—and the daughter might have been embarrassed or offended by some of the anecdotes about him that still circulated through the region. Miz Mac enjoyed the cadences of the old Anglican liturgy as led by Mr. Allington. Whatever your theology, you couldn’t beat the old faithful King James Version! Mr. Allington was from the North, and most of the congregation here didn’t like him much because he tried too often to relate scripture, both Old and New Testament, to moral questions of the present day. Miz Mac respected and liked him and hoped he would never hear any of the mean things some of his church people said about him.

Papa had preached mostly literal scripture and probably believed much of what he preached, though he had, late in life, secretly come to be disturbed by some odd thoughts and images that had invaded his mind, waking or sleeping. He had been a fairly learned man who held a degree from Yale College up in Connecticut, with which the MacGregor family had once had some early connections, though Miz Mac could no longer remember much about those connections. Like others of his time and cast of mind, Papa had usually seemed able to wall himself off from questions and doubt until near his death. He had shown kindness and affection to his pretty and clever red-haired daughter, who was now ninety-four and white-haired and much less clever, and to some of his other children, as well as, perhaps, to his successive wives. He had also owned a middle-sized plantation with a commensurate number of Negro chattel servants, but most of that, of course, evaporated with the War of Secession. Papa in his heyday would likely not have cared much for Mr. Allington. And Mr. Allington would likely not have been so friendly with Papa.

Miz Mac had always loved animals and suffered with their sufferings. She sometimes walked around her little lot with a pocketful of peanuts for the sassy, self-important squirrels that scampered insolently about and challenged all with their wriggling tails. Pecans they could harvest for themselves, but black walnuts, which were also plentiful in the area, might be too hard-shelled for even them to crack open readily. Miz Mac was sad when people shot any squirrels—men to feed their families, young boys to watch them fall gracefully through the air. And, in warmer months, she would sit for an hour at a time and observe a large yellow-and-black web-building spider whose colors spoke religiously to her soul; she had watched such spiders in her youth and had even learned their scientific name, but that name was long forgotten. And such spiders had grown fewer with the passing summers and the swell of human population.

Occasionally Tar would visit her and thrust his silvering muzzle into her cupped palm, sharing comfort with his mistress, who was older even than himself.

On her mantelpiece she kept a very dusty, scratched and dented old kaleidoscope, which she seemed to value but could no longer enjoy much because of her failing eyesight.

She and Beatrice, both mistress and servant, shared an enthusiasm for vegetation. The old, white plantation-born lady was expert on roses, azaleas, and dogwood. The less old, also plantation-born, colored lady specialized in seed-grown flowers and edible plants. Between the two, they made their little gardens thrive. They were a harmonious team! Four years now they had been together.

Memories. Miz Mac walked or, perhaps better said, hobbled through an ether of memories. Ether had been a theme word for her since childhood, when she first learned from her teacher about the universal, invisible stuff that permeated the universe and enabled light energy to traverse measureless space to bring starlight and moonlight to our earthly eyes as we sat on our piazzas at night. She pounced on that idea to help her try to understand God. Nobody believed in that ether theory anymore, but almost everyone still claimed to believe in some kind of god. At the age of ninety-four, Miz Mac still did not understand: Light energy but not sound energy?

At odd hours of the day or, even more, the night, she peered into the three-walled room of her past and resaw and reheard and reexperienced so much.

She remembered: Morning in late spring. Holding Papa’s bony, short-fingered hand and walking along the rice field bank. Papa, look at all those birds, what are they doing?

Mockingbirds mostly. But others as well, flocking together, circling and dropping down angry and screaming, diving beak-first at something on the bank.

What, Papa?

Get closer.

A snake, thick and black and much longer than her arm or even Papa’s arm. Moccasin, Papa said.

Oh, look, his eyes are gone! His head is bleeding. The birds we love are killing the snake we dread.

Snake tries to fight back, but is too slow and too blind. He needs to die, or he might swallow the birds’ eggs or their babies that come out of the eggs, or he may bite people in their ankles.

Die, bad snake!

Papa humanely finishes killing evil snake with big walking stick—crunch, crunch. Men always kill snakes. Little girl cries. Remember, says Papa, serpent caused Eve to sin. And Eve caused Adam to share that sin also. Maybe caused poor Cousin Malcolm to be crazy. Little girl cries anyway.

Remember: Grandmother J. She died because old grandmothers get even older with time and die same as everything else. No one would miss her much because she had not been friendly or kind, and her body was often taut and rigid with anger or something akin to anger, usually over something a child or a Negro had said or done. But the little girl saw her grandmother’s dead white face in the coffin and cried and remembered. She would still remember Grandmother J., even though she had not liked her.

Remember: plantation Negroes, who had names like Jesse and Katie and Jim and Hercules and … Could Hercules really be enslaved if he was so strong and could kill many-headed hydras and powerful lions? Some Negroes were kind, and some were cruel or a mixture of kind and cruel. Remember all kinds. But some of the cruel ones had an excuse because white people had been cruel to them. Remember the songs they sang, the music they made. White people could make good music too, but Negro music was different and sometimes better. Our family had no members who were good musicians.

Remember: some love and kindness and cruelty and meanness. View colorless moving forms. Hear long-stilled sounds.

Smell: sweet flowers and baking bread and chamber pot stench and privy stench of pee-pee and doo-doo and long-unwashed armpits and other pits, animal carcasses rotting in field and woods. Today, some say we can’t really reexperience past sense-perceptions, but Miz Mac thought that she could. And below it all lay some things that Miz Mac could not revisit because they had sealed themselves too deep, too far away. Some may have been locked in a diary. But she never read her diaries anymore. Nor could she even find most of them.

Miz Mac? Miz Mac? Mac? You in there? Where you at? Oh, Law! O Jesus! Your hand so cold now! Beatrice realized that she was now perhaps the oldest living person in the little house.

Tar nuzzled and licked at the old lady’s uncupped hand, as a previous dog had done with a previous human at the same bed several decades before. Dog and human family history repeated.

Beatrice hobbled along the clean, white sidewalk that the WPA had provided for the villagers but a year or two before.

An old car, a chugging Ford coupe, slowed alongside Beatrice as she stumbled forward, heading for the doctor’s office, a very long walk for so old a person.

What’s wrong, Beatrice? a young white man named Jerry called through the open window of the Ford. His voice expressed concern, but he did not remove the cigarette from between his lips.

Miz Mac dead, Mr. Jerry. Seem dead, anyway. I must go fetch doctor.

Well, get in the car, Beatrice. Take you forever to walk that far. I’ll sho’ take you there. He stopped and leaned to push open the passenger door of the Ford. There was not an easily accessible back seat, so the driving and smoking man patted the seat beside his own. Beatrice moved slowly and painfully to enter.

Sho’ hope the doc’s up by now. And it’s a damn shame if she’s really dead. Course, she was mighty old, I reckon. Prob’ly oldest person in the village. Can’t nobody live forever, said the white man around his cigarette.

Sho’ hope so too, Mistah Jerry, said Beatrice in affirmation of at least one of the young man’s comments. She drew a wrist across each teary eye and then strained to pull the heavy car door to.

She don’t respond when you talk to her? The white man flicked the ash from his cigarette through his open window and returned the half-spent coffin nail to his lips.

No, suh. Don’t speak nor move. Hands awful cold. A shallow sob passed through the old woman’s thin body.

Damn, said the driver, again around his cigarette. Yeah, sound like she sho’ gone, and doc can’t he’p her no more.

But doctor need to announce her dead. She ought to have said pronounce. This same physician, Dr. Smiley, had announced Beatrice’s sister, husband, and little boy dead. He had written fever in the blank space for the sister, brain injury from fall (and, in fact, the man had fallen after being struck) for the husband, and unknown for the little boy. The husband, Hamp, who had never been a very good husband or man, had actually been murdered. He had been slightly drunk one morning and had sassed his employer, who then struck him in the head with a length of lumber without meaning to kill him, but Hamp died anyway a week or so later. And no one had come forward to give testimony in the matter.

The doctor was a nice man, but he was getting too old to serve much longer. Beatrice hoped he might stay active long enough to sign her own certificate. But she would have to hurry and pass on!

Beatrice had lived in the country as a child, grown up on the edge of the South Santee plantation where she had been born amid social chaos and some scattered fighting. Luck was with her: her folks had, post-Emancipation, never known acute, life-endangering hunger or cruel cold. A couple of altruistic northern ladies had organized a little postwar school for colored children, and there she learned some important things: reading, writing, numbers, and a little history stirred in, which made some white people angry because they considered the history inaccurate and believed it promoted a spirit of grievance among the young colored folks. Beatrice largely forgot the history and some of the ’rithmatik. Miz Mac herself had worked at a similar school for some years.

The young white man pulled up in the side yard of Dr. Smiley’s house, which was where the physician kept his office. A couple of the doctor’s handsome Rhode Island red hens had escaped their own house and now puttered about their new territory clucking in mournful bliss.

Dr. Smiley was still drinking his second or third cup of morning coffee and looked sleepy. Mrs. Smiley, who served as his nurse and receptionist, noted Beatrice’s agitation and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

Miz Mac dead, I believe. Beatrice managed to say before her tears overcame her.

Oh, Lord! Beatrice, said the doctor and his wife in sequence. They let the servant woman sit in a straight-backed chair in the waiting room to regain her composure. The white waiting room.

She was at least ninety, mused the physician. Originally from Jim Island, I think, Plantation with a funny name. Very pretty in her youth—judging from old pictures. Still a handsome lady. Had she ever been married, do you know, Beatrice? Any children? Where had the doctor seen pictures of the lady as a young person? Maybe in the little Episcopal church where her father had preached in past years?

Can’t say for sho,’ Doctor. Don’t think so. Beatrice would surely have known if her friend and patron had been somebody’s wife and mother, but, when talking with meaningful white folks, it often seemed best to give tentative responses.

Beatrice suddenly realized that she was sitting in the white waiting room, and no one seemed to object. She had never been a person who openly challenged racial norms and practices, but sitting there felt vaguely pleasant, ever so slightly countering her present grief. Death, even someone else’s, really seemed to be the great equalizer, as she had often heard. The chairs there looked more comfortable than in the colored section. Dr. Smiley was known to treat Negroes quite well—within the bounds of law and local custom. Once he had been shouted at and cursed by a coarse white buckra who objected to having to wait while an injured black man was receiving emergency treatment.

Emancipation and Reconstruction had raised hopes and expectations in Beatrice’s family, and General Hampton had, at least passively, sought the Negro vote for governor but, having received some of it, walked a different path. And worse governors and lawgivers had followed—much worse. But then, Beatrice had generally taken more stock in divine governance than in human.

Dr. Smiley shook Jerry’s hand and thanked him for helping Beatrice and bringing her in. You can go on to your work now, Jerry. Grateful to you, he said. We’ll take care of Beatrice now.

Mrs. Smiley gave Beatrice some leftover toast with blackberry jelly and some boiled coffee with milk and sugar. Serving the servant. Then the doctor took her in the back seat of his four-door DeSoto to check on the old lady and to be certain she was in fact dead. She was.

Tar growled at Dr. Smiley at first and briefly bared his teeth, but then he let himself be calmed by Beatrice with words and comforting strokes. Several cats snooped around hoping to be fed by someone. Did they sense that something had gone wrong? Of the death of a human they seemed either ignorant, or perhaps they were incapable of caring.

Miz Mac’s face was as pale as Grandmother J.’s had been when she lay dead in her pinewood coffin all those decades ago. This body was longer, however, and much more slender. A head-turner in her youth, no doubt, thought the doctor and felt guilty because of the thought. Never married? No kids? How odd!

For cause of death, Dr. Smiley planned to write complications of aging in the blank provided. He would contact the usual funeral home in Georgetown to the north to come with a hearse and bring the body to their mortuary for embalming. He would inform Mr. Allington so that he could organize a modest funeral. He didn’t know for certain where the money for preparation and burial was to come from; few things in life are free—not even death. But there was time to think about that later. Did Beatrice know anything about her lady’s finances? Had the lady left a will of any kind? Talk to Beatrice about it a little later.

After a couple of days, Miz Mac returned. Duly embalmed and ready for all that awaited her: a tasteful ceremony conducted by Mr. Allington in the local Episcopal church and a dignified burial somewhere. In church, the rector gave assurance of glorious and eternal life, a better one than she had already lived. No one likely had anything against Miz Mac, but, other than Mr. Allington, only Beatrice was moved to stand and speak, though only a few words, chastened, perhaps, by the preponderance of white faces in a place where she had never stood. Colored people were still not generally welcome in white Episcopal churches in the state.

Hastily empaneled pallbearers loaded the feather-light body into the hearse for Miss Mac’s last journey: about fifty miles south across the big bridge and through some very pretty landscape.

A woman named Sarah, grand-niece of the deceased, had agreed by telephone that the old estate was probably where Miss Mac would like best to find her last repose. Conjecture, but not unlikely. There was some space left within the walls of the old family cemetery. The kindly Mr. Allington drove his little old car, by turns following and leading the black hearse. The estate was still called Twa Corbies, though no sign proclaimed it, and consisted now of only about fifty acres. A few crows were in raucous evidence.

A colored man working a garden plot stopped what he was doing, laid down his hoe, removed his hat, and watched the two-vehicle procession as it crunched up the once stately drive to the Big House that was still big, though somewhat dilapidated. No evidence of a Little House remained.

Mr. Allington met Sarah MacGregor, for now the mistress of Twa Corbies. Sarah was forty years old, lean, tan, and probably somewhat muscular: what one might in that late interwar time have called a modern woman without giving offense. Attractive in her way. She extended her hand and gave a partial smile. Sarah was an artist, good enough to earn a modest living from portraits and landscapes, but not yet well-known nationally.

Good to meet you, Mr. Allington. A shame the occasion is so sad. Of course, as a man of faith, you may not consider a person’s dying all that sad. If I should live to be ninety, I hope no one will be sad when I check out. Ninety-two or so she was, wasn’t she? Please call me Sarah, not Miss MacGregor.

Yes, ninety-four, I believe, Miss … Sarah. Please call me Raymond. Or Ray would be even better.

Mr. Allington had been a widower for several years, and he had gradually begun to enjoy again casual chatter with attractive women younger than himself. He was fifty-something.

The mortician’s crew soon set about digging. The day was bright but not excessively hot, so that the workmen didn’t sweat too much. The enclosed cemetery land was running out of new grave space. There was room beside a child’s site with a still-legible marker that said: Robert Keith MacGregor/Taken from Us to a Happier Eternity/May 4, 1859. Aged 2 yrs. Beneath the writing was a relief of a kneeling child with straight back and folded hands. Captioned: Now I Lay Me …

Sarah had already chosen and measured off the proper space.

Mr. Allington put on his vestments as the diggers dug. He disliked death despite the promise of a happy eternity. What if that promise were not kept? Or not correctly understood? His wife, Alice, had suffered long and cruelly before she died. He still had to struggle to suppress doubts and possibly sinful questioning.

When the grave was dug and the casket lowered, the pastor stood at the gravesite and spoke a short, unoffending eulogy about the lady concerning whom he knew so little and lacked the usual humorous or touching anecdotes from the life of the deceased.

Sarah, who knew only bits of family rumor and gossip that may or may not have had substance, spoke last. My aunt was a mysterious person. She marched to a different drummer, as they say. She must have felt many things more deeply than other people of her time. Strange that we really know so little about her. Now she is gone and won’t return. And even if she could return, I don’t think she would be able to answer all our questions. Rest in peace, Aunt Matilda.

The colored man who had been working in the garden and watched the hearse approach appeared quietly and stood respectfully and hatless at the low cemetery wall. A few others, both white and black, male and female, had also drifted up to listen. A century earlier, perhaps a hundred would have drifted over and grieved or pretended to grieve.

Today, a young white woman wiped her eyes and remarked to a companion, I don’t know who she was, but dead people always make me sad.

The funeral people finished their work and departed.

Sarah invited Mr. Allington into the parlor for tea and conversation. She was not by nature very sociable, but that afternoon, she felt the need to talk.

The kindly minister also grew quite open and talkative. He responded to Sarah’s brisk, unsentimental style.

I was born on New Year’s Day in 1900. Right here at Twa Corbies. It snowed hard that day and that night. Set records, maybe forever, I guess. Sarah lit a cigarette and blew a contemplative puff of smoke aloft. The two sat in the once elegant, now rather shabby, parlor. Her smoking seemed to pace and punctuate her speech. There were several well-used ashtrays in the room. Sarah sat in a very old and tattered Morris chair, its back set at the straightest notch. An austere black-and-white copy of a Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington standing beside a book-cluttered table hung above the large fireplace. The Yankees had not stripped this plantation very thoroughly.

So, you know very little about your aunt, said the minister. How so? You lived within less than a hundred miles of each other for years, I understand.

Geographically. Sarah sent a plume of cigarette smoke into the air and coughed a bit. Spiritually, or mentally I should say, she never got within a thousand miles of hardly anyone. She was alienated. She loved her brother and a sister, I guess. Her father, probably, though God knows why. Animals and nature she loved, certainly. One or two colored folks from the plantation she once had affection for, and, of course, Beatrice. Liked a few other people, me, for example, I think. But we seldom got together. Occasional meetings were enough for her.

Mr. Allington nodded and wished Sarah would quit smoking in his presence. Neither he nor his wife had ever smoked, yet Florence had died painfully of some pulmonary ailment. Somehow, there was justice—somewhere—waiting to be revealed to us on earth. There had to be.

Her father? prompted Mr. Allington. Your grandfather?

Oh, Sarah finished coughing. She smiled an almost pretty smile through tobacco-yellowed teeth. Let me fix you something to eat. My housekeeper is off today. She reminds me when it’s time to eat something. She stood up. You must be hungry by now. Remind me to talk about Grandfather when I get back. Somebody else I never saw but should know things about.

Not so hungry, but if … Sarah had left the room. Mr. Allington felt entitled to explore. As a northern man, whose ancestors had fought against Sarah’s ancestors, he sought to understand a little of the dead or, at least, slowly dying culture of white privilege and black servitude. On a table he found a Twa Corbies photograph album with some stiffly posed pictures going back to the 1850s, the early adolescence of photography. Sarah wouldn’t care that he had opened it, else she would not have left it lying in plain view.

The Big House stood, a spectral and ominous entity in the background of one prewar shot showing a white-clad young Negro alertly posing with one hand on the bridle of a confident-looking horse, gray-black in the picture, but what nuance of color would the animal have displayed in real light of day? Mr. Allington had very little knowledge of horses, anyway. The facial features of the lad were indistinct. Whirlwind with Abner, read the faded, ink-written caption. No date was given.

Mr. Allington carefully turned the fragile pages. Few of the photos bore dates. He sought pictures of Miz Mac’s parents and found only one of her father labeled Reverend Mr. M. He seemed to have a roundish, tight face behind a meager beard. And two or three supposedly of her mother. They were of poor quality and not labeled. The young Matilda appeared sporadically, looking very pretty at several ages, her eyes—hard to see though they were—at once mischievous and sad. Of her brothers and sisters only a very occasional photograph was identified by name. Two colored children, labeled as Annie and Pokey, were hard to make out in a cracked and blurred photo; their sandy-coated hound dog was better represented than the children.

Sarah reentered the parlor carrying a somewhat tarnished silver tray with rolls, sliced cheese, some sweetbreads, and a ceramic pot of tea with two cups. Her guest started as though surprised doing something improper.

Oh, I was taking the liberty … he said. This old album is …

No liberty at all. If you like, I can have copies of some pictures made for you. But the really old ones may not copy well. Tell me whether you like this tea. It’s American, from our state’s only tea plantation, only a few miles from here.

Mr. Allington, a heavy coffee-drinker, for politeness’s sake, praised the tea.

The two sat in the parlor until well into the evening. Sarah confessed that she had not attended a church service for several years but mendaciously promised Mr. Allington to mend her heathen ways and also to paint him a picture of Matilda, composite from her memory of her few encounters with the lady and pictures in the album, sign it, and send it to him. That promise she kept.

Sarah told Mr. Allington some of the family lore, which may or may not have been true, about the eccentricities of the Reverend Mr. MacGregor.

"Once he is said to have gone before a congregation, and his mind went blank, and he said, ‘I find that I have nothing to say, and I ask that you all consider it said.’ And he sometimes seemed to be obsessed with spiritualism and stuff like that. Some of that struck people as counter-Christian. He sometimes claimed that a sermon of his had started