That Spunky Old Belle Isn't Just Whistlin' 'Dixie'
Bruce WeberNovember 18, 2003: Lucy Marsden, the narrator of Allan Gurganus's popular 1989 novel, ''Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,'' is 99 years old. The date is 1985, and Lucy is in the Lane's End rest home, spilling out her life story, mostly about her marriage to the final Confederate survivor of the Civil War, whom she married when he was 51 and she 15. With her husband's memories seemingly absorbed as her own, her life seems to span well over a century in rural North Carolina, from the days of slaves and slaveholders to the days of T-shirts that read, ''Disco Ain't Dead Yet.''
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