Confederates in the Attic (52 page)

“I remember he had big ol’ blue eyes, reddish skin and a mustache. Not bad for an old feller.” That was William Jasper Martin, the Confederate veteran. He came up the road every day to buy tobacco at a nearby store, and each time he’d chat with Alberta over the fence. “We’d talk about nothin’, what I call no sense, just talkin’,” she said. “We didn’t spark none.” Sparking was old Southern slang for flirting.

But the talk soon turned serious. “He said he was huntin’ him a wife and wondered if I’d be his,” Alberta said. “I was tired of livin’ in that house and needed somebody to help raise my boy. We’d knowed each other several months. So I told him, yeah, reckon so.”

William was eighty, but he possessed one asset most younger men lacked: a decent, steady income. As a Confederate veteran, he drew a $50-a-month pension from the state, more than many sharecroppers earned in a year, particularly during the boll weevil-wracked years of the 1920s.

“We got married at the courthouse,” Alberta said. T wore a blue dress, wasn’t no special dress. He wore common clothes, too. His friends serenaded us round and round with cowbells and made a racket hollerin’ and hoopin’.” But there was no further celebration. “Times was hard then, people didn’t know what a honeymoon was.”

The gap in their ages also made for a certain formality. “I called
him Mister Martin,” Alberta said. “I never did call him any other name because he was so old. He called me Sis, like my daddy. But I called that old man Mister Martin, even in bed.”

I asked if she had any regrets about marrying a man sixty years her senior. Alberta smiled. “Better to be an old man’s darlin’ than a young man’s slave,” she said.

Ten months after their marriage, Alberta bore another son, William Jr., known as Willie. Her husband was generally kind to the children, she said. “But he was high strung, I can tell you that. He’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”

He was also vague about his Civil War days. “He didn’t talk much about it and I didn’t ask much,” Alberta said. “He said he went up to Virginny and was hungry. If they crossed a field, anythin’ you could get to, potatoes or anythin’ that a person could eat, they’d get it. He ended up in a hospital up there, pneumonia I think. He said he was reported dead but it was his little brother got kilt, not him. He never did say nothin’ about the Yankees or shootin’ anythin’, ’cept a bobcat.”

Even so, William attended veterans’ conventions each year in Montgomery. Then, during a reunion in 1932, he fell ill and died a few days after his return home. “He’s in a grave over in Opp. It’s got a marker, says what war he was in.” That was all the last Confederate widow knew about her husband’s service to the Cause.

Alberta quickly remarried, to William’s grandson Charlie, and more or less forgot what little she knew about her previous husband’s military service. Then, sixty years after William’s death, she saw a TV show at the seniors’ center about the Daughters of the Confederacy. “They were goin’ on and on about daughters and such, and here I’m a wife,” she said. “Or was one oncet.”

She also watched a TV adaption of Allan Gurganus’s novel
Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
. “It was a good picture all right, it played good, but none of it did resemble me,” Alberta said. She broke into a self-satisfied smile. “Anyhow, I done her one better. I ain’t the oldest livin’ Confederate widow. I’m the onliest one. The last of the livin’.”

Eventually, Alberta’s daughter-in-law in Arkansas pointed this out in a letter to the governor of Alabama. The governor’s office
passed the letter to the UDC, and that was how Dorothy Raybon in Greenville had come to research and confirm the legitimacy of Alberta’s claim. The UDC arranged for a Confederate marker to be put on William’s grave, and the governor’s office proclaimed Alberta an Honorary Lieutenant Colonel Aide-de-Camp in the state militia. A Sons of Confederate Veterans’ camp even named her an honorary cannoneer. “And I ain’t never shot a peashooter,” Alberta said, shaking her head.

Southern heritage groups also began escorting Alberta and her son to reenactments and remembrances across Alabama. “I remember one party they took us to up near Tuscaloosey,” Alberta said. “They shot some guns and I was too close and that made me deaf in my right ear.” She also found herself at a demonstration in Montgomery in support of keeping the rebel battle flag flying from the statehouse. “I think it should be there,” she said. “One flag can just as well fly as another. But it’s not worth no fuss and fight. Blacks all hate it. And you know, there’s lots of people that’s colored that’s better than any whites. Some of the whites are the sorriest you ever seen.”

Life had quieted down over the past few years, except for local reporters stopping by for an occasional interview. Alberta liked the attention, but confessed she couldn’t really understand what all the hoopla was about. And it irked her a little that the questions were always the same. “I lived with that old man for five years and six months,” she said. “He’s been dead forever. I was married to my next husband, Charlie, for fifty years and six months. Why don’t nobody ever ask after him?”

T
HAT NIGHT
, at a bed-and-breakfast called Aunt B’s, I read through a pile of documents Dorothy Raybon had given me about William Martin’s military service. They included a peculiar exchange of letters in the 1920s concerning William’s belated request for a Confederate pension. One state official wrote, “This old man’s memory is so bad he cannot recollect his Colonel’s name or his Captain’s name and but little of his service.” Another reported that William Martin couldn’t even recall the company he’d served in. “He
has lost his parole, and all the witnesses that were with him, so far as he knows, are dead.”

William’s application form also raised questions—or rather, failed to answer them. Asked what date he’d enlisted, William put down, “During the latter part of the War.” Each question about his actual time in the army prompted a “Don’t Remember” or “Don’t Know.” As to why he’d never applied for a pension before, William stated: “Could not furnish evidence needed.” Under income and assets, the document recorded “none.” At the bottom of the document appeared an X beside the notation, “his mark.”

Though William could offer no proof of military service, he later managed to produce two witnesses—one of them his brother—who signed a statement saying they’d seen William go off to war. So William Martin got his pension and went hunting a wife.

I phoned Alberta’s oldest son, Harold Farrow, at his home in Arkansas and asked if he recalled any more details about William’s wartime experience. No, he said. In fact, Harold recalled little at all about his stepfather. “He was old and cantankerous. Just an old man who set around in a rocking chair, did nothing,” he said. “But my brother and me must have pestered him, because he’d shake his walking stick and say, ‘I’ll whup you!’”

“Did he?”

Harold chuckled. “We lived in a wooden house that sat on cedar blocks, about thirty inches off the ground. So when the old man would grab his walking stick and get after us with it, we’d crawl under the house and yell, ‘You, old Martin. Wish you were dead!’”

Harold had one other vivid memory. “He was a jealous man, he was really jealous,” he said. Once, when Harold was six or seven, William’s grandson Charlie came to visit. “Old man Martin went out with a shotgun and said, ‘If you open that gate it’ll be the last gate you ever open.’ The old man must have had reason to be so angry. Jealousy I reckon.”

Charlie went away that day, though he returned to marry Alberta two months after his grandfather’s death. The family, including Alberta and seven-year-old Harold, then went to work in the fields, “We were the poorest of the poor,” he said. “Worked six in the morning until seven at night.” Harold left home at sixteen, joined the military
and never returned to Alabama, except to visit his mother. “I’m glad she’s getting a little attention,” he said. “She’s had a hard life. Yes she has.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, I toured what little there was to see of Elba, a town of 4,000 perched beside the Pea River. I asked a Chamber of Commerce official if Elba had any historic sites I might visit. “There’s that bug statue over in Enterprise,” she said, handing me a pamphlet about the neighboring town. In a bizarre act of homage, Enterprise had erected a monument to the crablike pest that ravaged Alabama’s cotton fields seventy years ago. “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity,” the inscription read. The weevil had forced cotton farmers to diversify, and Enterprise was now a leading peanut-growing center.

Elba, however, lacked its neighbor’s sense of humor and its, well, enterprise. Originally known as Bentonville, Elba had renamed itself after the desolate island where Napoleon went into exile. Even odder was the cover of the Chamber of Commerce’s glossy new brochure. It showed the entire town deep under water, and the words, “Elba Flood March 17, 1990.” This seemed a curious choice for a promotional tool.

“We’re trying to come up with a new slogan,” the Chamber official added. “Something like, ‘A Small Town for a Big Family.’” She paused. “We’re small. That’s about all you can say about Elba. Except for the Pea River always flooding.”

“How about ‘Home of the Last Confederate Widow’?” I suggested.

The woman smiled politely and shook her, head. “Who in the world would care about that, except for a Civil War wacko?”

Returning to Elba General, I found Alberta as chipper as she’d been the night before. So we picked up her life story more or less where we’d left off, with William’s death and her marriage two months later to Charlie Martin, a man about her own age. “It’s funny, but I used to say that if he was the last man in the world I’d never marry him,” she said. “He drank too much and messed around. But they say love’s like a potato, it sprouts from the eye. He was nice-lookin’.”

He was also fun, at least compared to his grandfather. “We’d go to square dances, mostly old-timey stuff,” Alberta said. Though she wasn’t a drinker, Alberta recalled one night she’d had a few with Charlie. “I got sky high. We danced all night. That was the happiest time of my life.”

Financially, though, life was harder than before. When William died, Alberta didn’t realize she could collect a Confederate widow’s pension—a stipend for which she became ineligible the moment she remarried. So the family had to get by on the $7.50 a month they earned in the fields. Alberta also had to endure gossip about her quick remarriage to her previous husband’s grandson. “You know people had a lot to say about it, but it wasn’t nothin’ of other people’s business,” Alberta said. “I couldn’t raise them boys by myself, times was so hard back then.”

Times stayed hard for most of their marriage. When Charlie died in 1983, Alberta’s son Willie moved in with her and the two got by on social security and pensions from Charlie’s and Willie’s military service. Still, Alberta hoped she might collect a little extra now that she’d been recognized as the last Confederate widow. The UDC maintained a small relief fund for elderly members in need. “But they say someone has to pass on to make space for me.”

Around noon, Willie stopped by the hospital. A crew-cut man with a bulbous nose and badly shaven cheeks, he appeared much older than his sixty-seven years.

“Willie, you don’t look too good,” his mother said from the bed.

“Now Momma, I’m not the one we need be worrying about.”

The two of them bantered until a nurse came in to escort Alberta off for tests. Alberta told Willie to show me some family mementos back at the house. “We’re in the sticks,” he said, guiding me down a road behind a lumber yard near the Pea River. The Martins’ simple, one-story home wasn’t much larger than a trailer. Inside, an old couch and easy chair faced the TV and a rebel flag draped across one wall. “Some big wheel with the Confederates gave us that,” Willie said. “Don’t mean nothing special to me, ’cept it covers some chips in the paneling.”

He pulled a scrapbook off the shelf. It was stuffed with letters and certificates from Confederate groups, and requests for Alberta’s signature.
One letter, from an SCV camp in South Carolina, explained that the flag now hanging on the Martins’ wall had flown briefly in her honor above the capitol dome in Columbia. It was signed, “I remain yours in the Cause for which they fought.” Willie shrugged. “We didn’t even know they had all these groups, sons and daughters and children and such. These people must be rich to go to all these meetings. Don’t have to work, I guess.”

The scrapbook also included a family tree, showing that William Jasper Martin had married his first wife in 1868 when she was only thirteen. They had ten children before she died. Then he married a second time and had five more children. Alberta was his third wife and Willie his sixteenth child. “That old man really got around,” Willie said.

Willie went to dig out a photo of William Senior from one of Alberta’s bedroom drawers. I stood in the hall while he sorted through the detritus of nine decades of living. “She keeps all kinds of junk,” he said, returning with a dog-eared recipe for Sour Cream Drop Cookies, an old family Bible, and a long, lustrous braid of auburn hair. “That’s Momma’s, don’t know why she kept it.”

Pressed inside the Bible were two old photographs. One showed Alberta as a young woman with dark hair spilling around her shoulders. The other showed a man with high cheekbones, a drooping mustache and a jaunty expression. Beside him sat a large, square-jawed woman with a prim bun piled atop her head. This was William Martin and his second wife, photographed at the turn of the century.

I asked Willie what he remembered about his father. “They say he’s my father, I don’t know,” he said. “I was only four when he died. Seems to me he used to sit me on his knee and feed me sweet potatoes.” He lit a cigarette and studied the picture for a moment. “Want to see the old man’s grave?” he asked.

W
E DROVE PAST
cotton fields and pecan groves and into Opp, a small town much like Elba. Before heading to the graveyard, Willie decided to visit Alberta’s eighty-six-year-old sister, Lera, who lived in a public housing project behind the Piggly Wiggly. We found Lera
putting a skillet of cornbread into the oven. With her long white hair and creased face, Lera looked just like her sister. Their personalities, though, were quite different. “Bert was always more tempered than me,” Lera said.