13
I’m the last living veteran of the last living veteran of that war. Probably a cheap kind of famous but, look, it’s better than nothing.
—LUCY MARSDEN, in Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
Iplummeted down the Beeline Highway, past Pine Level, Orion, Needmore, and Jack. Cars swerved to the shoulder, hazard lights winking in the rain. A crackly voice on the radio warned of flash floods across Alabama. Pressing my face to the windshield, I finally spotted a small sign and careered into the parking lot of Elba General Hospital. Grabbing a pot of mums from the passenger seat, I splashed through ankle-high water, through the hospital’s swishing doors, and skidded down the hall to the nurses’ station. Then I blanked on her name, the name of a woman I’d never met, a woman who’d never heard of me.
“Where’s the Confederate widow?” I blurted. “Is she all right?”
MY NIGHT RIDE TO ELBA had begun weeks before, in the northeast corner of Alabama. I was interviewing a neo-Confederate zealot when she said, off-handedly, “While you’re in Alabama, you really should see the last Confederate widow.”
“Last what?”
“Confederate widow,” she repeated. “She lives in a nowhere town down by the Florida panhandle. Opp, I think.” Then she resumed her rant about perfidious Yankees and the sanctity of the rebel flag.
I was titillated but dubious. Surviving offspring of Confederate soldiers, called “Real Sons” and “Real Daughters,” were rare enough. Simple math seemed to rule out a surviving spouse. The last Alabama Confederate died in 1951 at the age of 104. So a Real Wife, if she existed, represented the spouse of a man who today would be pushing 150.
A news search on my computer wasn’t encouraging, either. Amongst dozens of stories about Allan Gurganus’s best-selling novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, I found an Associated Press item on the last nonfictional spouse: Daisy Cave of Sumter, South Carolina. She died in 1990, the A.P. reported, “closing yet another chapter in the Civil War story.” No mention of Opp, Alabama.
Still, 1990 wasn’t that long ago. Maybe this Alabama widow had slipped through the cracks. So I contacted a Daughter of the Confederacy in a town not far from Opp and asked if she’d heard of this legendary spouse. “Oh, you mean Miz Alberta Martin,” Dorothy Raybon said. “Why of course. Her husband, William Jasper Martin, was a private in the 4th Alabama. I verified it myself.”
When I asked why this widow had remained obscure, Raybon paused before responding. At the time of her marriage to eighty-five-year-old William Martin, Alberta Martin was a young farm woman with a small child. Later, only eight weeks after the old veteran’s death, Alberta married again—to one of William Martin’s grandsons.
Alberta now lived in a town called Elba (close to Opp) with a son she’d borne the veteran. I asked what they did down there. “Just sort of exist,” Raybon said.
“What’s Mrs. Martin like?”
“She’s a real, sure-enough country lady,” Raybon said. “She dips snuff and keeps a little spittoon in her sweater pocket. And she tells it like it is.”
Early the next morning I called Alberta’s home and got her son, William. He said his mother had already gone out. She spent weekdays at the senior citizens’ center, playing bingo and horseshoes. I asked if I could come interview her. “Sure, anytime,” William said. “We don’t go no place but Elba.”
I studied the map. Elba lay deep in the south Alabama “Wiregrass,” a rural territory with no feature more notable than its coarse, spiky vegetation. The Wiregrass wasn’t near anyplace I’d planned to go. Anyway, I reckoned a few weeks’ delay wouldn’t ruin my scoop; Alberta Martin had hung on for ninety years already and was still spry enough to toss horseshoes. So I decided to tour the rest of Alabama, then stop off in Elba on my way to New Orleans, where I’d vaguely planned some R and R in the French Quarter.
My wife, though, kept pestering me every night when we talked on the telephone. “Have you seen that widow yet?” she’d ask, adding in her inimitable Australian slang, “You’ll hate yourself if she carks before you get there.”
So one stormy afternoon I phoned Elba again to schedule a visit. Alberta’s son answered, but this time he was somber. “Momma woke up real early this morning with gas pains something awful. I took her to the emergency room and they say she’s got to stay.”
I felt a surge of panic. For a ninety-year-old, early morning “gas pains” serious enough to require a hospital stay sounded ominously like heart trouble. I asked William if I might visit her at Elba General. “She’d like that” he said, “so long’s she’s conscious.”
So it was that I found myself speeding through high winds and slanting rain and skidding down the hospital hallway. The nurse on duty calmly glanced up from a paperback. “You mean Miz Martin?” she said, smiling at my drenched mums and rain-plastered hair. “Room 15.”
The ward was small and silent. There appeared to be few patients and no other visitors—unsurprising, given the tempest outside. The door to room 15 stood ajar. No one answered my knock, so I stepped just inside. Alberta Martin lay on her back with tubes running into her arms and bedsheets pulled up around her neck. The face poking up from the sheets looked as yellow and mottled as an apple-head doll. I’d arrived just in time.
Then Alberta opened her eyes. “You needn’t a done that,” she said, admiring the flowers. I set the mums on her night table, beside a glass filled with false teeth, and explained why I’d come. “Oh my,” she said, gathering up her long white hair, which tumbled extravagantly across two pillows. Then she flashed me a warm, toothless smile and confirmed what had already become obvious—that I needn’t have rushed. “I stay here so much it’s almost like home,” she said. The small, rural hospital was really a glorified doctor’s office; anyone with serious problems, I now realized, would be transferred to a bigger facility.
But I was glad to be there and Alberta seemed glad to see me. Her son was what she called “high strung” and couldn’t be counted on for company. “I made his bed ’fore I left this mornin’,” she said. “Don’t never leave the house till I done his and mine. Maybe you have to be carried away, somethin’ wrong with you, and your bed will be unmade.” Alberta settled comfortably onto her pillows. “Well, there’s no bingo here,” she said, “so I reckon we can talk all you want.”
We talked for three hours, and could easily have talked for three more if a nurse hadn’t kicked me out so Alberta could sleep. Like country folk across the South, Alberta liked to tell a story and take her time in the telling. So when I began by blurting out the obvious question—how had she come to marry a Confederate veteran?—Alberta smiled and said I couldn’t understand that until I’d heard the whole story of “the hard way I come up in the world.”
“I’se born just a piece from here, down yonder about five mile, in a little ol’ no-house on the road to Opp,” she began. I pulled my chair closer; her drawl and diction were the most foreign I’d heard since the Gullah-inflected speech of the Carolina Lowcountry. “My daddy and momma slept in one bed, my sister and me in t’other. In the next room was four brothers and five half-brothers and this that and t’other.”
When Alberta was eleven, her mother died. Alberta left school and joined her father in the fields, sharecropping. “I hoed peanuts, picked peanuts, shook peanuts with a pitchfork to get the dirt off, stewed peanuts,” she said. “And that was just the peanuts.”
At fifteen, Alberta and her sister went to work spinning thread at a cotton mill, earning nine cents an hour. Soon after, she met a handsome young man with reddish blond hair. “He drove a taxi and drank and messed around,” she said. “I was just young I guess and didn’t have no sense. That was me. I got pregnant and then he just quit me and married ’nother girl he’d got pregnant.”
Six months after Alberta gave birth, the taxi driver died in a car wreck. Alberta moved in with one of her half-brothers, who had four sons of his own. “When you stay in the country amongst your brothers and his boys and have to mind all of ’em,” she said, “you get tired of it.” So one evening, when an old man beckoned to her from across the fence, she went over to talk with him.
“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?”
THAT 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.”
THE 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.
WE 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.
I asked Lera what she remembered about her sister’s marriage to the Confederate veteran. “I’d have married him, too,” she replied. “Fifty dollars a month was a lot of money in them days.” She sighed. “That was times back then. A woman didn’t have no choices. First Bert and me worked here at the mill in Opp. Twelve-hour days, six days a week. It was like a fog in there from all the lint. But they fired you if you raised the window.”
Lera said Alberta left the mill when she had her first child. But then she was stuck caring for her half-brother and his family. “Bert wanted so bad to get away from home,” Lera said. “That veteran was all right by me. I was working at the cotton mill and would visit on my day off. They set around. Neither one of them worked. They had it good.” Lera, meanwhile, stayed at the mill for twenty-eight years and never earned more than a dollar a day.
I asked if she remembered William saying anything about the Civil War. “No, he didn’t talk about it,” she said. “Seems strange, now that I think on it, but folks didn’t go on about themselves then like they do now.”
The room went silent. I could smell the cornbread cooking. Willie said we best be getting to the cemetery. Seeing us to the door, Lera told Willie, “You tell Bert I said to stop belly-achin’ and get back to her bingo.”
The graveyard occupied a small, weedy plot beside a potholed road running out of Opp. The first headstone I looked at said, “Infant babe of L. W. and S. M. Fuller Born and Died April 25, 1922.” Several other stones marked the graves of both newborns and mothers who perished in childbirth. Some stones were made of cement and seemed to have been crudely inscribed with sticks. Even the names were plain. “Sarah Coon” or “Omer W. husband of Texie Martin” or given names I’d never heard before: Croyal, Malizie, Ardiller.
Willie led me to a long slab laid flat on the ground, its surface completely blank. At the top end, though, a fresh marble tablet read:
WILLIAM JASPER MARTIN
PVT 4 ALA INF
CONFEDERATE STATES ARMY
This was the stone the Daughters of the Confederacy had erected a few years back. “Before, it was just that slab, no writing at t’all,” Willie said. He snapped a Polaroid and stood quietly for a moment. “I can’t cry ’cause I don’t really remember the man.”
We wound back to Elba, pausing by the crossroads where Alberta was born and raised. “She lived back over there,” Willie said, pointing across fields of peanut and cotton at several weatherbeaten cabins clinging to the edge of a pine wood. The landscape looked straight out of a Walker Evans photograph of Depression Alabama. I realized, too, that Alberta or Lera might easily have served as models for one of Evans’s most famous portraits: a sharecropper’s wife in a plain cotton dress, her prematurely worn features starkly framed against the rough wood siding of a tenant’s shack.
Back in Elba, I dropped Willie at his home and returned to the hospital with a box of chocolates. Alberta looked tired and griped about the Jell-O, juice and congealed salad she’d been fed for lunch. “I like grits and sausage and cheese and butter and a bannaner for breakfast,” she said. “And a good lunch, too. Don’t eat too much anymore in the evenin’. All that food gets to workin’ and it hurts.”
Stomach trouble had also forced Alberta to give up her beloved snuff, which she’d first sampled at the age of five. “A long time ago, when a child looked pale or wouldn’t eat like they should, people said ‘Give em snuff.’ People thought it’d keep you from eatin’ cotton bolls and leaves and one thing or another.” I asked her about the portable spittoon the UDC lady had told me about. “Just a glass jar with a lid on it,” Alberta said. “Snuff glass, I called it.”
I took out the mementos Willie had found in her bedroom. She studied the photograph of herself for a moment, then fondled the braid of hair. “I don’t imagine I was purty, ’cept for my hair. This ain’t quite the color it used to be, it was a little darker back then.” Alberta’s parents were devout members of the Church of Christ and frowned on women cutting their hair. So Alberta had kept hers long until she was about thirty. “Then one day, like everyone else, I wanted short hair,” she said. “So I cut it off. But as soon as I did I wished it back on my head, long and brown like that. So I kept this braid to remember myself by.”
Alberta’s face softened and she began talking about a country custom called the box supper. “What you’d do, you’d make like a little shoebox with ribbons and bows around it, dress it up with purty paper,” she said. “In the box is enough food for two. Two apples, two bannaners, cakes and sandwiches. You take it to church and fellers start biddin’ on it. The boy that buys the box gets to eat it with you, and the girl who gets the highest bid wins a prize. I loved box suppers.”
“Did you ever win?”
“I might’ve once,” she said. Alberta had gone to a box supper with the old veteran soon after their marriage, and men began bidding for her box. “I wasn’t but twenty, weighed a hundred fourteen pounds back then. I had that long hair. Boys were biddin’ and biddin’ on my box. But Mister Martin didn’t like that. He thought they were making fun of him and he was jealous, thought they might spark with me or somethin’.” So they took Alberta’s box down from the table and put up someone else’s. After that, she and William stopped going to box suppers.
“I did win one contest,” Alberta added. “I was in a nursin’ home for three months after Charlie died, had a nervous breakdown. I had to rock in a rocker and the one that rocked longest won. I went five hours rockin’. The prize was five dollars.”
It was late afternoon and Alberta appeared tired. For the first time since my arrival the day before, I sensed she’d had enough of my questions about a time long ago. “Got a whole life to study over here in bed,” she said. “But I done passed thinkin’ about them days, I think about the future.” Then she looked at me closely, as if for the first time. “You got quite a time to go, ain’t you?”
“Yes, m’am. I hope so.” I paused for a moment, then asked her what she thought the future would be like. Alberta sighed, closing her eyes. “If it’s like it usually been bein’, it won’t be so good.”
I laid her auburn braid by the bed and slipped quietly out of the room.
AS IT HAPPENED, Alberta’s future wasn’t at all like it had usually been being. Nine months after my visit, I picked up USA Today and saw Alberta’s picture. A small story reported that she’d been awarded a Confederate widow’s pension by the state of Alabama totaling $335 a month (some of this was back pay; she’d become eligible for a pension again when her husband Charlie died in 1983). Alberta told the paper she planned to use the money to buy an air conditioner, a hearing aid and a new set of false teeth.
Alberta had also caught the eye of heritage groups again. The Sons of Confederate Veterans flew Willie and her to Richmond for the group’s 100th anniversary, Alberta’s first plane flight. She was greeted by a standing ovation. “She’s a living link to the Confederacy,” the SCV’s executive director declared. “That’s the closest any of us will ever be to a real Confederate soldier.”
William Jasper Martin also came in for some posthumous glory. The United Daughters of the Confederacy published a profile of Alberta in its magazine. It was filled with unsourced claims about her husband’s wartime heroics; William was wounded in a bloody fight near Richmond, the article said, and he later recalled the screams of men “cut down as a scythe would cut down grain.” The story also reported that he’d fought until the end and surrendered with Lee at Appomattox.
By then, I knew a bit more about William Jasper Martin’s service to the Cause. The vagueness of the tales he’d told his family, and his amnesia while applying for a pension, had left me wondering. So I went to the National Archives with a researcher who specialized in Confederate war records. William Jasper Martin was there all right. Drafted in late May of 1864, he was sent the next month to Richmond and turned up almost immediately in hospital records, suffering from rubella. He was released in July on a sixty-day furlough. Then he went AWOL and never returned. On his company’s muster roll, William’s name appeared beside the word “deserter” for the remainder of the War.
William’s name turned up again two months after Appomattox, when he went to Montgomery for a formal parole by federal officials. The papers recorded that he was five-feet-ten with dark hair, blue eyes and a “fair complexion”—much as Alberta described him. We also found records for William’s younger brother, who was mistakenly listed in one document under William’s name. He died of battle wounds, with personal effects totaling $3.05.
William was lucky he hadn’t been caught and shot for desertion by Confederate authorities, or exposed years later and denied a pension. But I was glad for Alberta, and for the false teeth and hearing aid, whatever her measles-ridden husband might have done 130 years before up in old Virginny.