Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  At first, Davis said, she found it discomfiting that her own grandfathers once fought against her father-in-law. But gradually she became intrigued by Fitzgerald’s history and wrote a play about the town’s early settlers, called Our Friends, the Enemy. The play presented a casting problem, though. When it was staged locally during the Civil War centennial, the director couldn’t find anyone left with a Northern accent. “I had to tell him we’d made Southerners of all of them,” Davis said.

  In a few ways, Fitzgerald had also turned the natives into Northerners. The United Daughters of the Confederacy still commemorated Confederate Memorial Day, but the group also showed up at the other Memorial Day, at which Davis herself laid a wreath honoring both blue and gray. The town’s emblem bore an image of a Union and a Confederate soldier shaking hands across a map of Georgia, above the words: “Blood that mingled in bitter conflict was here united in brotherhood.” When Davis opened the Blue & Gray Museum at the Lee-Grant Hotel, the offspring of soldiers from both sides donated heirlooms. Some residents—mutts descended from both Southern and Northern stock, or what Davis called “Yankee Rebels”—gave items from both armies.

  The Lee-Grant hotel was gone now, and there was little apart from the town’s street signs and Davis’s small museum to recall Fitzgerald’s remarkable history. “Folks joke about the fire department being on Sherman Street,” Davis said. “But otherwise you don’t hear much talk about the War.”

  In one sense, this seemed healthy. Though I’d often lamented the neglect of history in Atlanta and other places, I’d also seen how poisonous and polarized memory of the past could become. Still, it seemed sad that the story Davis had just told me wasn’t widely known. However anomalous Fitzgerald might have been, it offered a glimpse of an alternative strain of post-War Southern history, akin to the many instances of racial progress and cooperation in the late nineteenth century that had been erased from modern memory by Southerners’ demonization of Reconstruction, or by Northerners’ smug stereotypes of a Klan-driven, Jim Crow South.

  “History is lived forward but it is written in retrospect,” the English historian C. V. Wedgwood observed. “We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” Fitzgerald, for me, was a small reminder that the South’s post-War history wasn’t predestined to lead toward the strife and anger over the past I’d witnessed in so many other places across the South.

  For Davis, Fitzgerald’s story carried another, broader message for Americans. “If veterans could come together so soon after the War and forgive and forget, then surely we can overcome our differences,” she said. “Old wounds were healed here, old barriers overcome. Seems like we should be able to do the same.”

  She shut off the museum lights and I offered to give her a ride home. Davis lived in one of the original frame houses built by the pioneers, on a cross street between two avenues named for Southern generals. “When we moved to this house, I said to my Yankee husband, bless his heart, ‘Martin, if we’ve got to live in this nest of Yankees, I’m glad we’re between Gordon and Bragg. I don’t think I’d sleep as well between Sherman and Grant.’” She smiled, pausing at the door. “Funny, given all I know now, but sometimes I still feel that way.”

  13

  Alabama

  ONLY LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS SOME

  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

  I plummeted 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.”