Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  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 an
d 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.

  14

  Alabama

  I HAD A DREAM

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER, Requiem for a Nun

  Approaching Montgomery, I was jolted from my interstate trance by two anomalous sights. The first was a long line of men in white uniforms, shackled at the ankle, swinging hoes and hauling brush as shotgun-toting guards kept watch. Alabama had recently brought back chain gangs and positioned them by major highways for maximum publicity.

  The second sight was a huge Chamber of Commerce billboard welcoming visitors to Montgomery:

  WE’RE HISTORY!

  VISIT THE CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORIAL,

  THE FIRST CONFEDERATE CAPITOL.

  The irony of the first line, which consigned Montgomery to Trotsky’s dustbin, was matched by the startling juxtaposition that followed. Civil Rights and Civil War—joint billing as Montgomery’s premier tourist attractions.