Confederates in the Attic (51 page)

By the time Beth Davis moved to Fitzgerald from Atlanta in 1942, soon after marrying a native of the town, the last of the veterans had died and blue and gray had become hard to distinguish. Even churches had merged, bringing together Southern Methodists with a group known originally to natives as “the Yankee Methodist Church.”

Davis said her first inkling of the town’s unusual lineage was the odd accent of elderly residents she met. “A lot of them didn’t talk like we did,” she said. Davis, whose grandfathers had fought for the Confederacy, also didn’t know what to make of her husband’s early-morning singing, which included the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “He had a strong baritone and I was worried we were going to get evicted by our neighbors.” Stranger still, her husband’s family didn’t celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on April 26, which remained an important holiday in Georgia. Instead, in late May, her husband announced that he was headed to the graveyard to play Taps on his cornet. She went along.

“There were men whose graves said ‘He marched with Robert E. Lee’ right next to a lot of dead Yankees,” she recalled. “That’s when my husband had to explain all about Yankee Memorial Day, that his father had fought for the Union, that half the town had fathers who did. I said to him, ‘Martin Davis, you knew all this and didn’t tell me? You think I wouldn’t have come down here to live if you had?’” She laughed. “He said no, it was just that it had been drilled into him as a child not to discuss the Civil War with Southerners, including me.” She smiled, adding, “That was the first I’d heard of Yankees with manners.”

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.”

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?”

M
Y NIGHT RIDE TO
E
LBA
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.