Confederates in the Attic (53 page)

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:

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.

A
S 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.

A
pproaching 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:

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.

At first glance, driving into Montgomery at dusk, I wondered if the “We’re History” sign was meant to be read literally. The downtown office blocks had emptied for the day, leaving Montgomery a virtual ghost town. Birds twittering in the trees made more racket than passing traffic. Checking into a hotel by the grand but forsaken railroad station, I asked the receptionist where I might find something to eat. She directed me to a franchise-clogged highway several miles from downtown.

She also explained why the city seemed so dead. The interstate cleaved Montgomery in half in the 1960s. White flight and suburban strip malls had since sucked the life out of the old commercial district. Not that Montgomery had ever been renowned as a happening town. “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place,” the London
Times
correspondent, William Howard Russell, acidly observed in 1861, soon after the rebels set up government in Montgomery. “It looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”

But touring the city on foot, I discovered one advantage that Montgomery had over other Southern capitals I’d visited. Unlike Columbia or Jackson or Atlanta, Montgomery’s antebellum core hadn’t been cauterized by Sherman or razed by developers. Topography also conspired to elevate the past. The city’s historic center perched on high ground known in more rural days as “Goat Hill.” Depending on your perspective, Goat Hill represented one of the most hallowed or haunted places in the entire South.

Crowning the knoll was Alabama’s domed capitol, where Jeff Davis took the oath of office in 1861 (a few months later, the Confederate capital moved to Richmond). A brass star marked the marble on which Davis stood. A century later, George Wallace pointedly occupied the exact same spot to deliver his inaugural address as governor. “It is very appropriate that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom,” he declared. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Stepping into the foyer, I found myself surrounded by a school group about to start a tour through the capitol. “I’m Sandy,” said the statehouse guide, a young black woman in a white headband and
African-print dress. “And this is Lurleen Wallace.” Sandy pointed at a bust of George Wallace’s wife, adding, “She served sixteen months as governor before dying of cancer.”