War Brides

They know what’s comin’, these last two known Civil War widows. People wantin’ to know about that war.

“Lawd, huh-nee,” says Alberta Martin, 92, who is recognized as the only living widow of a Confederate veteran. She lives in Elba, Ala., where fans send her the purr-tiest flowers you ever laid your eyes on. “Ah tole so many tales ‘n’ things, ah’m about to tell ‘em all out.”

Deep in the southern Tennessee woods, the woman known as the last Union widow awakens at the sound of a visitor.

“Laww-dy,” says 89-year-old Gertrude Grubb Janeway, from her bed in a simple log cabin. A visitor from California. Who flew on an airplane. To ask about that war.

“They had never asked no questions ‘til here lately,” she says, shaking her head.

Lately, though. Lordy.

Such is the ageless reach of the Civil War that even its widows’ words are part of the legacy. Now the words of the last two, according to Civil War heritage groups, portend a finality, the fading oral history of a time that defined this nation.

Otherwise, history fumbles for cliches to explain the passions of the war--brother against brother, father against son--but no words will ever nail it. The numbers alone confound: From 1861 to ‘65, more than 620,000 men died in America’s deadliest war ever; by comparison, 58,000 U.S. troops died in the Vietnam War.

With each widow, only wisps of their husbands’ war stories emerge, like bits of cotton fluttering in the wind. As very young women, each had married an old ex-soldier in 1927--as fate would have it, one Confederate, one Union. These days, at Civil War events, the Confederate widow works a room with aplomb; the Union widow stays home.

Here are their stories:

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The ol’ man?

No, William Jasper Martin didn’t say much about that war. Got pretty hungry, though, on those forever marches. The bread in his knapsack got so hard, he’d take a hammer and smash it to pieces, and . . .

Mrs. Martin stops and shifts in a wingback chair at a riverfront hotel that Union troops seized during the Civil War. A hint of a sigh drags at her low voice.

That morning, friends had picked her up from her assisted-living home in southern Alabama for the 100-mile road trip to Selma. She has a long weekend ahead of Confederate heritage obligations. For the occasion, she wears her long, white hair in a tidy bun, and a knit sweater over a sapphire-blue dress.

“You know,” Mrs. Martin says, “this is something that should be carried on and on and on in order not to die. . . . If they don’t keep it up, it’ll soon be dead, and there won’t be nothing to it, and it’ll die away just like everything else.”

She was 21 when she married the 81-year-old veteran in December 1927 at the county courthouse. He was her second husband, and she now refers to him as the ol’ man. Nobody asks about her first or her late third husband--who happened to be Mr. Martin’s grandson from another marriage. But that’s another story.

She called the ol’ man Mr. Martin; he called her Sis. This fuss over him will keep on, she figures, until she’s lowered into the ground with a Confederate battle flag wrapped around her casket.

On this spring afternoon, she only must rise from her wheelchair and wave the Confederate battle flag. That’s enough for more than 4,000 cheering people at the Battle of Selma reenactment. Families here took overnight road trips to snap her picture or ask for an autograph, but she’s too weak to sign.

She saves her energy for the ball.

That night, friends wheel her to the entryway of an antebellum mansion packed with hundreds of men in Confederate uniform replicas and women in hoop skirts.

A black cavalry hat comes off in a swoop, and 35-year-old Shane Smith kneels before her on the marble floor. “Miz Alberta,” he says in hushed tones. With white gloves, he takes her hand and kisses it. Later, he says the moment is one of the greatest in his life.

“She is the last ray of hope that the Confederacy is understood for what it was,” says Smith, an agricultural sales manager, whose great-great-grandfather fought for the 25th Alabama Infantry.

For honor, for states’ rights, to ward off Yankee invaders--that’s what soldiers like Pvt. Martin were fighting for, Mrs. Martin’s fans say.

Mrs. Martin is not as certain. She turns to a friend for help.

Pvt. Martin was a poor farmer, and his family did not own slaves. Finally, she says: “Well, I just really don’t know for sure. I guess they were fighting to win the South in place of the North.”

War stories had no place with sharecroppers’ families in southern Alabama, where she grew up. Life turned not on how many men fell in battle but on whether her family had enough sweet potatoes buried in straw to last a spell. Her mamma died when she was 11, and she didn’t go to school much after that.

On most days, she picked cotton and gathered peanuts with her daddy. She was a teenage bride whose first husband died in a car crash. With her baby boy, she moved back in with her daddy and half-brother’s family in Covington County, where she first saw the ol’ man.

In those days, she would wash clothes for her brothers and hang them in the yard. Mr. Martin, a retired farmer, would stop by on his way to the corner store and chat over the white picket fence.

Wasn’t no great love story to it, Mrs. Martin says. He was a veteran with a $50 monthly pension; she was a single mother and cotton picker with a baby. He asked her daddy for her hand, and she said OK.

The ol’ man was high-strung and would whup you in a minute. Once, he got mad at a church auction when she put up for bid a box supper with apples and oranges, and sandwiches and peas. She took the box away.

Mr. Martin never let her see the imprint of war. He only hinted at hardship in blips of memory--the awful bread, raiding gardens for potatoes. About his trench warfare days, where he would sleep on a log with a blanket pulled over him to keep out of the mud and water.

He died in 1932, leaving a 4-year-old son who never heard his daddy’s war stories.

“I’d give anything in the world,” Mrs. Martin says, “if I ever knew some things that I’d love to know while he was still living, but you never know things if you don’t know how to ask for it.”

Two months after his death, the small town of Opp was clucking. Mrs. Martin had found a husband her age this time--Charlie Martin, Mr. Martin’s grandson from his first wife. They outlasted the town wags, though. Fifty years of marriage; can’t argue with that.

The couple lived in Elba, in a little bitty white frame house down a gravel road, until Charlie Martin’s death in 1983.

Mrs. Martin stayed in the same house, with a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in the living room, until earlier this year. These days, she listens to country-western music on the radio or watches the TV news. She visits with her two sons, or people who come to hear her stories. Everyone is sir or ma’am to her, even the young.

Every few weeks or so, a group flies her to an event and puts her up in a fancy hotel. Among her boosters is the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group that supports secession for the South.

Mrs. Martin also has shown up at Sons of Confederate Veterans conventions, a Gettysburg commemoration and a Montgomery museum in August 1996, where she ran into former Gov. George Wallace (Wallace had promised “segregation forever!” in 1963). Wallace, who died last September, cried when he met Mrs. Martin. She fished in her purse for a napkin and dried his tears.

On this weekend, she’s worn to the bone with all the war talk, and it ain’t over yet. She’s the real Last Confederate Widow with tales to tell still, and not the made-up one in the bestselling book and CBS miniseries “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.”

“Get home,” she mutters, half to herself, “and get some rest and start all over again.”

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Renee Tawa can be reached by e-mail at renee.tawa@latimes.com.

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Monday: A talk with local children of Confederate soldiers.