Dispatching Alberta Martin ...

Both Danny Loss at No Loss for Words and Fontana Labs at Unfogged note the passing of Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War soldier. In 1927, after her first husband abandoned his family, she married a Confederate veteran who was 60 years older than herself. Alberta Martin's story is not as bizarre as Allan Gurganus's novel, The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, might suggest. [The novel is great summer recreational reading.] Still, Alberta Martin did bare the old man a son and, when her husband died, she married his grandson. I don't know that they inspired Lonzo & Oscar's"I Am My Own Grandpa":

It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know,
But it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

Now many, many years ago, when I was twenty-three,
I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her, and soon they, too, were wed.

This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life,
My daughter was my mother, cause she was my father's wife.
To complicate the matter, even though it brought me joy,
I soon became the father of a bouncing baby boy.

My little baby then became a brother-in-law to Dad,
And so became my uncle, though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle, then that also made him brother
Of the widow's grown-up daughter, who, of course, was my stepmother.

Father's wife then had a son who kept him on the run,
And he became my grandchild, for he was my daughter's son.
My wife is now my mother's mother, and it makes me blue,
Because, although she is my wife, she's my grandmother, too.

Now if my wife is my grandmother, then I'm her grandchild,
And every time I think of it, it nearly drives me wild,
For now I have become the strangest case you ever saw
As husband of my grandmother, I am my own grandpa!

I'm my own grandpa.
I'm my own grandpa.
It sounds funny, I know, but it really is so,
Oh, I'm my own grandpa.

But Alberta Martin's third husband did become his own grandpa and his nephew became the father of her child or something like that. Even if there is biblical sanction of sorts for it, I don't recommend that people do this kind of thing. It gives historians who do genealogy a bloody headache. And, is it a wonder the Yankees think we Southern boondockers have six toes on each foot and hayseed in our teeth?

Anyway, Tony Horowitz devoted a chapter to Alberta Martin in his Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, even though she had little recollection of her first husband having talked about his experience in the Civil War. As Danny Loss suggested, we confer historical significance from the present. It doesn't occur inevitably out of the past. Alberta Martin's notoriety is entirely a historical accident. There was, essentially, nothing that she could tell us about the Civil War.

Still, the re-enactors would not disappoint us in Alberta Martin's dispatch:

Alberta will lie in state in the parlor of the first White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Ala. Nineteenth-century period music will be played at her funeral by the 52nd Regimental String Band of Memphis, Tenn., and the Olde Towne Brass Band of Huntsville, Ala. A Confederate reenactor heritage funeral march and graveside service will be held at the New Ebenezer Baptist Church Cemetery in Curtis, Ala.

If only the more reactionary forms of Confederate memory were so readily dispatched. Our last direct connection to the Confederacy was no memory at all.