D-FOB-Cohen-23 ALBERTA MARTIN, 97 You have to love a world in ...

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ALBERTA MARTIN, 97 You have to love a world in which the last living Confederate widow dies on Memorial Day. On May 31, Alberta Martin of Enterprise, AL, died of complications from a heart attack suffered earlier in the month.

Martin was born Alberta Stewart in 1906 into a poor sharecropping family in Danley's Crossroads, a settlement 70 miles south of Montgomery. When she was 11, her mother died, and Martin found herself a sort of younger mother/second wife to her father. At the age of 18, Martin had a son with a cab driver named Howard Farrow; he then died in a car accident in 1926. Following Farrow's death, Martin moved with her father and young son to a place I swear is called Opp, where she met William Jasper Martin, a widower born in Georgia in 1845. As a veteran of the Confederacy, Mr. Martin was the recipient of an attractive $50-a-month government pension.

Alberta wanted the money and William wanted her. "I had this little boy," she said in a 1998 interview, "and I needed someone to help raise him." Soon the 81-year-old man married his 21-year-old neighbor, and 10 months later another son was born.

Did she love her 60-year-older husband?

"That's a hard question to answer," Martin said. "I cared enough about him to live with him."

William Jasper Martin died in 1931, and two months later the ever-resourceful Martin married her late husband's grandson, Charlie Martin, becoming a wife and a step-grandmother all at once.

Complicating this Faulknerian saga is the likelihood that William Jasper Martin was a deserter. In Tony Horwitz's 1998 Confederates in the Attic, Martin is accused of deserting Company K of the 4th Alabama Infantry Regiment. Various Confederate interests groups contend that the 4th Alabama Infantry was sure to have contained more than one William Martin and, they note, the state thought Martin's record decent enough to award him a veteran's pension, and widow's benefits to Alberta.

In recent years, the Sons of Confederate Veterans marched Martin from memorial ceremony to statue dedication to convention to rally to parade and back again throughout the seceded states, adopting her as a symbol of a South that's now nearly indistinguishable from anywhere else in the lower 48. She'd sit up front in a wheelchair and wave a small Confederate flag for the crowds.

"I don't see nothing wrong with the flag flying," she told reporters during a 1997 ceremony in Gettysburg, PA, at which she was honored along with fellow nonagenarian Daisy Anderson (who died in 1998), the wife of a runaway slave who later joined the Union Army.

With Gertrude Janeway, the last living Union widow, dead last year, Martin's passing severs the last breathing link to the Civil War, nearly 140 years after it ended. o