Life
She was born as Alberta Stewart to sharecroppers in Danleys Crossroads, Alabama, a small sawmill town south of Montgomery. Her mother died when she was 11. At 18, she met a cabdriver named Howard Farrow and they had a son, but Howard died in a car accident in 1926.
After moving to Opp, Alabama, she met widower William Jasper Martin, born in 1845 and a veteran of the 4th Alabama Infantry, a Confederate unit during the Civil War. On December 10, 1927, the then-21-year-old Stewart married the 81-year-old Martin, primarily to get help raising her son and because his $50 per month Confederate pension check guaranteed her a degree of financial security. She gave birth to a second son, Willie Martin, 10 months after her wedding to William Jasper Martin, who was 82 at the time of the child's birth. William Jasper Martin died in 1931.
Two months after her second husband's death, Alberta Martin married Charlie Martin, William Jasper Martin's grandson from a much earlier marriage. Alberta and Charlie Martin were married for more than fifty years until his death in 1983, after which she moved to Elba, Alabama.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“What if there are not only two nostrils, two eyes, two lobes, and so forth, but two psyches as well, and they are separately equipped? They go through life like Siamese twins inside one person.... They can be just a little different, like identical twins, or they can be vastly different, like good and evil.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“I love long life better than figs.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Above the forest of the parakeets,
A parakeet of parakeets prevails,
A pip of life amid a mort of tails.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)