Road to Tara Read online

  By the time Latham reached Atlanta, his hopes for discovering another Erskine Caldwell or Caroline Miller had dimmed. He had been to Richmond, Charlotte, and Charleston and he had not found one publishable manuscript. It was too late to turn to England for books to fill Macmillan’s 1936 spring list; the competitive New York houses would already have signed up any worthwhile author. Once in his hotel rooms, Latham got on the telephone to his Atlanta office. To his disappointment, he learned that his representatives had no promising material to show him. Plans had been made, however, for him to meet as many young writers as he could during his forty-eight-hour stay.

  In desperation, Latham rang Lois Dwight Cole, an editor in Macmillan’s New York office who had formerly been their Atlanta representative. It had been two years since she had been in Atlanta, but he asked her if she recalled any promising writers in the city.

  “Peggy Mitchell Marsh,” Lois replied with some reluctance. “She has a manuscript she has been working on for years. She’s told me it’s about the Civil War and Reconstruction, but I haven’t read it. No one has, except her husband, John Marsh.”

  Lois warned Latham that Peggy was a rare writer — one who did not seek publication — and that she might not welcome his inquiries. The previous year, Lois herself had written to Peggy asking her to submit her manuscript to Macmillan. Peggy had not only refused but had asked Lois not to discuss the book with anyone, as she had no intention of ever publishing it. Now Lois felt uneasy about betraying this confidence, but she had always had a hunch about her friend’s novel. “If Peggy writes like she talks,” Lois told Latham, “the book is bound to be spell-binding.”

  The best way to reach Mrs. Marsh, Lois suggested, would be through her old friend and fellow newspaperwoman, Medora Field Perkerson. Ten years ago, she explained, Peggy Marsh had been the star feature writer on the Atlanta Journal Magazine, and she and Medora Perkerson, wife of the magazine’s editor in chief, had been colleagues there. Latham’s spirits began to rise. By coincidence, Angus Perkerson was to host a luncheon in his honor that day. Latham lost no time in calling Mrs. Perkerson at her newspaper office, and he was extremely forthright about the reason behind his request that Mrs. Marsh be invited to join them for lunch.

  “Peggy won’t like it, but I’ll try to arrange it,” Medora said.

  Atlanta, along with most of the country, was deep in the Depression doldrums, but the dogwood in nearby Druid Hills was in extravagant white bloom and Peggy Mitchell Marsh was in high spirits after the luncheon. Pointing out landmarks along the way and chatting nonstop, she drove Harold Latham and Medora Perkerson out to see the unfinished monuments of the sixty-foot equestrian figures of three Confederate heroes that were to be carved high up into the side of Stone Mountain. Conversation about Confederate heroes was exactly the fuel that fired Peggy’s enthusiasm.

  This was Latham’s first trip South, and most of the women he had met had seemed like hothouse flowers. But his small, vivacious guide — with her bobbed auburn hair, wide sailor-blue eyes, and a few bold freckles across the bridge of her impertinent nose — was of sturdier stuff. There was a strong contradiction in her appearance that was fascinating. She was certainly beautiful, and brimming with energy, but she had a way of looking rooted to the earth whenever she did stand still. It might have been the orthopedic shoes she wore, though Latham thought otherwise, for he had not even noticed them until rather late in the day. On first meeting Peggy Marsh, Latham had thought she must be no more than twenty years old, at least fifteen years younger than he now reckoned. Her size contributed to this false impression — she was under five feet tall — but there was also the youthful hairstyle held back with a demure bow, and the unguardedness of her expression. An aging bachelor, and a bit defensive about his unmarried state, Latham was always uncomfortable with women who played the femme fatale, and, at first, Peggy’s natural flirtatiousness had caught him off guard. But her worldly sense of humor and ribald conversation were even more surprising.

  Actually, Peggy was quite proud of her rebellious streak, and liked to think of herself as “a product of the Jazz Age, one of those short-haired, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to Hell or be hanged before they were thirty.” However, she was now thirty-five and she had not gone to hell at all. In fact, she still captivated most people she met with her good humor, salty tongue, and feminine charm. That was the enigma of Peggy Mitchell Marsh; she was a curious mixture of emancipated woman and Southern belle. Within an hour, Latham had fallen completely under her spell.

  Peggy drove her dented green Chevrolet at a slow, deliberate pace along the back roads that she knew so well. Chance, she thought, had her playing guide in the environs of a city that she considered as much a kin as any of her own family. Medora had rung her up only a few hours earlier to say that Angus had been called away at the last moment and could not host a luncheon the Journal was giving for Mr. Harold Latham of the Macmillan publishing company, and would Peggy be an absolute angel and step in and act as cohostess. Peggy, never able to refuse a friend in distress, agreed. Now, as she spoke entertainingly about the history of the giant stone sculpture, she was glad she had come along.

  Peggy Mitchell Marsh had had no idea of Latham’s motives until he confessed during the course of the luncheon that he had heard she had written a novel and that he would like to see it. “I have no novel,” she had replied.

  They had gone on to discuss well-known authors and their books, and had found that they had similar literary tastes. When Latham offered her a small commission if she would scout books in the Atlanta area for Macmillan, she had agreed.

  Latham was not discouraged when she denied having written a novel herself, for the way she had avoided looking him straight in the eye as she said it had made him certain that she was lying. And he sensed that, for all her loquaciousness, Mrs. Marsh was not a woman who could easily tell a lie. He also found himself in agreement with Lois Cole; this fiery little woman was one of the best tale benders he had ever heard. She spoke with smooth, precise diction in a lilting Southern voice, talking rapidly and with much skill. Peggy Mitchell Marsh, he decided, enjoyed being a raconteur. She was downright funny, a woman who possessed a rare sense of humor, and, as she recounted the story of how, during her newspaper days, she had been tied into a boatswain’s chair and suspended from a sixth-floor window so that she might share the sensations of the sculptor who had carved a head on the side of Stone Mountain, he was more anxious than ever to have a look at her manuscript.

  “No sooner had I got the feel of solid floor under my feet,” she told him, “but the photographer told me the slide in his camera had jammed and that he would have to reshoot. Well, I turned and faced him and stared right up into his eyes. ‘If the fate of the whole Confederacy rested on my being hung six stories from the ground again,’ I declared, ‘Sherman would have to make another march to the sea!’ ”

  When they were back in the car, Latham brought up the subject of her novel again, taking the chance of losing her good will. “I hate to press,” he began, “but Lois Cole did say that you indeed had written a novel, and I would like very much to see the manuscript.”

  She glanced over at him, frowning, before starting the car. “I have to admit I have been working on a novel, but it’s too early to talk about it.”

  “Well, can you at least tell me what it’s about?”

  “The South,” she said.

  “Like Tobacco Road? Any degenerates in it?” he prodded.

  “No, but there are some pretty stubborn characters who refuse to accept defeat.”

  “Why haven’t you submitted your book to anyone?” Latham asked.

  “It’s not ready, for one thing, and, for another, I don’t think it will sell because it’s about a woman who is in love with another woman’s husband and they do nothing about it, and because there are only four Goddamns and one dirty word in it.”

  “Oh? Which one is that?” he said, smiling.

  “Never mind
.”

  “Well, I would like to see your manuscript anyway.”

  “As I told Lois, if I ever do finish the novel, I’ll let Macmillan see it first.”

  The next day was a perfect April morning, the sun soft and buttery, the scent of spring in the air. Peggy, having promised Mr. Latham and Medora that she would scrounge up all the young authors she knew and bring them that afternoon to a Georgia Writers’ Club tea, spent the morning on the telephone. By the afternoon, as she wrote later, she had “jackassed” various and sundry hopefuls into the car “and gotten them to the tea where they could meet a live publisher in the flesh.”

  At the tea, Latham broached the subject of her book for the third time.

  “Please don’t talk about this. I really have no manuscript to show you,” she insisted.

  “Look here,” he replied, “this is the strangest build-up I have ever encountered. You say you have no manuscript ready to show, yet you have all your friends rooting for you.”

  She glanced away and quickly changed the subject.

  Twilight was drawing on when Peggy piled her charges into her car to drive them home. One of them asked when she planned to finish her book and why, as long as she was now scouting books for Macmillan, she hadn’t given her own manuscript to Mr. Latham.

  In the four years that she had written for the Atlanta Journal, Peggy had established a reputation as the magazine’s star reporter. Even now, ten years after she had left the paper, she was still considered something of a celebrity and literary authority, and budding authors often sought her counsel. Now, a young woman who had lately been hounding Peggy for advice on a book she was writing cried out from the back seat, “Why, are you writing a book, Peggy? How strange you’ve never said anything about it! Why didn’t you give it to Mr. Latham?”

  “Because it’s so lousy I’m ashamed of it,” she replied.

  “Well, I daresay, really! I wouldn’t take you for the type who would write a successful novel!” the girl exclaimed.

  Fury rose inside Peggy Mitchell’s small-breasted chest. What did this child know about her life and what type she was, or about what she had been or experienced or suffered? She was certain that, if confronted with the truth, the girl would be too shocked to believe it. The irony of this turned Peggy’s anger into indignant laughter. She laughed so hard that her foot hit the brake. The car stopped short.

  “See!” the girl said, when the sudden jolt catapulted her forward. “That confirms my opinion. You lack the seriousness necessary to be a novelist.”

  The words made Peggy so mad that as soon as she had left her passengers at their destinations she tore home. She had been working sporadically on a novel since 1926, and the more than two thousand pages of it were stuffed into soiled manila envelopes stored wherever she had found space for them in her apartment. It was shortly after 6:00 P.M.; Latham had said he was leaving late that night. She rushed around the apartment without bothering to restore order. Some of the envelopes were stacked under a bath sheet on her sewing-table desk, the rest were in more curious hiding places. She had to squirm under the bed to drag out the sections dealing with the Reconstruction, and then balance herself on a tall stool to reach the top of the pot and pan closet for the antebellum chapters.

  Once she had assembled what she thought was the entire manuscript, she recalled that there was no first chapter, or rather, that there were sixty first chapters, and that they were all terrible. So she sat down at her typewriter and rewrote the one she thought the best, starting it, however, on page three since she was too flustered to produce a whole new opening. She attached a note stating that she would write a two-page opening later. So many connecting links were missing between sections that she thought of the contents of the envelopes as “excerpts,” and she wrote several other covering notes to help avoid confusion in the reading.

  Not until Peggy was in the lobby of Harold Latham’s hotel did she realize what she looked like — “hatless, hair flying, dust and dirt all over my face and arms, and worse luck, my hastily rolled up stockings coming down about my ankles,” she later recalled. She had left the envelopes out in the car, but when she rang Latham in his room and he agreed to come downstairs, she ran back to fetch them, returning with her arm load just as he stepped out of the elevator. She was barely through the door when she began dropping envelopes, and by the time Latham reached her side there were already three bellboys picking them up behind her. Latham, fighting to keep a straight face, greeted her as though there was nothing at all odd in her appearance.

  Finally, she made her way to a sofa and sat down, piling the envelopes beside her. Latham later said he would never forget the sight of that “tiny woman sitting on a divan, with the biggest manuscript beside her that I had ever seen, towering in two stacks almost to her shoulders.”

  “Well, can this be your book, Mrs. Marsh?” Latham inquired.

  Peggy bounced to her feet, scooped up what envelopes she could hold in her arms, and handed them to Latham. “If you really want it you may take it, but it is incomplete and unrevised,” she warned.

  Latham lost no time in taking possession of the unwieldy manuscript. He was already packed and now had to buy a “please-don’t-rain” cardboard suitcase from a bellboy. Peggy helped him stuff the envelopes inside it. Across the top of one was scrawled, “The Road to Tara.”

  “Tara?” Latham asked.

  Tara, she explained, was her heroine’s home. “The book is about what made some of our people able to come through a war, a reconstruction, and a complete wrecking of the social and economic system. They used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ ”

  “It’s a Civil War novel then?” Latham asked.

  “No,” she replied, “It’s about the people in the South during those times who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”

  Peggy left Latham there in the lobby of the elegant Georgian Terrace Hotel, trying to lock the great mound of parcels inside his new case. The editor was already doubting his first hunch about Peggy Mitchell Marsh and her novel. From the stacks of envelopes and the weight of the makeshift valise, it was obvious that the book was of epic length, and fears of having “discovered” nothing more than a long, boring history of the Civil War set in. It was not until he had boarded his train for New Orleans and had opened the first envelope that he realized that this was also the worst-looking manuscript he had ever been given in his long career in publishing. After all his efforts to wrangle a look at it, he now considered not bothering to read the jumbled mess at all. When he arrived in New York he could simply return it with a note asking the author to submit a more organized manuscript. As it was, chapters were out of order and sometimes two or three versions of the same chapter were included in one envelope; whole pages were rendered incomprehensible by balloons and arrows and hen-scratch markings; inserts were placed on the backs of pages and not noted on the front. But Latham’s curiosity — and his desperation — got the better of him.

  He settled back in the plush green Pullman chair and began to read. And, like all future readers of this book, whose numbers were to be in the millions, Harold Latham was hooked.

  Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell

  Chapter Two

  ATLANTA WAS ONLY fifty-five years old when Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on Tuesday, November 8, 1900, the day William McKinley was reelected president. The city was an upstart when one considered that Savannah and Augusta had long since celebrated their centennials and that nearby Athens would soon have one. Margaret’s ancestors had arrived in Georgia at different times. Her mother’s family had immigrated to Charleston around 1685, after the Huguenot troubles in France, and had moved to Georgia after the Revolutionary War. Her father’s people had come to North Carolina from Scotland with the Hector MacDonald Colony after the failure of the Stuart Uprising, and had moved to Georgia before the Revolutionary War. The two families’ histories and the growth of Georgia as a state formed the basis of many of Margaret’s nursery tales. But even at the
age of three or four, it was stories about the history of Atlanta that she liked best.

  Margaret was born in the home of her widowed maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, at 296 Cain Street. The house had miraculously escaped destruction on the night of November 15, 1864, when General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Union Army set fire to Atlanta before Sherman began his devastating March to the Sea. Grandmother Stephens would sit on the front porch with baby Margaret on her lap and point out where a line of Confederate entrenchments had passed through the back yard. Then she would describe to her that terrible night when “vast sheets of flame devoured the city and everywhere you looked, a strange indescribable glare lighted the sky.” And how, by morning, every house of importance, the railroad depot, and the business section were in ashes.

  Annie Stephens shared her home with her daughter, Maybelle, her son-in-law, Eugene Muse Mitchell, and her two grandchildren, Stephens Alexander and Margaret. Annie had moved to Atlanta in 1863, as a wartime bride, from the Fitzgerald plantation in nearby Jonesboro, in Clayton County. Her father, Philip Fitzgerald, who had come from Tipperary County, Ireland, as a young man, owned 2,375 acres and thirty-five slaves; and his good wife, Eleanor McGhan Fitzgerald, saw to it that everyone of them was instructed and baptized in the Catholic faith. The Fitzgeralds, ardent believers, had endured much prejudice on behalf of their religion in Protestant Clayton County, but Philip gained a reputation for toughness and outspokenness, and was elected a senator in the state legislature.