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  Annie thought of her adopted city as home. She liked its youth and brashness, and felt she had a solid place in its beginnings. After the fire, there had begun a great exodus from Atlanta, as terrified families fled to Macon, their possessions piled high in open wagons. The bodies of thousands of soldiers were buried in shallow graves; rotting carcasses of horses and mules killed during the combat littered the recent battlefields around the city, which was itself a rubble heap.

  Of Atlanta’s more than four thousand buildings, only about four hundred still stood, and most of these had been damaged. Dogs that fleeing families had left behind lived amid the rubble and formed wolflike packs at night, baying in unison. Lean and hungry, they became increasingly vicious as the winter went on. But the many horrors did not discourage Annie and James Stephens, who remained to help raise Atlanta out of the ashes at the same time that they raised six daughters.

  By the time Margaret was born, her Grandfather Stephens, a wholesale grocer and real-estate speculator, had been dead four years and Grandmother Stephens was fifty-six. Thirty-eight years after the burning of Atlanta, she still considered as newcomers those families who had moved to Atlanta after the fire, and she had no use for anyone who had run off to another city. A strong, civic-minded woman, she could, according to her granddaughter, “go to the mayor and city council and reduce them to jelly by a few well-chosen words concerning male shilly-shallying and inefficiency.” With the help of some of her equally tough female contemporaries, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens managed to push through legislation even without the clout of a vote. Her daughter, Maybelle, was a firebrand in her own right, and by the time Margaret was two it had become obvious that her mother and grandmother could not live under one roof.

  The Mitchell family moved to a small house owned by Grandmother Stephens around the corner, at 177 Jackson Street. A year later, Eugene Mitchell, whose law practice was prospering, bought a twelve-room, two-story Victorian house on a large lot just a few doors down, at 187 Jackson Street. This rambling, drafty house, set back among giant oaks and with a great sweep of lawn in front, was in an historic section of Atlanta, and on its northernmost boundaries one could still see the trenches from which the Confederates had fought the Battle of Atlanta. No longer the elite section of town, it was, however, old guard; the majority of the houses were still owned by the families who had built them.

  Traditionally, most girls in the Stephens family were convent-educated. Margaret’s mother had been packed off to an old Royalist Convent in Canada where, as Maybelle told her daughter, they “taught things as they were in the good old sixteenth century.” Maybelle was a tiny woman with fly-away red hair, sharp blue eyes, and chiseled features. If her carriage had not been so proud and her figure so neat, she might have appeared to be dwarfed, for she stood no more than four feet, nine inches. Despite her diminutive size, the role of “the little woman” was not for her. Indeed, Maybelle was the mainspring of the Mitchell family, her mother’s equal, and the president of one of Atlanta’s most militant groups of suffragettes. At meetings, often held in the living room of the Mitchell house, she would stand on a stool in order to be seen and, in a style of oratory that had its roots in preachers’ fiery sermons on hell and damnation, she would shout about the inequities forced upon women. Meanwhile, her wide-eyed children would watch surreptitiously from the top of the stairs.

  The first time Margaret was permitted to stay up later than six o’clock was on the tremendous occasion of a suffragette rally that had as its guest speaker Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Mrs. Catt was world-famous, and Maybelle would not have considered missing her appearance in Atlanta. So, when the Mitchells’ nursery girl took sick an hour before the rally, Maybelle tied a “Votes for Women” banner around Margaret’s chubby middle, hissed a blood-curdling threat guaranteed to make her behave, and took her along to the meeting. From her spot on the platform between the silver pitcher and the water glasses, Margaret watched, entranced, as Maybelle made an impassioned speech.

  Eugene Mitchell viewed his wife with awed respect. Only five feet, five inches himself, he did not find his short stature an obstacle in achieving most of his life’s goals; his own limited vision had cut down the size and shape of them. He was in partnership with his brother, Gordon, in a successful law firm specializing in real estate and patents, an expertise not looked upon with great admiration by Maybelle, who had learned early that short people could become just as influential as tall ones — they just had to exert twice the energy.

  Eugene Mitchell did not share his wife’s Catholic faith, but, despite their religious differences, their marriage was solid, held together by mutual dependence. Maybelle seemed to possess the strength, the intuitive wisdom that he did not. Drawn to Maybelle because of her vigor and staunch purpose, reliant upon her drive, Eugene tacitly accepted her dedication to the Roman Catholic church and the suffrage movement. Husband and wife did, however, share a great loyalty to their family, Atlanta, and the South. A scholarly man, Eugene Mitchell found solace in reading and was an expert on the history of his city. He was also a clever businessman and used his legal knowledge to its fullest advantage in real-estate transactions and to protect his small financial investments. Perhaps Maybelle would have preferred to live more adventurously, but her husband was not a man to take chances.

  Once the Mitchells had moved to Jackson Street, Margaret’s life was more strictly ruled than it had been at her Grandmother Stephens’s. Her mother’s unyielding nature was difficult for the child to understand; nothing Margaret did appeared to please Maybelle, who was quick with the hairbrush whenever she thought her daughter was acting spoiled or ill-mannered. Stephens was a fair-haired, pug-nosed boy, short for his age. Margaret, five years younger, had to fight for his attention and admiration. This usually meant attempting feats even Stephens and his friends were too timid to try. During Margaret’s childhood, there was no tree too tall to climb, no space too minuscule to squeeze through if she was called upon to try.

  She loved her father dearly but, in those days, saw little of him. He was a soft-spoken man with dark, alert eyes and a mustache that he could twist about at the ends and that bristled against her cheek when he kissed her good-night. On weekends he was preoccupied with his books. He was then president of the Young Men’s Library Association, and from 1900 to 1905 he served on the board of trustees of the newly built and funded Carnegie Library, devoting most of his free time to collecting and purchasing volumes on Georgia and Atlanta for the library’s reference department.

  The population of turn-of-the-century Atlanta had trebled in a little over two decades to nearly ninety thousand. Since it had been almost entirely rebuilt in the 1870s, the city appeared newer than most Southern towns. Jackson Hill, the section where the Mitchells lived, looked across open pastures where livestock grazed, to the business district with its tall, recently built bank and insurance buildings.

  There was a large vacant lot halfway down Jackson Street, where the Mitchells pastured a Jersey cow. Tuberculosis had been a scourge in the Mitchell family for generations, and Maybelle supported a new theory that the rich cream off the milk of this breed of cow would prevent the white plague. Stephens’s pony, a Texas mustang, was also let loose to roam in this field. Maybelle had given him the animal for his eighth birthday, declaring that every man ought to learn to ride a horse by the time he was eight.

  Margaret greatly envied her brother’s new acquisition but, as she was only three, her parents refused to allow her even to be seated on the back of such a spirited animal. She had strict orders to stay on the veranda while Stephens and his young friends rode the mustang up and down the road in front of the house. One windy day she stood watching them for hours, until she became chilled through. To warm herself, she ran inside and stood over an open heating grate. Unknown to the household, a fire had started in the basement, and now a sudden draft sent flames up from beneath her, setting her skirts afire. Margaret’s ter
rified screams brought Maybelle running from a nearby room. Shouting for help, she scurried for blankets to wrap about the hysterical child in order to smother the flames. The servants doused the fire with buckets of water while Maybelle carried her bundled daughter out to the buggy and set off for the hospital — all in a matter of minutes. Maybelle’s quick thinking was no doubt responsible for the fact that, though Margaret suffered serious burns on her legs, she was left with few scars.

  For weeks the little girl was bedridden, tended by Maybelle and entertained by Grandmother Stephens with stories of her own childhood. When she was allowed up, bandages still swathed her legs, and Maybelle dressed her in Stephens’S old pants to conceal them. Later, after the bandages were removed, Maybelle insisted on keeping her in boys’ clothes to avoid the occurrence of another such accident. This boys’ attire was a source of great embarrassment to Margaret. Neighbors called her “Jimmy,” after a fancied resemblance to a character in a contemporary comic strip, and she was taunted by the other children on the block. The trousers set her apart from the neighborhood girls but, at the same time, they made her company more acceptable to her brother and his peers. Now Stephens even allowed her to feed the animals with him, the Mitchells’ menagerie having increased lately to include several ducks, two small alligators, a collie, and a number of cats. There were, Margaret learned, great advantages to illness and to being “different”; it was a lesson that she would never forget.

  April 26 was then a major holiday commemorating Atlanta’s Confederate dead. The first time Maybelle took Margaret to the parade that marked the occasion, she was four years old and tiny for her age. She stood beside Stephens on tiptoe, craning to see, asking questions and being told she must be very quiet or she would have to leave. Instinctively, she knew this was not like any other parade.

  Georgians had come from every corner of the state, and the town swarmed with people. “It was like an ancient tribal gathering,” Stephens recalls. “Everyone, from old men on canes down to the perambulators, was there lining Peachtree Street.” It was a somber crowd, and faces were strained with checked emotion. There were no balloons, shouts, or cheers, as at other parades. First came a band playing Confederate songs; then the artillery and artillerymen sitting on the caissons, their arms crossed; then the infantry and cavalry. As they marched by, people would shout, “Hello, Bill!” and “Hello, Joe!” But when the band stopped playing, a sudden hush swept through the spectators. No one moved as marchers held high a great mass of blood-red flags emblazoned with white stars. Shuffling along behind was a long line of old men, survivors of the great war. These were Atlanta’s soldiers, the men who had fought their cause, and tears flowed down many cheeks. It was 1904, forty years after the Battle of Atlanta, but the town was still Confederate at heart, and the people who stood crying at the sight of the soldiers who had come home were mourning the loss of their nation.

  After the parade, Maybelle took the children to the post office to see the U.S. flag, the only one in town and so different from the flag of the Confederacy. Maybelle stood there with them in solemn silence, her head bowed, her grip so taut that her nails cut into the children’s palms. This was conquered territory and they were a conquered people, and the children could feel it. Never would they get it out of their bones.

  Like her mother and her Grandmother Stephens, Margaret felt a strong bond with Atlanta. From her cradle days she had heard her parents talking so often about the fighting and hard times of the Civil War that she assumed that they had been through it all themselves. It was not until years later that she learned the war had not ended shortly before her birth.

  Indeed, the early years of Margaret’s life were heavily influenced by a war fought four decades earlier. She was taught the names of battles along with the alphabet, and Maybelle’s lullabies were doleful Civil War songs. Maybelle was completely tone deaf, but her voice rose and fell in mournful cadences, and the small child clutched her pillow to her in fear as she stared up at her mother’s tear-stained face in the dimly lit room. And after Maybelle left, turning out the gas lamp as she went, Margaret would lie awake in the darkness, unable to sleep as the images in her mother’s songs seemed to materialize in the shadows.

  Into a ward of whitewashed walls

  Where the dead and dying lay —

  Wounded with bayonets, shells and balls —

  Somebody’s darling was borne one day ...

  At the age of five, Margaret knew all the stanzas of this song by heart, along with a half dozen similarly depressing ones sung by her mother as lullabies. Her education concerning the harrowing days of the Civil War did not end there, however. Sunday afternoons, arrayed in her best clothes (usually a dress made by Grandmother Stephens), she was taken to call on elderly relatives, and if she sat quietly and listened to the Battle of Gettysburg and the Valley Campaign without interrupting, her reward was an invitation from an obliging veteran to put her two thumbs into the two dents in his skull where a minié ball had gone in and out.

  Often, as she later recalled, she would be “scooped up into a lap, told that [she] didn’t look like a soul on either side of the family, and then forgotten for the rest of the afternoon while the gathering spiritedly refought the Civil War.” An impressionable, sensitive child reared to believe children should be seen and not heard, she bore the discomfort of these afternoons in respectful silence as she sat “on bony knees, fat, slick taffeta laps, and soft, flowered muslin laps,” not daring to wriggle for fear “of getting the flat side of a hairbrush where it would do the most good.”

  “Cavalry knees,” she said, “were the worst knees of all. Cavalry knees had the tendency to trot and bounce and bob in the midst of reminiscences and kept me from going to sleep.”

  During these Sunday excursions she heard about battle wounds and the primitive way they were treated, how ladies nursed in hospitals, the way gangrene smelled, what measures were taken when the blockade got too tight for drugs and food and clothing had to be brought in from abroad. She heard about the burning and looting of Atlanta and the way the refugees from the town had crowded the roads and the trains to Macon. And how her Grandfather Mitchell had walked nearly fifty miles after the Battle of Sharpsburg with two bullet wounds in his skull. She heard about Reconstruction, too. In fact, she heard all there was to hear about the Civil War except that the Confederates had lost it.

  None of these happenings were discussed as having occurred forty years earlier, or even as particularly remarkable events; they were just a part of her family’s lives. Gradually they became part of Margaret’s life as well, so much a part that she grew to feel she must have experienced some of the most vivid of them.

  Each old-timer repeated how “terribly important little Atlanta was to the Confederacy.” Margaret felt great pride in this knowledge and paid special attention to stories about her city. At five, she knew all the industries that had sprung up in Atlanta during the war and could rattle them off like the ABCs: “pistol factories, percussion-cap factories, tanneries and boot makers, saddle and harness factories, machine-manufacturing shops, iron-rolling mills where the armor plate for warships was turned out, iron rails for the railroad tracks, wagon shops, hat and cap factories.” She appointed herself chief storyteller to her brother and his friends and would inform them how Atlanta, because of its safe position behind the lines, had been admirable for base-hospital purposes, and she would recount in grizzly detail the horrors of the wounded, sick, and maimed who passed through the city during the war. Such stories were as much a part of Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell’s childhood as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm were of other children’s. At one Sunday gathering when she was four, she was asked to recite the poem “I’m a Good Old Rebel and That’s What I Am.” It never struck her as odd.

  Young Atlanta had risen to the Confederacy’s needs; it was a great and brave city. And, whereas Margaret never felt quite a true child of Maybelle’s — whom she considered to be all the things she
was not: blessed by God, adored by Eugene Mitchell, and revered by most people who crossed their threshold — she did consider her relationship with Atlanta, whose history had formed her earliest impressions, to be deep and binding.

  Chapter Three

  WHEN SHE WAS FIVE, Margaret’s father bought her a small roan plains pony, which she lost no time in learning to master. She sat erect with pride in the saddle, riding with good hands and a long stirrup as she loped down the newly paved street that passed their front door. After a great deal of fuss and argument — her mother thought her too young — Eugene Mitchell set up jumping bars in the field, but the pony balked and, to her great disappointment, Margaret was ordered to abandon the sport.

  Instead, every afternoon she would go riding with an old Confederate veteran whom she later called her “boon companion.” The grizzled vet had long silver hair and a white goatee, wore a jimswinger coat, and won Margaret’s heart by gallantly kissing her grubby childish hand. The two of them would head out to the country dirt roads, where they would invariably pick up another veteran or two and form a military line. The Confederates’ families and Maybelle encouraged these afternoons in the mistaken belief that the child and the old-timers would keep each other out of mischief.

  A day seldom passed when the old boys did not have a heated argument about the Civil War. As far as Margaret was concerned, these quarrelsome vets were ideal company. Proud to be considered one of the gang, she still wore Stephens’s outgrown pants, tucked her pigtails under a boy’s cap, and sat a horse like a midget sergeant major. No quarter was given because of her extreme youth. She was expected to keep up with the company as a rookie and to hold her tongue and, although she delighted in her friends’ salty language, she remained an admiring though silent observer, fearful that any impropriety on her part could bring the outings to an end. Anyway, as she said afterwards, “It would have taken the lungs of the bull of Bashan to be heard above their tumult.” Eyes wide, horrified and amused by turns, she listened closely to these quarrels encompassing a myriad of subjects, each old soldier bragging about his own regiment in the Confederate Army and spewing invective on all the others. Margaret cherished every minute of these excursions and was sad and resentful when she had to give them up in order to attend school.