Road to Tara Read online

  One sunny day, while Stephens and her cousins stood admiringly on the curbside, Margaret let out a great whoop and, tearing past them, shouted, “Watch me turn him ’round!” She pulled Bucephalus into a sharp turnabout, but the horse lost his footing and careened to the ground with Margaret beneath him, screaming in terror. When the boys reached her, she was lying unconscious on her left side, her left leg oozing blood and badly crushed, and Bucephalus was running wild in the tall grass of the open field.

  Chapter Four

  DESPITE MARGARET’S desperate pleas, Bucephalus was sold during the months of her recuperation. She was further distressed by the edict that she must never again attempt to ride a horse. With Stephens in school most of the day and Maybelle engaged in her suffrage activities, Margaret was forced to entertain herself during the long convalescence that followed the leg surgery she had undergone. With her mother’s prodding, she began in earnest to read the books in the family’s extensive library.

  Leathered volumes of Byron, Burns, Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy shared shelves with the well-read Civil War books. Maybelle renewed her efforts on behalf of War and Peace, but the book defeated Margaret. “Tolstoy and most of the Russian writers were the damned dullest, most muddled headed, confused bunch,” she later declared. But to Maybelle, or anyone else who asked if she had read War and Peace, she lied outright. In fact, in her adolescence, she would talk knowingly and at length about the book to Maybelle’s visitors, having never read more than the opening chapter.

  Though her leg injuries healed far more favorably than the doctor had expected, Margaret was left with a slight limp. Most athletic activities were curtailed, but she returned to her dancing lessons in order to strengthen the weakened muscles.

  Eugene Mitchell promised the family a vacation in New York that summer, while the construction of their new house was being completed, and Margaret looked forward to the trip with great enthusiasm.

  The family left home in June, boarding a steamship out of Savannah. To her relief, Margaret was not seasick. She roamed the decks with her father during the day and in the evening waltzed with him in the ship’s lounge to the new “Dream of Heaven Waltz.” Her leg injury had not made her dancing awkward, and Maybelle finally had reason to believe that her daughter might turn into a lady after all.

  New York, with its milling crowds and skyscrapers, was fascinating. Yet, Margaret felt overwhelmed, too. People found her Southern accent amusing, and absolute strangers would comment about it in restaurants and stores. The Mitchells visited Maybelle’s sister, Edyth Ney Morris, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and took the day-long Hudson River boat trip to Albany and back. Then, to Margaret’s disappointment, Stephens and her father remained in New York City while Margaret was dispatched with her mother to the Milk Cure, a health farm in New Jersey. She found it boring, but she returned to Atlanta in August, 1912, looking rosy-cheeked and robust, and she was able to join spiritedly in the move from Jackson Hill to the Mitchells’ new house.

  Though Peachtree Street was considered a fashionable address, the stretch of road that went past the house was still packed dirt, like most of Atlanta’s streets. But the new house was grand enough to be called a mansion, and the first time Margaret set eyes upon the great, dignified white facade, so unlike the other houses on Peachtree Street, most of which were Victorian, she was stunned, and more than a bit uncomfortable. With two-story Doric columns in the front, it was a fine example of classical revival architecture, a style popular in the South long before the Civil War and revived at the turn of the century. A few of the ruined and deserted plantation houses in Clayton County were of the same design. The Mitchell’s new neighbors considered the house gauche — it was one thing to live in a monumental Greek revival house that had been built in the first half of the nineteenth century, quite another to build a new one.

  Her parents may have been paying their respects to the past with this imposing structure, but all Margaret knew was that the house looked strange and awkward on its small city lot; it did not seem to belong on Peachtree Street any more than she did. Nor was she pleased by the manicured landscaping in this section of town, although there were some wooded areas and a small park across the road. She sensed that life was going to be necessarily different on Peachtree Street, and change did not sit well with her.

  The interior of the house was even more impressive than the outside. One entered into a large central hall with a sitting room to the left and a music room to the right and, when the walnut doors were flung back, the length of the three combined spaces stretched for seventy feet. This mansion, with its carved mantels and high ceilings and a grand staircase that demanded a queenly descent, was no place for the tomboy who had raced through the more comfortable old Victorian house on Jackson Street to the shuddering claps of slamming doors. A glance at the finely dressed and well-mannered neighborhood children told her that they might be very nice indeed, but that they would never understand a girl of eleven who, despite her mother’s efforts, still enjoyed wearing pants and throwing mudballs.

  Not only was Margaret in a new house, two trolley-car rides from her old neighborhood, but she was enrolled in a new school. Like the house, the Tenth Street School seemed enormous to the girl, and she made few friends. She was now a part of a more elite society than that of Jackson Hill, and she felt somehow stained by Maybelle’s suffrage activities and her Catholicism. Margaret was not accepted by the young residents of Peachtree Street, who had been learning the social niceties of Southern society while she had been skidding into first, second, or third base. And, though she was a vivacious, pretty girl, she had a penchant for saying things that shocked her proper new friends. They thought she was funny and they laughed at her jokes, but they did not come to her home nor invite her to theirs. And Stephens, a good-looking young man of seventeen, was preparing for college and was in and out of love. He had always been at the center of his sister’s life; now he treated her in a patronizing fashion. For Margaret, those first months on Peachtree Street were lonely and unhappy.

  To maintain their new, higher standard of living, the Mitchells hired more servants than they had had on Jackson Hill. Now uniforms and formal address replaced the casual dress and attitude of the domestic help they had once employed, and, worse, the expense placed a strain on the whole household. Suddenly Margaret was aware of what the Mitchells could not afford. The heat was kept way down in winter because, as she was often reminded, her father was “not a millionaire”; guests were few, and far between; and any proposed purchase had to be discussed at length before it was agreed to. Even Maybelle’s spirit seemed to wither with the move to Peachtree Street and, though she remained active in the women’s movement, meetings were no longer held at the Mitchell house.

  Margaret felt a stranger in her own home. Her great solace was in writing romances, mostly in play form. In the yard there was a circle of privet bushes that she called her “magic ring,” and in good weather she would sit cross-legged in its center, filling lined tablets with tales of adventure set in exotic lands.

  On the back page of one of these notebooks is the heading “Locations.” Beneath it is a list of likely story backgrounds, including Africa, Alaska, China, Egypt, Hades, Mexico, Russia, Turkey, South America, and Paris. Listed as well are these themes: “Crook, Civil War, Smugglers, Shipwreck, Sepoy Rebellion, ‘Society.’” A sense of the flavor of Margaret’s writing at this time can be gleaned from the titles of some of her stories: “Phil Kelly: Detective,” “A Darktown Tragedy,” “The Cow Puncher,” “In My Harem,” and “The Fall of Roger Rover.”

  During the Easter holiday, her mother took Margaret on a buggy trip through the back country and over the dirt roads of Georgia, where Maybelle spoke to groups of farm women about women’s rights. It was Maybelle’s intention to awaken Margaret to what she must face as a woman, but Margaret was far more interested in the old foundations of some burned-out houses, and in the tales of how their owners had been forced to flee as Sherman
torched his way to Savannah. Maybelle’s fiery speeches to the back-country women did not ignite a sense of “sisterhood” in Margaret; in fact, Maybelle seemed to communicate with these strange women better than she did with her daughter. Margaret returned from this trip feeling troubled and even more an outsider in her mother’s world.

  Not since the firing on Fort Sumter had the American people been so shocked as when, on August 4, 1914, the news came that war in Europe was a reality. Thirteen-year-old Margaret, having listened to grim tales of war all her life, understood its waste and devastation better than most educated Northern adults. Her parents and their friends discussed the war in Europe endlessly and were against isolation. The Mitchell and Stephens families were always proud to say that their ancestors had fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Seminole, Mexican, and Civil wars. They had “fought for Georgia whenever they could get a chance and if there wasn’t one, then they made it.” They hadn’t taken arms in the Spanish American War because they thought it “a piddling sort of war at best,” but they were prepared to send their sons into battle again if they must.

  Stephens stood ready to fight for his country and Maybelle stood proudly, though apprehensively, behind him. But the thought that her brother might be involved in the kind of bloody combat she was hearing discussed terrified Margaret, and, in the fall of 1914, she went off to her first day of school with a heavy heart.

  Having completed grammar school with no special honors, Margaret now entered Washington Seminary, a private school for girls founded by two great-nieces of George Washington. Here, manners and proper female deportment were part of the curriculum. Margaret went unwillingly, but her only alternative seemed worse: a convent school like the one that Maybelle and all the Fitzgerald women had attended. Still, the atmosphere at Washington Seminary was oppressive enough, and Margaret’s four years there were not happy ones.

  There were girls in Margaret’s class who admired her daring. She swam better than most and, despite all the dire warnings of her doctor, rode horseback with great style. She was the most tireless girl on hiking expeditions and could always think of some amusing activity. Her jokes, colorful language, and witty comments were often quoted. Nevertheless — perhaps because of her boyishness and her candor, or because of her somewhat bossy manner — few of the girls accepted her and she was not invited to join any of the school sororities. Her best friends were still the boys from her old neighborhood, with whom she could be herself, roughhouse, use slang, and discuss more vital subjects than those typical of “girl talk.” In an unpublished memoir, Stephens looked back on this time and wrote that she “had not made a social success at her school, though she came of an old family who had sufficient means to provide her with the proper things for a girl entering on her social life in the city.”

  It was more than unpopularity that plagued Margaret at Washington Seminary. Stephens added that “she made enemies” and that this “led to much bitterness.” He also claimed that these hard feelings followed his sister throughout her life, and that she “never forgot who were her enemies.” A classmate who perhaps fell into that category asserts that, as a young woman, “Margaret was only happy if she could boss people around.” The fact is, Margaret was something of a loner at school.

  Washington Seminary was housed in an old mansion, white-columned and enormous, and the elegant rooms and grounds were scrupulously maintained. The original house was reserved for the boarding students, and behind it stood the more modern buildings. According to Atlanta women of Margaret’s era and social level, “Nearly everybody went to Washington Seminary.” The school was located only a few minutes from the Mitchell house, which meant that it was easy for girls who lived on Peachtree Street to stop by on their way home. No doubt sensing the problems her daughter was having socially, Maybelle encouraged after-school visits, but when classmates dropped by she would lecture them on women’s rights, and this did not help her daughter’s popularity.

  Margaret’s most sympathetic teacher, Mrs. Eva Paisley, taught English II and III in a long, narrow, damp classroom in the basement of Washington Seminary. Mrs. Paisley recognized Margaret’s writing talent and made extensive notes in red ink in the margins of her theme papers: “Unity, Margaret,” “Sentence balance,” “Coherence,” “Simplify!” To Margaret’s embarrassment, Mrs. Paisley often read her themes before the class. “Listen to what you are saying,” she instructed. “Good writing must also be good listening!”

  Margaret confided little in her mother and never showed her the stories she wrote. No doubt she feared Maybelle’s disapproval of her efforts, but, beyond that, she was a very private person. She kept a diary for several years and then, the year that she was in Mrs. Paisley’s class, she decided to write a novel. For several months, she would hurry home from school and lock herself in her room to work on a book she called “The Big Four,” about the adventures of four close friends in a girls’ boarding school. Written painstakingly in longhand, it covered four hundred copybook pages and was divided into fourteen chapters. On the back inside cover she wrote: “There are authors and authors but a true writer is born and not made. Born writers make their characters real, living people, while the ‘made writers’ have merely stuffed figures who dance when the strings are pulled — that’s how I know I’m a ‘made’ writer.”

  The plot of this first ingenuous effort was an extension of Margaret’s own fantasies. In one episode, the fictitious Margaret saves a friend’s family from ruin by destroying some incriminating papers; in another chapter, she fearlessly leads her classmates to safety during a disastrous fire. Margaret stuck with the novel to the end, but, on rereading the work, it seemed to her little more than a “string of plain old lies.”

  Having, in her mind, failed as a novelist, Margaret channeled all her creative energy into the school’s dramatic club and soon became their star performer, leading playwright, and secretary. And, although her attempt at a novel had not been successful, she continued to write short stories, one of which appeared in the school’s class book under the nickname she now adopted for herself — Peggy Mitchell.

  “Peggy lay in the sand behind some mesquite bushes, hugging her father’s rifle to her breast and watching Alvarado’s men move about the house,” began this tale of a young girl who survives the massacre of her entire family by a Mexican bandit and then confronts the desperado herself. “Out in the early sunlight hurried the bandit leader, tossing away a cigarette as he came and hastily buckling on his belt. With infinite care Peggy slid the gun up to the level of her eyes and found the man across the sights. Coldly, dispassionately, she viewed him, the chill steel of the gun giving her confidence. She must not miss now — she would not miss — and she did not.”

  Initially, this story was rejected by the class book’s student editor, but Eva Paisley, who oversaw the publication, intervened, and the piece was included. A picture of the dramatic club taken in the fall of 1916 shows twenty-two members of the club, dressed in white middies and dark skirts, gathered about a Ford two-seater. The twenty-third member, Margaret, is perched on the roof.

  On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany. The Allies’ position could hardly have been worse than it was that spring. The casualties had been extraordinarily heavy; the naval situation was perilous after an appalling number of sinkings; and England had only about three weeks’ worth of food for its armed forces. Stephens, who had graduated from the University of Georgia in 1915 and had then gone on to Harvard Law School for nearly two years, now returned home to become one of the first Atlantans to be conscripted. He was sent for his officer’s training to nearby Fort McPherson, between Oakland City and East Point.

  No sooner had the shock of war hit Atlanta than a catastrophe took place that was to bring back memories of the summer of 1864. On the morning of May 21, 1917, after a particularly dry month, a hot wind blew from the south. At 12:46 P.M., the fourth telephone alarm of the morning came into the fire department. There was a f
ire on the roof of an old Negro pesthouse, then being used as a storage depot for Grady Hospital. It did not sound serious and, as all the best equipment was already out, a fire truck without a proper hose was sent. By the time a second vehicle was dispatched, the fire was beyond control and sweeping a hot path northward into the white residential section of Jackson Hill, just up the road from where the Mitchells had lived and near Grandmother Stephens’s house. Fanned by the wind, flames swept across the open fields, moved along the crest of the hill, and then rushed downward, leaping from house to house so swiftly that residents did not have time to save much more than their children and the sick and elderly as they made a wild dash toward safety. In less than an hour, twenty blocks were ablaze, the sky was a “hideous red glow” and the acrid smell of smoke hung thick in the air.

  Streets had now begun to fill with automobiles, trunks, and all manner of household goods and treasures, from shoe brushes to pianos. People ran screaming ahead of the fire, tripping and falling over the abandoned possessions scattered promiscuously on pavements and streets. An hour of sustained fear passed before Grandmother Stephens was found well and safe (having been downtown shopping at the time the fire broke out), although her house, which had survived Sherman and the burning of Atlanta, was razed to the ground.

  Atlanta was in a state of dire emergency as the hot breeze continued to spread the flames. In a desperate effort to stop the conflagration, the fire department employed explosives to destroy houses that were in the flames’ path, in order to create a burned-out belt around the fire. The deafening explosions created more pandemonium. The entire population was wild with terror as flames and black coils of pungent smoke shot up into the sky and houses halfway across the city shook from the blasts of TNT. But not even dynamiting could stop the flames. They leaped across trenches, spread out east and west, gutting whole streets. Then, suddenly, as the wind shifted, the fire spent the major part of its force.