-seven
IT WAS ON A WILD WET NIGHT IN APRIL that Tony Fontaine rode in from
Jonesboro on a lathered horse that was half dead from exhaustion and came
knocking at their door, rousing her and Frank from sleep with their hearts
in their throats. Then for the second time in four months, Scarlett was
made to feel acutely what Reconstruction in all its implications meant,
made to understand more completely what was in Will’s mind when he said
“Our troubles have just begun,” to know that the bleak words of Ashley,
spoken in the wind-swept orchard of Tara, were true: “This that’s facing all
of us is worse than war—worse than prison—worse than death.”
The first time she had come face to face with Reconstruction was when
she learned that Jonas Wilkerson with the aid of the Yankees could evict
her from Tara. But Tony’s advent brought it all home to her in a far more
terrifying manner. Tony came in the dark and the lashing rain and in a few
minutes he was gone back into the night forever, but in the brief interval
between he raised the curtain on a scene of new horror, a curtain that she
felt hopelessly would never be lowered again.
That stormy night when the knocker hammered on the door with such
hurried urgency, she stood on the landing, clutching her wrapper to her
and, looking down into the hall below, had one glimpse of Tony’s swarthy
saturnine face before he leaned forward and blew out the candle in Frank’s
hand. She hurried down in the darkness to grasp his cold wet hand and
hear him whisper: “They’re after me—going to Texas—my horse is about
dead—and I’m about starved. Ashley said you’d— Don’t light the candle!
Don’t wake the darkies…. I don’t want to get you folks in trouble if I can
help it.”
With the kitchen blinds drawn and all the shades pulled down to the
sills, he permitted a light and he talked to Frank in swift jerky sentences as
Scarlett hurried about, trying to scrape together a meal for him.
He was without a greatcoat and soaked to the skin. He was hatless and
his black hair was plastered to his little skull. But the merriment of the
Fontaine boys, a chilling merriment that night, was in his little dancing
eyes as he gulped down the whisky she brought him. Scarlett thanked God
that Aunt Pittypat was snoring undisturbed upstairs. She would certainly
swoon if she saw this apparition.
“One damned bast—Scallawag less,” said Tony, holding out his glass for
another drink. “I’ve ridden hard and it’ll cost me my skin if I don’t get out
of here quick, but it was worth it. By God, yes! I’m going to try to get to
Texas and lay low there. Ashley was with me in Jonesboro and he told me
to come to you all. Got to have another horse, Frank, and some money. My
horse is nearly dead—all the way up here at a dead run—and like a fool I
went out of the house today like a bat out of hell without a coat or hat or a
cent of money. Not that there’s much money in our house.”
He laughed and applied himself hungrily to the cold corn pone and cold
turnip greens on which congealed grease was thick in white flakes.
“You can have my horse,” said Frank calmly. “I’ve only ten dollars with
me but if you can wait till morning—”
“Hell’s afire, I can’t wait!” said Tony emphatically but jovially. “They’re
probably right behind me. I didn’t get much of a start. If it hadn’t been for
Ashley dragging me out of there and making me get on my horse, I’d have
stayed there like a fool and probably had my neck stretched by now. Good
fellow, Ashley.”
So Ashley was mixed up in this frightening puzzle. Scarlett went cold,
her hand at her throat. Did the Yankees have Ashley now? Why, why
didn’t Frank ask what it was all about? Why did he take it all so coolly, so
much as a matter of course? She struggled to get the question to her lips.
“What—” she began. “Who—”
“Your father’s old overseer—that damned—Jonas Wilkerson.”
“Did you—is he dead?”
“My God, Scarlett O’Hara!” said Tony peevishly. “When I start out to
cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with
the blunt side of my knife, do you? No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”
“Good,” said Frank casually. “I never liked the fellow.”
Scarlett looked at him. This was not the meek Frank she knew, the
nervous beard clawer who she had learned could be bullied with such ease.
There was an air about him that was crisp and cool and he was meeting the
emergency with no unnecessary words. He was a man and Tony was a man
and this situation of violence was men’s business in which a woman had no
part.
“But Ashley— Did he—”
“No. He wanted to kill him but I told him it was my right, because Sally
is my sister-in-law, and he saw reason finally. He went into Jonesboro with
me, in case Wilkerson got me first. But I don’t think old Ash will get in any
trouble about it. I hope not. Got any jam for this corn pone? And can you
wrap me up something to take with me?”
“I shall scream if you don’t tell me everything.”
“Wait till I’ve gone and then scream if you’ve got to. I’ll tell you about it
while Frank saddles the horse. That damned—Wilkerson has caused
enough trouble already. You know how he did you about your taxes. That’s
just one of his meannesses. But the worst thing was the way he kept the
darkies stirred up. If anybody had told me I’d ever live to see the day when
I’d hate darkies! Damn their black souls, they believe anything those
scoundrels tell them and forget every living thing we’ve done for them.
Now the Yankees are talking about letting the darkies vote. And they
won’t let us vote. Why, there’s hardly a handful of Democrats in the whole
County who aren’t barred from voting, now that they’ve ruled out every
man who fought in the Confederate Army. And if they give the negroes
the vote, it’s the end of us. Damn it, it’s our state! It doesn’t belong to the
Yankees! By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne! And it won’t be borne!
We’ll do something about it if it means another war. Soon we’ll be having
nigger judges, nigger legislators—black apes out of the jungle—”
“Please—hurry, tell me! What did you do?”
“Give me another mite of that pone before you wrap it up. Well, the
word got around that Wilkerson had gone a bit too far with his nigger-
equality business. Oh, yes, he talks it to those black fools by the hour. He
had the gall—the—” Tony spluttered helplessly, “to say niggers had a right
to—to—white women.”
“Oh, Tony, no!”
“By God, yes! I don’t wonder you look sick. But hell’s afire, Scarlett, it
can’t be news to you. They’ve been telling it to them here in Atlanta.”
“I—I didn’t know.”
“Well, Frank would have kept it from you. Anyway, after that, we all
sort of thought we’d call on Mr. Wilkerson privately by night and tend to
him, but before we could— You remember that black buck, Eustis, who
used to be our foreman?”
“Yes.”
“Came to the kitchen door today while Sally was fixing dinner and—I
don’t know what he said to her. I guess I’ll never know. But he said
something and I heard her scream and I ran into the kitchen and there he
was, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch— I beg your pardon, Scarlett, it just slipped
out.”
“Go on.”
“I shot him and when Mother ran in to take care of Sally, I got my horse
and started to Jonesboro for Wilkerson. He was the one to blame. The
damned black fool would never have thought of it but for him. And on the
way past Tara, I met Ashley and, of course, he went with me. He said to let
him do it because of the way Wilkerson acted about Tara and I said No, it
was my place because Sally was my own dead brother’s wife, and he went
with me arguing the whole way. And when we got to town, by God,
Scarlett, do you know I hadn’t even brought my pistol. I’d left it in the
stable. So mad I forgot—”
He paused and gnawed the tough pone and Scarlett shivered. The
murderous rages of the Fontaines had made County history long before this
chapter had opened.
“So I had to take my knife to him. I found him in the barroom. I got
him in a corner with Ashley holding back the others and I told him why
before I lit into him. Why, it was over before I knew it,” said Tony
reflecting. “First thing I knew, Ashley had me on my horse and told me to
come to you folks. Ashley’s a good man in a pinch. He keeps his head.”
Frank came in, his greatcoat over his arm, and handed it to Tony. It was
his only heavy coat but Scarlett made no protest. She seemed so much on
the outside of this affair, this purely masculine affair.
“But Tony—they need you at home. Surely, if you went back and
explained—”
“Frank, you’ve married a fool,” said Tony with a grin, struggling into the
coat. “She thinks the Yankees will reward a man for keeping niggers off his
women folks. So they will, with a drumhead court and a rope. Give me a
kiss, Scarlett. Frank won’t mind and I may never see you again. Texas is a
long way off. I won’t dare write, so let the home folks know I got this far in
safety.”
She let him kiss her and the two men went out into the driving rain and
stood for a moment, talking on the back porch. Then she heard a sudden
splashing of hooves and Tony was gone. She opened the door a crack and
saw Frank leading a heaving, stumbling horse into the carriage house. She
shut the door again and sat down, her knees trembling.
Now she knew what Reconstruction meant, knew as well as if the house
were ringed about by naked savages, squatting in breech clouts. Now there
came rushing to her mind many things to which she had given little
thought recently, conversations she had heard but to which she had not
listened, masculine talk which had been checked half finished when she
came into rooms, small incidents in which she had seen no significance at
the time, Frank’s futile warnings to her against driving out to the mill with
only the feeble Uncle Peter to protect her. Now they fitted themselves
together into one horrifying picture.
The negroes were on top and behind them were the Yankee bayonets.
She could be killed, she could be raped and, very probably, nothing would
ever be done about it. And anyone who avenged her would be hanged by
the Yankees, hanged without benefit of trial by judge and jury. Yankee
officers who knew nothing of law and cared less for the circumstances of
the crime could go through the motions of holding a trial and put a rope
around a Southerner’s neck.
“What can we do?” she thought, wringing her hands in an agony of
helpless fear. “What can we do with devils who’d hang a nice boy like Tony
just for killing a drunken buck and a scoundrelly Scallawag to protect his
women folks?”
“It isn’t to be borne!” Tony had cried and he was right. It couldn’t be
borne. But what could they do except bear it, helpless as they were? She
fell to trembling and, for the first time in her life, she saw people and
events as something apart from herself, saw clearly that Scarlett O’Hara,
frightened and helpless, was not all that mattered. There were thousands of
women like her, all over the South, who were frightened and helpless. And
thousands of men, who had laid down their arms at Appomattox, had
taken them up again and stood ready to risk their necks on a minute’s
notice to protect those women.
There had been something in Tony’s face which had been mirrored in
Frank’s, an expression she had seen recently on the faces of other men in
Atlanta, a look she had noticed but had not troubled to analyze. It was an
expression vastly different from the tired helplessness she had seen in the
faces of men coming home from the war after the surrender. Those men
had not cared about anything except getting home. Now they were caring
about something again, numbed nerves were coming back to life and the
old spirit was beginning to burn. They were caring again with a cold
ruthless bitterness. And, like Tony, they were thinking: “It isn’t to be
borne!”
She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days
before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting.
But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle
flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different,
something that heartened her but frightened her—fury which could find no
words, determination which would stop at nothing.
For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one
with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn’t
to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a
struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners
enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be
turned over to ignorant negroes drunk with whisky and freedom.
As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself
akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left
Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to
him or to his family. Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood. She
remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood
was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the
kindly courteous exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the
drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath—
murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp
that he was, had killed a negro for being “uppity to a lady.”
When Frank came in dripping with rain and coughing, she leaped to her
feet.
“Oh, Frank, how long will it be like this?”
“As long as the Yankees hate us so, Sugar.”
“Is there nothing anybody can do?”
Frank passed a tired hand over his wet beard. “We are doing things.”
“What?”
“Why talk of them till we have accomplished something? It may take
years. Perhaps—perhaps the South will always be like this.”
“Oh, no!”
“Sugar, come to bed. You must be chilled. You are shaking.”
“When will it all end?”
“When we can all vote again, Sugar. When every man who fought for
the South can put a ballot in the box for a Southerner and a Democrat.”
“A ballot?” she cried despairingly. “What good’s a ballot when the
darkies have lost their minds—when the Yankees have poisoned them
against us?”
Frank went on to explain in his patient manner, but the idea that ballots
would cure the trouble was too complicated for her to follow. She was
thinking gratefully that Jonas Wilkerson would never again be a menace to
Tara and she was thinking about Tony.
“Oh, the poor Fontaines!” she exclaimed. “Only Alex left and so much
to do at Mimosa. Why didn’t Tony have sense enough to—to do it at night
when no one would know who it was? A sight more good he’d do helping
with the spring plowing than in Texas.”
Frank put an arm about her. Usually he was gingerly when he did this, as
if he anticipated being impatiently shaken off, but tonight there was a far-
off look in his eyes and his arm was firm about her waist.
“There are things more important now than plowing, Sugar. And
scaring the darkies and teaching the Scallawags a lesson is one of them. As
long as there are fine boys like Tony left, I guess we won’t need to worry
about the South too much. Come to bed.”
“But, Frank—”
“If we just stand together and don’t give an inch to the Yankees, we’ll
win, some day. Don’t you bother your pretty head about it, Sugar. You let
your men folks worry about it. Maybe it won’t come in our time, but surely
it will come some day. The Yankees will get tired of pestering us when they
see they can’t even dent us, and then we’ll have a decent world to live in
and raise our children in.”
She thought of Wade and the secret she had carried silently for some
days. No, she didn’t want her children raised in this welter of hate and
uncertainty, of bitterness and violence lurking just below the surface, of
poverty and grinding hardships and insecurity. She never wanted children
of hers to know what all this was like. She wanted a secure and well-
ordered world in which she could look forward and know there was a safe
future ahead for them, a world where her children would know only
softness and warmth and good clothes and fine food.
Frank thought this could be accomplished by voting. Voting? What did
votes matter? Nice people in the South would never have the vote again.
There was only one thing in the world that was a certain bulwark against
any calamity which fate could bring, and that was money. She thought
feverishly that they must have money, lots of it to keep them safe against
disaster.
Abruptly, she told him she was going to have a baby.
* * *
For weeks after Tony’s escape, Aunt Pitty’s house was subjected to repeated
searches by parties of Yankee soldiers. They invaded the house at all hours
and without warning. They swarmed through the rooms, asking questions,
opening closets, prodding clothes hampers, peering under beds. The
military authorities had heard that Tony had been advised to go to Miss
Pitty’s house, and they were certain he was still hiding there or somewhere
in the neighborhood.
As a result, Aunt Pitty was chronically in what Uncle Peter called a
“state,” never knowing when her bedroom would be entered by an officer
and a squad of men. Neither Frank nor Scarlett had mentioned Tony’s brief
visit, so the old lady could have revealed nothing, even had she been so
inclined. She was entirely honest in her fluttery protestations that she had
seen Tony Fontaine only once in her life and that was at Christmas time in
1862.
“And,” she would add breathlessly to the Yankee soldiers, in an effort to
be helpful, “he was quite intoxicated at the time.”
Scarlett, sick and miserable in the early stage of pregnancy, alternated
between a passionate hatred of the bluecoats who invaded her privacy,
frequently carrying away any little knickknack that appealed to them, and
an equally passionate fear that Tony might prove the undoing of them all.
The prisons were full of people who had been arrested for much less reason.
She knew that if one iota of the truth were proved against them, not only
she and Frank but the innocent Pitty as well would go to jail.
For some time there had been an agitation in Washington to confiscate
all “Rebel property” to pay the United States’ war debt and this agitation
had kept Scarlett in a state of anguished apprehension. Now, in addition to
this, Atlanta was full of wild rumors about the confiscation of property of
offenders against military law, and Scarlett quaked lest she and Frank lose
not only their freedom but the house, the store and the mill. And even if
their property were not appropriated by the military, it would be as good as
lost if she and Frank went to jail, for who would look after their business in
their absence?
She hated Tony for bringing such trouble upon them. How could he
have done such a thing to friends? And how could Ashley have sent Tony
to them? Never again would she give aid to anyone if it meant having the
Yankees come down on her like a swarm of hornets. No, she would bar the
door against anyone needing her help. Except, of course, Ashley. For weeks
after Tony’s brief visit she woke from uneasy dreams at any sound in the
road outside, fearing it might be Ashley trying to make his escape, fleeing
to Texas because of the aid he had given Tony. She did not know how
matters stood with him, for they did not dare write to Tara about Tony’s
midnight visit. Their letters might be intercepted by the Yankees and bring
trouble upon the plantation as well. But, when weeks went by and they
heard no bad news, they knew that Ashley had somehow come clear. And
finally, the Yankees ceased annoying them.
But even this relief did not free Scarlett from the state of dread which
began when Tony came knocking at their door, a dread which was worse
than the quaking fear of the siege shells, worse even than the terror of
Sherman’s men during the last days of the war. It was as if Tony’s
appearance that wild rainy night had stripped merciful blinders from her
eyes and forced her to see the true uncertainty of her life.
Looking about her in that cold spring of 1866, Scarlett realized what was
facing her and the whole South. She might plan and scheme, she might
work harder than her slaves had ever worked, she might succeed in
overcoming all of her hardships, she might through dint of determination
solve problems for which her earlier life had provided no training at all.
But for all her labor and sacrifice and resourcefulness, her small beginnings
purchased at so great a cost might be snatched away from her at any
minute. And should this happen, she had no legal rights, no legal redress,
except those same drumhead courts of which Tony had spoken so bitterly,
those military courts with their arbitrary powers. Only the negroes had
rights or redress these days. The Yankees had the South prostrate and they
intended to keep it so. The South had been tilted as by a giant malicious
hand, and those who had once ruled were now more helpless than their
former slaves had ever been.
Georgia was heavily garrisoned with troops and Atlanta had more than
its share. The commandants of the Yankee troops in the various cities had
complete power, even the power of life and death, over the civilian
population, and they used that power. They could and did imprison citizens
for any cause, or no cause, seize their property, hang them. They could and
did harass and hamstring them with conflicting regulations about the
operation of their business, the wages they must pay their servants, what
they should say in public and private utterances and what they should write
in newspapers. They regulated how, when and where they must dump their
garbage and they decided what songs the daughters and wives of ex-
Confederates could sing, so that the singing of “Dixie” or “Bonnie Blue
Flag” became an offense only a little less serious than treason. They ruled
that no one could get a letter out of the post office without taking the Iron
Clad oath and, in some instances, they even prohibited the issuance of
marriage licenses unless the couples had taken the hated oath.
The newspapers were so muzzled that no public protest could be raised
against the injustices or depredations of the military, and individual
protests were silenced with jail sentences. The jails were full of prominent
citizens and there they stayed without hope of early trial. Trial by jury and
the law of habeas corpus were practically suspended. The civil courts still
functioned after a fashion but they functioned at the pleasure of the
military, who could and did interfere with their verdicts, so that citizens so
unfortunate as to get arrested were virtually at the mercy of the military
authorities. And so many did get arrested. The very suspicion of seditious
utterances against the government, suspected complicity in the Ku Klux
Klan, or complaint by a negro that a white man had been uppity to him
were enough to land a citizen in jail. Proof and evidence were not needed.
The accusation was sufficient. And thanks to the incitement of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, negroes could always be found who were willing to
bring accusations.
The negroes had not yet been given the right to vote but the North was
determined that they should vote and equally determined that their vote
should be friendly to the North. With this in mind, nothing was too good
for the negroes. The Yankee soldiers backed them up in anything they
chose to do, and the surest way for a white person to get himself into
trouble was to bring a complaint of any kind against a negro.
The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of
the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. The better
class of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white
masters. Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave
population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had
been beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to
avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of “trashy free issue
niggers,” who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from
the field-hand class.
In slave days, these lowly blacks had been despised by the house negroes
and yard negroes as creatures of small worth. Just as Ellen had done, other
plantation mistresses throughout the South had put the pickaninnies
through courses of training and elimination to select the best of them for
the positions of greater responsibility. Those consigned to the fields were
the ones least willing or able to learn, the least energetic, the least honest
and trustworthy, the most vicious and brutish. And now this class, the
lowest in the black social order, was making life a misery for the South.
Aided by the unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen’s
Bureau and urged on by a fervor of Northern hatred almost religious in its
fanaticism, the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to
the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of
small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or
small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond
their comprehension, they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in
destruction or simply because of their ignorance.
To the credit of the negroes, including the least intelligent of them, few
were actuated by malice and those few had usually been “mean niggers”
even in slave days. But they were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily
led and from long habit accustomed to taking orders. Formerly their white
masters had given the orders. Now they had a new set of masters, the
Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were: “You’re just as good as
any white man, so act that way. Just as soon as you can vote the Republican
ticket, you are going to have the white man’s property. It’s as good as yours
now. Take it, if you can get it!”
Dazzled by these tales, freedom became a never-ending picnic, a
barbecue every day of the week, a carnival of idleness and theft and
insolence. Country negroes flocked into the cities, leaving the rural
districts without labor to make the crops. Atlanta was crowded with them
and still they came by the hundreds, lazy and dangerous as a result of the
new doctrines being taught them. Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox,
typhoid and tuberculosis broke out among them. Accustomed to the care of
their mistresses when they were ill in slave days, they did not know how to
nurse themselves or their sick. Relying upon their masters in the old days
to care for their aged and their babies, they now had no sense of
responsibility for their helpless. And the Bureau was far too interested in
political matters to provide the care the plantation owners had once given.
Abandoned negro children ran like frightened animals about the town
until kind-hearted white people took them into their kitchens to raise.
Aged country darkies, deserted by their children, bewildered and panic
stricken in the bustling town, sat on the curbs and cried to the ladies who
passed: “Mistis, please Ma’m, write mah old Marster down in Fayette
County dat Ah’s up hyah. He’ll come tek dis ole nigger home agin. ’Fo’
Gawd, Ah done got nuff of dis freedom!”
The Freedmen’s Bureau, overwhelmed by the numbers who poured in
upon them, realized too late a part of the mistake and tried to send them
back to their former owners. They told the negroes that if they would go
back, they would go as free workers, protected by written contracts
specifying wages by the day. The old darkies went back to the plantations
gladly, making a heavier burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters
who had not the heart to turn them out, but the young ones remained in
Atlanta. They did not want to be workers of any kind, anywhere. Why
work when the belly is full?
For the first time in their lives the negroes were able to get all the
whisky they might want. In slave days, it was something they never tasted
except at Christmas, when each one received a “drap” along with his gift.
Now they had not only the Bureau agitators and the Carpetbaggers urging
them on, but the incitement of whisky as well, and outrages were
inevitable. Neither life nor property was safe from them and the white
people, unprotected by law, were terrorized. Men were insulted on the
streets by drunken blacks, houses and barns were burned at night, horses
and cattle and chickens stolen in broad daylight, crimes of all varieties
were committed and few of the perpetrators were brought to justice.
But these ignominies and dangers were as nothing compared with the
peril of white women, many bereft by the war of male protection, who lived
alone in the outlying districts and on lonely roads. It was the large number
of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives
and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and
caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this
nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most
loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being. The
North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged,
because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands
at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been
overthrown by the invaders.
Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the
point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of
them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles. The vote must be
given to them but it must be denied to most of their former owners. The
South must be kept down and disfranchisement of the whites was one way
to keep the South down. Most of those who had fought for the
Confederacy, held office under it or given aid and comfort to it were not
allowed to vote, had no choice in the selection of their public officials and
were wholly under the power of an alien rule. Many men, thinking soberly
of General Lee’s words and example, wished to take the oath, become
citizens again and forget the past. But they were not permitted to take it.
Others who were permitted to take the oath, hotly refused to do so,
scorning to swear allegiance to a government which was deliberately
subjecting them to cruelty and humiliation.
Scarlett heard over and over until she could have screamed at the
repetition: “I’d have taken their damned oath right after the surrender if
they’d acted decent. I can be restored to the Union, but by God, I can’t be
reconstructed into it!”
Through the anxious days and nights, Scarlett was torn with fear. The
ever-present menace of lawless negroes and Yankee soldiers preyed on her
mind, the danger of confiscation was constantly with her, even in her
dreams, and she dreaded worse terrors to come. Depressed by the
helplessness of herself and her friends, of the whole South, it was not
strange that she often remembered during these days the words which Tony
Fontaine had spoken so passionately:
“By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne! And it won’t be borne!”
* * *
In spite of war, fire and Reconstruction, Atlanta had again become a boom
town. In many ways, the place resembled the busy young city of the
Confederacy’s early days. The only trouble was that the soldiers crowding
the streets wore the wrong kind of uniforms, the money was in the hands of
the wrong people, and the negroes were living in leisure while their former
masters struggled and starved.
Underneath the surface were misery and fear, but all the outward
appearances were those of a thriving town that was rapidly rebuilding from
its ruins, a bustling, hurrying town. Atlanta, it seemed, must always be
hurrying, no matter what its circumstances might be. Savannah,
Charleston, Augusta, Richmond, New Orleans would never hurry. It was ill
bred and Yankeefied to hurry. But in this period, Atlanta was more ill bred
and Yankeefied than it had ever been before or would ever be again. With
new people thronging in from all directions, the streets were choked and
noisy from morning till night. The shiny carriages of Yankee officers’ wives
and newly rich Carpetbaggers splashed mud on the dilapidated buggies of
the townspeople, and gaudy new homes of wealthy strangers crowded in
among the sedate dwellings of older citizens.
The war had definitely established the importance of Atlanta in the
affairs of the South and the hitherto obscure town was now known far and
wide. The railroads for which Sherman had fought an entire summer and
killed thousands of men were again stimulating the life of the city they had
brought into being. Atlanta was again the center of activities for a wide
region, as it had been before its destruction, and the town was receiving a
great influx of new citizens, both welcome and unwelcome.
Invading Carpetbaggers made Atlanta their headquarters and on the
streets they jostled against representatives of the oldest families in the
South who were likewise newcomers in the town. Families from the
country districts who had been burned out during Sherman’s march and
who could no longer make a living without the slaves to till the cotton had
come to Atlanta to live. New settlers were coming in every day from
Tennessee and the Carolinas where the hand of Reconstruction lay even
heavier than in Georgia. Many Irish and Germans who had been bounty
men in the Union Army had settled in Atlanta after their discharge. The
wives and families of the Yankee garrison, filled with curiosity about the
South after four years of war, came to swell the population. Adventurers of
every kind swarmed in, hoping to make their fortunes, and the negroes
from the country continued to come by the hundreds.
The town was roaring—wide open like a frontier village, making no
effort to cover its vices and sins. Saloons blossomed overnight, two and
sometimes three in a block, and after nightfall the streets were full of
drunken men, black and white, reeling from wall to curb and back again.
Thugs, pickpockets and prostitutes lurked in the unlit alleys and shadowy
streets. Gambling houses ran full blast and hardly a night passed without its
shooting or cutting affray. Respectable citizens were scandalized to find that
Atlanta had a large and thriving red-light district, larger and more thriving
than during the war. All night long pianos jangled from behind drawn
shades and rowdy songs and laughter floated out, punctuated by occasional
screams and pistol shots. The inmates of these houses were bolder than the
prostitutes of the war days and brazenly hung out of their windows and
called to passers-by. And on Sunday afternoons, the handsome closed
carriages of the madams of the district rolled down the main streets, filled
with girls in their best finery, taking the air from behind lowered silk
shades.
Belle Watling was the most notorious of the madams. She had opened a
new house of her own, a large two-story building that made neighboring
houses in the district look like shabby rabbit warrens. There was a long
barroom downstairs, elegantly hung with oil paintings, and a negro
orchestra played every night. The upstairs, so rumor said, was fitted out
with the finest of plush upholstered furniture, heavy lace curtains and
imported mirrors in gilt frames. The dozen young ladies with whom the
house was furnished were comely, if brightly painted, and comported
themselves more quietly than those of other houses. At least, the police
were seldom summoned to Belle’s.
This house was something that the matrons of Atlanta whispered about
furtively and ministers preached against in guarded terms as a cesspool of
iniquity, a hissing and a reproach. Everyone knew that a woman of Belle’s
type couldn’t have made enough money by herself to set up such a
luxurious establishment. She had to have a backer and a rich one at that.
And Rhett Butler had never had the decency to conceal his relations with
her, so it was obvious that he and no other must be that backer. Belle
herself presented a prosperous appearance when glimpsed occasionally in
her closed carriage driven by an impudent yellow negro. When she drove
by, behind a fine pair of bays, all the little boys along the street who could
evade their mothers ran to peer at her and whisper excitedly: “That’s her!
That’s ole Belle! I seen her red hair!”
Shouldering the shell-pitted houses patched with bits of old lumber and
smoke-blackened bricks, the fine homes of the Carpetbaggers and war
profiteers were rising, with mansard roofs, gables and turrets, stained-glass
windows and wide lawns. Night after night, in these newly built homes, the
windows were ablaze with gas light and the sound of music and dancing
feet drifted out upon the air. Women in stiff bright-colored silks strolled
about long verandas, squired by men in evening clothes. Champagne corks
popped, and on lace tableclothes seven-course dinners were laid. Hams in
wine, pressed duck, pâté de foie gras, rare fruits in and out of season, were
spread in profusion.
Behind the shabby doors of the old houses, poverty and hunger lived—
all the more bitter for the brave gentility with which they were borne, all
the more pinching for the outward show of proud indifference to material
wants. Dr. Meade could tell unlovely stories of those families who had been
driven from mansions to boarding houses and from boarding houses to
dingy rooms on back streets. He had too many lady patients who were
suffering from “weak hearts” and “declines.” He knew, and they knew he
knew, that slow starvation was the trouble. He could tell of consumption
making inroads on entire families and of pellagra, once found only among
poor whites, which was now appearing in Atlanta’s best families. And there
were babies with thin rickety legs and mothers who could not nurse them.
Once the old doctor had been wont to thank God reverently for each child
he brought into the world. Now he did not think life was such a boon. It
was a hard world for little babies and so many died in their first few months
of life.
Bright lights and wine, fiddles and dancing, brocade and broadcloth in
the showy big houses and, just around the corners, slow starvation and
cold. Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and
hatred for the conquered.
