Confederates in the Attic (47 page)

A small, bald man appeared at her shoulder. This was Peggy’s brother, Ray. “Our father was a sharecropper,” he said. “He had to do a half-dozen other jobs to get by. Cut railroad ties. Kill possums and sell their skins. Pick pecans. And he’d go around to all the sharecroppers who had less than a bale of cotton, put their shares together to make a bale, and take it to market to sell.”

“Remember the man Daddy cut ties with?” Peggy said.

Ray smiled. “Daddy had a partner who would pull off his clothes and cut railroad ties in the nude. He told everyone it was because the mosquitoes made him work harder. But the real reason was that he only had one pair of clothes and didn’t want to ruin them in the woods.”

As children, Ray and Peggy worked six days a week in the fields. On Sundays they went to church. The only entertainment they recalled
was listening to the
Grand Ole Opry
on a neighbor’s radio. “I was in the eighth grade when I first read
Gone With the Wind,”
Peggy said. “But I hid it from my mother. She was Assembly of God, very fundamentalist. She didn’t approve of risqué literature.” Then came the movie, which was even more romantic. “It was like visiting another planet,” Peggy said. “And to think our ancestors lived like that. The only one of ours we’d heard about was a grandfather who went broke and lost his mind over the Civil War. He papered his living room with Confederate dollars.”

She went quiet for a moment. “I was a good student, the first woman in my family to finish high school. Sometimes I wonder if there hadn’t been a Civil War, maybe I could have been a Margaret Mitchell.” Instead, Peggy had worked as a telephone operator and rarely traveled beyond rural Arkansas. “This is my first vacation in years,” she said of the Elderhostel program.

Ray glanced at his watch. “One o’clock,” he said, studying the class schedule. “Laughter Therapy.”

Herb Bridges finished gathering his things. “I should have told these folks about the real Tara and Twelve Oaks,” he said. “Or where they would have been.” Caught up like the others in the book’s romance, I’d almost forgotten that this was why I’d sought Bridges out in the first place.

Bridges offered to show me the sites, which he’d found by matching the geography described in the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s own time in Clayton County. We turned down a wooded lane called Tara Road, then parked by a thicket of kudzu-draped cedars. This was the location, Bridges said, of the old Fitzgerald house that Betty Talmadge had moved fifteen years before, and that Margaret Mitchell often visited as a child. Bridges had learned from Mitchell’s brother that the farmhouse was once surrounded by cotton fields. The site now faced a raw subdivision—“Andover at Hawthorne. A Swim/Tennis Community from $79,900”—with duplexes planted around cul-de-sacs so new they hadn’t yet been named.

This spot wasn’t mentioned in the novel, but it provided Bridges with the starting point for his sleuthing of Mitchell’s imaginary landscape. “We know she liked to take long walks around here,” he
said. “If you look closely at what she might have seen, it matches awfully closely to the book.”

We drove a mile or so to a fork in Tara Road. Bridges said, “Remember the first scene of the book, when the Tarleton twins leave Scarlett?”

I opened my paperback: “When they had rounded the curve of the dusty road that hid them from Tara, Brent drew his horse to a stop under a clump of dogwood.” Bridges smiled. “This is the spot.”

He’d based his calculation on the lay of the land and the site’s distance from real coordinates in the book, such as Jonesboro and the Flint River. “Just to make sure, I talked to some old people around here,” he said. “They all told me there was once a clump of dogwoods at exactly this spot.”

The dogwoods had been supplanted by a copse of real estate signs—
“FOR SALE
TARA Realty Company”—and by a sign pointing to Tara Beach, a spit of sand beside a nearby artificial lake. Bridges continued slowly down Tara Road, referring me to the book’s next scene, in which Scarlett waits for her father to return along the road from the Wilkes estate: “In her thoughts she traced its course down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek Temple. ‘Oh Ashley! Ashley!’ she thought, and her heart beat faster.” The road reappeared a few chapters later, during the O’Haras’ carriage ride to the Twelve Oaks party: a dusty trace bordered by wild violets, Cherokee roses, “savage red gulches” and cotton plantations.

Now, bulldozers pummeled the red land, sowing tract houses. But the topography matched the text, eerily so, with the road dipping down a gentle slope to the the sluggish brown Flint. It was easy to conjure the swamp bottom where the white-trash Slatterys clung to their three acres of land between the O’Haras’ and Wilkeses’ estates. On the opposite side of the river, the road rose toward a hill with a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. “Twelve Oaks,” Bridges said, pointing to the top of the hill.

There was no Greek Temple atop the rise, just woods and cows
and undulating pasture. Bridges pointed at the dense woods skirting the meadow. “Mitchell writes about the ‘soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience’ to reclaim the land,” he said. “Well look. They have.” I couldn’t help wondering, though, how long it would be before the woods were claimed by another swim/tennis community.

We retraced our route, back across the Flint and up the hill on the other side. Bridges paused near the bygone dogwood clump. A long driveway wound up a small knoll. “Tara would be back there, no doubt in my mind,” he said. “This has to be it.”

A handwritten sign at the base of the driveway said For Sale By Owner. But Bridges wasn’t keen to go any closer, and conceded he’d never done so. “You run into some ornery folk around here,” he said. I reckoned Bridges, a former mailman, knew what he was talking about.

He dropped me back at my car, and I sat for a while flipping through the novel, rereading passages on Tara. “It was built by slave labor, a clumsy, sprawling building that crowned the rise of ground overlooking the green incline of pasture … ‘Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,’ he shouted. ‘’Tis the only thing in the world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it!’…‘Yes, yes! To Tara! Oh, Rhett, we must hurry!’”

I circled back along Tara Road and pulled up the driveway with the For Sale By Owner sign. The road ended at a low-slung weatherboard house with a cinder-block foundation and a washing machine on the porch. Two bearded men stood leaning against pickup trucks, spitting tobacco juice.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you know that this is where Tara was. I mean, would have been if it were real.”

“No it ain’t,” said one of the men, who introduced himself as Cooper. “Tara’s back down the road a mile. That’s where that crazy old lady found it. Now there’s a hundred fifty-five duplexes going in.”

I realized he was talking about the old Fitzgerald house, and tried to explain what Herb Bridges had just told me. Cooper turned and glanced at his modest house. “Lived my whole damned life in Tara
and never even knowed it.” He shrugged. “My wife’s crazy about all that
Gone With the Wind
stuff. But it just don’t flip my boat.” His eyes narrowed. “’Less there’s money in it.”

“What’s it selling for?” I asked.

He thought a moment and said, “Fifty something.” This was a ludicrous sum, given that modern split-levels with swimming and tennis privileges were selling down the road for seventy something. I confessed that I wasn’t looking for property, just information. Cooper looked disappointed, but told me about a few Civil War graves nestled in the woods behind his house. “There’s snakes back there as big as your arm, but you’re welcome to poke around if you want.”

Bushwhacking through the dense brush, I found a few stones almost buried by vines and pine needles. I could just barely make out the inscriptions. One, undated, said simply: “John M. Turner. Papa.” But two others had the familiar, slightly pointed top of Confederate headstones I recognized from a dozen battlefields. (“They’re shaped that way to keep the damn Yankees from sitting on them,” a Sons of Confederate Veterans member had told me.) Brushing away vines, I found one marked “Elijah A. Mann Co. E 10th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” and another that said, “Lieut. Sidney D. Mann Co. D. 44th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” No O’Haras or Wilkeses or Tarletons. Still, I wondered if Margaret Mitchell might have tramped back here as a teenager and had her imagination stirred by these lonely Confederate graves.

Hiking back through the woods and into the yard, with its rusted bikes and battered pickup trucks, I climbed in my car and navigated slowly out toward the interstate, past red earth gashed with still more real-estate signs (“Ashley Woods,” “Tara Pointe,” “Grand Oaks at Tara New Homes from the 80s”), and then past Jonesboro, Tara Shopping Center, Tara Alternator and Starter, Tara Transmission, O’Hara’s Food and Spirits. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that the Japanese never found Tara. It was gone. Gone With the Window.

B
ACK IN
A
TLANTA
, I called the historian I’d visited, Franklin Garrett, to corroborate what I’d seen and heard in Jonesboro. He laughed hoarsely, then told me that Margaret Mitchell had phoned
him in the 1930s, before finishing her novel. She wanted to check if any of the names she planned to use corresponded with families in the 1860 city directory. “She didn’t want to embarrass anyone by using that name and attaching it, say, to the owner of a lewd house in her novel.”

Later, after the movie’s release, Garrett helped the city plan a tourist route past the approximate locations of Miss Pittypat’s house and other spots in Atlanta mentioned in the book. He quickly received a long, angry letter from Mitchell. “Franklin,” she wrote of the sites, “they weren’t anywhere except in my mind.”

“What about Tara and Twelve Oaks?” I asked.

Garrett chuckled again and mentioned several letters that Mitchell penned when fans of
Gone With the Wind
began trekking to Georgia in search of the famed plantations. I found one of the letters quoted in an old newspaper story. Mitchell told how she’d scoured the backroads of Clayton County while researching her novel to make sure that the scenery she described was indeed fictional. She even jumbled the county’s geography and checked that there were no Tara-like homes with tree-lined avenues. She did this so that no one might think their own grandmother was the model for Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell was miffed that people were nonetheless determined to pin her fictional creations to firm ground.

“My trouble,” she concluded, “seems to have been all for nothing.”

So, apparently, had mine.

H
eading east from Atlanta, I shadowed Sherman’s route as he rampaged toward the sea: reducing homes to charred chimneys known as “Sherman’s sentinels,” twisting railroad tracks into “Sherman’s neckties,” and sending parties of foragers, called “bummers,” to pillage the countryside.

Or so I’d always imagined. Since arriving in Georgia, I’d been doing some reading. Once again, I learned that much of what I’d absorbed of the Civil War was more mythic than factual. Sherman talked a good game, pledging to “make Georgia howl,” but the reality of his March rarely matched his words (at least in Georgia; he was harsher on the Carolinas). One Georgia geographer had painstakingly mapped the March route and found that many homes alleged to have been burned were still in fact standing. “The actual destruction of private dwellings,” he concluded, “was rare indeed.”

Nor was Sherman’s March, which caused few civilian deaths, notably cruel by historic standards. As compared to the laying waste to Europe during the Thirty Years’ War, the routine massacres of
Native Americans—or the murder and mayhem caused by Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill—Sherman’s treatment of Georgia civilians was almost genteel.

His surrender terms certainly were. When Joseph Johnston yielded his forces soon after Appomattox, Sherman drafted an agreement so lenient that it provoked outrage in the North, compelling Sherman to match the terms Grant offered Lee. Sherman had lived in the South for twelve years before the War and shared many of its attitudes. All this helped to explain an odd circumstance; Sherman was much less reviled by Southerners a century ago than today. Georgians received Sherman courteously during a return visit to the state just fifteen years after his March. When he died in 1891 (having devoted his post-War years to Indian-fighting, memoir-writing and roller-skating), Sherman’s pallbearers included his wartime foe Joseph Johnston. Eighteen years later, a reporter for
Harper’s
magazine retraced Sherman’s March and noted “a surprising absence of bitterness” among inhabitants along the route.