Margaret Mitchell & John Marsh

by Marianne Walker

  In writing her novel, Peggy wove some of her Grandpa Russell’s experiences and features into her characterization of Rhett Butler. As Stephens pointed out, no child could forget being raised onto that old cavalryman’s bony knees and told to put her fingers into the grooves in her grandfather’s skull while the old man’s trembling hand guided the fearful child’s fingers to the spot. “Feel it, child? Do ye feel it?” the old man would ask.32 One summer when Peggy was seven or eight, her father, who had heard his father’s “grooves story” hundreds of times, drove his family to Sharpsburg. They walked all over that field, once soaked with blood, trying to determine where the batteries had been captured and where Grandpa Russell had been wounded.33 From that time on, Peggy enjoyed exploring Civil War battlefields in her area and learning about their history.

  As an imaginative, curious child with an eye for detail and a keen memory, she listened intently to the telling and retelling of these stories, which shaped her world and presented her ancestors as epic heroes. She grew up with an abiding sense of Georgia’s history. Years later, in explaining how she got the idea for Gone With the Wind, she said that she supposed she got it “in the cradle.” She had heard so much when she was very young about the battles and the hard times after the war that for years, she said, she believed her parents had been through it all.34 “In fact I was about ten years old,” she wrote, “before I learned the war hadn’t ended shortly before I was born.”35

  After describing her ancestors as “a remarkably tough bunch of people,” she explained, “I don’t mean tough in the modern slang meaning of the word. But tough in its older meaning, hard, resistant, strong.”36 Each of the old men had fought in the Confederate Army and continued to fight the war in their memories whenever two or three of them got together. Each of the old ladies had nursed the wounded and the dying in hospitals and struggled to manage the farms while their menfolk were away.37

  5

  Unlike John Marsh, whose childhood was filled early with responsibilities and marred by the death of his father, Peggy had an idyllic childhood. Her brother Stephens described it as “serene and happy in a way that was possible only in a world where one felt absolutely secure.”38 Everything about her childhood and her environment—house, neighborhood, relatives, playmates, parents—nurtured her imagination and later emerged in one way or another in her novel.

  As they were growing up, neither she nor Stephens had responsibilities or any kind of work to do around their house or yard. The Mitchells had plenty of servants, although none of them appears to have been the prototype for Scarlett’s outspoken Mammy. The large vacant lot next to their house was Peggy and Stephens’s playground, an ideal place to fly kites, play ball, race ponies. And it was here that Peggy, dressed like a little boy, romped and played with her brother and the neighborhood children from daylight to dark.39 Her mother dressed her in boy’s pants and shirts after an accident occurred when Peggy was only three. Her leg was burned when her light, ruffled dress caught on fire as it brushed against the opened coal-burning grates used to heat the house. Although the injury was not serious, Maybelle feared that such an incident might recur in a more serious manner, and that same afternoon she put all of her daughter’s pretty dresses away except for special occasions. When Peggy went out to play, she wore boy’s clothes and a tweed cap under which her long blond hair was tucked. (She was light-haired until her teens.) Though very small and delicately built, she was really a sturdy child, and very active. The boy’s clothes suited her. Neighbors took to calling her “Jimmy” from a fancied resemblance to a small boy who figured in a comic strip that ran in the Journal. Throughout her life, she preferred loose, comfortable clothes and often wore overalls, shorts, or slacks. In a letter to Henry and Mary Marsh on July 3, 1933, Peggy congratulated them on the birth of their second daughter Jane. Recalling her childhood, she wrote,

  I had no sister and yearned for one to the extent of telling the family doctor that I was sure that Mother would just as soon have a little negro daughter as a white one if he really was out of little white girls, as he solemnly told me. (I got soundly tanned for that remark, by the way.) Other little girls had sisters and it was so convenient! They always had some one to play with. They were not obliged to control their tempers and stay on good terms with neighboring little girls in order to have companions. They could stick out their tongues, pack up their doll rags and walk off switching their small behinds and refuse to play with me, secure in the knowledge that they had sister for company. And when they grew older, they could and did wear each others clothes and have each other to confide in about “what-I-said-to-him-and-what-he-said-to-me.” And it seemed to me that sisters near in age always lured more beaux into a house than a lone girl could do single handed and, at sixteen, that was a very serious matter. . . . I used to ask for a sister on Christmases and birthdays and Mother was quite willing to oblige me but had terrible luck in the matter so I had to grow up with the none too tender companionship of Stephens who felt that girls were, at best, a care and that if I wished to play with him, I would have to be a boy named Jimmy. And so I was a boy named Jimmy till I was fourteen.41

  When Peggy was two years old, her father moved their family into a larger house, No. 187, on the southeast corner of Jackson Street and Highland Avenue. In 1903, as his law practice prospered, he moved his family again, this time into a twelve-room, two-story, Victorian brick house at No. 179 Jackson Street. This was the house that Peggy loved the most. Her favorite private place to read and write was on the wide, front porch overlooking Jackson Street. Shaded with honeysuckle vines during the hot part of the summer day, it was the coolest spot after sundown, when there was usually a little breeze. Large, old trees shaded the house, and Maybelle’s flower gardens decorated it. Directly behind the house was a stable for the cow and the small Texas plains pony that her father bought Peggy when she was about three years old. By the time she was five, she had taken many falls but she, no sissy, learned to ride well. When she and Stephens were older, their father purchased a horse for them. Unfortunately, the horse was not surefooted and, in 1911, he fell on his side while Peggy was riding him, injuring her leg. Her father sold that horse and never bought another one.42 However, she continued to love horseback riding and went every chance she got.

  Although Maybelle indulged her daughter, she disciplined her too. Stephens wrote, “Mother used her slipper on Margaret,” particularly when she acted self-conscious, stand-offish, and silent when she was very young.43 Whenever she would hide behind her mother’s skirt and refuse to speak to strangers, friends, or even relatives, her mother would take her upstairs to her parents’ bedroom and swat her little seat with a house slipper, telling her sternly that she must talk to people who were polite enough to notice and speak to her. “You must always respond to people! Not to do so is rude,” Maybelle exclaimed, “and rudeness ranks with sins which cry to heaven for vengeance.”44 By the time Peggy started school, she no longer suffered from shyness. She was never pushy or arrogant, but she could always hold her own in any company. No one who knew her well as an adult ever suspected that she had been a diffident child.

  In a letter that Maybelle wrote to Peggy, who was no older than four or five at the time, we get some idea of Peggy’s precocity and penchant for mischief. Vacationing in White Springs, Florida, Maybelle wrote her daughter: “I received your letter today and it was a fine one. I never saw better writing and it was so easy to read. I am having a nice time down here but am lonesome for my little ones. . . . I am glad you and your father and Stephens are having a good time. Be sure and be good to your father and dont tease Stephens too much.”45

  Peggy was also a tomboy with a strong sense of adventure. She loved playing baseball, engaging in mud-ball battles, climbing trees, playing war, playing cowboy and Indians—but never dolls. Stephens said he never once saw his sister playing with dolls although she, like her mother, loved cats and kittens and had lots of them.46

  In summertime, the children pl
ayed outside nearly every day all day long, until dark. In the wintertime, they were allowed to play only for a couple of hours after school, and then they had to study their lessons. Both parents expected their children to excel in schoolwork. Stephens did. But Peggy was often mischievous, talkative in the classroom, and slipshod about her lessons although she managed to maintain average grades. To the end of her life, she preferred learning what she wanted to learn and not what someone else tried to drum into her head. Just like her Scarlett, she had to see the immediate, practical value of acquiring information before it interested her.

  One of her earliest memories of schoolwork had to do with her mother. As a grownup, Peggy frequently told this story because she said the genesis of her novel lay in it.47 When she was not quite six, she told her mother she could not do arithmetic, did not want to go to school, and saw “no value at all in an education.” Her mother angrily snatched her up in her arms, plopped her in the buggy wagon, and took her, on what Peggy said was one of the hottest September afternoons she ever saw, for a fast, bumpy drive on the old country road that led to Jonesboro. As she pointed out the crumbling plantation mansions in their sad disarray, Maybelle told Peggy about the wealthy people who had once lived in these fine houses, about how secure their world had been, and about how suddenly “their world exploded beneath them.” Peggy explained, “Some of the ruins dated from Sherman’s visit, some had fallen to pieces when the families in them fell to pieces. And she showed me plenty of houses still standing staunchly. . . . And she told me that my own world was going to explode under me, some day, and God help me if I didn’t have some weapon to meet the new world.” Describing her parent as “an idealist with a very wide streak of common sense,” Peggy said her mother exclaimed, “What you could do with your hands and what you had in your head is all anyone has left after her world has exploded. So, for God’s sake, go to school and learn something that will stay with you. The strength of a woman’s hands isn’t worth anything but what they’ve got in their heads will carry them as far as they need to go.”48

  6

  Much has been made of Peggy’s thrift, of what one of her biographers calls her “stinginess.”49 Harvey Smith, one of her friends, wrote that Peggy was so scrupulously careful to pay every penny she owed that it was sometimes embarrassing, and that she was just as exacting in requiring that every penny owed her be repaid. “Certainly her fear of poverty,” he added, “was one of the motivating characteristics of her life just as the strange compulsion to have people (or was it herself) believe her to be ill and suffering.”50

  Here again, opinions of those who knew her well differ. Jim and Mary Davis pointed out several examples of times when they, as a struggling young couple with three small children, benefited greatly from Peggy’s and John’s generosity, which included paying for the Davises’ stay in the Biltmore whenever they visited Atlanta. And, Jim pointed out, it was Peggy who insisted on paying for braces to straighten the teeth of all the Davises’children. Deon Rutledge, who worked for the Marshes, also spoke of Peggy’s generosity to her and to her mother Bessie. Deon explained that once, when she went through a difficult period, Peggy sent her on a week’s vacation to New York City. When Deon decided to remain in the city for a year, Peggy sent her a weekly paycheck, which she called “stand-by pay,” every week throughout that entire year.

  While Smith exaggerates Peggy’s obsession with money, it is true that she had acquired from her family an insecurity about financial matters. Her father was never a risk taker, and after he and Maybelle, as newlyweds, endured the panic of 1893, he became even more conservative than ever. Years later, he told Stephens that the financial depression of 1893 had “taken out of him all daring, and put in its place a desire to have a competence assured to him.”51 In addition to her father’s influence was her mother’s reminder to her at an impressionable age that she had better be prepared for changes and adversity or else she would be defeated by them. Then, too, there were all those tragic stories her grandparents and relatives told her in her childhood about how the family had lost everything in the Civil War. As she said many times, her family lived to incredible ages and had incredible memories, and she was brought up on stories of the hard times after the American Revolution, after the Seminole War, in the panic during Andrew Jackson’s regime, and after the Civil War. She heard over and over how bad things were in the panics of 1873, 1893, and 1907. She later explained that these influences kept her constantly aware of the possibility that, as her mother had told her, the world could “explode” at any time: “I suppose that explains why I wrote a book about hard times when the country was enjoying its biggest boom.”52 In view of her background, it seems she was conditioned from infancy to be concerned about her financial security.

  7

  Eugene Mitchell adored Maybelle to the end of his life, and the letters he wrote to her during their courtship are as beautiful as any in literature. A bountiful provider, he generously gave her and the children everything they ever wanted. But he was, without a doubt, a bit overbearing. He had a strong, dominating personality; he was argumentative, excitable, and forceful about expressing his opinion. Even though he agreed to have his children baptized and reared as Catholics, his disdain for the Catholic Church worried Maybelle. Early in her marriage, Maybelle learned how to protect herself from the difficulties of living with Eugene by having episodes of undiagnosed maladies. During the first decade of their marriage especially, she had many vague health problems that permitted her to “rest” with out-of-town relatives and to take “cures” in resort areas with mineral springs.53

  During their mother’s frequent absences, the young children, left in the care of their father and servants, entertained themselves with play and books. Peggy’s love for reading and writing manifested itself very early. Stephens said that his sister began “to write stories just as soon as her fingers could guide a pencil and join letters into words. She did not wait to be able to spell. The stories were forming too fast in her. As soon as she finished one, she started another. Her main diversion seemed to be to write, not to talk.”54

  Reading and writing were two activities her mother encouraged. The Mitchells were a reading family, and their home was filled with many books and periodicals. Maybelle started reading to the children when they were infants and taught both to read and write before they entered the first grade at the Forrest Avenue School. One of Maybelle’s classmates, Mary Johnston, was the author of two well-researched novels about the Civil War. Maybelle read and reread these books to Peggy, and each time she read certain sections, she and her child would break into tears. After her own book became famous, Peggy explained that in the process of checking the section of her novel about the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta, she wanted to be certain that she had described the weather correctly. An old veteran told her that it had rained for twenty-five days at Kennesaw Mountain, that the rain came “up to the seat of my pants!” But she wanted to know for sure. When reference books did not supply the answer, she turned to Johnston’s Cease Firing because she knew it was the best-documented novel ever written about the Civil War.55

  Stephens recalled, “When I think of Margaret back in those days on Jackson Hill, I usually see her in a starched dress, her short blonde hair brushed back from her face, sitting on the top step of the porch, deep in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”56 Her reading stirred her imagination and inspired her to write plays and stories in little school tablets that her mother bought for her. Her earliest stories are written in pencil in a bold, clear print; the later ones, in ink. The covers of some of these little books, which were no bigger than four by five inches, were bound with string and illustrated with charming crayon drawings also done by the author.57 These little books are precious evidence of a writer in progress.

  Her childhood writings reflected her favorite books: Treasure Seekers, The Story of the Amulet, and “The Psammead.” She loved the stories by E. Nesbit, and Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet
were her most treasured volumes. When she was grown, she gave copies of these two books to all of her nieces and nephews and her friends’ children. Long after she became famous, she kept her own two, well-worn copies of the little books in her bookcase. She liked to read boys’ stories, particularly those by George Alfred Henty. Stephens remembered that during one period she collected series, such as The Rover Boys. When he criticized her for doing so, telling her that the plots were always the same and the style always terrible, she said that a good plot would stand retelling and style did not matter “so long as you can understand what the characters are doing.”58 She also loved the romantic adventures of George Barr McCutcheon and Richard Harding Davis, and her early writings, which bore such titles as “The Fall of Ralph the Rover,” “In My Harem,” “The Cow Puncher,” “A Darktown Tragedy,” “The Little Pioneers,” and “Phil Kelly, Detective,” reflect the influence of those two writers.

  Through the years, Maybelle encouraged Peggy to write and lavished praise on her works. Her writings were not shown to anyone except her mother and occasionally her father, but no one else, not even her brother. The family, Stephens said, did not treat her as if she were “a genius” though her mother, no doubt, thought Peggy was one.59 Maybelle saved every one of her daughter’s stories, storing them in white enamel bread boxes that she called “safes.”60 Stephens wrote: “I don’t know how soon the first bread box was filled up, but several of them went along with us when we moved from Jackson Hill to Peachtree Street. By the time Margaret went off to college, there was an imposing row of breadboxes on a shelf in the storeroom. She never stopped writing.”61