When she was about ten or twelve years old, she evaluated her own talent by writing in the front of one of the copybooks: “There are authors and authors but a true author 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 string is pulled—That’s how I know that I’m a ‘made’ writer.”62
When Peggy became a teenager, her mother took her on short summer vacations to resorts like Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlantic Beach at Jacksonville, Florida, where she got to meet other young people her own age. Once a year, Eugene Mitchell took the family on long vacations to Boston or New York, and they took several trips on ocean liners up the Hudson River to Albany, New York. Peggy excitedly looked forward to the melodramas her parents took her to see whenever they visited New York. Once back home, she used the ideas she got from them in her own writings. The early plays that she wrote, directed, and starred in, using neighborhood children to fill minor roles, were full of action and what she called “cold, unscrupulous, revengeful” villains, children hiding between the walls of frontier forts, Indian attacks, and brave defenders.63
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More philosophical and attuned to her children’s psyches than her husband ever was, Maybelle had a calming influence on him. For example, when seventeen-year-old Peggy, who had been in and out of love dozens of times, became engaged to Clifford Henry, a young lieutenant in France during World War I, her father became furious thinking about the possibility of his only daughter marrying some man about whom he knew nothing. While Peggy and her mother were on a trip to New York, where they met the young man’s parents, Maybelle wrote reassuringly to her husband, “Dear, you must have had no youth or forgotten it if you attach so much importance to the affections of seventeen years. . . . Why worry over what can’t happen for four or five years and 99 to 100 will not happen at all. . . . So put your mind at rest about this affair, as there can come no harm of it.”64 Maybelle always deflected Eugene’s temper away from Peggy.
Maybelle was also more sensitive about everything than Eugene was. She was concerned about the poor and the injustices heaped upon women and blacks—injustices that do not seem to have bothered Eugene at all.65 Although Stephens wrote that his father “never hesitated to take unpopular stands on public issues, nor to place himself in danger of violence, at a time when Atlanta had dangerous mobs, and when rioting and lynching were common,” Stephens provided no examples of his father’s stands.66 However, we do have evidence of Maybelle’s sensitivity to the suffering of others. In one of his letters written while she was away resting with her relatives, Eugene admonished her: “You injure yourself by troubling over other people’s misfortunes.”67
Peggy and Stephens loved their father but they adored their mother. Long after she was grown, Peggy described her mother in a letter to Harvey Smith:
No, I’m not what mother was as she was the smartest and the kindest and the most attractive woman I ever saw. She was a real aristocrat if ever I saw one and carried no side at all. She was passionately interested in every thing that drew breath, and being an aristocrat it never once occurred to her that she could be demeaned by associating with anyone, even the lowliest. She was constantly taking up with strange people on street cars and trains and having exciting and animated arguments with them. She stopped the car at Five Points, if necessary, to call to old negroes who had worked for her or her family and held long, public conversations with them on their love lives and their miseries. She never turned any hungry or needy person from her door and I’ve seen her peel off her gloves on cold days to put on the blue hands of poor children and only restrained [her] by my wails from giving my muff too. And lots of times, we walked home from town because she’d given her last cent and car fare to someone who needed it. I don’t believe she ever consciously gave a thought to social position as social position. She simply took it as naturally as the air she breathed that she was “good folks” and would have thought it very ill bred to ever admit that she thought it.68
Fans of Gone With the Wind may see the resemblance between Maybelle and Scarlett’s mother, Ellen, and even between Maybelle and Melanie. Also, the kind of relationship that Ellen and Gerald O’Hara have in the novel is similar to the relationship that Peggy’s parents had.
As her husband’s business steadily prospered and he became more and more involved in civic activities, Maybelle pursued her own intellectual interests in religion and social issues. She studied her Catholicism thoroughly and was prominent in the affairs of the Sacred Heart Church. She advanced the modern but unpopular notion that women, as well as men, should have an active role in the leadership of the church. Much to the clergy’s dismay, she spoke often and openly about this role and was one of the founders of the Catholic Laymen’s Association.69 She was also one of the founders of the women’s suffrage movement in Atlanta. Basing her argument on the principle of justice, she objected to paying taxes on the property and the money she had inherited from her father without the privilege of voting on how the money should be spent.70
In 1909, Eugene Mitchell was able to purchase a large lot on Peachtree Street and build a two-story, classical colonial-style house with terraces, the kind that many Georgians were building after the turn of the century as a reaction to the ornate architecture of the Victorian age.71 The family moved into 1149 (later numbered 1401) Peachtree Street in the fall of 1912, when Peggy was twelve. Stephens wrote that this house was “exactly the house Mother had wanted to live in. It was in every detail the complete fulfillment of her dreams and I believe she was completely happy here though the time was shorter than any of us could have foreseen.”72 It is no exaggeration to describe this residence as a mansion. The ground floor spread for seventy feet; it had a parlor, a sitting room, a music room, a dining room, a large kitchen, a pantry, and a huge front entrance hall. Upstairs were spacious bedrooms that opened onto porches. The front rooms were usually kept open but could be closed off by tall folding doors.
Inspired by the children in this new neighborhood, who liked to act, Peggy began writing plays. “Her taste and style were melodramatic,” Stephens said. “Action was the big thing. And lots of it from the opening line.”73 With Maybelle’s encouragement Peggy recruited children to act in her plays, and the performances were conducted in the great front rooms of the Peachtree mansion. Peggy and the neighborhood children, dressed in homemade costumes, delighted the audience of mothers, grandmothers, and whomever else they could find to support their theatrical endeavors. Maybelle made these occasions special by serving desserts. These performances created many happy times for mother and daughter, but this house would never have the happy memories for Peggy that the Jackson Street house had. The Peachtree house was always too large, too formal, and too cold to suit her; and it was associated with sadness because it was there that her mother died in 1919.
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In 1914, Maybelle enrolled Peggy in a fashionable private finishing school—Washington Seminary, which was in walking distance of their home. Originally named the “North Avenue Presbyterian School for Women,” it had, by this time, moved to Peachtree Street and changed its name.74 Peggy usually walked to and from school with the neighborhood children. In her first years at Washington Seminary, she was chubby and still much the tomboy. Her nickname, which she bitterly resented, was “piano legs.”75 She was not studious, and one of her report cards shows her barely passing geometry and Latin, making C’s in French and in English, but B’s in history and in mythology, suggesting that she did well in subjects that interested her. Mrs. Eva Wilson Paisley, an English teacher, took a special interest in her but was unable to convince her to study hard.
Not all the girls in this school liked Peggy, who ran around with a small group called the “Happy Gang.” After her best friend, Courtenay Ross, was accepted into the Pi Phi Sorority (Courtenay’s older sister was already a member), Courtenay nominated Peggy. But Peggy was blackballed. It was a
shocking rejection, one that neither she nor her family ever forgot. In writing about this period in his sister’s life, Stephens recorded in his memoir, “Margaret did not like Washington Seminary. She did not get an invitation to join any of the school sororities, but she had begun to meet people outside of school circles and she never lacked for men friends.” Although Stephens never explained the reason for her being blackballed—he may not have known the reason—he did write that “at school she had made enemies as well as friends. The judgment of adolescents was wrong, but it led to much bitterness. There are people in Atlanta who have always disliked Margaret Mitchell and will always dislike her. Margaret never forgot who were her enemies.”76
According to Facts and Fancies, the senior yearbook, Peggy did achieve some successes. She belonged to the Senior Round Table, a five-member honorary group of class leaders, and she was the secretary and president of the Washington Literary Society and of the Dramatic Club. She was also the literary editor of the yearbook during her senior year.77 In concluding his assessment of this period in his sister’s life, Stephens wrote, “At the end of her school days, we find a girl who 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 young girl entering on her social life in the city.” The rejection she felt at Washington Seminary fed into her natural inclination toward rebelliousness, which manifested itself a little later in behavior that worried her father and grandmother.
By the time she had turned seventeen, she had slimmed down to less than ninety pounds. She dressed in stylish, feminine fashions, and usually wore long skirts because she thought her legs were ugly. Without any effort on her part, she attracted boys who began to look upon her as something other than a good shortstop. She and Courtenay were popular with boys, and they went to many parties at the Piedmont Driving Club and the Capital City Club. With the help of their parents, they also hosted many beautiful parties, some for the soldiers at Fort McPherson and at Camp Gordon. Their first formal dance was on November 24, 1916, when Courtenay’s parents gave a dance for her at the Piedmont Driving Club. Another dance, given by Courtenay’s parents at their home on 47 The Prado, on June 28, 1917, was reported in the society section of one of the Atlanta newspapers. The names “Margaret Mitchell” and “Berrien Upshaw” were included in the guest list.78 At that time, Upshaw was one of Courtenay’s dates, but later he would play an important role in Peggy’s and John’s lives.
The Washington Seminary did not prepare Peggy for Smith College, where her mother sent her after her graduation. One of the pioneers in the promotion of higher education for women, Smith College was somewhat beyond the norm for most of Atlanta’s debutantes. But Maybelle believed that Peggy would be better off going far away to college, meeting new people, getting a fresh start.79 Her reasons for selecting Smith are evidence of her concern that Peggy achieve social as well as academic success. Two weeks prior to the day she had to attend registration at Smith, Peggy left Atlanta with her mother for a vacation in New York City, where they shopped, visited museums, saw Broadway plays, dined in the finest restaurants, and stayed in the Waldorf-Astoria, the city’s best hotel. Their letters to Eugene and Stephens are full of excitement and news; and the old, faded snapshots of this trip, their last time together, show their smiling faces radiant with happiness.
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After her mother’s sudden, unexpected death in the flu epidemic in January 1919, Peggy came home, of course, for the funeral, but at her father’s insistence returned to Northampton to complete her freshman year. She had been a great social success at Smith; she made many friends, particularly with the Amherst College boys nearby, who were enthralled with her southern style of femininity. But she was not academically successful, and her vivid memories of her mother’s expectations made her even more aware that she was not. Shortly after receiving her midterm grades, she wrote her brother on March 17, 1919:
Steve, sometimes I get so discouraged I feel that there is no use keeping on here. It isn’t in studies, for I’m about a “C” student—but I haven’t done a thing up here. I haven’t shone in any line—academic, athletic, literary, musical or anything. . . . In a college of 2500 there are so many cleverer and more talented girls than I. If I can’t be first, I’d rather be nothing.80
At the end of the term, her father asked that she return to Atlanta to keep house for him and her brother. At eighteen, unhappy and uncertain about her future, Peggy returned home.
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Like Peggy, John came from a sturdy stock of hard-working men and women who had courage and endurance. His ancestors knew neither great wealth nor extreme poverty. Modest, self-reliant, and intelligent, they were self-contained and quiet people, unlike the great talkers in Peggy’s family. They were what is called in northern Kentucky “backbone people,” what Peggy referred to as “buckwheat people.”81
John’s family took pride in having been among the early settlers of Kentucky, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, the opposing presidents in the Civil War. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, and in many Indian battles. Before settling in Kentucky, his mother’s people had been well-to-do tidewater Virginians of English and French Huguenot ancestry.82 His maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Berry, served as a captain in the Continental Army and was General George Washington’s bodyguard at Valley Forge for three years. In Clarke County, Virginia, Berry’s Ferry is named after Thomas, and Berryville, Virginia, for Thomas’s brother, Benjamin.
In 1776, when Kentucky became a county of Virginia, John’s maternal ancestors, along with many other Virginians, moved into the frontier wilderness that the Cherokee Indians named “Kentucky,” their word for “Dark and Bloody Ground.”83 The land was given that name because of the many bloody battles the early settlers fought with the Indians there. In fact, William Kennan, his mother’s great-grandfather, was a famous strong and swift runner in his youth and is recognized in Collins’s History of Kentucky as a “brave Indian fighter.”84 Also recognized in that book is John’s maternal great-great-grandfather, John Kercheval of Huguenot ancestry, who was a representative in the Kentucky legislature for many years.
John’s people on his father’s side were all frontiersmen who in the early eighteenth century hacked their way across the mountains in Pennsylvania to Kentucky or came down the Ohio River in flatboats. One group floated down the river with a piano strapped to their flatboat. They endured many hardships before they carved out a place for themselves in northern Kentucky, in what is now known as Maysville.85
Before and for a long time after the Civil War, Maysville was a prosperous community, established as a town by the legislature of Virginia on December 11, 1787. Stretched out narrowly on one of the highest banks of the Ohio River in northern Kentucky, Maysville is located at the mouth of Limestone Creek and was called Limestone until about 1793. Built on what was known as Limestone Landing, it was a bustling port of entry used by pioneers, traders, hunters, and adventurers, floating down the Ohio River in their crude wooden flatboats, canoes, and rafts in the late eighteenth century. While John was growing up there, it had a population of eight thousand.
Because of its great salt licks south of the Ohio River, Maysville attracted buffalo for over ten thousand years. The wide, winding path that the buffalo stomped out from the banks of the river down the hill into the valley and on to Blue Licks is still known as the Old Buffalo Trace.86 The first settlers used this path as a gateway to the West as early as 1751.87
So it was that while Peggy as a child explored old entrenchments and Civil War battlegrounds and listened to endless tales about bloodthirsty Yankees, John and his brothers explored the Old Buffalo Trace, searched for arrowheads on the banks of the Ohio River, and listened to old-timers talk about the fierce skirmishes they had had with Tecumseh and his allies.
His father’s parents were Abi Neal and Jacob Marsh, a farmer who moved from his birthplace in We
st Union, Ohio, to Mason County in 1856, shortly after he and Abi were wed. For many years, they lived at the mouth of Lawrence Creek. They were married for fifty-five years and had seven sons and two daughters. Their third son was John’s father, who was born on October 23, 1855, in South Ripley, Ohio, less than ten miles from Maysville. He was named Millard Fillmore Marsh after the president who had gone out of office in 1853, the president who loved the Union more than he hated slavery and thus enforced the Compromise of 1850. When Millard Marsh was only a year old, his parents moved to Charleston Bottoms, three miles west of Maysville, and there he grew to manhood, working on his father’s farm in the summer and attending public school in the winter. When he was twenty-one, he accepted a teaching position at the Maysville Seminary, but he resigned after a brief time to take charge of a private school at Brooksville, about eighteen miles away, in Bracken County. While teaching at Brooksville, he studied law in nearby Cincinnati, Ohio, and the following spring was admitted to the Maysville bar. For several years he practiced law in Maysville, where he also had a real estate and insurance business. In 1885, he became the editor of the Maysville Daily Bulletin and held that position until his death, nearly twenty years later.88 Well liked in the community, he was nicknamed “The Squire” because of his gentlemanly manner.
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