by Anne Edwards
Returning from her first day at North Boulevard School, Margaret told her mother that she hated arithmetic and did not want to go back. Maybelle’s response was to bare her daughter’s rear and give her a good whacking with a hairbrush. When she was done, she ordered Margaret into the Mitchells’ stylish horse-drawn carriage, took the reins herself, and drove out toward Clayton County and the Fitzgerald farm at such a clip that Margaret gripped the seat in fear. Maybelle drove in silence as she followed the railroad tracks onto the Jonesboro road, where gnarled, ancient oaks now cast late-afternoon shadows. An unearthly stillness seemed to have settled over the countryside and, as the red sun slipped behind the hills, the tall pines that grew on their slopes became dark skeletal giants. Margaret, sensing the significance of this excursion, glanced at her mother in the shadowing red-rimmed twilight. Maybelle’s eyes glinted with fierce emotion.
“Fine and wealthy people once lived in those houses,” she told the child, slowing the horses and pointing at the shabby former plantation houses that they passed. “Now they are old ruins and some of them have been that way since Sherman marched through. Some fell to pieces when the families in them fell to pieces. See that one there?” she said as they passed a derelict farmstead. “The people who lived in that house were ruined with it.”
She wheeled the trembling child around to look toward the opposite side of the road and motioned to an old but well-tended dwelling. “Now, those folk stood as staunchly as their house did. You remember that, child — that the world those people lived in was a secure world, just like yours is now. But theirs exploded right from underneath them. Your world will do that to you one day, too, and God help you, child, if you don’t have some weapon to meet that new world. Education!” Maybelle bellowed in a voice that cut the silence of the country twilight. “People — and especially women — might as well consider they are lost without an education, both classical and practical. For all you’re going to be left with after your world upends will be what you do with your hands and what you have in your head. You will go back to school tomorrow,” she ended harshly, “and you will conquer arithmetic.”
And with that, she let go of her daughter, grasped the reins, and, turning around, cracked the buggy whip and started swiftly and silently on the long ride home.
Many of Margaret’s childhood summers were spent at “Rural Home,” the Jonesboro farm of her spinster Fitzgerald aunts, Sis and Mamie. Margaret was especially fond of her Aunt Sis who, even in later middle age, was a beautiful woman with waving gray hair, large soft eyes, fair magnolia skin, and a winning silvery laugh. Best of all, she told her young niece stories about the Fitzgerald family history with great flair. Aunt Sis, as faithful a Catholic as the rest of the Fitzgeralds, would repeat over and over what prejudice there had been toward “our holy religion” from the earliest settlement in Georgia. And, of course, she also told stories of what had happened when Sherman’s army had marched through Jonesboro, raiding so many of the homes; how the Fitzgerald house had been spared, but how the farm had been destroyed; and how Philip Fitzgerald, then a man of sixty-five years of age, took up “the remnants of his large property and began all over again with no slaves, no food, and only three of his daughters and an ailing wife at home to help with the work.”
Aunt Sis was fond of explaining, “There was just two kinds of people, wheat people and buckwheat people. Take wheat — when it’s ripe and a strong wind comes along, it’s laid flat on the ground and it never rises again. But buckwheat yields to the wind, is flattened, but when the wind passes, it rises up just as straight as ever. Wheat people can’t stand a wind; buckwheat people can.”
The Fitzgeralds had that instinct for survival that Maybelle so respected. They had survived the war and had become stronger people through their trial.
Margaret could sit at Aunt Sis’s feet for hours listening to her recreate the terror of living in a town suddenly full of freed slaves, Yankee troops, and recently paroled Confederate soldiers. According to Aunt Sis, “Annie, visiting from Atlanta, had the spunk in the family” and had marched “straight through federal camp and the headquarters of General Wilson and requested a guard of Union soldiers to protect the Fitzgerald house — and got it.”
Sepia photographs of the Fitzgerald family were lined up on the dark mahogany library table in the seldom-used front parlor, and there Margaret was introduced to all her Fitzgerald ancestors: her thick-set, Irish great-grandfather, Philip; her delicate, fair-haired great-grandmother, Eleanor McGhan; and Uncle James, Philip’s brother, the fiery schoolteacher who had perhaps encountered more prejudice than any other Fitzgerald because he had brought his ardent Catholicism into his schoolroom. There were photographs of her mother as an appealing girl, looking younger than the years Aunt Sis ascribed to her as she told Margaret how Maybelle had spent summers at Rural Home, just as Margaret was doing, and how Philip Fitzgerald would take the frail girl, who had been “weakly as a child,” up onto his horse with him, where she would sit in front of him “hangin’ on for her own small life,” her short skirts billowing scandalously in the wind as they rode about the county visiting disapproving neighbors.
The Fitzgerald farm was plain compared to the much grander neighboring plantations. There was Stately Oaks, owned by the McCords, on the Atlanta Public Road, where Union troops had camped on the grounds. The old Johnson House, with its eight imposing white columns in front, had been used during the war, both as a Confederate commissary and then as a hospital for wounded soldiers. Stories of the Warren House, which had been the headquarters of the Fifty-second Illinois Regiment, were retold in stiff, uncompromising tones. Sherman had spared the Warren place, and, after the war, old man Warren, suspected of Northern sympathies, had been labeled a Yankee and run out of town. The bullets in Warren’s walls and the cannonballs in his yard did not allay local bitterness toward him, a bitterness that Aunt Sis still nurtured.
Margaret liked the Crawford House best. Six fluted Doric columns graced the broad porches and supported the long second-floor balcony. The house was the scene of lavish parties and barbecues and, there, it was not difficult for Margaret to transport herself back to the early days in Clayton County.
The young girl took refuge in these vivid imaginings; indeed, the past was the most satisfying thing in her life. Never happy in school, she made few friends. At home, she felt she did everything wrong; she doubted her mother’s love and was fearful of losing her father’s. So, she fantasized about living in the past, and made up little stories and plays in which she was the heroine in Yankee attacks — and many of the stories she made up were based on those told by Jonesboro survivors of the war.
Jonesboro had been a busy railroad junction in the 1860s, and when the Atlanta Campaign dragged on, prolonged by Hood’s doggedness, Sherman had changed his strategy. He moved the bulk of his armies to the south, cut the Confederate supply lines, and then moved north again to Jonesboro to destroy the railroads before his final attack on Atlanta. Hood’s orders to General Hardee — in charge of troops in Jonesboro on Wednesday morning, August 31, 1864 — were to “hold against the Union forces at all costs.” By evening Jonesboro was battered, a smoking ruin. According to one account, dead were “heaped like so much cordwood in the pinewoods” for a quarter mile above the courthouse, near the railroad tracks, which were now a twisted mass of steel. When the battle was over, the Fitzgerald farm stood raped and silent, its fields stripped, its slaves and animals gone, the house emptied of most valuables. But Eleanor Fitzgerald’s dark velvet drapes still hung defiantly at the windows, and her few small personal treasures, including her sacred gold cross, were buried under the pig house in an old tea caddy. This story was told to Margaret so often by her aunts that she was to remember the statistics of the dead and the exact details of the attack twenty years later with infallible accuracy.
Cotton had been the source of economic salvation in those days, and, at the Fitzgerald farm in the rolling foothills of north Georgia, cotton was still the ma
in crop while Margaret was growing up. The red Georgia clay, “blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts,” was generally considered “the best cotton land in the world.” When Margaret was ten, she nurtured vague fantasies of living on a cotton plantation, and she decided to spend the summer of 1911 at Rural Home helping the Fitzgerald field hands pick cotton, a choice frowned upon even by her country kin. It was almost unendurable work, but she refused to quit, laboring beneath a blistering sun, her back aching, her hands bleeding. It was a summer that was to have a great impact upon her life. Although she stuck it out, at the end, she turned away forever from the land. And, from the blacks in the field, she learned for the first time — and to her shocked disbelief — that the South had not won the war.
By the time Margaret was ten, her coppery hair had turned to deep auburn; her eyes, to an indigo blue. But what gave her a unique beauty was the extreme liveliness of her expression. She talked incessantly and with vivacity. Her parents called her “Chatterbox” and found it fitting that the magazine she bought out of her small allowance each month was so named. Maybelle, with high hopes, replaced Margaret’s pants with skirts and sent her to various dance classes, but these efforts on Maybelle’s part did not erase Margaret’s tomboy image — her walk was boyish, and with her capable, strong hands she could shinny up a tree as fast as any of her brother’s friends. She loved the excitement of baseball and was accepted on the neighborhood all-boy baseball team as pitcher, a position she retained until she was fourteen years old. Mudball battles were another great sport. Dressed in the raggediest, skimpiest clothes possible, Margaret would be there on the ready, crouching behind the big girders on neighborhood building sites and passing mudballs to the larger boys in front.
At the northeast corner of the Mitchell land, looking down over the entire city of Atlanta, was a giant pine tree that must have survived the Civil and Revolutionary wars. Margaret and Stephens built a treetop platform in it, complete with an elevator with a basket carriage in which they would pull up the family’s feline pets.
All this boyish behavior did not dislodge the feminine and romantic notions of the ten-year-old girl. On days when the weather kept her indoors, she would read for hours — not the books Maybelle wanted her to read, “the classics and perennials” as they were called, but fairy tales and Victorian novels that she would check out when her father took her with him to Carnegie Library. She wrote stories as well, using small squares of paper that she would pencil line herself and tie together with bright ends of yarn. One, entitled “The Knight and the Lady,” was written in a wavering, lopsided script and with numerous misspellings. In it, good overcomes evil and the “beautiful lady” marries the “good knight” after he impales the “wild, rough knight.”
These romantic tales were abandoned when Margaret began collecting book series such as the Rover Boys. Stephens told her that the plots were always the same and that the style was terrible, but she would answer in defense of the books that a good plot would stand retelling, and that the story, not style, was what mattered. And thus, ignoring his disdain, she began to write tales of bandits and frontiersmen, and heroines (usually named Margaret) threatened by imminent danger but bravely overcoming it. Penciled in a large, childish scrawl, these stories filled lined school tablets and were filed away in two rusty breadboxes that Maybelle had discarded.
A story entitled “The Little Pioneers,” dated January 31, 1910 (she was nine), and written in a slightly steadier script than her previous literary efforts, ends:
In the night Margaret was awakened by shrieks and yells mingled with shouts of defiance from the garrison. Quickly slipping on he[r] clothes she hurried out only to start back at the scene which lay before her. Many men lay, either wounded or dead on the ground while the air was thick with smoke and shots whistled through the air. As the sun arose all could be plainly seen: the band of Apaches were, in the usual way, galloping around the fort, and firing. Every little while one, bolder than the rest, would clamber over the stockage, only to be shot or beaten back by the brave defenders whose rank were steadily thinning out.
She left her readers to wonder what happened to poor Margaret, but her story-telling talents were already apparent.
To her brother’s and her male cousins’ terrified delight, Margaret also spun spooky ghost tales. And she wrote short skits, which were performed in the Mitchells’ parlor in full costume and in which Margaret almost always cast herself as the hero. The often violent plots of these plays and tales did not sit well with the Mitchells, who were, in most respects, an old-fashioned family despite Maybelle’s emancipated views on women’s rights. Among the books that were forbidden in the Mitchell house as immoral were Tom Jones and Don Juan. However, Maybelle believed that a girl was not well educated unless she had read the classics, providing they were the ones that, according to Stephens, “contained depravities of a more orthodox type, like the seduction of Little Emily in David Copperfield.” Margaret managed to read the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens by the time she was twelve, but only in exchange for bribes of five, ten, and fifteen cents from her father. And she preferred having “the hide beat off of” her to reading Tolstoy, Thackeray, or Jane Austen.
Most of the spankings Margaret endured were for infractions of one of her parents’ own personal beliefs rather than for the mischievous things for which young children are usually chastened, and, generally, it was her mother who was the disciplinarian.
One time when Maybelle was away and Eugene Mitchell was left in charge of the children, Margaret dramatized Thomas Dixon’s book The Traitor, which, together with his The Clansman, was later adapted into the film The Birth of a Nation. Eugene was at his office when Margaret directed her drama, playing the lead part of Steve because none of the little boys in the neighborhood would condescend to play any part that involved kissing a girl. The production took place in the Mitchell sitting room, and the young clansmen performed in their fathers’ shirts with the shirttails cut off at the knees. Margaret wrote Mr. Dixon years later:
I had my troubles with the clansmen as, after Act 2, they went on strike, demanding a ten cent wage instead of a five cent one. Then, too, just as I was about to be hanged, two of the clansmen had to go to the bathroom, necessitating a dreadful stage wait which made the audience scream with delight, but which mortified me intensely.... On (my mother’s) return, she and my father ... gave me a long lecture on infringement of copy-rights.... For years afterward I expected Mr. Thomas Dixon to sue me for a million dollars.
Not only did Eugene scold her harshly, he also gave her quite a spanking, so that, as Margaret went on to explain, “I would never forget 1 must not take what wasn’t mine,” and that “plagiarism was exactly the same as stealing.”
As a patent and real-estate lawyer, Eugene Mitchell’s reputation had been built on protecting his clients’ patent rights and deeds. Plagiarism was a new word to the small girl, but it was a word that she took seriously for the rest of her life. And, not only did one not plagiarize, one did not allow others to plagiarize one’s own work.
Margaret’s efforts as a playwright and author were not encouraged by her mother. To Maybelle, who had great respect for scientific achievement and who relaxed with problems in calculus and trigonometry while other women embroidered, Margaret’s plays and stories were fancies that fed a lazy mind; she considered the time Margaret devoted to them a shameful waste. If a girl wanted to make something worthwhile of her life, she had to master math and Latin and science. Maybelle followed the career of Madame Curie with awe, and she never forgave herself for not going to college and realizing her own youthful dream of becoming a scientist. As for Margaret, she was well aware of her mother’s hopes for her, and she was desperate to gain Maybelle’s approval. So, despite the obvious pleasure she took in writing, whenever anyone asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, Margaret always replied, “A doctor.”
This admirable goal somewhat mitigated Maybelle’s displeasure over Marga
ret’s casual attitude toward the Catholic church. The girl never went to mass and said her prayers only when prodded. Maybelle attributed this lapse to Margaret’s “scientific mind,” and by the time her daughter was eleven Maybelle was discussing with her the grand future she would have as one of America’s few woman physicians.
Still, there was a certain remoteness between mother and daughter. Margaret was of such a secretive nature that once, in a pique, Maybelle accused her of taking after an uncle of Eugene Mitchell’s who would walk a mile out of his way rather than let a neighbor know in which direction he was going.
Jackson Hill, the neighborhood where the Mitchells’ house stood, had always been a suburban development. It was a solid middle-class section, but it did not have the fame nor the éclat of Peachtree Street. By 1911, Eugene Mitchell was president of the Atlanta Bar Association and of the Board of Education, and a man of means. Nothing would do but to move his family to a more prestigious neighborhood. Maybelle, who wanted the best for her family, agreed, and he purchased a large lot in the center of one of Peachtree Street’s loveliest blocks.
With the approaching change of residence, Eugene traded the children’s ponies for a larger animal, a pedigreed horse that they named Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s famous mount. Margaret was thrilled; horseback riding remained her favorite sport. It did not take her long to learn how to handle the huge black horse and, having done that, she could barely wait to see how fast he could gallop. Stephens now had little interest in riding but, during the first weeks of ownership, Margaret was out with Bucephalus for hours every day, racing him lickety-split up and down the hill, whooping and hollering as she tore at a great gallop past the house. She was still so small in stature that even riding as erectly as she did, she looked ridiculously tiny astride the giant of a horse.