by Anne Edwards
“Queer girl,” Williams thought, and then, remembering that she had endured the deaths of two loved ones that year, attributed her sudden reticence to her grief.
Peggy Mitchell
1919–1925
Chapter Six
SHE GOT OUT of the great black touring car that had once brought as many as nine young officers back to the house on Peachtree Street to dance and sing and weave fantasies. She was home. Bessie, the cook, must have been listening for the sound of the motor because now she stood squinting into the sun on the veranda, the front door open behind her. Charlie, the yard-man, his black face smiling in welcome, took the bags from the trunk of the car. A smallish black girl, her hair tied back with a white kerchief, stood in Bessie’s tall shadow; this was Cammie, the fifteen-year-old housegirl. If it had not occurred to Peggy Mitchell before, it must have at that moment — she was now mistress of the house on Peachtree Street, and she was only three years older than the skittish Cammie.
Peggy started up the steps. The house seemed even more imposing than she remembered and, without the romance of officers with gold bars and lilting dance music coming through the windows, Peggy liked it less than ever.
Her girlhood had been left behind at Smith. With Maybelle dead, she was now the woman in charge of the Mitchell household, and she saw things with new eyes. She was shocked to discover that they were not as rich as she had thought, and her first step was to fire most of the large staff of servants her mother had employed, keeping only Bessie, Cammie, Charlie, and a laundress, Carrie Holbrook, who came in two days a week. To Eugene Mitchell’s amazement, his daughter extracted as much work from the diminished staff as Maybelle had from the full complement.
It was not long before Peggy Mitchell — her family refused to use the name, but the servants complied with her request to be addressed as “Miss Peggy” — realized that with her mother’s death her father had lost the driving force in his life. What ambition he had had was gone. She would never replace her mother in his heart, and neither could she expect him to take over what she now saw had been her mother’s role: head of the family. It had been Maybelle who had both set the scene and directed the action of their life drama.
Eugene Mitchell could not be called a man of daring or of foresight. Nor did he have the quality of endurance of his male ancestors. His father, Russell Crawford Mitchell, had walked with his skull split open for a hundred and fifty miles to safety during the Civil War, transporting an injured cousin with him, and had survived until 1905, raising twelve children and supporting them comfortably. Grandfather Mitchell had insisted that his rather dreamy, intelligent son Eugene should study law, and Russell Crawford Mitchell was not a man to challenge. He himself, as a young man, had practiced law in Florida after the war and had been disbarred for assaulting a state official. With his career in law at an end, he and his wife had returned to Atlanta, where he became successful in the lumber business. But early on, Grandfather Mitchell had decided that his sons would succeed in the profession in which he had failed.
Eugene had graduated from the University of Georgia with honors in 1885, qualifying for his law degree within a year. Never adventurous, he had settled into making a good living by drawing wills, examining land titles, and securing patents. He suffered a severe financial setback in the depression of 1893, just after marrying Maybelle, and she never completely forgave him for his lack of courage in facing that crisis. It did not destroy the bond they had, but it brought an undercurrent of dissatisfaction — at least on Maybelle’s part — to their union. Stephens Mitchell says that the Panic of ’93 took from his father “all daring and put in its place a desire to have a competence assured to him.” Eugene had regained some of his losses by the time Margaret was born, but he was never to achieve more than middle-class prosperity.
Eugene Mitchell devoted his greatest energy to his love of Southern history and the world of books (although he often said no book worth reading had been written since the death of Queen Victoria), and to his positions on the board of the Carnegie Library and the board of education of Atlanta. To him, truth was paramount, and a contract, will, or title deed, inviolable. In midlife he was a bookish, dour man, meticulous in his work and somewhat aloof in his relationships with family and friends. Yet, underneath his rather cold exterior, there was a restlessness that hinted at deeper currents, and sometimes he displayed a flash of humor that gave evidence of a lighter side to his nature. With Maybelle’s death, he had withdrawn into himself, and Peggy’s return home did not assuage his grief. To her dismay, she was no more an integral part of her father’s life now than she had been when her mother was alive.
No sooner had Peggy established a routine in the household and begun to settle into her new responsibilities than Grandmother Stephens, accompanied by her younger spinster sister, Aline, descended upon her, along with trunks of personal possessions and boxes upon boxes of currently fashionable feathered hats. Now a septuagenarian, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens was still as feisty as ever, and quite determined that Peggy should not throwaway her life by becoming a household drudge to Eugene and Stephens Mitchell. She fought with her son-in-law over his “stealing a young woman’s youth” and doggedly tried to convince her granddaughter to continue her education, and, when she failed at that, she began a campaign to “spruce the girl up.”
Ties and middies and serge skirts began to mysteriously disappear from Peggy’s wardrobe every laundry day. Grandmother Stephens then brought in a seamstress. Peggy protested all this waste and extravagance quite vociferously, and, within four months, her grandmother realized the two of them simply could not live in the same house. With Aunt Aline in tow, she haughtily departed to temporary quarters at the Georgian Terrace Hotel. But her efforts had not all been in vain; Peggy did, indeed, look different — her skirts had been raised; her hair, cut and becomingly coiffed; and not a middy blouse or long tie remained in her wardrobe. Yet, she chose to wear only the plainest of the clothes Grandmother Stephens had had made for her. There was more than mulishness attached to this.
The cost of food and other goods had risen astronomically since the war’s end. Inflation had quadrupled prices in some instances and the American public, fearing where this would end, demanded that the government put a stop to such profiteering. When, by the spring of 1920, no change had been wrought, consumers went on a buyers’ strike. For women, the vogue became last year’s dress. Rent strikes opposing steep increases by landlords swept the nation, and the courts were often on the side of the tenants. Newspapers printed menus for feeding a family of five on fifty cents a day. Thrift, as well as old clothes, was in style, and Eugene Mitchell, who could not forget the vicissitudes of 1893, thoroughly approved of his daughter’s stance. In fact, at her suggestion, he had a tailor “turn” a suit of clothes for him — a procedure that involved turning a suit inside out and redoing the buttonholes, pockets, and lapels so that an almost-new suit replaced the former shiny, worn one at about one-sixth the price of a custom-made model.
Left on her own once again to run her father’s household, Peggy began to contemplate the life she had come home to, and the kind of future she could expect. Though her father encouraged her to go out with friends and to attend social events, her former friends in Atlanta now seemed cool to her.
It had not taken Grandmother Stephens’s warnings for Eugene Mitchell to see what Peggy’s lack of a social life and her devotion to her family could mean. Visions of a spinster daughter may well have been behind his insistence that Peggy make a formal entrance into Atlanta society, where she could meet young people her own age and, eventually, a well-off, socially acceptable young man whom she might wish to marry.
After much pressure from Stephens as well as her father, Peggy agreed to make her debut and, in January of 1920, after a tense wait, she was approved for membership in the elite Debutante Club for the winter season of 1920–21. According to Stephens, on the social and financial scale in white Atlanta, families had serial numbers from 1 to 200
,000, and the Mitchells were somewhere near the halfway mark.
Considering her strong feelings about her Aunt Edyth and Greenwich “society,” one cannot help but wonder why Peggy went along with this plan to launch her into local society and find her a husband.
There were, however, indications that she was rebelling unconsciously. One fair February day, a month after her acceptance to the Debutante Club, Peggy drove out to a stable near Stone Mountain, where she rented a large black horse reminiscent of Bucephalus. She rode the animal off the bridal path to a steep, narrow hill covered with low branches. At the top of the slope was a stone wall that separated the horse farm from the road. Instead of turning back at this point, Peggy decided to jump the wall, but her approach was short and the horse did not clear the top. Peggy was thrown and the horse came down on top of her. She lay there in pain and shock for nearly an hour before other riders happened along the same isolated path.
The leg that had undergone surgery years before was once again severely injured. This time, Peggy was to take seriously the doctor’s warning that she must never do “a damn fool thing like that again,” for her recovery was slow and painful. Grandmother Stephens came in every day to help. but this only created more tension in the house. It was the young black girl, Cammie, upon whom Peggy now came to rely for errands, and the girl seemed to enjoy the responsibility and freedom this gave her. Cammie could be exasperating, but she could be amusing, too, and she was wily and clever, two traits Peggy admired.
It was summer before she was on her feet again. To strengthen the muscles of her leg, she took a dance class offered by one of her former instructors. Even so, to her disgust, the doctor ordered her to wear heavy, low-heeled shoes.
By early July she had improved enough to accept a date to go on an overnight camping trip to Lake Burton with a young intern, Dr. Leslie Morris, several other couples, and a youthful chaperone. One of the girls she met on this trip, Augusta Dearborn, was to become a close friend. Augusta lived in Birmingham, but was in Atlanta visiting a married sister for the season.
Peggy’s ankle was still bandaged and the handsome Dr. Morris treated her protectively. Augusta was fairly certain he was in love with Peggy and thought Peggy was attracted to him. They did appear to have much in common: medicine, poetry, and an interest in Georgia’s history. But Peggy was adamant that the life of a doctor’s wife did not appeal to her.
Upon their return from this trip, Dr. Morris invited Peggy to attend a costume ball being given at the East Lake Country Club. Peggy accepted only at Augusta’s insistence, for she was not yet comfortable in Atlanta society. She felt that the Mitchell and the Fitzgerald families, because of their dedication to the growth of Atlanta, had as much of which to be proud in their ancestry as did the city’s arrogant and more wealthy social leaders; still, conflicting emotions of inferiority and contempt rose whenever she was in their company.
On the warm August night of the dance, Leslie Morris escorted Peggy into a ballroom full of masked dancers wearing colorful costumes of the past. Peggy had considered donning a boy’s outfit, something to suggest Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but she’d finally dressed as a small antebellum girl, complete with long curls, poke bonnet, and pantaloons. She was the only young woman in such unconventional costume; the others wore the flattering, coquettish gowns of earlier Southern belles. Even on the arm of the attractive Dr. Morris, who had dressed as a Confederate officer, Peggy was a comical sight on the dance floor.
Dominating the stag line that night was a young man named Berrien Kinnard Upshaw, a broad-shouldered University of Georgia football player with a reputation for wildness. “Red” Upshaw, at six feet two, towered over Peggy, and with his brick red hair, sloe green eyes, cleft chin, and bright pirate costume, he cut a dashing figure. Red Upshaw was amused and attracted by the rebellious quality he recognized in Peggy, and he admired the courage she displayed in not leaving the dance even though it was obvious that she was being ridiculed. The chaperones, from their posts in the gilt chairs that encircled the room, watched with arched brows and pursed lips as this oddly matched pair danced together, and they were quick to notice when the couple left early and in each other’s company, leaving Leslie Morris behind.
Peggy was smitten by Red Upshaw from the start, and when Augusta asked her to join a group at her sister’s summer cottage on Saint Simons Island, Upshaw was included in the party. The girls strongly disagreed about Upshaw. Augusta found him “unpolished,” not at all suitable, in her opinion, as a beau for Peggy. Red Upshaw was almost always irreverent. He called Augusta “Aggie,” a name she hated; and Peggy, “Short-Leg Pete,” or just “Short Legs.” Peggy appeared to be furious at him for this, but there was an undeniable chemistry between the two of them, even as — to the discomfort of her hostess and the other guests — they teased each other unmercifully, seemingly always on the brink of violent argument.
There was a certain mystery surrounding Upshaw that intrigued Peggy; he had an aura of glamour that made him a topic of discussion among her peers and their families. It was known that he was the eldest son of a respectable old Georgia family now living in North Carolina, but there were also whisperings of scandal — although no one seemed to know any of the details — and Peggy rather enjoyed the small sensation and the family censure her friendship with him caused.
The twenties began much as they were to end, as a materialistic decade dominated by business and the getting of money. Idealism seemed to have been lost somewhere on a French battlefield. The young had fought a war and had returned home to find that they had helped save the world so that more automobiles, chewing gum, and face powder could be sold; their world was in upheaval, and the codes taught them as children now seemed irrelevant. The sale of liquor had been prohibited, and young men who had only recently carried army rifles now kept flasks filled with bootleg gin on the ready. Young women tapped their toes as they cranked up the Victrola. They read the fevered verses of Edna St. Vincent Millay and the shocking novels of James Branch Cabell, and they painted their nails, penciled their brows, and wore heavy perfumes when they were out to vamp a man. But the changes in women went much deeper than their made-up faces and brazen flirtations. They now had a say in politics, and they spoke up loud and clear. One year after Maybelle’s death, women had finally won the right to vote, and this gave them a new place in society and a new freedom. It was not easy for either of the sexes to determine just how far this freedom should extend.
For all her later claims of being a true flapper of the twenties, Peggy Mitchell was slow in taking steps toward her own liberation and never truly won it. She sent up flares from time to time, flouted the old conventions of society, and acted the role of the new, daring woman when she could use the pose as a weapon to get back at those who had hurt or slighted her, or when it served to hide her true feelings. But the puritanical side of her character kept her from really letting go. In truth, she cared very much about what other people thought of her, especially those people whose love and admiration she so desperately needed.
She was unsure of what she should or should not do as a “new woman.” She smoked, drank, read the most controversial books, and flirted outrageously. But she still thought that sex before marriage was unthinkable, and that although it was acceptable for a bachelor to have sexual needs, her own desires were cause for guilt. To add to her confusion, she had left the church for good following the angry scene at her mother’s funeral. Never a devout Catholic, she now felt adrift without any religious support whatsoever. She had always felt a great ambivalence where the Catholic church was concerned, and had been torn between her parents’ religious beliefs, for, though he was not a pious man, Eugene Mitchell had retained his Protestant faith. Grandmother Stephens’s enforced evening prayers had been a great source of conflict when she had come to stay at Peachtree Street. Getting down on her knees in her own home was something that Peggy Mitchell simply could not and would not do. Now, with the appearance of Red Upshaw in her lif
e, she needed explanations for some of the contradictory emotions she was experiencing. Never before had she met a man whose very masculinity made her unsure of herself. All the other men in her life — her father, Stephens, Clifford Henry, the young soldiers preparing to go off to war — had needed mothering, had made her feel just a bit superior. But not Red Upshaw. He laughed at what he called her “pretensions,” and was never taken in by her self-righteous poses. Indeed, he liked her best when she was being distinctly unlady-like, and he shared her pleasure in risqué stories and was not critical when she smoked or took a drink.
Peggy had cut herself off from Grandmother Stephens and she could not turn to the church for answers, so she turned instead to her father and Stephens. Fearing Red Upshaw’s improper influence on Peggy, they urged her to continue with her plans to make her debut. She hated the idea more than ever, and might have held out but for the fact that Upshaw quit college, where his grades had been impressive, to bootleg liquor. This caused a rift between them, not because Peggy disapproved of his covert activities but because she thought he was throwing away a brilliant future.
For a year Peggy had been advocating austerity in the family’s wardrobe. Now, as if in sudden revolt, she did a turnabout and, as the fall season approached, she spent hours pouring over the current fashions in magazines like Vogue and reading the social columns in the Atlanta Journal to see who wore what where. “When a girl is making a social career,” she told Stephens, “clothes are a uniform to be worn like a soldier’s.” And she entered into the preparations with the fervor befitting a good officer.
