Road to Tara

by Anne Edwards

  Peggy did not talk about Red Upshaw and, during 1925 and 1926, she saw less of Augusta, Lethea, and Medora, who knew about so many of the painful episodes of her first marriage. According to Augusta, Peggy displayed a “maternal attitude” toward her at this time, telling her she was not quite “developed” and “needed taking care of,” almost as though she was purposely trying to undermine Augusta’s self-confidence. Augusta had gone to New York to follow a cherished dream of becoming an opera singer, and she had, in fact, been accepted in a small opera company and appeared publicly in a supporting role in The Magic Flute. But Peggy did not think she had made a wise choice, and Augusta’s beau, Lee Edwards agreed. Peggy supported his decision to go to New York and bring Augusta back with him to Atlanta. The older, more settled Edwards, an executive with Georgia Railroad who was twenty-six years Augusta’s senior, convinced the young woman that her future was with him and not on the lyric stage. They were married in the Little Church Around the Corner, a theatrical favorite, and then, after a European honeymoon, came home to Atlanta.

  Peggy and Lee were soon fast friends, even to the point, at times, of excluding Augusta. Peggy would call and say to her, “Put Lee on, I have a story to tell him he’ll enjoy.” Or, she would stop by and go off in a corner with him to tell him a joke that she thought Augusta might not like, and the two of them would roar with laughter. Augusta never seemed to mind this, nor was she offended that she was no longer part of Peggy’s innermost circle, for her own marriage, pregnancy, and her music commanded most of her time.

  Laughter was probably what Peggy sought more than anything during the first year of her marriage. She loved jokes and tall stories and “camping” about. Augusta still recalls with amusement the way “Peggy would pretend she was pregnant [in imitation of Augusta] with a big shawl draped around her and a beach ball under it rolling up and down.”

  Peggy began writing Jazz Age short stories in her spare time. When she had three or four of them, she gathered up her courage and, with John’s prodding, sent them off to Smart Set magazine because she had heard Medora speak so often of its editor, H. L. Mencken.

  Chapter Ten

  AUTUMN, 1925. It was the height of the Jazz Age, and Peggy captured something of its spirit in her story “Matrimonial Bonds,” in which she described the Charleston being danced by girls whose “short skirts swayed to the rhythm above their chiffon stockings and dainty slippers, their curly bobbed heads thrown backwards in exuberance and all the zest and joyousness of frolicsome — not flaming — youth shining from their sparkling eyes.”

  Marriage had not removed Peggy from the roll call of flappers in Atlanta. She had confided to Frances that she was the only happily married member of the gang she trailed along with, the only one who was not afraid to let her husband know that he was “the only one.” The “pleasant result” of this frankness, as Peggy saw it, was that she had “all the dates with [her] ex-flames” that she wanted, as well as a “house full of Tech boys to tea time without scenes later, passionate and recriminating, with the man I live with.”

  For Thanksgiving, since the Dump lacked space, Peggy decided to cook the family turkey with Bessie’s help at her father’s house and invite a host of relatives. Stephens was keeping company with Carrie Lou Reynolds, a young lady from Augusta, Georgia, whom Peggy privately referred to as “the marshmallow” because she was so round and powdery white. Grandmother Stephens was invited, along with Aunt Aline and members of both the Fitzgerald and Mitchell clans. It was to be both a reunion and a chance for Peggy to display her talents in her new role of homemaker. Then, four days before the holiday, Angus Perkerson called her into his office and asked her to do a two-part feature that would require “a helluva lot of research and damn little time.”

  The five Confederate generals to represent Georgia in the immortal granite of the Stone Mountain Memorial had been selected, and work was to begin in the spring. What Perkerson wanted was a three-thousand-word sketch of the lives and achievements, in both peace and war, of Generals John B. Gordon and Pierce M. Butler Young. It would appear that coming Sunday, to be followed the next Sunday by a segment about Generals Thomas R. R. Cobb, Henry Benning, and Ambrose Ransom Wright. Could she do it? Of course, she agreed.

  The Thanksgiving invitations had already been issued, and Peggy turned in desperation to Bessie, who promised to see to it that the turkey got to the table. Without a second thought, Peggy was on her way down to Carnegie Library to cover the most important assignment of her reportorial career. The selection of the five generals had only been made that morning, so she would be in a race to beat the Georgian to the story — one she knew she could write better than anyone else. Perhaps even more pressing was her need to prove herself a reliable historian after the disappointment and rancor that had followed her story on women in Georgia’s history.

  She worked until the library closed on Wednesday night and then went home with an armful of reference books and stayed up most of the night reading. On Thanksgiving morning, she began to write her first draft, scooting over to the house on Peachtree Street just in time to help Bessie put the finishing touches to the table and the platters.

  Perkerson had the final draft, with John’s small bit of editing, by Saturday and told Medora it was one of the best pieces Peggy Mitchell had ever written. There was a smack of authority in the writing, a kind of reverence coupled with plain good storytelling. The article was published the next day and was enthusiastically received, and, after discussing it with Medora, Perkerson called Peggy back into his office to tell her that he had decided to stretch out the series for three more weeks, which meant she could devote three thousand words each to the remaining three generals. Peggy returned to Carnegie Library with added zeal.

  “When General Cobb Wrote the Georgia Code” appeared on December 6, and Peggy, quite eloquent herself, wrote of how Cobb swept the state out of the Union and into the Confederacy with his eloquence, and how he had died at Fredericksburg on the Sunken Road, where thousands of others lost their lives.

  His brigade was stationed behind a stone wall in the old road, the target of six consecutive attacks by Federal troops. Far away across the battlefield stood Old Federal Hill, the girlhood home of General Cobb’s mother. It was from this old house that she had married and it was in the yard and the estate that the Federal batteries were planted — the batteries that were raining on Sarah Robinson Cobb’s son.

  General Cobb had dismounted from his horse, in one of the intervals of fighting, and was walking down the road behind the wall, encouraging the men, giving orders for the removal of the wounded, checking up, with saddened heart, the number of dead in the Sunken Road, when a bullet struck him. It severed a femoral artery and the General lived only a little while, dying on the battlefield with the roar of the guns in his ears.

  The readers’ response to the article was so good that Perkerson let her extend the next piece, “General Wright — Georgia’s Hero at Gettysburg,” to 4,500 words, rare for the Sunday magazine. And the readers were stirred with good reason as they read of General Wright...

  charging up the green slopes, slippery with blood, with his yelling men behind him. Sword in hand, he led the advance, amid a rain of bullets and swirl of cannon smoke that would have daunted a less fearless man than he. But fear seemed never to have entered his heart, for, calling to the color bearer to follow close, he waved his sword and cried to his men — “Come on! Follow me! Do you want to live forever?”

  Sometimes he turned his back on the enemy to harangue his men, climbing the slope backwards, calling for the flag to follow after him as banner-bearer after banner-bearer fell and the standard was snatched by willing hands before it touched the earth. They reached the top of the rise, sprang over the captured guns, cheering as the enemy retreated down the opposite side of the hill.

  When she returned to Carnegie Library the next week to do her research for “General Benning, Hero of Burnside Bridge,” she realized that she was filling her notebook
with extraneous stories and bits of historical information that intrigued her but had no place in the piece — incidents at Gettysburg, comments of survivors.... And, as she wrote about General Benning, she found herself almost more caught up in the story of his wife,

  a tiny woman, frail and slight, but possessed of unusual endurance and a lion’s heart. The battles she fought at home were those of nearly every Southern woman, but her burdens were heavier than most.

  Left in complete charge of a large plantation, this little woman, who was the mother of ten children, was as brave a soldier at home as ever her husband was on the Virginia battlefields. She saw to it that the crops were gathered, the children fed and clothed and the negroes cared for.... While her husband was away she buried her aged father whose end was hastened by the war, comforted her sorrowing mother, cared for her bereaved sister-in-law. the widow of her brother, and her brother’s children and nursed sick and wounded Confederate soldiers. And hardest of all things in those trying days, she went three times to Virginia to bring home her own wounded.

  The last article appeared on December 20. By Christmas, Peggy had come to two significant realizations. First, aware of just how much she had come to value her marriage to John Marsh, she took down the two calling cards on their door and replaced them with one, which read, “Mr. and Mrs. John Marsh.” Second, she realized that the itch to write something more challenging than a newspaper article had overtaken her.

  John gave her two books for Christmas, Barren Ground by Ellen Glasgow, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Glasgow was from Richmond, Virginia, a Southern woman like herself, and Peggy was much impressed by this author’s ability to so accurately recreate the world of the middle- and upper-class South. Like Fitzgerald, Ellen Glasgow was a stylist, the kind of writer Peggy most admired and thought she could never be. For a few weeks after reading these books, her confidence deserted her. Smart Set had rejected her short stories, and she was sure that John was wrong about her writing potential. Then an idea came to her for a novel dealing with the Jazz Age.

  She named her heroine, the daughter of a Georgian judge, Pansy Hamilton. The young men and women in Pansy’s circle all bore a strong resemblance to the group that belonged to the Yacht Club. The story began with a wild party where bootleg booze was being consumed; this was followed by a fast, chilling auto chase, at the end of which the young man, who was the wildest of the crowd, crashed. His girlfriend, Pansy, came to his rescue, stealing into a locked pharmacy for medical supplies so that the injured man wouldn’t have to be taken to the hospital, where she was certain he would be arrested for drunken driving.

  Peggy wrote thirty pages and then was unable to continue — the hero too closely resembled Red Upshaw. She decided to leave the Jazz Age in the hands of the brilliant F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  Throughout the spring of 1926, Peggy’s schedule was that of a busy working wife. Lula arrived to clean the apartment after Peggy had left for the office, so there was always a sheaf of notes and instructions pinned to a bulletin board in the kitchen. Lula was only there an hour or two a day, and Peggy did all the grocery shopping and prepared dinner. She drew evening work at least twice a week and her assignments had begun to bore her. “What It Costs to Rush a Girl” occupied the front page of the magazine on January 10; “Spirited Heroines and Knee-Length Skirts,” on January 31. She spoke to Medora, who gave her a story, “Conjuring the Wood Out of Alcohol,” for which she had to go into Darktown, Atlanta’s black ghetto. There was a possibility of danger about this that excited her. In Darktowl1, she was to interview the “Conjur” doctors and their victims, some of whom were paying as much as fifty dollars for voodoo charms that would allow them to drink bootleg whiskey without fear of sudden blindness, potash poisoning, or insanity.

  “ ‘Conjur’ folks,” Peggy wrote, were “extracting dimes and dollars from the more superstitious members of their race,” and taking “advantage of the different waves of terror” which swept over Darktown. She went on to describe the fraud and its perpetrators in plain, strong language.

  When John heard she had gone to Darktown unaccompanied, he was frantic. Eugene Mitchell’s maid, Bessie, was also alarmed when she saw the article. For a white woman to walk alone through this dangerous black ghetto was not much better than flaunting herself, as far as Bessie was concerned. Since Peggy had come through the experience unscathed — though, admittedly, a bit frightened — John was more concerned about the possibility of one of the maligned “darkies” (a word she used in the article) seeking revenge. She had handed in the story against his wishes and for several days after it appeared, John insisted on meeting her at the office and escorting her home. From the time of this incident, John pressured her into resigning from her job to stay at home and be Mrs. John Marsh, housewife. She argued that they could not afford for her to do so yet, and then, weakening, agreed to a compromise — when he received a raise, she would quit.

  Forces were working in John Marsh’s favor. The previous year had seen the sudden demise of hundreds of small-town newspapers throughout the country as the new tabloids and their star reporters had won the upper hand. Many people were dismayed at the depths to which the public taste seemed to have fallen, even though they might avidly buy the national tabloids or read the syndicated stories of the men and women who wrote luridly about lust and crime. The public lapped up coverage of sensational trials, such as the suit for separation brought by “Peaches” Browning against her husband, Edward “Daddy” Browning, who had a penchant for very young girls. One critic gave voice to a common complaint when he wrote that the press was having “a carnival of commercial degradation” and would soon be “drenched in obscenity.”

  The Journal did not lower its standards more than it had to in order to survive, but it was using the stories of a great many syndicated writers, like Faith Baldwin and Peggy Joyce and revivalist Billy Sunday. Peggy’s job was never in jeopardy, but her stories were not as prominently featured as they had been. Even her interview with Tiger Flowers, Atlanta’s own new middle-weight champion of the world, was pushed back to page nine, supplanted by a syndicated interview with a confessed murderess.

  The Tiger Flowers piece was one in which Peggy took great pride because she thought she had successfully captured the sound of black speech:

  My wife used to be of the choir befo’ we took to travellin’ around so much. Uster sing powerful lot myself, but looks like I got hit in the mouf so much it plumb ruined my voice.

  Verna Lee and me learned to do the Charleston and I got to be a fool about it. Soon the congregation say, “Tiger, how you reconcile this Charleston with bein’ a steward of the Church?”

  “Ain’t I got to keep my wind,” I say. “Ain’t Charlestonin’ better for the wind than skippin’ rope and a heap more sociable?”

  “And the congregation say, ‘Tiger, that shore is the truf.’ ”

  In April, John received a raise and Peggy gave the paper one month’s notice. She drew her last paycheck as a staff employee on May 3, 1926. But her writing days for the Journal were not yet over; she agreed to free-lance a weekly column called “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip.” The name had been drawn from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and the title was misleading for, instead of gossip, the reader found a column containing amusing or informative anecdotes from Atlanta’s history or about various leading citizens, past and present. The column at least took her out of the house and down to Carnegie Library, where she spent hours each day in the basement, looking through bound copies of old newspapers so massive and heavy that she had to lie on her stomach on the cold floor to read them. She filled her notebook with stories and details that had no place in the pages of the Atlanta Journal, brought these bits of information home, and put them in the drawer of the old sewing-machine table that served as her desk.

  “Elizabeth Bennet’s Gossip” was more challenging to write than one might suspect. It was humorous and anecdotal, an attempt to make Atlanta’s past relevant without being ir
reverent. But as the summer passed, Peggy found it not challenging enough. She again began to consider stories she might write, and she told a close friend that she had “several hundred novels on my mind and have had them there since childhood.”

  To both her friends and her family, Peggy appeared to be a strong, healthy, young woman. She was tight and lean, still boyish in build, and she had surprising strength in her hands and arms and could lift heavy objects with considerable ease. She regularly consumed large quantities of alcohol with no apparent effect, smoked heavily, and never gave her sex as an excuse to get out of doing a man’s job.

  Her friends conceded that she was, unfortunately, accident prone but, despite this, in her reporting days she bloomed with good health. Yet, from the time Peggy Mitchell retired from the Journal to become Mrs. John Marsh, she seemed to be perpetually recovering either from injury or illness. She did, indeed, suffer a series of painful mishaps, but as she stood guard over John’s shaky physical condition, she became increasingly obsessed with her own, even hypochondriacal.

  With Lula Tolbert to clean, Peggy’s housekeeping chores at the Dump were minimal. Most of her friends worked and could not indulge in womanly afternoon entertainments like bridge and the current fad, Mah-jongg. As autumn came around, her restlessness grew. About the same time, John was conscious of a testiness in their relationship. He wrote several people close to him that he was pressuring Peggy to try her hand at a novel but that she was pretty “bull-headed.” Years later, she was to claim that she “hated writing almost as much as Wagner and tap dancing” and only because John “drove” her had she sat down at her typewriter. This happened one day in the fall of 1926, when her restiveness had made her cross and John had accused her of “putting her mind out to pasture.” After he left for the office, she pushed the old sewing-machine table with her typewriter on it to a spot under the two high windows in the living room and, wearing a newsman’s green eyeshade, one of John’s shirts, and a pair of baggy men’s overalls, she set to work on a story she first conceived as a novel, “ ’Ropa Carmagin,” but which, three weeks and a little less than fifteen thousand words later, had become a novella.