She was born in the middle of a week when frenzied excitement gripped Atlanta and the air was tense with expectation of disaster.A negro who had boasted of rape had actually been arrested,but before he could be brought to trial the jail had been raided by the Ku Klux Klan and he had been quietly hanged.The Klan had acted to save the as yet unnamed victim from having to testify in open court.Rather than have her appear and advertise her shame,her father and brother would have shot her,so lynching the negro seemed a sensible solution to the townspeople,in fact,the only decent solution possible.But the military authorities were in a fury.They saw no reason why the girl should mind testifying publicly.
The soldiers had made arrests right and left,swearing to wipe out the Klan if they had to put every white man in Atlanta in jail.The negroes,frightened and sullen,muttered of retaliatory house burnings.The air was thick with rumors of wholesale hangings by the Yankees should the guilty parties be found and of a concerted uprising against the whites by the negroes.The people of the town stayed at home behind locked doors and shuttered windows,the men fearing to go to their businesses and leave their women and children unprotected.
Scarlett,lying exhausted in bed,feebly and silently thanked God that Ashley had too much sense to belong to the Klan and Frank was too old and poor spirited.How dreadful it would be to know that the Yankees might swoop down and arrest them at any minute!Why didn't the crack-brained young fools in the Klan leave bad enough alone and not stir up the Yankees like this?Probably the girl hadn't been raped after all.Probably she'd just been frightened silly and,because of her,a lot of men might lose their lives.
In this atmosphere,as nerve straining as watching a slow fuse burn toward a barrel of gunpowder,Scarlett came rapidly back to strength.The healthy vigor which had carried her through the hard days at Tara stood her in good stead now,and within two weeks of Ella Lorena's birth she was strong enough to sit up and chafe at her inactivity.In three weeks she was up,declaring she had to see to the mills.They were standing idle because both Hugh and Ashley feared to leave their families alone all day.
Then the blow fell.
Frank,full of the pride of new fatherhood,summoned up courage enough to forbid Scarlett leaving the house while conditions were so dangerous.His commands would not have worried her at all and she would have gone about her business in spite of them,if he had not put her horse and buggy in the livery stable and ordered that they should not be surrendered to anyone except himself.To make matters worse,he and Mammy had patiently searched the house while she was ill and unearthed her hidden store of money.And Frank had deposited it in the bank in his own name,so now she could not even hire a rig.
Scarlett raged at both Frank and Mammy,then was reduced to begging and finally cried all one morning like a furious thwarted child.But for all her pains she heard only:“There,Sugar!You're just a sick little girl.”And:“Miss Scarlett,ef you doan quit cahyin'on so,you gwine sour yo'milk an'de baby have colic,sho as gun's iron.”
In a furious temper,Scarlett charged through her back yard to Melanie's house and there unburdened herself at the top of her voice,declaring she would walk to the mills,she would go about Atlanta telling everyone what a varmint she had married,she would not be treated like a naughty simpleminded child.She would carry a pistol and shoot anyone who threatened her.She had shot one man and she would love,yes,love to shoot another.She would—
Melanie who feared to venture onto her own front porch was appalled by such threats.
“Oh,you must not risk yourself!I should die if anything happened to you!Oh,please—”
“I will!I will!I will walk—”
Melanie looked at her and saw that this was not the hysteria of a woman still weak from childbirth.There was the same breakneck,headlong determination in Scarlett's face that Melanie had often seen in Gerald O'Hara's face when his mind was made up.She put her arms around Scarlett's waist and held her tightly.
“It's all my fault for not being brave like you and for keeping Ashley at home with me all this time when he should have been at the mill.Oh,dear!I'm such a ninny!Darling,I'll tell Ashley I'm not a bit frightened and I'll come over and stay with you and Aunt Pitty and he can go back to work and—”
Not even to herself would Scarlett admit that she did not think Ashley could cope with the situation alone and she shouted:“You'll do nothing of the kind!What earthly good would Ashley do at work if he was worried about you every minute?Everybody is just so hateful!Even Uncle Peter refuses to go out with me!But I don't care!I'll go alone.I'll walk every step of the way and pick up a crew of darkies somewhere—”
“Oh,no!You mustn't do that!Something dreadful might happen to you.They say that Shantytown settlement on the Decatur road is just full of mean darkies and you'd have to pass right by it.Let me think—Darling,promise me you won't do anything today and I'll think of something.Promise me you'll go home and lie down.You look right peaked.Promise me.”
Because she was too exhausted by her anger to do otherwise,Scarlett sulkily promised and went home,haughtily refusing any overtures of peace from her household.
That afternoon a strange figure stumped through Melanie's hedge and across Pitty's back yard.Obviously,he was one of those men whom Mammy and Dilcey referred to as “de riffraff whut Miss Melly pick up off de streets an'let sleep in her cellar.”
