Gone with the Wind

by Margaret Mitchell

Prissy rolled her eyes wildly, peeping first at the set face of her mistress and then at the cow which bawled plaintively. Scarlett seemed the less dangerous of the two, so Prissy clutched at the sides of the wagon and remained where she was.

Prissy was not the only one who was “sceered” of cows. Scarlett had always feared them, even the mildest cow seemed sinister to her,

thoo

“Pork, how many darkies are here?” “Miss Scarlett, dem trashy niggers done runned away an’ some of dem went off wid de Yankees an’—”

“Pork, what of the corn whisky Pa buried in the oak barrel under the scuppernong arbor?”

“Miss Scarlett, you sho is de beatenes’ chile!

“Well, Miss Scarlett, mah Dilcey ten’ ter Miss Melly’s chile. Mah Dilcey got a new chile herseff an’ she got mo’n nuff fer both.”

martinet

“Miss Scarlett, it wuz dem Slatterys, dem trashy, no-good, low-down po’-w’ite Slatterys dat kilt Miss Ellen. Ah done tole her an’ tole her it doan do no good doin’ things fer trashy folks, but Miss Ellen wuz so sot in her ways an’ her heart so sof’ she couldn’ never say no ter nobody whut needed her.”

So Miss Ellen, she tuck an’ nuss dem too.

“You hesh yo’ mouf, you Injun-nigger!” Mammy turned with threatening violence on Dilcey.

Ellen’s daughter would be the refuge Ellen had always been.

This was the end of the road, quivering old age, sickness, hungry mouths, helpless hands plucking at her skirts. And at the end of this road, there was nothing—nothing but Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton, nineteen years old, a widow with a little child.

She did not like Suellen. She saw it now with a sudden clarity. She had never liked her.

She did not especially love Carreen—she could not love anyone who was weak.

somewhere along the long road to Tara, she had left her girlhood behind her.

Tonight was the last time she would ever be ministered to as a child. She was a woman now and youth was gone.

dispensing with the usual forms of courtesy her mother had always taught her to use with negroes. She began asking questions so brusquely and giving orders so decisively Pork’s eyebrows went up in mystification. Miss Ellen didn’t never talk so short to nobody,

“Well’m, Prissy ain’ fixing to be no cow midwife, Miss Scarlett,”

anyone at Tara who won’t work can go hunt up the Yankees.

“As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill—as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.”

How careless they had been of food then, what prodigal waste! Rolls, corn muffins, biscuit and waffles, dripping butter, all at one meal. Ham at one end of the table and fried chicken at the other, collards swimming richly in pot liquor iridescent with grease, snap beans in mountains on brightly flowered porcelain, fried squash, stewed okra, carrots in cream sauce thick enough to cut. And three desserts, so everyone might have his choice, chocolate layer cake, vanilla blanc mange and pound cake topped with sweet whipped cream.

But no one talked back to Scarlett these days.

Scarlett reigned supreme at Tara now and, like others suddenly elevated to authority, all the bullying instincts in her nature rose to the surface.

“Some folks rides mighty high dese days,”

her own bitterness that everything her mother had told her about life was wrong.

It did not occur to her that Ellen had looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.

beneath the gentle voice and the dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel,

“Do you suppose it would be dishonest to go through his knapsack? He might have something to eat.” “I do not,” said Scarlett, annoyed that she had not thought of this herself.

She had changed more than she knew and the shell of hardness which had begun to form about her heart when she lay in the slave garden at Twelve Oaks was slowly thickening.

termagant,

I is part Indian and Indians doan forgit them as is good to them.

I is sorry ’bout my Prissy. She mighty wuthless.

“I never expected to see Melly Hamilton straddling a horse!”

beatenest

the problem was food.

At Tara, they ate rabbit and possum and catfish, if Pork was lucky. On other days a small amount of milk, hickory nuts, roasted acorns and yams.

It was annoying that Melanie always seemed to grasp more of situations than she herself did.

I agree with Melly. I never saw a nice Yankee, male or female.

Wouldn't he have come to Tara by now?

Grits and black-eye peas.

Sleep had refreshed her and given her strength and from the cold hard core at the bottom of her heart, she drew courage.

He smiled down at her with the first expression of honest pleasure she had ever seen on his face.

Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

He had almost seemed like a human being and not the perverse wretch she knew so well.

Nihil desperandum’

“I think you’re real rude to throw off on my poor hands.

Rhett Butler was a dangerous man to run afoul of.

the lonesome blackened chimneys, now known as “Sherman’s Sentinels,”

that old maid in pants, Frank Kennedy.