Scarlett (24 page)

T
he Charleston that had molded Eleanor Butler and drawn Rhett back after decades of adventuring was an old city, one of the oldest in America. It was crowded onto a narrow triangular peninsula between two wide tidal rivers that met in a broad harbor connected to the Atlantic. First settled in 1682, it had, from its earliest days, a romantic languor and sensuality foreign to the brisk pace and Puritan self-denial of the New England colonies. Salt breezes stirred palm trees and wisteria vines, and flowers bloomed year-round. The soil was black, rich, free of stones to blunt a man’s plow; the waters teemed with fish, crab, shrimp, terrapin and oysters, the woods with game. It was a rich land, meant to be enjoyed.

Ships from all over the globe anchored in the harbor for cargoes of the rice grown on Charlestonians’ vast plantations along the rivers; they delivered the world’s luxuries for the pleasure and adornment of the small population. It was the wealthiest city in America.

Blessed by reaching its maturity in the Age of Reason, Charleston used its wealth in the pursuit of beauty and knowledge. Responsive to its climate and natural bounties, it used its riches also for the enjoyment of the senses. Each house had its chef and its ballroom, every lady her brocades from France and her pearls from India. There were learned societies and societies for music and dancing, schools of science and schools of fencing. It was civilized and hedonistic in a balance that created a culture of exquisitely refined grace in which incomparable luxury was tempered by a demanding discipline of intellect and education. Charlestonians painted their houses in all the colors of the rainbow and hung them with shaded porches through which sea breezes carried the scent of roses like a caress. Inside every house there was a room with globe, telescope, and walls of books in many languages. In the middle of the day they sat at dinner for six courses, each offering a choice of dishes in quietly gleaming, generations-old silver pieces. Conversation was the sauce of the meal, wit its preferred seasoning.

This was the world which Scarlett O’Hara, one-time belle of a rural county in the raw red frontier earth of north Georgia, now intended to conquer, armed only with energy, stubbornness, and a dreadful need. Her timing was terrible.

For more than a century, Charlestonians had been renowned for their hospitality. It wasn’t unusual to entertain a hundred guests, fully half of whom were unknown to host and hostess except through letters of introduction. During Race Week—the climax of the city’s social season—owners from England, France, Ireland, and Spain often brought their horses months in advance to accustom them to the climate and water. The owners stayed at the homes of their Charleston competitors; their horses were stabled, as guests, next to the horses the Charleston host would be running against them. It was an open-handed, open-hearted city.

Until the War came. Fittingly, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. To most of the world Charleston was the symbol of the mysterious and magical, moss-hung, magnolia-scented South. To Charlestonians as well.

And to the North. “Proud and arrogant Charleston” was the refrain in New York and Boston newspapers. Union military officials were determined to destroy the flower-filled, pastel-painted old city. The harbor entrance was blockaded first; later, gun emplacements on nearby islands fired shells into narrow streets and houses in a siege that lasted for almost six hundred days; finally Sherman’s Army came with its torches to burn the plantation houses on the rivers. When the Union troops marched in to occupy their prize, they faced a desolate ruin. Wild grasses grew in the streets and choked the gardens of windowless, shell-scarred, broken-roofed houses. They also faced a decimated population that had become as proud and arrogant as their Northern reputation.

Outsiders were no longer welcome in Charleston.

People repaired their roofs and windows as best they could and locked their doors. Among themselves, they restored the cherished habits of gaiety. They met for dancing in looted drawing rooms where they toasted the South in water from cracked and mended cups. “Starvation parties,” they called their gatherings, and laughed. The days of French champagne in crystal flutes might be gone, but they were still Charlestonians. They had lost their possessions but they had almost two centuries of shared tradition and style. No one could take that from them. The War was over, but they weren’t defeated. They would never be defeated, no matter what the damn Yankees did. Not so long as they stuck together. And kept everyone else out of their closed circle.

The military occupation and the outrages of Reconstruction tested their mettle, but they held fast. One by one the other states of the Confederacy were readmitted to the Union, their state governments restored to the state’s population. But not South Carolina. And especially not Charleston. More than nine years after the end of the War, armed soldiers patrolled the old streets, enforcing curfew. Constantly changing regulations covered everything from the price of paper to the licensing of marriages and funerals. Charleston became more and more derelict outwardly, but ever stronger in its determination to preserve the old ways of life. The Bachelors’ Cotillion was reborn, with a new generation to fill the gaps caused by the carnage of Bull Run, Antietam, and Chancellorsville. After their working hours as clerks or laborers, former plantation owners took the streetcars or walked to the outskirts of the city to rebuild the two-mile oval of the Charleston Race Course and to plant the blood-soaked churned mud of the land around it with grass seed bought with combined widow’s mites.

Little by little, by symbols and by inches, Charlestonians were regaining the essence of their beloved lost world. But there was no room in it for anyone who didn’t belong there.

P
ansy couldn’t hide her amazement at the orders Scarlett gave her when she was unlacing for bed the first night in the Butler house. “Take the green walking-out costume I wore this morning and give it a good brushing. Then take off every speck of trimming, including the gold buttons, and sew on some plain black buttons instead.”

“Where I going to find any black buttons, Miss Scarlett?”

“Don’t bother me with fool questions like that. Ask Mrs. Butler’s maid—what’s her name? Celie. And wake me up tomorrow at five o’clock.”

“Five o’clock?”

“Are you deaf? You heard me. Now scoot. I want that green outfit ready to put on when I get up.”

Scarlett sank gratefully into the feather mattress and down pillows on the big bed. It had been an over-full, over-emotional day. Meeting Miss Eleanor, then shopping, then that silly Confederate Home meeting, then Rhett appearing from nowhere with the silver tea service… Her hand stretched over to the empty space beside her. She wanted him there, but perhaps it was better to wait a few days, until she was really accepted in Charleston. That miserable Ross! She wouldn’t think about him or those horrible things he’d said and done. Miss Eleanor had denied him the house, and she wouldn’t have to see him, she hoped not ever again. She’d think about something else. She’d think about Miss Eleanor, who loved her and who was going to help her get Rhett back, even if she didn’t know that’s what she was doing.

The Market, Miss Eleanor had said, was the place to meet everybody and hear all the news. So to the Market she would go—tomorrow. Scarlett would have been happier if it wasn’t necessary to go so early, at six o’clock. But needs must. I have to say this for Charleston, she thought sleepily, it’s plenty busy, and I like that. She was only halfway through a yawn when she fell asleep.

The Market was the perfect place for Scarlett to begin the life of a Charleston lady. The Market was an outward, visible distillation of Charleston’s essence. From the city’s earliest days it had been the place where Charlestonians bought their food. The lady of the house—or, in rare cases, the man—selected and paid for it, a maid or coachman received it and placed it in a basket hung over the arm. Before the War the food was sold by slaves who had transported it from their masters’ plantations. Many of the vendors were in the places they had been before, only now they were free, and the baskets were carried by servants who were paid for their service; like the vendors, many of them were the same people, carrying the same baskets they had before. What was important to Charleston was that the old ways hadn’t changed.

Tradition was the bedrock of society, the birthright of Charleston’s people, the priceless inheritance that no carpetbagger or soldier could steal. It was made manifest in the Market. Outsiders could shop there; it was public property. But they found it frustrating. Somehow they could never quite catch the eye of the woman who was selling vegetables, the man selling crabs. Black citizens were as proudly Charlestonian as white ones. When the foreigner left, the whole Market rang with laughter. The Market was for Charleston’s people only.

Scarlett hunched her shoulders to lift her collar higher on her neck. A cold finger of wind got inside it despite her efforts, and she shivered violently. Her eyes felt full of cinders, and she was sure her boots must be lined with lead. How many miles could there be in five city blocks? She couldn’t see a thing. The street lamps were only a bright circle of mist within mist in the ghostly gray pre-dawn half-light.

How can Miss Eleanor be so cursed cheery? Chattering away as if it wasn’t freezing cold and black as pitch. There was some light ahead—way ahead. Scarlett stumbled towards it. She wished the miserable wind would die down. What was that? In the wind. She sniffed the air. It was! It was coffee. Maybe she’d live after all. Her steps matched Mrs. Butler’s in an eager, accelerated pace.

The Market was like a bazaar, an oasis of light and warmth, color and life in the formless gray mist. Torches blazed on brick pillars that supported tall wide arches open to the surrounding streets, illuminating the bright aprons and headscarves of smiling black women and highlighting their wares, displayed in baskets of every size and shape on long wooden tables painted green. It was crowded with people, most of them moving from table to table, talking—to other shoppers or to the vendors in a challenging, laughing ritual of haggling obviously enjoyed by all.

“Coffee first, Scarlett?”

“Oh, yes, please.”

Eleanor Butler led the way to a nearby group of women. They held steaming tin mugs in their gloved hands, sipping from them while they talked and laughed with one another, oblivious to the din around them.

“Good morning, Eleanor… Eleanor, how are you?… Push over, Mildred, let Eleanor get through… Oh, Eleanor, did you hear that Kerrison’s has real wool stockings on sale? It won’t be in the paper until tomorrow. Would you like to come with Alice and me? We’re going after dinner today… Oh, Eleanor, we were just talking about Lavinia’s daughter. She lost the baby last night. Lavinia’s prostrate with grief. Do you think your cook could make some of her wonderful wine jelly? Nobody does it the way she does. Mary has a bottle of claret, and I’ll supply the sugar…”

“Morning, Miz Butler, I saw you coming, your coffee’s all ready.”

“And another cup for my daughter-in-law, please, Sukie. Ladies, I want you to meet Rhett’s wife, Scarlett.”

All chattering stopped and all heads turned to look at Scarlett.

She smiled and inclined her head in a little bow. She looked apprehensively at the group of ladies, imagining that it must be all over town, what Ross said. I shouldn’t have come, I can’t stand it. Her jaw hardened, and an invisible chip settled on her shoulder. She expected the worst, and all her old hostility to Charleston’s aristocratic pretensions returned in a flash.

But she smiled and bowed to each of the ladies as Eleanor introduced her… yes, I just love Charleston… yes, ma’am, I am Pauline Smith’s niece… no, ma’am, I haven’t seen the art gallery yet, I’ve only been here since night before last… yes’m I do think the Market’s real exciting… Atlanta—more Clayton County actually, my folks had a cotton plantation there… oh, yes, ma’am, the weather is a real treat, these warm winter days… no, ma’am, I don’t think I met your nephew when he was in Valdosta, that’s quite a ways from Atlanta… yes’m, I do enjoy a game of whist… Oh, thank you so much, I’ve been positively aching for a taste of coffee…

She buried her face in the mug, her job done. Miss Eleanor’s got no more sense than a pea hen, she thought mutinously. How could she just pitch me in to the middle like that? She must think I’ve got a memory like an elephant. So many names, and they all mix up together. They’re all looking at me as if I was an elephant, too, or something else in a zoo. They know what Ross said, I know they do. Miss Eleanor might be fooled by their smiling, but I’m not. Bunch of old cats! Her teeth ground against the rim of the mug.

She wouldn’t show her feelings, not if she went blind to keep from crying. But her cheeks were stained with high color.

When she finished her coffee, Mrs. Butler took her mug and handed it, with her own, to the busy coffee-seller. “I’ll have to ask you for some change, Sukie,” she said. She held out a five dollar bill. With no waste motion, Sukie dipped and swirled the mugs in a big pail of brownish water, set them on the table at her elbow, wiped her hands on her apron, took the bill and deposited it in a cracked leather pouch hanging from her belt, withdrawing a dollar bill without looking. “Here you is, Miz Butler, hope you enjoyed it.”

Scarlett was aghast. Two dollars for a cup of coffee! Why, with two dollars you could buy the best pair of boots on King Street.