11

Georgia

GONE WITH THE WINDOW

You drive through Atlanta … and take a look around, and up, and you wonder, what is this place? Is this a place?

—WALKER PERCY, Going Back to Georgia, 1978

Retreating south to Virginia, like the ferrets after Pickett’s Charge, I plotted my campaign through the crucial stretch of Civil War real estate I’d so far skirted. In the year following Gettysburg, while Lee locked the Federals in a bloody stalemate in Virginia, the Union army out “West” battled its way into the Confederate heartland of Georgia and Alabama. “I begin to regard the death and mangling of a couple of thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash,” William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his wife in July 1864, after a bloody repulse in north Georgia. Five weeks later, Sherman tersely telegraphed his superiors, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”—a victory that saved Lincoln from defeat in the fall elections and helped seal the doom of the Southern Confederacy.

Reaching Atlanta was far easier now than in Sherman’s day. Fueled by Georgia’s 97-cents-a-gallon gas and unenforced speed limits, I bombed down an interstate that spilled straight into Peachtree Street, the city’s main drag. Unlike Sherman, I approached Atlanta with trepidation. Though I’d never visited the city proper, it was impossible to travel the South without getting trapped in Atlanta’s tentacled airport, or being blitzed by TV images of the city’s bland skyline, its relentless boosterism, its bloodlessly efficient baseball team. Atlanta loomed in my imagination like a blimp-sized smile button.

I’d also absorbed the prejudices of non-Atlantans I’d met in my travels (admittedly, mostly folks of a traditional bent). To Southrons, as true sons and daughters of Dixie liked to call themselves, Atlanta was the anti-South: a crass, brash city built in the image of the Chamber of Commerce and overrun by carpetbaggers, corporate climbers and conventioneers. “Every time I look at Atlanta,” quipped John Shelton Reed, the South’s wittiest observer, “I see what a quarter million Confederate soldiers died to prevent.”

Atlanta-bashers had even made a science of the city’s disloyalty to Dixie. Reed, a sociologist by trade, cited surveys showing that Atlanta’s “pace of life”—as measured by walking speed, length of bank transactions, per capita wristwatch-wearing—exceeded the national average. Even worse, Atlantans ranked below average in their hospitality to strangers (i.e., making change or helping a blind person across the street). “The only thing remarkable about Atlanta,” Reed opined, “is the number and variety of table-dancing establishments.”

Arriving in Atlanta at dusk, I was mostly struck by the number and blandness of its malls and shops. The interstate deposited me in Buckhead, an upscale district that an Atlantan had recommended as “colorful” and “close in.” Cruising slowly down Peachtree, I passed Lenox Square (America’s first suburban mall), a restaurant with a sign that said “A Buckhead Tradition since February,” and countless “detail salons,” a hardcore breed of car wash where attendants cleaned vehicles with tweezers and Q-Tips. Every ten blocks or so stood a chain restaurant called Mick’s; the road map I’d picked up at a gas station labeled every Mick’s, posted like mileage markers all across town.

It was several Mick’s and six miles from Buckhead to Atlanta’s compact downtown. Whatever peach trees once bloomed here were gone, supplanted by a forest of office towers bearing corporate names: Coca-Cola, Delta, Georgia-Pacific, CNN. Climbing out of my car, I toured the only visible nineteenth-century survival: Underground Atlanta, a commercial district that remained below street level as the modern city grew up around it. Underground originally served as a railroad-side market where slaves and other “wares” were unloaded and sold. Now, its quaint gaslights illuminated renovated shopfronts: Victoria’s Secret, Sam Goody, Foot Locker, Hooter’s, The Gap.

Like most newcomers, bred on Gone With the Wind, I assumed that Sherman and his torch-wielding soldiers bore the principal blame for Atlanta’s arid modernity. This notion was also ingrained in the city’s self-image. Atlanta took the phoenix as its symbol; its motto was Resurgens. But the next day, at the Atlanta History Center, I learned that the modern city hadn’t exactly risen from Civil War ashes. “Atlantans leveled much more of Atlanta than Sherman did,” said Franklin Garrett, the city’s leading historian.

At eighty-nine, Garrett’s memory was so encyclopedic that the History Center held an annual trivia contest called “Stump Franklin.” He’d last been stumped several years before, when he failed to recall the name of a doorman at a 1920s department store. But he remembered the building. “Gone. Same as the whole block,” he said, consulting a map and ticking off the structures like so many extinct species.

Evanescence had always come with the territory in Atlanta. While most antebellum Southern cities—Savannah, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans—grew up around colonial ports, Atlanta began only twenty-four years before the Civil War as a railroad end point called Terminus. Showing an early talent for reinvention, Terminus quickly shed its funereal name and became a bustling rail and munitions center during the Civil War. Retreating Confederates torched much of the city before Sherman’s men added to the bonfire. Even so, Garrett said, about a quarter of the city, including some 400 homes and buildings, survived the flames.

What old Atlanta couldn’t survive was the city’s ceaseless remaking of itself after the War. The devastation was so complete, Garrett said, that not a single antebellum building now remained. The city’s battlefields had fared just as badly. Peachtree Battle Shopping Center was virtually all that recalled the rebels’ rearguard assault at Peachtree Creek in July 1864. Even the name Peachtree had lost its historic cachet. Peachtree was such a desirable business address that hustling Atlantans had simply cloned it; there were now thirty-two streets with the fruit tree as part of their name.

While Garrett mourned the loss of so much history, he felt this devastation reflected the city’s essential character. “Atlanta’s always been on the go,” he said. “Never was a moonlight-and-magnolia city like Savannah or Charleston. It always had more of a Rhett Butler attitude than an Ashley Wilkes one.”

This go-go attitude had a progressive side, of course. It was an Atlanta newspaper editor, Henry Grady, who popularized the phrase “New South” in 1886 to describe a region ready to reconcile with the North—and ready for Northern investment. Atlanta was the first Southern city to abolish the poll tax and integrated far more easily than most urban centers. The city also began electing black mayors in the 1970s and had become a Mecca for middle-class blacks from across the nation. The Chamber of Commerce got in on the act, too, once taking as its slogan, “A City Too Busy to Hate.”

Like so much about Atlanta, this hype had a way of clouding reality. Atlanta’s inner city remained among the poorest and most crime-ridden in America, and urban blight was matched by frenzied white flight. Even so, it was impossible to wander downtown Atlanta without being struck by the profusion of black professionals and interracial couples, and by the casual mingling of blacks and whites at bars, lunch counters and offices.

But Atlanta’s comparative racial amity—and ceaseless peddling of its progressive image—abetted the city’s neglect of its past. Whatever history Atlanta couldn’t tear down, it bobbed around, lest any ugly blot from the past mar the city’s reputation. During the run-up to the 1996 Olympics, this sanitizing of the past became downright Orwellian. A suburb called Roswell, under pressure from corporate sponsors, deleted “antebellum” from the title of its annual historical festival (it also tried to bar Confederate reenactors from participating). Roswell’s Historic Preservation Commission also removed a marker pointing out slave quarters beside an antebellum home. “We’ll just put it right back out after the Olympics are over,” a local official said. “This is history.”

AT DAY’S END, as glass towers emptied downtown, I saw another side of Atlanta that boosters preferred not to advertise. While blacks headed home to urban neighborhoods or close-in suburbs south of downtown, whites streamed onto freeways toward distant enclaves, mostly north of the city. Atlantans referred to the beltway ringing the city as the “perimeter,” as though it represented a real frontier between the majority-black city and the overwhelmingly white suburbs. There was even a corporate outpost oxymoronically called “Perimeter Center.”

Atlantans also spoke of their beltway-ringed city as a doughnut. There were now two telephone area codes, one for “inside the doughnut,” the other for outside. And while the population of the city proper had dwindled since 1970, dipping below 500,000, the metro area had doubled in size to over three million people, mostly living outside the doughnut.

Joining a twelve-lane highway, I lost myself in the tangle of interstates leading out of the city. Despite its rapid growth, north Georgia remained remarkably pastoral. Greater Atlanta didn’t so much sprawl as metastasize, with exurban nodes appearing suddenly amidst piney woods, rolling hills and red-clay fields. Greater Atlanta had also sprouted an astonishing crop of gated communities. One, called Sweetbottom Plantation, offered upscale homes modeled on those in Charleston’s Battery and New Orlean’s Garden District: a bit of Old South grace transplanted to New South suburbs, with security gates and private roads.

I ended my drive at Stone Mountain, just east of the city. Reputedly the largest hunk of exposed granite in the world, the dome-shaped mountain poked up from Atlanta’s wooded perimeter like a very tall, very bald man in a crowd. Chiseled on its face was the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture, a three-acre carving of the Confederate trinity—Lee, Jackson and Davis—riding horses and holding hats over their hearts. Lee alone stood nine stories tall.

Commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1915, and begun by the same artist who crafted Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain was intended as the South’s foremost Confederate shrine. It also became a rallying place for the Ku Klux Klan, which was reborn there in 1915 and later declared Atlanta its Imperial City. But eighty years later, when the park at Stone Mountain’s base was named an Olympic venue, the Invisible Empire became, well, invisible. A museum exhibit on Stone Mountain, opening just before the Games, omitted any mention of the Klan. “I think some chapters are just better left to the historians,” Atlanta’s mayor told the local press.

The park’s management had also chosen to soften the Confederate content of a popular laser show that used the sculpture as a backdrop. Curious to see the result, I joined several thousand people strewn on blankets and banana chairs at the mountain’s base. As the lights came up, I was struck by how different Stone Mountain was from Mount Rushmore. Here, the figures were shown in profile, in relatively shallow relief, as though a huge Confederate coin had left a fossil-like print in the mountain’s face.

This impression lasted about ten seconds, the time it took for the sound track to kick on, playing as overture a familiar soft-drink jingle: “There’s always Coca-Cola!” Laser beams created a Coke bottle dancing across the mounted Confederates. This was followed by a cartoon strip featuring a good ol’ boy named Buford, traveling through a time tunnel—though not very far. Animated rock guitarists flashed onto the mountain to the strains of ZZ Top and the Beatles. This segued into the theme song from Beverly Hills Cop, accompanied by abstract images: trapezoids, stars, clusters.

No musical riff or laser image lasted more than a few seconds. I caught snatches of the B-52s singing “Heading down the Atlanta Highway” and Alabama doing “Forty Hour Week.” Charlie Daniels’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” collided with Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles as airplanes landed to the strains of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” Then came sports iconography—the Braves, the Falcons, the Hawks—before Elvis appeared, thrusting his pelvis across Traveller’s rippling flank. At this point, I felt sure I could hear Robby Lee and his famous mount rolling over in their graves up in Lexington.

The show concluded in a blur of cliches: Scarlett O’Hara, peaches, plantations, and the mascots of various Georgia universities. Then Elvis appeared again, singing “Dixie” in a slow, sensual drawl as the lasers outlined Lee, Jackson and Davis. The crowd began to cheer. But as the mounted men sprang to life and galloped across Stone Mountain, “Dixie” segued into the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and Lee broke his sword across his leg. The two halves of the blade quickly transmogrified into a map of North and South, merging together as the sound track belted, “His truth is marching on.” Finally, to expunge any last hint of the Cause, the sound track played “God Bless the U.S.A.” amidst images of the Lincoln Memorial, JFK’s grave, Martin Luther King Jr., and a ballot box. Fireworks exploded and the mountain became, in turn, an immense American flag, the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore. The music and lasers abruptly cut off and the three horsemen of the Confederacy melted into the night.

I sat there for a while, letting “Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn” and Lee and Lincoln and Elvis all jangle around in my head. The show was a puddle of political correctness. The message seemed to be that there was no message—no real content to any of the divisive figures or songs or historic episodes the laser show depicted in its fast-paced cartoon. Why debate who should or shouldn’t be remembered and revered when you could just stuff the whole lot in a blender and spew it across the world’s biggest rock?

Like so much in Atlanta, Stone Mountain had become a bland and inoffensive consumable: the Confederacy as hood ornament. Not for the first time, though more deeply than ever before, I felt a twinge of affinity for the neo-Confederates I’d met in my travels. Better to remember Dixie and debate its philosophy than to have its largest shrine hijacked for Coca-Cola ads and MTV songs.

BUT THEN, even neo-Confederates in Atlanta were different. While traveling the South, I’d often encountered representatives of the Heritage Preservation Association, an Atlanta-based group renowned for its attack-dog tactics in defense of the rebel flag. So I made a lunch date with the group’s president, Lee Collins. I expected to encounter a gaunt, fiery-eyed man with a rebel-flag pin and nineteenth-century hair—the sort of figure I’d often met at neo-Confederate gatherings. Instead, I was greeted at my hotel by a groomed, thirty-something preppy who wore a button-down shirt, a designer tie and horn-rimmed glasses.

“We can eat Southern,” Lee Collins said as we climbed into his minivan, “or we can go further South than that.” Intrigued, I chose the latter. Collins picked up his car phone and began chatting in Spanish. Then to me: “My wife’s Colombian and I’ve been itching to try this place.” Collins turned up Buford Highway, the main thoroughfare of immigrant Atlanta, and drove past Asian noodle bars and Muslim butchers before pulling into a hole-in-the-wall cantina. Collins ordered off the menu, again in fluent Spanish.

“We have a culture—Southern culture—that’s been bleached from the fabric of America,” Collins said, slathering tortilla chips with hot sauce. “My children are half-Hispanic and I’m proud of that. But they’re also half-Southern. I want them to be proud of that, too.”

Collins had met his wife through a Colombian folklore and dance group. Since then, he’d made a number of Hispanic contacts, which had helped expand his non-Confederate livelihood: a computer-consulting business. “My background is engineering,” he said. “I’m trained to identify problems, implement and monitor a solution, then move on to the next problem. We don’t get wrapped up in emotion. The same goes for the Heritage Preservation Association.”

The HPA had a computer bulletin board and a toll-free hot line (1-800-TO DIXIE) so members could report “heritage violations,” such as a hotel chain’s decision to stop displaying the Georgia state banner, which incorporated the rebel flag. The HPA ran ads, directed letter-writing campaigns, lobbied the state legislature during debates over the flag. The HPA even had a political action committee, or PAC, to funnel money to sympathetic candidates.

“The heritage movement is a brand-new industry,” Collins said, hoeing into rice and beans. “It’s like Lotus was ten years ago, producing spread sheets while others produced software. Now, Lotus will sell you a database. We’ve created a niche, too. A niche of the civil rights industry. Our niche is Southern heritage.”

Collins also had learned to appropriate the idiom of civil rights and of liberal groups combating discrimination. “We’re chosen people, surviving many atrocities,” he said, sounding like a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League. Mimicking the NAACP, the HPA had created a legal-defense team to assist victims of bias, such as a textile worker who was fired for pasting a battle flag to his toolbox.

“The main thing I’ve learned from the civil rights movement is the power of perseverance,” Collins said. “It took fifteen years to get the Martin Luther King holiday. We’re in this for the long haul.”

Most other neo-Confederates I’d met were romantics. The South they revered was hot-blooded, Celtic, heedlessly courageous; their poster boy was the Scottish clansman played by Mel Gibson in the splatterfest Braveheart. In their view, rationalism and technological efficiency were suspect Yankee traits, derived from a mercantile English empire that had put down the Scots and Irish.

Collins was well acquainted with this philosophy, but he didn’t subscribe to it as an organizing tool for today’s struggle. “Nostalgia’s not a powerful enough force,” he said. “If it were, the Sons of Confederate Veterans would have ten million members and the Christian Coalition would have a thousand.”

Even so, Collins wasn’t immune to certain strains of neo-Confederate ideology. In his view, Atlanta’s New South trappings were simply an extension of the Civil War and the North’s efforts to mold Dixie in its own image. “The New South breaks the back of the agrarian economy and promotes an industrial South,” he said. “That’s succeeded. But it hasn’t captured the hearts and minds of the people.”

To Collins, this helped explain Atlanta’s suburban sprawl. “People here still have a rural mentality. They want space,” he said. “Southerners may work in a factory but they still dream of owning a farm.” No matter how many Northerners flocked to Atlanta, an essential Southernness would endure. “We have an extra layer of armor. Our culture.”

Collins’s armor deflected every arrow I tried to fling at his arguments. The heritage movement wasn’t backward-looking, he said; it was tuned precisely to the times. “We’re anti-federal. Con-federal, if you like. I’d rather that Georgia not get one federal dollar.” He believed this same independent streak had sparked the Civil War, which in his view was fought over economic issues and constitutional sovereignty. “If all the South wanted to do was maintain slavery, the easiest way was to stay in the Union, where slavery was legal.” Nor did the rebel flag symbolize the oppression of blacks; after all, the Stars and Stripes flew over slavery for eighty years, which the battle flag of the South never did. “The Confederacy was an attempt to institute a strict interpretation of the Constitution. Period.”

I’d heard most of this before, but never so slickly presented—and never over plantains and chile verde. Collins even offered an entrepreneurial critique of Atlanta’s failure to exploit Confederate history. “We have a natural resource, it’s inexhaustible. That resource is Southern heritage. Stone Mountain—people don’t come there to ski, they come because it’s a Confederate memorial. It makes me sick, the lost opportunity to capitalize on something we have. It’s bigger than oil because it’s inexhaustible and it doesn’t pollute the atmosphere.”

Collins was a busy man. He tossed down a cup of café con leche and handed me a business card and a copy of the HPA’s “mission statement.” One thing he wouldn’t share, though, was the size of his organization. “In keeping with the strategy of Lee at Appomattox,” he said, “I don’t release numbers. The element of uncertainty has been good for us.”

BACK AT MY MOTEL, flipping through the HPA’s literature, I noticed an ad for another enterprise I’d often wondered about while traveling the South: a north Georgia business called the Ruffin Flag Company. I’d seen Ruffin wares advertised in dozens of Southern publications, and for sale at shops and reenactments across the region. It struck me that Ruffin Flag might be a good place to take the commercial pulse of the neo-Confederacy, and to get a better sense of the movement’s size and shape than Lee Collins was willing to give me. Also, the name of the company’s owner intrigued me. Soren Dresch didn’t sound like the usual Celtic-blooded descendant of Confederate soldiers.

Ruffin Flag was based east of Atlanta in a small town whose loquacious sign—“A Dixie Welcome to Crawfordville, Ga. Homes, Stores, Schools, Churches, Factories and Business Locations”—announced a depleted downtown where many of the homes, factories and businesses were now abandoned. Main Street, lined with decayed storefronts and fading “Soda Malt” signs, had the picturesque seediness of a Deep South movie set, which it frequently had been.

Crawfordville also was the hometown of the Confederacy’s asthmatic and ascerbic vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens. In refreshing contrast to modern vice presidents, Stephens didn’t hesitate to bad-mouth his boss, once calling Jeff Davis “weak and vacillating, petulant, peevish, obstinate but not firm.” His mansion, Liberty Hall, still perched at the edge of town, its slave quarters intact. Just across the street stood a wood bungalow with a rebel flag flying out front. This was the headquarters of the Ruffin Flag Company, quite literally a cottage industry.

Just inside the bungalow’s front door, I found Ruffin’s owner punching holes in leather belts decorated with the rebel banner. Soren Dresch was a doughy, balding man of thirty-one. He wore khakis, docksiders and a polo shirt, and spoke with a Northern accent. At first glance, he could have passed for the slightly rumpled manager of a Cape Cod yacht club.

This wasn’t too far off the mark. When I asked about Dresch’s name, he explained that his father was a philosophy major and Yale Ph.D. with a fondness for the gloomy Dane, Sören Kierkegaard. “My full name’s Soren K. Dresch,” he said, “but the K’s just a K. Dad liked Kafka, too, I guess.”

Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Dresch had displayed Copperhead tendencies from an early age. “I had a shrine to the Confederacy in my room. Rebel flags, license plates, things I’d gotten through the mail.” Dresch wasn’t sure where this allegiance came from. His father’s family hailed from Kansas, his mother’s from Ohio. “My dad was a liberal sixties-type, he rebelled against the system,” Dresch said. “Maybe I was rebelling against him. He hated all my stuff and once tried to throw it out.”

But Dresch remained a rebel, seceding to the University of Alabama after high school. It was there that he’d discovered a flair for commerce. His first enterprise: importing cheap rebel flags and selling them to students. This was the mid-1980s, when attacks on the flag by the NAACP and other groups helped spark a renascence of passion for the flag, particularly at Deep South universities. Then, like Lee Collins, Dresch found a niche he could fill. “There was this void at the quality end of the market,” he said.

Dresch took me into his showroom, in what had once been the parlor of the modest cottage. He pointed to a rack of license plates, including one sold by a competitor: “Save Yo’ Confederate Money Boys—the South’s Gonna Rise Again.” Dresch grimaced with distaste. “When I started, that was the only sort of stuff on the market. Rebel-flag bug screens, bumper stickers, and tacky T-shirts. Rednecky stuff.” One entrepreneur even marketed a rebel-flag bandanna that doubled as a diaper.

Dresch showed me one of his own license plates, bearing the Confederate seal: George Washington and the motto Deo Vindice. Another plate displayed the Alabama state flag: a red Saint Andrew’s Cross set on a white field. “Quality,” Dresch said. “Taste. When I started in business I thought the cheapest stuff would sell best. But the opposite is true because the Confederacy is dear to people’s hearts. I’ve sold forty thousand license plates since 1992.”

He led me into another room, where a computer glowed in one corner beside a telephone answering machine. Dresch picked up an afghan decorated with the rebel flag. “Hand-loomed Carolina cloth,” he said, stroking the dense fabric. Quality Confederama didn’t come cheap. Some of Dresch’s wares sold for $100 apiece. “Customized flags are even more,” he said. For instance, a flag specially designed for draping a casket.

Dresch also sold smaller items: beer coolers, belts, dog collars. “But nothing racist,” he assured me. His bumper stickers stuck to innocuous slogans, such as, “Dixie: Old Times There Are Not Forgotten.” And his T-shirts tended toward black-and-white images of renowned Confederates, including one depicting a man with a long mane of white hair and a rifle perched against his knee. This was Edmund Ruffin, for whom Dresch’s company was named. A prominent antebellum agronomist who authored a ground-breaking treatise called “An Essay on Calcareous Manures,” Ruffin became a fanatical secessionist and allegedly fired the first shot at Fort Sumter.

Four years later, depressed by the South’s defeat, Ruffin wrapped himself in a rebel flag and wrote a final diatribe in his diary, which Dresch had printed on the back of the T-shirt: “And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near my last breath, I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race.” Ruffin then fired his last shot through his own brain.

Dresch smiled. “I move a lot of Ruffins,” he said. But his best seller by far was a T-shirt emblazoned with another fierce Confederate: Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “Wizard of the Saddle” and first Imperial Wizard of the Klan. “Lee, of course, used to be our best seller,” Dresch said. “But Forrest has eclipsed Lee fivefold in the last few years.”

Dresch’s success in selling Forrest T-shirts gave commercial confirmation to the trend I’d sensed across the South: a hardening, ideological edge to Confederate remembrance. As Dresch put it, “Southerners are getting tired of taking it on the chin. They’re getting more aggressive. Lee’s the Southern gentleman who represents reconciliation with the Union. Forrest represents the spirit of going after them with everything you’ve got.”

As I’d learned from Shelby Foote, Forrest differed from Lee in another way, which helped explain his special appeal to working-class Southerners. Born to poverty and possessing little formal education, Forrest was a self-made man who became a wealthy slave trader before the War and rose from private to lieutenant-general during the conflict. “Come on boys,” Forrest once wrote in a recruiting ad, “if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.”

I continued my chat with Dresch at a local diner, over cornbread, turnip greens, and ham. Dresch confessed that he’d added some padding during his years in Dixie, and also adopted a slight Southern inflection. “Subconsciously, I’ve probably worked on that,” he admitted. But Dresch maintained one curious tie to the North. His flags were made, not by diehard Southern seamstresses, but by a sect of Apostolic Lutheran women in the upper peninsula of Michigan, one of the most northerly reaches of the continental United States. Dresch had met a few of the women during a visit to Michigan and was impressed by their work ethic and attention to detail. Sewing from their homes, these Northern women now earned $6 an hour making flags from a pattern book called Emblems of Southern Valor.

“One of the ladies quit because she thought the flag represented opposition to the U.S.,” Dresch said. “But most of them don’t have much idea what this is all about.”

I asked Dresch what Edmund Ruffin might think of a company bearing the firebrand’s name that nonetheless maintained business ties to the perfidious Yankee race. Dresch shrugged. “He’d probably put a bullet through my head.” For a man named after the author of “Fear and Loathing Unto Death,” Soren Dresch seemed remarkably unperturbed by the contradictions of his peculiar livelihood.

After lunch, Dresch reached into his pickup and selected a Ruffin T-shirt and several other items for me to take home. “Let me know how they play up in Virginia,” he said, heading back to his office. “I haven’t got much market penetration up there.”

MY SECOND WEEK in Atlanta, I stopped at the city’s main tourist office and chatted with a genial redhead named Mary Ann. I told her I’d visited Stone Mountain and a few other War-related sites, and wondered if I’d missed anything.

“Not much,” she said. Then, digging through a drawer, she pulled out a brochure in rather the manner of a convenience store clerk reaching for a plastic-covered Hustler. “We don’t display this one because it wouldn’t be P.C. and someone might be offended,” she explained. The pamphlet, compiled by a local Daughter of the Confederacy named Izabell Buzzett, offered a brief guide to rebel monuments scattered around Atlanta. I told Mary Ann I’d collected dozens of similar brochures across the South. She nodded, adding sotto voce: “In most other cities, this would be out front and Mrs. Buzzett would be standing here behind the counter, not me.”

But this was Atlanta. Nor was there much demand for traditional Confederate history from the tourists who came into Mary Ann’s office. “Where’s Tara? That’s always their first question,” she said. “Then, ‘Where are Scarlett and Rhett buried, and are they next to each other?’”

“What do you tell them?”

Mary Ann smiled. “I try to break the news gently. ‘Honey, you know it’s a movie, don’t you?’ Then I have to explain that the whole thing was filmed in California. Not one scene in Georgia.” Tara’s fields were actually a patch of the San Fernando Valley, tinted red to look like Georgia. Even the oak trees around Tara were fake, crafted from telephone poles.

“It’s sad to shatter people’s illusions,” Mary Ann said. “They expect Tara to be right here by the Civic Center.” As consolation, she pointed them to a collection of movie memorabilia at the Road To Tara Museum and a reproduction plantation at Stone Mountain.

One group, though, always wanted more. “The Japanese worship Scarlett,” Mary Ann said. “They always come in here and say, ‘I am searching for Gone With the Window.’”

I lolled outside for a while, thumbing through the brochures Mary Ann had given me. I could of course follow the trail Mrs. Buzzett laid out, and search for obscure Confederate obelisks. But I’d been there, done that. I was also intrigued by Mary Ann’s comments, which confirmed something I’d sensed throughout my travels: Gone With the Wind had done more to keep the Civil War alive, and to mold its memory, than any history book or event since Appomattox. Anyway, Atlanta begged for a different approach. Why dig for the real and unremembered past when I could search like the Japanese for the fictional one instead?

THE INTERSTATE EXIT for Jonesboro, half an hour south of Atlanta, spilled onto Tara Boulevard. The road led past Tara Auto World, Tara Mobile Home Park, Tara Hardware, Tara Baptist Church and the usual offerings of fast food, fast gas and fast cash. I turned off Tara Boulevard, past Tara Music, Tara Trophies, Tara Florist and entered downtown Jonesboro, a pleasant row of brick storefronts facing a railroad depot with a sign that said, “Home of Gone With the Wind.” At the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce, a picture of Tara hung behind the front desk. Lee Davis, the chamber’s vice president for marketing, reached for my copy of the novel. “Clayton County—we’re mentioned right there on page six,” she said. “That’s the world’s best marketing program.”

Davis had one problem, though; there wasn’t anything in Jonesboro or Clayton County to market. In the phone book, there were forty-seven listings under Tara, including Tara Billiards, Tara Church of Christ, Tara Dermatology Center, Tara Sanitation. The only thing missing was Tara.

“Margaret Mitchell’s great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had a place near here,” Davis said. “But that’s it.” Nor did modern Clayton County much resemble the countryside Mitchell described in her novel as a “pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers.” Now a fast-growing bedroom suburb of Atlanta, Clayton County’s “savagely red land” had been plowed under for subdivisions and shopping malls. Also, like Peachtree Street, the setting for Gone With the Wind was no longer an exclusive address. “Just about every county in Georgia already tries to cash in on the whole hoop-skirt thing,” Davis said.

On the way out, we paused at a lobby exhibit of Gone With the Wind memorabilia. Beside a movie still of Vivien Leigh I noticed a picture of a woman who looked remarkably like her. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Scarlett O’Hara,” Davis said. “The professional one, I mean. She won some pageant a few years back and she’s pretty much been Scarlett ever since.”

Her real name was Melly Meadows—short for Melanie, just like Ashley Wilkes’s wife—and she lived nearby. So I gave her a call and arranged to meet at her home office just off Jonesboro’s main street. The young woman who greeted me on the porch wore tight blue jeans and a loose, open-necked blouse. But there was no mistaking her resemblance to Scarlett, at least as portrayed by Vivien Leigh: alabaster skin, slim waist, oval face, cupid-bow mouth and long dark hair tied back with an emerald-green ribbon.

“I’m so happy you came by,” she said, gently shaking my hand. “Here, let me give you my brochure and business card.”

Embossed on the card was her photograph in antebellum dress and Melly “Scarlett” Meadows printed in both English and Japanese. “Southern Belles & Gentlemen also available,” the pamphlet said. Melly invited me to join her on the porch swing. “I’ve sort of become Scarlett O’Hara Incorporated,” she sighed.

Melly Meadows was a self-made Southern belle. After years of being teased by classmates about her resemblance to Vivien Leigh, she entered a Scarlett look-alike contest at a local mall and beat forty other wannabes (her sister was runner-up). After that, she started donning her hoop skirt for local charity events. Before long, she’d been hired to appear at business breakfasts, ribbon cuttings and other promotional events around Atlanta. She’d gone on to promote everything from Vidalia onions to tourism in Atlanta to Coca-Cola in Japan. In a good year she cleared $50,000.

Now in her early twenties, Melly was planning for life after Scarlett, and had begun studying at a local college. “I want to be a Christian evangelist,” she said. This seemed like quite a jump, from belle to Bible student. But Melly didn’t think so. “I stick to best-selling books,” she explained.

Actually, Melly hadn’t read Gone With the Wind until recently. Nor did she study the book for beauty tips; apart from staying out of the sun to keep Scarlett’s “magnolia-white skin,” the look came naturally to Melly. But hoop skirts took some getting used to. Her antebellum attire weighed over twenty pounds and was hard to walk in. At first, Melly said, she often knocked over chairs and plants. And once, while sprinting across a rain-soaked plantation yard for a TV commercial, she’d run up her hoop and collapsed in the mud.

“You realize real quick that it wasn’t all that glamorous back then,” she said. “With all those hoops and crinolines and pantalets, women were probably sweaty and stinky most of the time.”

Nor did the costume transform male admirers into bold Rhett Butlers. Melly noticed that men tended instead to become shy and respectful. “Anyway, it’s hard to get very close to someone in a hoop skirt.” Melly had also learned to deflect unwanted advances with Scarlett-like brass. “I just smile and say, ‘You’re a black-hearted varmint’ or ‘I should slap you in the face!’”

Melly kept an office in the modest brick bungalow where she still lived with her mother. She led me to a back room equipped with a fax, laser printer and five telephone lines. “With rollover and voice mail of course,” she said. “I have a cellular phone when I’m on the road.”

She booted up her computer and showed me a file called “Belles.” It listed thirty-some women she’d trained as stand-ins. “If someone calls with a job and I can’t do it,” she explained, “I tell them, ‘I can book you someone else.’ I subcontract Rhetts, too.” She even had a Mammy on tap. I asked if she felt any discomfort with this aspect of her Old South role. “Not really,” she said. “Scarlett was disrespectful to everyone. She’s often mean, a bit harsh. If anything, she was nicer to her slaves than she was to her children.”

Melly, though, did find some qualities in Scarlett with which to identify. “I like her flair for business, that’s a similarity. And I’m fairly feisty.” Melly also shared Scarlett’s fondness for shocking behavior. Once, at a formal event welcoming Japan’s royalty to Atlanta, Melly fell to chatting with the Empress. “I thought to myself, gosh, their life is awfully structured,” Melly recalled. “So when she asked me if I wore a corset, I said in a loud voice, ‘Do you want to see my underwear?’” Then Melly lifted her skirt to reveal red pantalets. The gesture pleased the Empress and made Melly an instant celebrity in Japan.

Melly had since visited Tokyo several times and now spoke Japanese well enough to make small talk with admirers. “Once I was speaking Japanese to a tourist in Atlanta and a woman gasped, ‘Oh my gosh, the Japanese have even bought Scarlett O’Hara!’”

Like Mary Ann, the woman I’d met at the tourist office, Melly sensed a special Japanese affinity for Gone With the Wind. “In some ways, their culture is similar to the Old South,” she said. “Traditional women wear kimonos and are admired for their delicate nature, while men are tough and strong.” Melly showed me a Japanese newspaper profile of her and translated the headline: “Miss Scarlett, A Traditional Japanese Girl.”

Melly sensed another kinship between nineteenth-century Georgia and twentieth-century Japan; both rebuilt themselves after being ravaged by war. “Their symbol of royalty is the phoenix, just like Atlanta,” she said.

It so happened that Melly had a date the next night with a Japanese tour group. So I caught up with her again at a Southern-themed restaurant in Atlanta. Melly stood in the parking lot wearing a hooped taffeta skirt, lace gloves, and emerald-colored earrings that matched her green velvet belt and purse. A bus pulled up and twenty-five Japanese surged toward her, talking excitedly, bowing and posing beside her for pictures. Melly pointed the toe of her white shoe and pulled up her skirts to reveal red pantalets. The tourists laughed and clapped. Then she turned around and looked seductively over her bare shoulder in an uncanny mimic of Vivien Leigh. For the moment at least, Melly Meadows seemed a very long way from Bible school.

The group moved inside to a formal dining room, and Melly sashayed between the tables, making chat in Japanese. I asked the group’s tour guide, a man named Daijiro, to translate her banter.

“You are so handsome, you look like Clark Gable.”

“What is your company?”

“I am very fond of your Emperor and Empress.”

Daijiro said the group was composed of retired fruit and vegetable wholesalers on a week-long tour of America. They were visiting three places only: Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Atlanta. “We want to see the history and beauty of America,” Daijiro explained.

I asked him why Gone With the Wind had such strong appeal in Japan. “You must understand the times,” he said. “In the 1930s we saw American movies, then during the war we didn’t. These movies came back after the war and Gone With the Wind was the most popular. I think it gave people hope to see this woman fighting so hard to build her land back. Also, she stands by her family, which is something we admire.”

He paused. “There is something else, but this is just my idea. I think people watched the movie and thought, ‘This is the real America, a wonderful place, not the one we fought in war.’”

The food arrived and the tourists dipped tentatively into gumbo and cornbread. Daijiro watched Melly for a moment, then added, “Scarlett’s strength fascinates us. But inside we feel more like Melanie Wilkes, who is polite and kind.”

Listening to Daijiro, I sensed another kinship between Japanese and Southern culture; they shared a subtle, mannered code that often seemed contradictory and confusing to blunt, unmannerly outsiders like myself.

As the main course arrived, Melly waved good-bye. “Oh fiddle-dee-dee!” she sang out, swishing from the room and down the restaurant’s grand staircase. Her mother waited out front in a minivan with the engine running. Melly had another appearance that evening and was already late.

I offered Melly my arm so she could hoist her hoop skirt into the van. “Why, you’re a true gentleman, even if you are a Yankee,” she drawled, swinging the van door shut. Her mother sped off, leaving me alone in the parking lot with the faint fragrance of verbena lingering in the warm Georgia night.

MELLY MEADOWS LEFT ME with something else: a curious tip. Despite what I’d heard at the Chamber of Commerce, Tara was still in Clayton County. Melly knew only vague details—“a big old house belonging to a crazy old lady”—but she passed on a name: Betty Talmadge, the elderly ex-wife of former Georgia governor and senator, Herman Talmadge.

Betty Talmadge lived seven miles west of Jonesboro on a narrow lane that dead-ended at a Greek Revival plantation house. By the entrance stood a precise miniature of the mansion, about the size of a doghouse. A sign on the front said “Rabbit E. Lee” and a bunny hopped out to sniff at me. Then a large, one-legged woman appeared across the lawn. “I’m Betty,” she shouted. “Lost my leg a few years ago from a blood clot. Let me show you my house.”

Betty sprinted across the lawn on her crutches, leading me onto the mansion’s verandah. “I’m told they hid grain in here so the Yankees wouldn’t steal it during the War,” she said, tapping one of the columns with her crutch. “Good story. Who knows.”

Betty clumped inside, across wide pine boards covered with a needlepoint rug. “I quit smoking on June 8th, 1970, at 8 P.M.,” she said, admiring the carpet. “My needlework took off after that.” She also showed me a glass case filled with flowers sent to her by Pat Nixon as thanks for a luncheon Betty hosted for the First Lady after her husband’s resignation. “Pat was nice. I liked Dick, too. He got caught, that’s all.”

This casual view of political scandal had family roots. Betty’s father-in-law, Eugene Talmadge, was a long-time Georgia governor who once told voters, “Sure I stole, but I stole it for you.” He also liked to warn political foes, “I’m just as mean as cat shit.” Southern politics didn’t produce characters like that anymore, least of all in Georgia, whose most recent governor of note was a pious peanut farmer from Plains.

Betty led me into another room, adorned with paintings of herself as a young Washington hostess. “Done yesterday, as you can tell,” she dryly observed. “Washington was fun back then. People had wild parties. Drank too much and fooled around.” She shook her head. “Those days are gone. Gone with the wind, you could say.”

Grateful for an opening, I nudged the conversation around to my literary search. Betty laughed. “Oh, this isn’t Tara, it’s Twelve Oaks. I’ve got Tara, too, but that’s another story.” The story of Twelve Oaks (the Wilkes family estate) began with a 1973 New York Times piece, which Betty had carefully preserved in plastic sheeting. It reported that the Talmadge estate was “believed to have been Margaret Mitchell’s model for Twelve Oaks.” The reporter offered no further details. Nor did Betty.

“Margaret Mitchell, like all writers, may have pushed it or pulled it a bit,” she said. “But this is the house. Or that’s what I tell people.” She smiled and put the newspaper clip back in its folio. “The New York Times is the paper of record. If it prints something, it must be true.” I couldn’t help wondering if Betty herself had been the unnamed source of the Times anecdote, but it seemed rude to ask.

Betty had turned the story to good use. In 1975, without warning, her husband filed for divorce. Then he was reprimanded by the Senate for financial misconduct and voted out of office. Returning to Georgia, Betty found herself a downwardly mobile divorcee rattling around an eleven-room mansion in the countryside. Echoes of Scarlett again.

“I was a small-town girl who married at eighteen,” she said. “You were considered an old maid if you got to twenty-two without a husband. The only advice my mother had was this: ‘You just be a lovely complement to your husband.’” She laughed. “I swallowed all that. But my mother never told me what you do when you’re fifty-three and your husband takes off.”

What Talmadge had done was become a hostess again, this time for pay, feting businessmen and foreign tourists with dinners at her alleged Twelve Oaks. Her set-menu “Magnolia Supper” included Scarlett Carrots, Rhett Butler biscuits and abra-Ham Lincoln. “The social secretary for Ladybird Johnson taught me to name dishes,” Betty said. “It’s a conversation starter. You’d be surprised, but a lot of prominent people are ill at ease socially. It loosens them up.”

This cutesy habit extended to her animals; hence Rabbit E. Lee, whom I’d met at the door. Talmadge took me out back and introduced her other farm creatures: Ulysses S. Grunt, Clark Gobble, Scarlett O’Hen, the Honorable John C. Cowhoun. “I’ll do anything to make my Yankee friends smile,” Betty said.

I steered the conversation back to Tara. Betty said that fifteen years ago, she’d learned that the farmhouse owned by Margaret Mitchell’s great-grandparents, the Fitzgeralds, had become vacant and fallen prey to vandals. “I decided as long as I had Twelve Oaks, I might as well have Tara, too.” She bought the derelict house over the telephone for $1,000.

Betty pointed across a field at what looked like a pioneer cabin, perched at the fringe of pine woods. This was the Fitzgerald place, or all of it that Betty had salvaged; she kept what remained of the house’s grander Victorian addition in storage. I gazed at the building and felt a twinge of disappointment. Betty’s home at least was an antebellum mansion, Twelve Oaks or not. But this weatherboard shack looked like it might once have belonged to the Slatterys, the “swamp trash” who lived down the hill from Tara, not to the O’Haras.

But the story didn’t end there. Soon after buying the Fitzgerald place, Betty heard that the facade of the Hollywood Tara was for sale. Its aged owner, Julian Foster, had purchased the movie set twenty years before in hopes of creating an antebellum Disneyland in Georgia. His dream never materialized and the rotting facade had become an albatross. But Foster, a paranoid man, refused to disclose Tara’s location. “He kept saying, ‘I’m the only person who knows where it is. That’s my insurance,’” Betty said.

In the end, Foster took Betty on a circuitous drive that ended at a barn in the north Georgia hills. She bought the set for $5,000, one-fiftieth the cost of Tara’s construction in 1930s Hollywood. But before she could take possession, Foster died. “I contacted his widow,” Betty said. “She said the sale was still on, but I was now the only person who knew where to find Tara.”

Betty had a poor sense of direction, and after a week-long search by car and small airplane she still couldn’t find the barn. It was only through a canceled rent check for the shelter that she finally tracked Tara down. “I got it,” she said, “or it’s got me, I’m not sure which.”

The set was built of plywood, composition board, and papier-mâché (supplies “you could get at Sears,” one of the set’s creators confessed in an interview after the movie’s release). Nonetheless, an appraiser hired by Betty had compared the set to other Hollywood props—the tail from the lion costume in the Wizard of Oz, the piano in Casablanca, the HMS Bounty—and set Tara’s value at $1.2 million. “I guess I should feel rich, but I don’t,” Talmadge said. “At least not yet.”

Betty hoped to peddle Tara, the Fitzgerald House and Twelve Oaks as a package, forming the core of a theme park like the one Julian Foster had dreamed of creating. But she hadn’t found any takers. So Tara remained in storage—where, exactly, Betty wouldn’t disclose. “I’m like Foster,” she said. “I don’t tell anyone where it is. That’s my insurance.”

But she agreed to show me pictures of the set, which was now in pieces: a door, a few columns, a papier-mâché brick. It looked the way Tara might have if Sherman’s men had burned the place down after all. Betty, though, hadn’t surrendered all hope. Seeing me to the door, she smiled defiantly. “Tomorrow, as they say, is another day.”

TOMORROW FOUND ME IN Jonesboro again, still on Tara’s trail. I’d learned that a retired mailman named Herb Bridges had amassed the world’s largest collection of Gone With the Wind ephemera. He was also reputed to know everything about the novel’s fictional and historic landscape—including the true location of the O’Hara estate.

Bridges was a small, gentle man of sixty-five who lived in a brick ranch house along the rural mail route he’d worked for thirty years. His former job was one reason he knew the local landscape so well. Working for the post office had also led to his trove of memorabilia, which he’d begun collecting years ago when he’d spotted a first edition of the novel at a used bookshop. “I don’t know why I bought it,” he said. “It cost twenty-five dollars, which in those days seemed like an awful lot of money.” The book was now worth about $10,000.

Then one day, Bridges visited a library in Atlanta and a strange urge overcame him again. “There was a copy of the book in Czech,” he said. “And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to own one?”

Bridges didn’t know much about publishing, but he knew how to work the postal system and managed to have a Czech edition sent through the Iron Curtain. “Then I got to thinking, what does it look like in Bulgaria?” So he wrote to Sofia. Gradually, as his modest budget allowed, Bridges acquired copies from Vietnam, Ethiopia, and dozens of other countries. “It became a joke at the post office,” he said. “Here I was, a mailman in rural Georgia, getting all these packages from these Communist countries. I think some people thought I was a spy.” He’d even located a copy from Latvia, published in 1938—shortly before the small Baltic state vanished as an independent country for fifty years.

Bridges also began sending away for movie posters and scripts, and kept an eye out for kitsch at flea markets: Scarlett-shaped perfume bottles, plates painted with Ashley’s face, assorted dolls, puzzles, matchbooks, and other tchotchkes. “People think this sort of promotional junk started with Star Wars and Batman,” he said, showing me several rooms cluttered with the stuff. “As you can see, it didn’t.”

Unfortunately, Bridges’s children didn’t share his obsession, and he didn’t want to sell his collection piece by piece. So, like Betty Talmadge, Bridges kept waiting for a wealthy “Windie,” as cultish fans of the book and movie were known, to buy his possessions and put them on permanent display. “I’ll probably be buried in a vault with this stuff, like one of those pharaohs,” he said. “Then a few centuries from now they’ll dig me up, along with all these Scarlett and Rhett and Mammy dolls, and wonder, ‘What weird, idol-worshiping religion did this man belong to?’”

Bridges had also picked up an impressive trove of trivia about the book and movie, which he shared at local colleges and adult-ed programs. So later that week, I went to hear him lecture at an Elderhostel in Jonesboro. Fifty people listened raptly as Bridges exhibited his trinkets and an equally colorful array of anecdotes. Margaret Mitchell was a five-foot-tall, 100-pound flapper who once declared, “Being one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South!” She titled her first draft “Tote the Weary Load” and originally named her heroine Pansy, not Scarlett. And she was only forty-eight when an off-duty taxi driver ran her down as she crossed Peachtree Street to watch a movie. I also learned that the actress who played Prissy ended up on welfare in Harlem; that Nazi Germany banned the film because it romanticized resistance to occupation; and that Clark Gable had false teeth and breath so malodorous that some actresses resisted kissing him.

After the talk, a small white-haired woman with a name tag that said “Peggy Root. Magnolia, Ark.” stared intently at Bridges’s movie posters. “You can’t imagine what Gone With the Wind meant to my generation,” she said in a gentle drawl.

When I asked why this was so, her eyes misted over. “Poverty,” she said. “Ours, I mean. When I was coming up in Arkansas, we didn’t have chairs in both the kitchen and setting room. So the adults dragged chairs from one room to the other while the kids sat on the floor. Life was that bare. Then this book comes out about a rich South we never knew. It was escapism, I guess.”

A small, bald man appeared at her shoulder. This was Peggy’s brother, Ray. “Our father was a sharecropper,” he said. “He had to do a half-dozen other jobs to get by. Cut railroad ties. Kill possums and sell their skins. Pick pecans. And he’d go around to all the sharecroppers who had less than a bale of cotton, put their shares together to make a bale, and take it to market to sell.”

“Remember the man Daddy cut ties with?” Peggy said.

Ray smiled. “Daddy had a partner who would pull off his clothes and cut railroad ties in the nude. He told everyone it was because the mosquitoes made him work harder. But the real reason was that he only had one pair of clothes and didn’t want to ruin them in the woods.”

As children, Ray and Peggy worked six days a week in the fields. On Sundays they went to church. The only entertainment they recalled was listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a neighbor’s radio. “I was in the eighth grade when I first read Gone With the Wind,” Peggy said. “But I hid it from my mother. She was Assembly of God, very fundamentalist. She didn’t approve of risqué literature.” Then came the movie, which was even more romantic. “It was like visiting another planet,” Peggy said. “And to think our ancestors lived like that. The only one of ours we’d heard about was a grandfather who went broke and lost his mind over the Civil War. He papered his living room with Confederate dollars.”

She went quiet for a moment. “I was a good student, the first woman in my family to finish high school. Sometimes I wonder if there hadn’t been a Civil War, maybe I could have been a Margaret Mitchell.” Instead, Peggy had worked as a telephone operator and rarely traveled beyond rural Arkansas. “This is my first vacation in years,” she said of the Elderhostel program.

Ray glanced at his watch. “One o’clock,” he said, studying the class schedule. “Laughter Therapy.”

Herb Bridges finished gathering his things. “I should have told these folks about the real Tara and Twelve Oaks,” he said. “Or where they would have been.” Caught up like the others in the book’s romance, I’d almost forgotten that this was why I’d sought Bridges out in the first place.

Bridges offered to show me the sites, which he’d found by matching the geography described in the novel with Margaret Mitchell’s own time in Clayton County. We turned down a wooded lane called Tara Road, then parked by a thicket of kudzu-draped cedars. This was the location, Bridges said, of the old Fitzgerald house that Betty Talmadge had moved fifteen years before, and that Margaret Mitchell often visited as a child. Bridges had learned from Mitchell’s brother that the farmhouse was once surrounded by cotton fields. The site now faced a raw subdivision—“Andover at Hawthorne. A Swim/Tennis Community from $79,900”—with duplexes planted around cul-de-sacs so new they hadn’t yet been named.

This spot wasn’t mentioned in the novel, but it provided Bridges with the starting point for his sleuthing of Mitchell’s imaginary landscape. “We know she liked to take long walks around here,” he said. “If you look closely at what she might have seen, it matches awfully closely to the book.”

We drove a mile or so to a fork in Tara Road. Bridges said, “Remember the first scene of the book, when the Tarleton twins leave Scarlett?”

I opened my paperback: “When they had rounded the curve of the dusty road that hid them from Tara, Brent drew his horse to a stop under a clump of dogwood.” Bridges smiled. “This is the spot.”

He’d based his calculation on the lay of the land and the site’s distance from real coordinates in the book, such as Jonesboro and the Flint River. “Just to make sure, I talked to some old people around here,” he said. “They all told me there was once a clump of dogwoods at exactly this spot.”

The dogwoods had been supplanted by a copse of real estate signs—“FOR SALE TARA Realty Company”—and by a sign pointing to Tara Beach, a spit of sand beside a nearby artificial lake. Bridges continued slowly down Tara Road, referring me to the book’s next scene, in which Scarlett waits for her father to return along the road from the Wilkes estate: “In her thoughts she traced its course down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek Temple. ‘Oh Ashley! Ashley!’ she thought, and her heart beat faster.” The road reappeared a few chapters later, during the O’Haras’ carriage ride to the Twelve Oaks party: a dusty trace bordered by wild violets, Cherokee roses, “savage red gulches” and cotton plantations.

Now, bulldozers pummeled the red land, sowing tract houses. But the topography matched the text, eerily so, with the road dipping down a gentle slope to the the sluggish brown Flint. It was easy to conjure the swamp bottom where the white-trash Slatterys clung to their three acres of land between the O’Haras’ and Wilkeses’ estates. On the opposite side of the river, the road rose toward a hill with a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape. “Twelve Oaks,” Bridges said, pointing to the top of the hill.

There was no Greek Temple atop the rise, just woods and cows and undulating pasture. Bridges pointed at the dense woods skirting the meadow. “Mitchell writes about the ‘soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience’ to reclaim the land,” he said. “Well look. They have.” I couldn’t help wondering, though, how long it would be before the woods were claimed by another swim/tennis community.

We retraced our route, back across the Flint and up the hill on the other side. Bridges paused near the bygone dogwood clump. A long driveway wound up a small knoll. “Tara would be back there, no doubt in my mind,” he said. “This has to be it.”

A handwritten sign at the base of the driveway said For Sale By Owner. But Bridges wasn’t keen to go any closer, and conceded he’d never done so. “You run into some ornery folk around here,” he said. I reckoned Bridges, a former mailman, knew what he was talking about.

He dropped me back at my car, and I sat for a while flipping through the novel, rereading passages on Tara. “It was built by slave labor, a clumsy, sprawling building that crowned the rise of ground overlooking the green incline of pasture … ‘Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,’ he shouted. ‘’Tis the only thing in the world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it!’…‘Yes, yes! To Tara! Oh, Rhett, we must hurry!’”

I circled back along Tara Road and pulled up the driveway with the For Sale By Owner sign. The road ended at a low-slung weatherboard house with a cinder-block foundation and a washing machine on the porch. Two bearded men stood leaning against pickup trucks, spitting tobacco juice.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Did you know that this is where Tara was. I mean, would have been if it were real.”

“No it ain’t,” said one of the men, who introduced himself as Cooper. “Tara’s back down the road a mile. That’s where that crazy old lady found it. Now there’s a hundred fifty-five duplexes going in.”

I realized he was talking about the old Fitzgerald house, and tried to explain what Herb Bridges had just told me. Cooper turned and glanced at his modest house. “Lived my whole damned life in Tara and never even knowed it.” He shrugged. “My wife’s crazy about all that Gone With the Wind stuff. But it just don’t flip my boat.” His eyes narrowed. “’Less there’s money in it.”

“What’s it selling for?” I asked.

He thought a moment and said, “Fifty something.” This was a ludicrous sum, given that modern split-levels with swimming and tennis privileges were selling down the road for seventy something. I confessed that I wasn’t looking for property, just information. Cooper looked disappointed, but told me about a few Civil War graves nestled in the woods behind his house. “There’s snakes back there as big as your arm, but you’re welcome to poke around if you want.”

Bushwhacking through the dense brush, I found a few stones almost buried by vines and pine needles. I could just barely make out the inscriptions. One, undated, said simply: “John M. Turner. Papa.” But two others had the familiar, slightly pointed top of Confederate headstones I recognized from a dozen battlefields. (“They’re shaped that way to keep the damn Yankees from sitting on them,” a Sons of Confederate Veterans member had told me.) Brushing away vines, I found one marked “Elijah A. Mann Co. E 10th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” and another that said, “Lieut. Sidney D. Mann Co. D. 44th Ga. Inf. C.S.A.” No O’Haras or Wilkeses or Tarletons. Still, I wondered if Margaret Mitchell might have tramped back here as a teenager and had her imagination stirred by these lonely Confederate graves.

Hiking back through the woods and into the yard, with its rusted bikes and battered pickup trucks, I climbed in my car and navigated slowly out toward the interstate, past red earth gashed with still more real-estate signs (“Ashley Woods,” “Tara Pointe,” “Grand Oaks at Tara New Homes from the 80s”), and then past Jonesboro, Tara Shopping Center, Tara Alternator and Starter, Tara Transmission, O’Hara’s Food and Spirits. And I realized that it was probably a good thing that the Japanese never found Tara. It was gone. Gone With the Window.

BACK IN ATLANTA, I called the historian I’d visited, Franklin Garrett, to corroborate what I’d seen and heard in Jonesboro. He laughed hoarsely, then told me that Margaret Mitchell had phoned him in the 1930s, before finishing her novel. She wanted to check if any of the names she planned to use corresponded with families in the 1860 city directory. “She didn’t want to embarrass anyone by using that name and attaching it, say, to the owner of a lewd house in her novel.”

Later, after the movie’s release, Garrett helped the city plan a tourist route past the approximate locations of Miss Pittypat’s house and other spots in Atlanta mentioned in the book. He quickly received a long, angry letter from Mitchell. “Franklin,” she wrote of the sites, “they weren’t anywhere except in my mind.”

“What about Tara and Twelve Oaks?” I asked.

Garrett chuckled again and mentioned several letters that Mitchell penned when fans of Gone With the Wind began trekking to Georgia in search of the famed plantations. I found one of the letters quoted in an old newspaper story. Mitchell told how she’d scoured the backroads of Clayton County while researching her novel to make sure that the scenery she described was indeed fictional. She even jumbled the county’s geography and checked that there were no Tara-like homes with tree-lined avenues. She did this so that no one might think their own grandmother was the model for Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell was miffed that people were nonetheless determined to pin her fictional creations to firm ground.

“My trouble,” she concluded, “seems to have been all for nothing.”

So, apparently, had mine.