“He went through all the Mexican campaigns with Father,nursed him when he was wounded—in fact,he saved his life.Uncle Peter practically raised Melanie and me,for we were very young when Father and Mother died.Aunt Pitty had a falling out with her brother,Uncle Henry,about that time,so she came to live with us and take care of us.She is the most helpless soul—just like a sweet grown-up child,and Uncle Peter treats her that way.To save her life,she couldn't make up her mind about anything,so Peter makes it up for her.He was the one who decided I should have a larger allowance when I was fifteen,and he insisted that I should go to Harvard for my senior year,when Uncle Henry wanted me to take my degree at the University.And he decided when Melly was old enough to put up her hair and go to parties.He tells Aunt Pitty when it's too cold or too wet for her to go calling and when she should wear a shawl....He's the smartest old darky I've ever seen and about the most devoted.The only trouble with him is that he owns the three of us,body and soul,and he knows it.”
Charles'words were confirmed as Peter climbed onto the box and took the whip.
“Miss Pitty in a state bekase she din'come ter meet you.She's feared you mout not unnerstan'but Ah tole her she an'Miss Melly jes'git splashed wid mud an'ruin dey new dresses an'Ah'd 'splain ter you.Miss Scarlett,you better tek dat chile.Dat
lil pickaninny gwine let it drap.”
Scarlett looked at Prissy and sighed.Prissy was not the most adequate of nurses.Her recent graduation from a skinny pickaninny with brief skirts and stiffly wrapped braids into the dignity of a long calico dress and starched white turban was an intoxicating affair.She would never have arrived at this eminence so early in life had not the exigencies of war and the demands of the commissary department on Tara made it impossible for Ellen to spare Mammy or Dilcey or even Rosa or Teena.Prissy had never been more than a mile away from Twelve Oaks or Tara before,and the trip on the train plus her elevation to nurse was almost more than the brain in her little black skull could bear.The twenty-mile journey from Jonesboro to Atlanta had so excited her that Scarlett had been forced to hold the baby all the way.Now,the sight of so many buildings and people completed Prissy's demoralization.She twisted from side to side,pointed,bounced about and so jounced the baby that he wailed miserably.
Scarlett longed for the fat old arms of Mammy.Mammy had only to lay hands on a child and it hushed crying.But Mammy was at Tara and there was nothing Scarlett could do.It was useless for her to take little Wade from Prissy.He yelled just as loudly when she held him as when Prissy did.Besides,he would tug at the ribbons of her bonnet and,no doubt,rumple her dress.So she pretended she had not heard Uncle Peter's suggestion.
“Maybe I'll learn about babies some time,”she thought irritably,as the carriage jolted and swayed out of the morass surrounding the station,“but I'm never going to like fooling with them.”And as Wade's face went purple with his squalling,she snapped crossly:“Give him that sugar-tit in your pocket,Priss.Anything to make him hush.I know he's hungry,but I can't do anything about that now.”
Prissy produced the sugar-tit,given her that morning by Mammy,and the baby's wails subsided.With quiet restored and with the new sights that met her eyes,Scarlett's spirits began to rise a little.When Uncle Peter finally maneuvered the carriage out of the mudholes and onto Peachtree Street,she felt the first surge of interest she had known in months.How the town had grown!It was not much more than a year since she had last been here,and it did not seem possible that the little Atlanta she knew could have changed so much.
For the past year,she had been so engrossed in her own woes,so bored by any mention of war,she did not know that from the minute the fighting first began,Atlanta had been transformed.The same railroads which had made the town the crossroads of commerce in time of peace were now of vital strategic importance in time of war.Far from the battle lines,the town and its railroads provided the connecting link between the two armies of the Confederacy,the army in Virginia and the army in Tennessee and the West.And Atlanta likewise linked both of the armies with the deeper South from which they drew their supplies.Now,in response to the needs of war,Atlanta had become a manufacturing center,a hospital base and one of the South's chief depots for the collecting of food and supplies for the armies in the field.
Scarlett looked about her for the little town she remembered so well.It was gone.The town she was now seeing was like a baby grown overnight into a busy,sprawling giant.
Atlanta was humming like a beehive,proudly conscious of its importance to the Confederacy,and work was going forward night and day toward turning an agricultural section into an industrial one.Before the war there had been few cotton factories,woolen mills,arsenals and machine shops south of Maryland—a fact of which all Southerners were proud.The South produced statesmen and soldiers,planters and doctors,lawyers and poets,but certainly not engineers or mechanics.Let the Yankees adopt such low callings.But now the Confederate ports were stoppered with Yankee gunboats,only a trickle of blockade-run goods was slipping in from Europe,and the South was desperately trying to manufacture her own war materials.The North could call on the whole world for supplies and for soldiers,and thousands of Irish and Germans were pouring into the Union Army,lured by the bounty money offered by the North.The South could only turn in upon itself.