Into the soil. There was nothing for her here.

She walked back across the yard and took the path down toward the

silent row of whitewashed cabins in the quarters, calling "Hello!"

as she went. But no voice answered her. Not even a dog barked.

Evidently the Wilkes negroes had taken flight or followed the

Yankees. She knew every slave had his own garden patch and as she

reached the quarters, she hoped these little patches had been

spared.

Her search was rewarded but she was too tired even to feel pleasure

at the sight of turnips and cabbages, wilted for want of water but

still standing, and straggling butter beans and snap beans, yellow

but edible. She sat down in the furrows and dug into the earth

with hands that shook, filling her basket slowly. There would be a

good meal at Tara tonight, in spite of the lack of side meat to

boil with the vegetables. Perhaps some of the bacon grease Dilcey

was using for illumination could be used for seasoning. She must

remember to tell Dilcey to use pine knots and save the grease for

cooking.

Close to the back step of one cabin, she found a short row of

radishes and hunger assaulted her suddenly. A spicy, sharp-tasting

radish was exactly what her stomach craved. Hardly waiting to rub

the dirt off on her skirt, she bit off half and swallowed it

hastily. It was old and coarse and so peppery that tears started

In her eyes. No sooner had the lump gone down than her empty

outraged stomach revolted and she lay in the soft dirt and vomited

tiredly.

The faint niggery smell which crept from the cabin increased her

nausea and, without strength to combat it, she kept on retching

miserably while the cabins and trees revolved swiftly around her.

After a long time, she lay weakly on her face, the earth as soft

and comfortable as a feather pillow, and her mind wandered feebly

here and there. She, Scarlett O'Hara was lying behind a negro

cabin, in the midst of ruins, too sick and too weak to move, and no

one in the world knew or cared. No one would care if they did

know, for everyone had too many troubles of his own to worry about

her. And all this was happening to her, Scarlett O'Hara, who had

never raised her hand even to pick up her discarded stockings from

the floor or to tie the laces of her slippers--Scarlett, whose

little headaches and tempers had been coddled and catered to all

her life.

As she lay prostrate, too weak to fight off memories and worries,

they rushed at her like buzzards waiting for death. No longer had

she the strength to say: "I'll think of Mother and Pa and Ashley

and all this ruin later-- Yes, later when I can stand it." She

could not stand it now, but she was thinking of them whether she

willed it or not. The thoughts circled and swooped above her,

dived down and drove tearing claws and sharp beaks into her mind.

For a timeless time, she lay still, her face in the dirt, the sun

beating hotly upon her, remembering things and people who were

dead, remembering a way of living that was gone forever--and

looking upon the harsh vista of the dark future.

When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve

Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and

beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever.

What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy

luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. And, as Scarlett

settled the heavy basket across her arm, she had settled her own

mind and her own life.

There was no going back and she was going forward.

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed

women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking

memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter

pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to

look back.

She gazed at the blackened stones and, for the last time, she saw

Twelve Oaks rise before her eyes as it had once stood, rich and

proud, symbol of a race and a way of living. Then she started down

the road toward Tara, the heavy basket cutting into her flesh.

Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: "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."

In the days that followed, Tara might have been Crusoe's desert

island, so still it was, so isolated from the rest of the world.

The world lay only a few miles away, but a thousand miles of

tumbling waves might have stretched between Tara and Jonesboro and

Fayetteville and Lovejoy, even between Tara and the neighbors'

plantations. With the old horse dead, their one mode of conveyance

was gone, and there was neither time nor strength for walking the

weary red miles.

Sometimes, in the days of backbreaking work, in the desperate

struggle for food and the never-ceasing care of the three sick

girls, Scarlett found herself straining her ears for familiar

sounds--the shrill laughter of the pickaninnies in the quarters,

the creaking of wagons home from the fields, the thunder of

Gerald's stallion tearing across the pasture, the crunching of

carriage wheels on the drive and the gay voices of neighbors

dropping in for an afternoon of gossip. But she listened in vain.

The road lay still and deserted and never a cloud of red dust

proclaimed the approach of visitors. Tara was an island in a sea

of rolling green hills and red fields.

Somewhere was the world and families who ate and slept safely under

their own roofs. Somewhere girls in thrice-turned dresses were

flirting gaily and singing "When This Cruel War Is Over," as she

had done only a few weeks before. Somewhere there was a war and

cannon booming and burning towns and men who rotted in hospitals

amid sickening-sweet stinks. Somewhere a barefoot army in dirty

homespun was marching, fighting, sleeping, hungry and weary with

the weariness that comes when hope is gone. And somewhere the

hills of Georgia were blue with Yankees, well-fed Yankees on sleek

corn-stuffed horses.

Beyond Tara was the war and the world. But on the plantation the

war and the world did not exist except as memories which must be

fought back when they rushed to mind in moments of exhaustion. The

world outside receded before the demands of empty and half-empty

stomachs and life resolved itself into two related thoughts, food

and how to get it.

Food! Food! Why did the stomach have a longer memory than the

mind? Scarlett could banish heartbreak but not hunger and each

morning as she lay half asleep, before memory brought back to her

mind war and hunger, she curled drowsily expecting the sweet smells

of bacon frying and rolls baking. And each morning she sniffed so

hard to really smell the food she woke herself up.

There were apples, yams, peanuts and milk on the table at Tara but

never enough of even this primitive fare. At the sight of them,

three times a day, her memory would rush back to the old days, the

meals of the old days, the candle-lit table and the food perfuming

the air.

How careless they had been of food then, what prodigal waste!

Rolls, corn muffins, biscuits 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. The memory of those savory meals had the

power to bring tears to her eyes as death and war had failed to do,

and the power to turn her ever-gnawing stomach from rumbling

emptiness to nausea. For the appetite Mammy had always deplored,

the healthy appetite of a nineteen-year-old girl, now was increased

fourfold by the hard and unremitting labor she had never known

before.

Hers was not the only troublesome appetite at Tara, for wherever

she turned hungry faces, black and white, met her eyes. Soon

Carreen and Suellen would have the insatiable hunger of typhoid

convalescents. Already little Wade whined monotonously: "Wade

doan like yams. Wade hungwy."

The others grumbled, too:

"Miss Scarlett, 'ness I gits mo' to eat, I kain nuss neither of

these chillun."

"Miss Scarlett, ef Ah doan have mo' in mah stummick, Ah kain split

no wood."

"Lamb, Ah's perishin' fer real vittles."

"Daughter, must we always have yams?"

Only Melanie did not complain, Melanie whose face grew thinner and

whiter and twitched with pain even in her sleep.

"I'm not hungry, Scarlett. Give my share of the milk to Dilcey.

She needs it to nurse the babies. Sick people are never hungry."