It looks a million dollars just like Miz Scarlett I stayed at the Westin Peachtree Plaza (001 404 659 1400; ) where double rooms start from around $169 (£100) per night, excluding breakfast. Belmont is now the campus of Nashville University but the mansion is worth seeing. It looks a million dollars - just like Miz Scarlett.I'm convinced. How do I get there?I flew to the American South on Continental Airlines (0845 607 6760; ), which offers return fares to Atlanta from around £267 return in November from London Gatwick via Houston. With their assistance, Adalicia got free passage down to New Orleans where she sold at an all-time high and made $1m. The soldiers of Mr Lincoln could not resist the way Miss Acklen fluttered her eyelashes and actually helped her to load the barges. Adalicia and her slave girl then set off to New Orleans, only to run into the Condeferates whom she convinced that Union soldiers were trying to stop her cotton getting to market. At Monmouth Plantation in Natchez and at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage in Nashville you will see slave quarters. Monmouth has turned these huts into luxury hotel accommodation, ideal for couples but less comfortable for the dozen or so who would have lived there originally.What about Miz Scarlett herself?Some people claim that Margaret Mitchell's grandmother bore a resemblance to Katie Scarlett O'Hara, but a prime candidate has to be the remarkable Adalicia Acklen of Nashville. During the war, she refused to be cowed by the occupying Union forces and appealed to their commander, claiming the Confederates were preventing her cotton from getting to market. This redoubtable lady had cotton plantations and a fine house, just to the south of Nashville, called Belmont.
They feel the memory particularly keenly in Atlanta, even if they have no antebellum architecture left. My local guide told me indignantly that Atlanta was the only city to have been razed to the ground in a war (I had to ask her if she'd heard about Hiroshima and Dresden) where citizens were not given a gentlemanly three hours' notice to leave.What about the black contribution to Gone With The Wind?Several cities commemorate the truth behind Mammy, Prissy and Big Sam. In Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Center For Non-Violent Change has a big display about what life on the cotton plantation was like for slaves and in Charleston, although the Middleton Plantation was burned down, the old cotton press was saved and now houses both a chapel and a slavery exhibition. There is only one war in the eyes of Southerners and that was the "War Between States" - even today many Southerners refuse to call it the "Civil" War because civil it damn well wasn't. And an antebellum guest house in New Orleans (5603 St Charles Avenue) has a "Scarlett" room with reproductions of those famous green-fringed curtains on the windows.What's all this "antebellum" stuff?That's the word down south for life before the "War". The family not only provided a mayor of Charleston, but his butler invented the city's favourite dish, she-crab soup, to commemorate a visit by President Taft in 1911. In the gift shop, you can buy patterns to make your own Scarlett O'Hara dresses, including the green one she famously cannibalised from curtains when setting out to save Tara. The "Dump", as Mitchell called her basement flat, has been restored and has a cinema extension where you can see movie memorabilia including the gushing telegram that Vivien Leigh sent to Mitchell when she landed the part of Scarlett. Some Charlestonians think Margaret Mitchell was inspired by the tale of "Rhett's Butler" but others believe his name was taken from the nickname of her first husband, a bootlegging blackguard from the Carolinas, known as "Red" Upshaw.How come you know all this?No trip to Atlanta is complete without a visit to the Margaret Mitchell House where she wrote her one and only novel, published in 1936. |
 |
 |
