BOOKS | An Excerpt from Scarlett
University of Nebraska, Potomac Press, 2025
Published: November 2025
Pre-order copies wherever fine books are sold.
University of Nebraska, Potomac Press ❧ Bookshop.org ❧ Barnes & Noble ❧ Books-A-Million ❧ Amazon
Scarlett
Chapter One ❧ Midnight
Quiet at last. Just the flutter of leaves in the breeze outside, and the sound of my companions unfolding their sleeping gear. We’ve arranged our belongings so as not to disturb the museum exhibit that occupies the room by day. A gardening basket in one corner. A pine table set, as if for breakfast, with two plates and a bowl. A massive brick hearth.
Except hearth isn’t quite the right word, not here at least. Not inside this pine cabin on the Georgia coast 15 miles north of Brunswick. As I unzip the sleeping bag I’ve borrowed from my stepson, it occurs to me that nothing in this space is what it claims to be. Not the faux table setting or the curtained windows or the wicker chair or the narrow cot with the chenille spread and embroidered pillow in the pseudo-bedroom to my left, and not the sign outside on the path to the door: Servants Quarters.
I know the kind of scene we’re meant to conjure: a plump Mammy in a kerchief standing at the fireplace stirring a pot of something while children frolic on the floor behind her—the same pine floor where I’ve laid out my make-believe bed on top of a yoga mat, which, I now realize, does nothing to cushion my back against the hard wood planks.
It’s been decades since I’ve come this close to roughing it. I spent the past two nights under a chintz duvet on a queen-sized canopy bed in an air-conditioned Savannah hotel room. Before heading south on I-95 today, I treated myself to lunch in the hotel restaurant, a restored 18th-century tavern. Glass of sauvignon blanc, locally sourced fried-green tomato sandwich with aioli, espresso.
I crawl inside the flannel interior of my camping gear and try to court sleep, but I’m distracted by my two companions. Joe’s stretched out behind me on the floor, posting updates to his Facebook page. Prinny’s half-asleep beside me, breathing softly. It’s her tenth or 11th overnight in a cabin, and she’s got the drill down. Flashlight neatly positioned on a nearby chair, on top of her neatly folded clothes. Thick foam pad under her back.
I close my eyes and listen to the mournful pings of Joe’s phone as he sends the last of his missives into the world. Then silence. The room goes dark. Just the three of us arrayed like mannequins on a moonlit stage set on the Georgia coast. This is why I came, isn’t it? Except I can’t get comfortable. Roll to one side, yank at my T-shirt, imagine I’m back home in Michigan with my husband.
“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” I snarled a week ago as I stood over my open suitcase, fretting.
“You’ll figure it out,” he said.
But I haven’t. Lying here, feigning sleep, my mind hurtles into its familiar spin cycle. What if I’m awake all night? What if I step on a snake on my way to the bathroom? There are rattlers on the plantation grounds, alligators in the marshes where they used to grow rice. Ticks. Spiders. Joe likes to tell about the time he woke in a cabin to find spiders crawling all over him. He’s never seen a ghost on a sleepover, but spiders, yes. They terrify him.
“You have to visit these places to see what they endured,” he said earlier tonight in a talk to docents inside the visitors’ center of the plantation. He wore narrow, wire-rimmed glasses and a collarless white shirt under the thick blue wool uniform of a Union soldier. A dozen people, all white, mostly retirees, sat attentively in rows of plastic chairs. On the screen above his head, he unveiled slide after slide of the kinds of places he meant: weatherbeaten shacks in Tennessee, wooden cabins in South Carolina, a two-story brick tenement behind an urban mansion in North Carolina, attic rooms in New York and Pennsylvania.
“Because they hung in there,” Joe said of the people who once lived in these spaces, “we’re here today. African Americans. They acquiesced because of us, their descendants. Anything beyond acquiescence could be their death.”
This morning’s Georgia Times-Union had advertised his talk and our overnight stay, noting that as a descendant of enslavers from the region, I’d be joining Joe McGill, founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, and Prinny Anderson, a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson, on the latest of Joe’s sleepovers in a slave dwelling, this one at the Hofwyl-Broadfield State Historical Site in Glynn County. I was startled by the front-page coverage, the realization that without meaning to, I had exposed my family—the distant cousins who don’t return my texts or emails when I visit the area, the nameless person who planted a Confederate flag in front of the granite obelisk that marks my ancestors’ cemetery in Brunswick. “Sleepover Puts Spotlight on Glynn’s Slave-holding Past,” the Times-Union headline announced.
And now here I am, rolling onto my left side, scrunching the single pillow I’ve remembered to bring with me, wondering how long my bladder will hold out before I have to make my way in the dark with Prinny’s flashlight to the bathroom that’s been installed on the other side of the wall behind the fireplace in another tiny space originally built to house as many as 12 people. Who knows what I’ll trip over on my way there? I’ve learned to step gingerly in this part of the world. My grandmother, born in Brunswick in 1898, was taught as a child to kill any snake she found that wasn’t poisonous and to call for an uncle with a gun whenever she spotted one that was. In her seventies, on a visit to the family homestead in the woods outside Brunswick, she nearly stepped on a diamondback one day as she was getting out of her car.
She loved this hardscrabble strip of Atlantic coastline halfway between Jacksonville and Savannah. Although she and my grandfather retired to a small town in tidewater Virginia, she never reconciled herself to the place. “Virginia is as far north as I will ever go,” she declared, and pressed her tiny foot into the carpet as if to mark a line.
She had a bird’s beaked nose and mouth and wore her hair in long, graying ropes looped around her skull. She dressed in brown, or at most a drab olive. Much of the time she terrified me: the stern reminders to buckle my seatbelt, the drumbeat of her shoes climbing the stairs to inform me of yet another unwitting household infraction. The stories of ancestral hardship meant to show me how good I had it. The Scarlett O’Hara prettiness of what life was like before the war, versus the shabbiness of what came after. Her own widowed mother, forced to open a boardinghouse and take in strangers to make ends meet.
Mary King Hilsman Pettigrew, my maternal grandmother—whom we called Mamie. She’s the reason I’m here tonight, 20 minutes up the highway from her birthplace. She’s the one who insisted I know the kind of people I came from: strong people—strong women in particular. Like my grandmother herself, who knew more about roughing it than I’d ever learn. She spent 20 years living in the Caribbean with my Navy-officer grandfather, braving scorpions and malaria while raising three children. At the end of it all she only wanted more—more island sunsets and patois songs, more solitary rambles in the countryside searching for pre-Columbian relics. My grandmother, the excavator.
Except when it came to our family. She and her sisters devoted years to assembling the ancestral story, compiling photos, deciphering letters, filling in cemetery maps and genealogical charts. It was no secret we had “owned slaves,” as they put it. But it wasn’t something they dwelt on. “There are things we don’t talk about,” Mamie said briskly, and often.
Little room in this scenario for what I’m doing tonight. My grandmother would have winced at this morning’s front-page coverage. She and her sisters gave their share of interviews to the local press, but always with an emphasis on the salutary: the family patriarch, Francis Muir Scarlett, a penniless British immigrant who made his way to Georgia as a teenager in the late-18th century and became one of Glynn County’s richest planters; his 11 exemplary children; their illustrious 20th-century heirs.
And the story everyone liked best: the coincidence that Margaret Mitchell chose our family name for her infamous heroine.
Born in the last years of the 19th century and raised on the same postwar brew of recrimination and regret that nourished Mitchell, my grandmother Mamie could not forget. “It still makes me angry at the Yankees stripping the Southern families,” she said in her late seventies. She preferred the golden age that preceded her birth, the years when the family fields stretched to the edge of the ocean that spelled misery to millions and wealth to us, when palmettoes shimmered in the twilight, and blushing belles cavorted with suitors at parties like the ones Scarlett O’Hara attended, she who carried our name.
❧
Or maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe my grandmother and I aren’t so different after all. I can remember times when I sensed a touch of hesitation or doubt—remorse, even—beneath her arctic veneer. In the spare bedroom she used upstairs as a studio, she painted portraits of women, some of them Black, that she had copied from newspaper clippings: mothers grieving lost children or slain civil rights leaders; young girls staring pensively into space.
In 1982, during her last feverish years of work on the family saga, in one of her many letters to me, Mamie asked if I could get her a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “I saw a copy once when a child,” she wrote, “but someone said something like this: ‘Chile you don’t want to read that old Yankee book.’ I did want to read it, but didn’t.” She had gone decades without satisfying her curiosity. But recently she had picked up a biography of the Beechers that referred so often to the novel my grandmother now wanted to read it. She was 84. “It will make me angry, of course, but I will have to risk that.”
I was too busy with school to send the book, and she didn’t ask again. Her letters to me grew shorter and shorter until they dwindled to near incoherence (“I have been trying to write the things I seem to remember”) and then stopped.
Decades later, I learned that my grandmother had been haunted lifelong by a childhood memory. Specifically, she remembered sitting inside the family house in Brunswick at night with the Scarlett women while they waited for the Scarlett men to come home from some clandestine outing—a “night ride,” presumably, of the sort Mitchell depicts in Gone with the Wind and that terrorized Blacks throughout the South in the first half of the 20th century. In her final year of life, my grandmother tried to communicate what she remembered to my mother and uncle. They were with her in the hospital room to which she had been confined for months, mind sliding in and out of consciousness. One day my grandmother’s eyes abruptly flickered open, and she looked up at her children as if gripped by a vision. She tried to say something—to “make a confession,” my Uncle Bob thought—but then shut her eyes and sank back into the pillows. My grandmother died shortly before Christmas 1994. With her I lost my last breathing link to that distant world.
❧
I’m here tonight—spring of 2015—because I want to know what my grandmother could not bring herself to say. Over dinner this evening, Joe and Prinny and I talked about slavery’s shadow past. After Joe’s presentation at Hofwyl-Broadfield, we’d driven up the road to a waterfront bar on another old rice plantation, Butler Island, once owned by a planter named Pierce Butler—known in part for his troubled marriage to the celebrated British actress Fanny Kemble. We’d ordered shrimp and oysters, lemonade and beer, and as we ate and drank, we’d talked well into the night about our respective ancestral links to slavery. Joe said he’d started spending the night in slave dwellings in 2010 as a way of calling attention to these neglected structures and honoring his enslaved forebears. He reminded us that 12 U.S. Presidents had been enslavers, eight of them while in the White House. One of those men was Prinny’s ancestor, a man who decried the tyranny of slavery while pushing for its expansion. At his picturesque hilltop property in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had enslaved hundreds of people he regarded as inferior to white Americans “in the endowment both of body and mind.” Some of those individuals were his own offspring.
I had spent the previous two days at the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, paging through the papers of a slave dealer who did business with my ancestors during Jefferson’s lifetime. Inside box after acid-free box, I had touched the moth-eaten remnants of plantation inventories, shipping manifests, contracts, mortgages, sales agreements and receipts, including one for a 17-year-old “African-born” girl named Margaret who was sold in order to settle a debt.
“As a nation we like to preserve buildings, but it’s usually the house on the hill,” Joe had told the docents at Hofwyl-Broadfield earlier that evening. “We tend not to preserve those places that take us out of our comfort zones.” At the start of the Civil War, he’d gone on, some four million enslaved Americans were living in cabins like the ones at Hofwyl-Broadfield. Few of those dwellings survived. “One reason,” Joe surmised, “is because of that intent to erase our history.”
It’s always been complicated, I had scribbled that morning in my journal.
Lying here at midnight, inside a slave cabin 15 miles north of where my ancestors built a fiefdom based on enslaved labor, I am newly aware of those complications—all the reasons my grandmother Mamie had to brush aside our history. All the reasons I’d rather be somewhere else tonight. Even now, eyes shut, I’m counting the hours until I can get in my car and drive home to Michigan, the easy North. Patterns drift across my eyelids—stars, waves, circles opening and closing like a kaleidoscope. That’s what I’m looking for, I think: patterns. All the ways my grandmother’s life, and mine, reinforce the world our ancestors built. The world I saw inside the archive in Savannah this week. The world my family refused to acknowledge.
University of Nebraska, Potomac Press
Published: November 2025
Pre-order copies wherever fine books are sold.