Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of
pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river
swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the
bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay
to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton
seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and
maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed
brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of
spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when
the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight
furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle
Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The
rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to
keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms.
It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts,
the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses,
peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts,
of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles
of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges
rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious,
a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age old
patience, to threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We had you
once. We can take you back again."
To the ears of the three on the porch came the sounds of hooves, the jingling
of harness chains and the shrill careless laughter of negro voices, as the
field hands and mules came in from the fields. From within the house floated
the soft voice of Scarlett's mother, Ellen O'Hara, as she called to the
little black girl who carried her basket of keys. The high-pitched, childish
voice answered "Yas'm," and there were sounds of footsteps going out the back
way toward the smokehouse where Ellen would ration out the food to the home
coming hands. There was the click of china and the rattle of silver as Pork,
the valet-butler of Tara, laid the table for supper.