MM begins chapter 8 with the same sort of exposition she used throughout most of chapter 7. Scarlett hates on Savannah and Charleston some more (just for GP), so she heads north on the train in May of 1862 in the hopes that she'll like Atlanta better "in spite of her distaste for Miss Pittypat and Melanie."
So far, Scarlett dislikes everyone and everything she encounters besides her parents and Tara. It seems as though her mood hasn't improved since that fiasco that occurred in the Wilkes library, and I can't blame her for her depression. After all, assuming she was married in April of 1861 (a safe assumption), she has been a widow for a whole year and is a new mother and she honestly has no hope of ever enjoying an exciting time again in her life. Scarlett is vibrant and young and it is no surprise that she dislikes Charleston and Savannah and latches onto Atlanta as a kindred spirit: it's full of bustle and change and so is our protagonist. Atlanta is the same age as Scarlett and MM makes Atlanta a parallel for her main character. I've visited many times and I've often wondered what the city would have been like if Sherman hadn't burned it to the ground.
Oddly enough, there is very little online or in libraries about pre-1864 Atlanta. Most of the information I've found has come from the reconstruction period, including this nifty Wikipedia map from 1874: (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Atlanta-wards-1874.jpg).
Anyway, Scarlett meets up with Uncle Peter as soon as she alights from the train in central Atlanta. Uncle Peter uses quite a lot of dialect, but I think Mitchell is less successful here than she was with Mammy. Maybe it's because Uncle Peter's speaking style doesn't convey much about the man himself: it's used entirely for comedic effect and it just doesn't ring true because it's too 1930's stereotypical/Stepin Fetchit/ugly to be anything other than nasty.
Having said that, I actually do enjoy Uncle Peter as a character because he gives us a glimpse into the life of the urban slave--an existence that is rarely addressed in most literature and history books about slavery. Most of the cities of the south were overwhelmingly black during the pre-war period (and many still are today) and I wonder what the true ratio of black:white was in Atlanta when Scarlett arrived there in 1862. It was probably not as high as it was in more settled cities like Charleston and Savannah, but I'm sure it was much higher than that of New York and Boston during this time. I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch.
One last thought about Uncle Peter: Before he died, Charles Hamilton told Scarlett that "the only trouble with [Uncle Peter] is that he owns the three of us (Charles, Melly and Pitty), body and soul, and he knows it." I'm going to assume MM dropped that little nugget intentionally, as a way to clue us all into the complex relationships most city dwellers had with their slaves during this period.
Prissy is presented in this section as a counterpart to Uncle Peter. She is dumb and young while he is wise and old, but both characters function merely as comic relief, and MM sometimes unnecessarily steps over the line with Prissy, at one point saying that the girl's "elevation to nurse was almost more than the brain her little black skull could bear." This description rubs me wrong chiefly because of the inclusion of the word "black," since Prissy's foolishness has absolutely nothing to do with the color of her skin. I will return to the matter of race and GWTW in a later post, but I couldn't let that little remark slip by unremarked.
Switching gears, I notice that MM does a great job of foreshadowing while describing Atlanta, sneaking in some little details that will become very important over the next section of the novel. For instance, Scarlett notices the high number of hospitals for the war wounded located in the city. And furthermore "every day the trains just below Five Points disgorged more sick and more wounded," but after dropping this little tidbit of information into the book MM simply moves on without comment. Any reader with a rudimentary knowledge of the Civil War knows that the south lost primarily because of the high number of CSA casualties, but MM doesn't concoct some lengthy discussion between Scarlett and Uncle Peter about the status of the war wounded here. As a result, when the south does run out of men later in the book, the reader is almost as surprised as Scarlett by how quickly things fall apart.
Besides Uncle Peter and Atlanta, Belle Watling is the third major character to make her appearance in Chapter 8 of GWTW. Belle's hair is "too red to be true," and she's dressed in showy, loud clothing, and Scarlett is fascinated.
Events move quickly in Chapter 8, and soon Scarlett is living with Melanie and Aunt Pittypat and nursing at the hospitals and swinging "palmetto fans until her shoulders ached and she wished that all the men were dead," which is hilariously selfish and a spot on emotion for anyone who's ever done any sort of repetitive manual labor.
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