I never know exactly what to make of Prissy--or, in fact, what to make of any of MM's black characters in GWTW. Some of MM's characterizations and political views are outside the bounds of my modern sensibilities, particularly in the later chapters that cover the events of Reconstruction and the rise of the ku klux klan. However, although I'm disappointed in some of her opinions, I don't take much offense anymore because I sincerely believe that MM was an equal opportunity offender. She grew up--and was dead and buried--long before the hey-days of Civil Rights and politically correctness, and while that's no excuse it's...an explanation for much of her behavior anyway. She was a whole generation or two before Harper Lee (Mockingbird was written in the early 1960's, but takes place in the 1930's when Lee was a child), and whatever wincing I do at some of her descriptions and word choices is tempered by an appreciation for MM's almost even handed approach toward everyone and everything Scarlett encounters in GWTW.
Because Scarlett hates everybody.
And she hates awesomely, doesn't she?
For all the talk about Scarlett's hysterical behavior and selfishness and single-minded-focus on money and Ashley, she really is a pretty reliable narrator. And she's remarkably even-handed and detailed in her analysis of other people, and totally, hilariously, outrageously mean. She loves her parents, but everybody else (except Ashley in the early part of the novel) is just an annoyance for her. She hates upper class men and women, she hates the Yankees, she hates kids, she hates cows, she hates horses, she hates "crackers", she hates hill-folk (Archie, etc), she hates the folks of Charleston and Savannah, and she hates most of the black people she encounters, too. She's just a hater. And a Mean Girl, to boot. So when MM's narrator/Scarlett's derision of Prissy in this section of the novel flares up I can't complain. At least Prissy is given a definite personality in this chapter, which is more than I can say for some of the under developed people who pass through the novel. Plus, hilariously and amazingly enough, Scarlett's increasing frustration with Prissy stems from Scarlett's own irritation with her own personal shortcomings--she's mad at Prissy because Prissy is just as scared, stupid and inept as Scarlett is when Sherman finally hits town and Melly needs help having her baby.
I'm not in love with MM's attempt at AA dialect here either, but I can't very well complain much about her depiction of Prissy's english when she's already run Gerald's Irish accent through the ringer so many times. Scarlett even hates the accents of Charleston and Savannah, and the narrator even gives Rhett a drawl--although his "cultured" accent is never actually given the same treatment as the Irish, the Yankee, and the black accent. I have family living in Augusta and Atlanta, and I've noticed that they speak much quicker than the slow, syrupy accents I usually mentally associate with Southern American English.
I've even been occasionally accused of having a southern accent myself, mostly by East-Coasters who wouldn't know a Southern Illinois accent if it smacked them upside the head. All four of my grandparents were born south of Interstate-70, and I've heard echoes of many of Prissy's pronunciations in the speech patterns of my relatives, some of my friends who have Mississippi origins, and in my own mouth sometimes, so I can't really, truly take great offense at MM's depictions throughout GWTW.
Anyway...
The Wilkes baby is coming and Scarlett sends Prissy off to go find the Meades. But Dr. Meade is busy at the hospital tending to the soldiers, and Mrs. Meade is off looking for her young son Phil who has been killed in battle. Eventually Scarlett decides to head into Five Points and search for Dr. Meade herself, since Prissy hasn't successfully located the doctor. She runs past the Leyden House and heads down Peachtree toward the depot and the hospital. I still haven't satisfactorily figured out precisely where Aunt Pitty's house is supposed to be located, but the Leyden House (124 Peachtree) is about a half-mile from Five Points, and if Aunt Pitty's was on the north side of the old town, then I figure the distance between Melly and Dr. Meade to be little further than a half-mile. Not very far.
But incredibly far if you're a terrified young girl, racing around the dusty town in broken down slippers and stays and that big floppy hat Scarlett rocks in the film.
Halfway to the hospital Scarlett finds out from a passing Confederate officer that the battle of Jonesboro has been lost, the blues are victorious, and the grays are in full retreat. And then we get this marvelous bit of internal dialogue from our girl:
"The Yankees were coming. The army was leaving. The Yankees are coming."
She's grounding and pounding her point like an MMA fighter here, isn't she? She's being repetitive, but not unduly so, particularly since the reader is probably just as frantic as our protagonist by now. Particularly when she turns a corner and runs into a whole bunch of looters/refugees carrying sacks of corn and potatoes and barrels of flour and greasy sides of bacon and bags of peas and everything else they can carry away from the now wide-open commissary warehouses down by the railroad tracks.
It looks, smells, and sounds like the end of the world.
There is no order now, now rhyme or reason or logic to anything that's going to happen to Scarlett and the rest of the characters we know so well. Atlanta is now an open city, and chaos has broken out, although it takes Scarlett quite some time to realize what is happening and prioritize her survival. If she'd been thinking clearly and aware of everything that is actually happening, Scarlett probably would have gone to the commissary and grabbed some of the foodstuffs for her family, but she has no idea how totally insane things are going to get in a short while. She's never been hungry before despite the rationing and shortages of the last few years, so she has absolutely no reason to expect that she'll be practically starving by the end of that week.
There's a "packed, hysterical mob surging in the open space of Five Points," and Scarlett is racing around looking for the doctors. By my estimate I've visited Atlanta at least 40 times in my life, but the streets are confusing and have weird names and I still don't really know my Buckheads from my Mechanicsvilles. But I do know the Central Business district fairly well, including the area around Five Points, mostly because I visited the city quite a lot during the post-Olympic period of the late 1990's. Peachtree Street is still the central artery of the city of course, but in my day we used to do a lot of shopping at the Atlanta Underground and all the stores they used to have down on Decatur street. Either way, I had my fun in those days, but even now when the whole area is experiencing a down swing I still stop by Five Points and take a picture in front of the statue every time I pass through the city.
By the time Scarlett finds Dr. Meade the old gentleman is hysterical and "his face was the face of a man drunk with fatigue and impotent rage and burning pity." It soon becomes painfully clear that Dr. Meade isn't going to help Scarlett.
As a matter of fact, there's nobody around to help Scarlett deliver Melly's baby since Prissy is helpless and kind of dumb (or smartly avoiding responsibility for the entire situation). Child birth was insanely dangerous during the 19th century, and Melly is going to have a terrible time delivering Beau, but with the town being overrun by Yankees and men dying left and right labor is of low priority.
Scarlett heads home, and the earlier frantic crowd that she saw on the way into Five Points has now turned into something else. "There were women in the mob near Decatur Street, garishly dressed women whose bright finery and painted faces gave a discordant note of holiday." They are all drunk on cheap corn whiskey (the best kind!), and Scarlett even spots Belle Watling clinging "for support to a one-armed soldier who reeled and staggered." So now all the crazed civilians Scarlett saw a few moments ago have been replaced by prostitutes and one-armed soldiers and public inebriation and a bunch of other stuff Scarlett shouldn't even know about.
Scarlett is a southern belle and she's not supposed to interact with bad women and slaves and drunk strangers, but she's sharing the sidewalk with them now. The home-world that MM has constructed in the first third of the novel--the society of cotton fields and knights and ladies and rules and expectations and peace--has crumbled. And it has, for now anyway, been replaced by a crazy place where up is down, black-and-white boundaries have given way to blue-and-gray terrors, and Scarlett O'Hara is going to have to fend for herself.
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