Growing Up Laura

Margaret Mitchell's  voice

 

In the dim parlor, heavy with the scent of wax candles and grief, Catherine stood, great with child, her face carved with loss, surrounded by eight of her brood, their eyes red-rimmed as they bade farewell to the man whose laughter once filled these walls. His body was laid in a young cemetery, where dew clung to the grass like tears and a solitary oak stood guard, its roots cradling the promise of a daughter yet to draw breath.

 

In the tender arms of the plantation, where cotton fields stretched like white waves under a merciless Georgia sun, Laura Bryan came into the world on May 2, 1847, her first cry trembling through a house draped in mourning. The youngest of ten, she was born to a mother bowed by sorrow, for James A. Bryan, her father, had slipped into eternity mere weeks before.

 

Laura’s infant wail pierced a home where shadows lingered. Far off, across the wide Ohio plains, her eldest brother, Robert, a young man of twenty-one bent over medical tomes in Cincinnati, received a letter, its ink blurred by haste and sorrow, bearing news of his father’s death. The creased page, arriving too late to call him home before Laura’s birth, seemed to mock the miles between. When at last he returned, dust thick on his boots, Robert shouldered the weight of the family’s legacy. As executor, he tallied the estate’s every thread and plow—oxen, linens, the lowing herd—with a hand steady as his script, his annual reports weaving a tapestry of two decades’ joys and burdens.

 

The plantation thrummed with life, its pulse the labor of some fifty souls, men, women, and children bound to its soil, their hands coaxing bounty from the earth. Five spinning wheels whirred like restless ghosts in the outbuildings, and a loom’s steady thump sang of homespun cloth for dresses and quilts. Yet not all came from the land’s own heart; a yellowed receipt from a Macon mercantile in 1849 whispered of two yards of crisp linen, five of bright calico for the enslaved, and five of soft diaper cloth, all for $2.75. Little Laura, toddling at two through halls fragrant with old wood and loss, wore diapers cut from such cloth, her small form a flicker of hope in a house cloaked in yesterday’s pain.

 

Her childhood unfolded amid the plantation’s vivid, perilous beauty. She clutched dolls, their cotton hearts and hand-stitched gowns sewn by weary hands—perhaps one such dress, frail as memory, later found tucked in a wall, stolen by a mouse for its nest, a relic of Laura’s own making. Beyond the porch, she chased her siblings through fields alive with the hum of cicadas, but the wild was no gentle playmate. Snakes glided through the underbrush, wild hogs rustled at the forest’s edge, and even the plantation’s mules, startled, could turn fierce. Laura learned early to step lightly in a world that shimmered with radiance yet bristled with danger.

 

Her schooling began in a one-room schoolhouse, its rough benches warmed by slants of golden light. By thirteen, in 1861, her tuition of $20 was paid to P. A. Crowder, noted in a receipt as crisp as the autumn air. Whether she followed her sisters to the Female College in Culloden, none can say, for the Civil War’s gathering clouds made such paths treacherous. Yet music was her refuge; in 1863, her fingers danced over a piano’s worn keys, tracing the lilting strains of “Favorite Waltz” and “Bonnie Eloise,” as receipts attest. By 1864, war’s hunger had driven three months’ tuition to $110, a stark mirror of a world unmoored.

 

In May 1861, as cannon fire rumbled on distant fields, tragedy struck again. Catherine, the family’s unyielding cornerstone, slipped from life, leaving Laura, scarcely fourteen, adrift without a mother’s touch. Robert, now her anchor, guided her affairs with the same steady hand that tamed the plantation’s sprawl. The settlement of Catherine’s estate was a bitter ritual; names of the enslaved were drawn from a hat, their lives scattered like chaff, a cruel emblem of the times.

 

The war’s shadow swallowed the Bryan clan. All ten siblings felt its chill. Most brothers, or their kin by marriage, donned Confederate gray, their hearts pledged to a cause as fierce as it was doomed. A receipt from January 1862 marked $7.50 for Abner “going to war,” a paltry sum for so vast a sacrifice. Troup, encamped in Virginia’s rain-soaked fields, fell to disease in September 1861, his death a wound that bled deep into the family’s soul.

 

A photograph from after the war captures Laura’s quiet strength. In 1867, she wed Mack Stewart of Jones County, two years after her sister Catherine bound her life to Mack’s brother. In the faded image, Laura stands tall, her dress sweeping the floor like a river, beside a seated Mack, frail as a wraith. His suit hangs loose, his legs thin as whispers, hinting at wartime’s cruelties—perhaps wounds or the gnawing hunger of a prison camp, though no record speaks plain. Mack’s death in 1870 left Laura a widow at twenty-three, her heart tempered by loss yet unbroken.

 

But Laura, like the stubborn pines that defied Georgia’s storms, endured. In 1878, she married John Hartley of Fort Valley, their love blooming into two daughters. Through years of grief and grit, Laura wove a thread of resilience. In March 1906, at fifty-eight, she drew her final breath and was laid to rest in the family cemetery, now softened by moss and time, beside the mother who held her and the father she never knew. Under the old oak’s watchful limbs, Laura joined the Bryan legacy, her life a quiet song of endurance in a land both radiant and unyielding.