Gone with the Wind / Унесённые ветром

There was much about the South – and Southerners – that he would never understand: but he adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them – poker and horse racing, red-hot politics, States’ Rights and damnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and courtesy to women. He even learned to chew tobacco. There was no need for him to acquire a good head for whisky, he had been born with one.

They were a pleasant race, these coastal Georgians, and Gerald liked them.

From them he learned what he found useful. Poker and a steady head for whisky brought to Gerald two of his three most prized possessions, his valet and his plantation. The other was his wife, the mysterious kindness of God.

Gerald wanted to be a slave owner and a landed gentleman. So the possession of Pork, his first slave, who became his valet, was the first step toward his heart’s desire.

Then the hand of Fate and a hand of poker combined to give him the plantation which he afterwards called Tara, and at the same time moved him out of the Coast into the upland country of north Georgia.

With his own small stake and a neat sum from mortgaging the land, Gerald bought his first field hands and came to Tara to live in bachelor solitude in the former owner’s house, till such a time as the white walls of Tara should rise.

He cleared the fields and planted cotton and borrowed more money to buy more slaves. Gradually the plantation widened out, as Gerald bought more acres lying near him, and in time the white house became a reality instead of a dream.

It was built by slave labor, a clumsy building overlooking the green pasture land running down to the river; and it pleased Gerald greatly. The old oaks hugged the house closely with their great trunks. The lawn grew thick with clover and grass, and Gerald saw to it that it was well kept. There was an air of solidness, of stability and permanence about Tara, and whenever Gerald galloped around the bend in the road and saw his own roof rising through green branches, his heart swelled with pride.

Gerald was on excellent terms with all his neighbors in the County, except the MacIntoshes whose land was on his left and the Slatterys whose three acres stretched on his right along the swamp bottoms between the river and John Wilkes’ plantation.

With all the rest of the County, Gerald was on terms of amity.