Margaret Mitchell: The Attic's Ghost

Lyrics

[Intro]
Apartment Number One.
Crescent Avenue, 1926.
The air is thick with paper dust and sunbeams.
Just you, Peggy.
And the ghost you’re building.

[Verse 1]
A broken ankle put the world on hold.
So you sat down at the Remington portable.
And with two fingers, you began to type.
A secret scribbling, a hobby you called it.
Outside, the iron veins of Atlanta hissed and pounded.
The real city, loud and graceless.
But inside Apartment One, you resurrected a garden.
A green canopy of memory, magnolias and myth.
You wrote it for Georgians, you said.
A story of survival.

[Chorus]
You were building a ghost for this city, weren't you?
From an attic room on Crescent Avenue.
A story so beautiful it could make us forget.
What we were, what we did.
A ghost of velvet and resilience, to walk down Peachtree Street forever.
The Attic's Ghost.

[Verse 2]
Then Harold Latham came down from New York.
Ten years of work, a thousand pages in a heap.
You told him he’d have to pay the excess postage.
He almost didn't read it.
But he did.
And by June of 'thirty-six, the ghost was loose.
A million copies breathing in the humid air.
Your private story became the public truth.
The one we wanted to believe.

[Chorus]
You were building a ghost for this city, weren't you?
From an attic room on Crescent Avenue.
A story so beautiful it could make us forget.
What we were, what we did.
A ghost of velvet and resilience, to walk down Peachtree Street forever.
The Attic's Ghost.

[Bridge]
Loew's Grand Theatre, December fifteenth, 1939.
The klieg lights burn away the winter chill.
A city dressed in velvet curtains.
Celebrating its own beautiful lie on a silver screen.
While the real city held its breath outside.
With its separate doors and its silent truths.

[Outro]
August, 1949.
Peachtree Street again.
No cameras this time.
Just the screech of a taxi's tires.
The indifferent iron of a city moving on.
You left.
But your ghost is still here.
Still whispering in the canopy.
Tomorrow is another day.