CHAPTER XLII
SCARLETT'S CHILD was a girl, a small bald-headed mite, ugly as a hairless monkey and absurdly like Frank. No one except the doting father could see anything beautiful about her, but the neighbors were charitable enough to say that all ugly babies turned out pretty, eventually. She was named Ella Lorena, Ella for her grandmother Ellen, and Lorena because it was the most fashionable name of the day for girls, even as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were popular for boys and Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation for n***o children.
She was born in the middle of a week when frenzied excitement gripped Atlanta and the air was tense with expectation of disaster. A n***o who had boasted of rape had actually been arrested, but before he could be brought to trial the jail had been rai
