Content Warning: This section contains discussions of sexual assault and attempted assault.

Reconstruction forcibly hits home for Scarlett when a neighbor from the county named Tony Fontaine seeks refuge at her house. He has just killed a free Black man who tried to rape a white woman. The man was egged on by Jonas Wilkerson, so Tony killed him too. Now he must flee to Texas and asks Frank for a fresh horse. Scarlett realizes how the scales have been tipped in favor of the lower classes: “The South had been tilted as by a giant malicious hand, and those who had once ruled were now more helpless than their former slaves had ever been” (835).

She is even more alarmed that formerly enslaved field hands are being told by Yankees that they have a right to molest white women. A new group has sprung up to defend them since the government won’t protect the rights of its former enemies: “[…] the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters […] drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight” (839). Meanwhile, Atlanta has once again become a boom town.