8 Ways to Raise a GWTW Reader

Reading Margaret Mitchell on Reading

Make your way to any search engine and punch in a line like “how to raise children that love to read.” I read up on all that advice long before I married and became a father. Funny thing is, whatever habits, tips, tricks, essential oils, or enhanced interrogation methods mentioned in those results, were absent in my childhood home and upbringing. Wasn’t ‘til my twenties, while enduring the tedium of long shifts as a rent-a-cop in a quiet Chattanooga building, did I consider reading a book.

The first library book I checked out was the Davinci Code, the second, Left Behind. God used those two books to save my soul and turn me into a raging bibliophile—mysterious ways indeed. That’s a story for a different time.

With the birth of my precious daughter, I’m confronted with my scant knowledge of children's books, especially those for little girls. My habits of reading and collecting are no secret, so I have several boxes checked from those reading blog search results. She’ll hear stories read aloud, grow up in a house full of books, and see the joy of reading modeled by her parents.

All of this was on my mind when I picked up Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936-1949, edited by a favorite of mine, Richard B. Harwell. Mrs. Mitchell was a voracious reader from an early age. Yet, you won’t find her parents’ methods in any how-to book or mommy blog, but that’s why I’m here. 

How to Raise a “GWTW Reader”

(all quotes are from Margaret Mitchell’s letters)

1. Fathers should be local history aficionados, inner-monologuing while hunching over maps with an antique magnifying glass heavy enough to bludgeon any jaundiced jayhawkers milling about.

As to how I got started on Civil War material, I suppose I started in my cradle. Father is an authority on Atlanta and Georgia history of that period and Mother knew about as much as he did. I heard so much when I was little about the fighting and the hard times after the war that I firmly believed Mother and Father had been through it all instead of being born long afterward. In fact I was about ten years old before I learned the war hadn't ended shortly before I was born.

2. Mothers need to be summoning the spirit of the Coon Creek Girls, singing from memory everything Cecil J. Sharp collected and Harwell mentions in Confederate Music.

Mother used to sing me to sleep with those doleful tunes of the Sixties, “Jacket of Grey” and “Somebody's Darling,” varying them with “If You Want to Have a Good Time, Jine the Cavalry” and “Bonnie Blue Flag.”

3. Pick out poems and readings for your children to recite.

When I went to school and learned to “recite” on Friday afternoons, my pieces, picked by Father and Mother, were Henry Grady's “The New South,” “Little Giffen” (poem by Francis Orrery Ticknor) and “The Conquered Banner” (poem by Father Abram Ryan).

4. You must be reading aloud and weeping.

Mary Johnston was a schoolmate of my mother's and before I could read, I had her books read to me. Mother was strong minded but she never failed to weep over The Long Roll and Cease Firing.

Why? Well, one day, your daughter might be writing the next great Southern epic and can’t sleep because she can’t stop thinking about the weather during “the campaign from the Tennessee line to Atlanta.” A Confederate Veteran told her “how it rained for twenty-five days at Kennesaw Mountain.” But she needs to make sure. So she reads John Bell Hood’s Advance and Retreat; Joseph Eggleston Johnston’s Narrative of Military Operations; Sherman’s Memoirs “but got little satisfaction.” Then she remembers you reading Cease Firing and “knew it to be the best documented novel ever written, so” she “consults it to see about the weather.” And she sleeps like a baby.

5. Surrounding your children with the oldest people alive is a must.

And all during my childhood I'd been told to be prepared for the next time the world turned over. My family live to incredible ages and have incredible memories and I was brought up on stories of the hard times after the Revolution and what happened to kinfolks after the Seminole Wars and who went under in the panic during Andy Jackson's regime and what happened to people after 1865 and how bad things were in the panics of 1873 and 1893 and 1907.

When you ask how I gathered my material, I am at a loss for an answer. I can only say that I grew up with most of it. I have always loved old people, and from childhood listened eagerly to their stories—tucking away in my mind details of rickrack braid, shoes made of carpet, and bonnets trimmed with roosters' tails. I have always liked Southern literature and Southern history, and since I could first read I have read everything I could find on the subject of the Civil War.

6. Put down the pretty pop-ups. Pick up the dusty deep cuts.

I have read most of the old memoirs I could lay my hands on. Not recently, perhaps but from my childhood. I was raised on Surry of Eagle's Nest (John Esten Cooke) and the War Time Diary of a Georgia Girl (Eliza Frances Andrews) and other books of that type when most children were reading Peter Rabbit and the Rover Boys. And throughout the years I have run down every book of that kind I could find, every old diary (unpublished) that I heard about, old letters, too.

7. There’s always bribery and physical violence.

Most of my “classical” reading was done before I was twelve, aided by five, ten and fifteen cents a copy bribe from my father and abetted by the hair brush or mother's number three slipper. She just about beat the hide off me for not reading Tolstoy or Thackeray or Jane Austen but I preferred to be beaten.

Oh, your child is 13 and hasn’t read all the classics? It’s so over. Probably not going to make it.

8. Simmer down there, Winfield Scott. A little late-night book blockade running is a good thing.

Thanks for all the kind words about the book moving and being “like the books one reads when one is young.” When I read that my mind went back a great number of years to the books that I used to smuggle into bed and read, under the covers, by a flashlight and they were The Three Musketeers and all those marvelous novels of Lever, Harry Lorrequer, Charles O'Malley and the improving works of Mr. Bulwer-Lytton which did not seem at all improving then, and Jules Verne and With Fire and Sword and Pan Michael. Thanks for putting me in such good company. I'd feel mighty happy if I knew that some small girl was ruining her eyes reading my book under cover by flashlight! (Letter to Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Vincent Benet. July 23, 1936)