A Book Review: 85 Years Too Late
- Jill Zeller
- March 13, 2022
After this encounter with the movie, I decided to read the book again. Well aware of its current censorious status I went in thinking: “it can’t look as bad as people are now saying”.
Well, it does.
My Wikipedia consultants tell me that Margaret Michell was born in Atlanta in 1900. The Civil War saga and tale of the South was her only novel and earned her a Pulitzer. However she did author and publish numerous short stories, interviews, non-fiction articles and society columns. Only one of her ancestors, her maternal great-grandfather, owned slaves, while the rest of the family made big bucks rebuilding and buying property in Atlanta during Reconstruction.
Mitchell’s portrayal of slaves and slave life in Gone With the Wind is extremely discomforting. Aside from the cringe-worthy replication of “darky” speech—a style-sheet practice that has been thankfully abandoned by modern authors—her character Scarlet O’Hara, Southern Belle with a tarnished and greedy glint in her green eyes, regularly describes slaves and post-war Free Negroes as stupid, degenerate, and disrespectful of their white betters. Mitchell does paint a stark and believable picture of the fall of Georgia and the near-vanquishing of plantation life during and after the war, and her Reconstruction years are equally dystopic. Hearing tales of the war and Reconstruction from her great and grand parents as Mitchell was growing up primed her for her descriptions of gritty and frightening days after the South surrendered.
I asked myself as I read the book: “did Mitchell really believe what she was writing about slaves?” Turns out, she probably did. Thomas Dixon was a white man I was, until now, very happy never to have heard of. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, Dixon published a white supremacy-based fictional trilogy. A Baptist minister, lawyer and politician, among others, Dixon glorified the Klan (as did Mitchell in her book), supported Jim Crow and general racism (“black rapists”), and vigorously opposed female suffrage (Mitchell, to her credit, was an avid support of women’s equality and right to vote, as was her mother). Mitchell wrote to Dixon after she read his books as a teenager: “I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much.”
It’s interesting that I have managed to internalize all the interposing decades of pealing back lies and bringing out truth between my first reading of Gone With the Wind and this recent one (definitely the last). Navigating changes in interpretation of art, literature, and music is as tricky as sailing round Cape Horn in 1755. And still I get it wrong, and often feel clumsy and frustrated and sometimes annoyed by the demands of “political awareness”. But I’d much rather be on that slippery slope than in the thirsty desert of bias, bigotry and deliberate disinformation favored by so many in America today.
As a apt aside, I am currently reading To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, a beautifully written alternate history told in three parts. In Yanagihara’s new America, circa 1893, the South achieved secession from the North and is called “The Colonies”. The rest of the country is divided further into The Free States (New York State and others), The Republic of Maine, The Western Union (California, Oregon and Washington) and America (all the rest). “Negros” escaping the Colonies are aided by citizens in The Free States but not encouraged to miscegenate or even linger. They’re given clothing and food then urged to “move on”. There’s a lot more interesting cultural “norms” in the first book, and I can’t wait for books 2 and 3, each occurring one century later and included in this single 705 page volume, to find out where this is all leading.
5 thoughts on “A Book Review: 85 Years Too Late”
It is widely believed that Mitchell modeled Tara to a great degree on the plantation owned by Theodore Roosevelt’s maternal family. The father of his mother, Martha Stewart “Mittie” Bulloch, sold one of his slaves to throw the expected extravagant wedding of his daughter to the wealthy New York City businessman, philanthropist and politico, Roosevelt’s father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. During the War she provided as much cash, material and informational assistance to her family and the Cause as possible. Her brothers were instrumental in the creation of the ships built in England and France (which Henry Adams’s father, Lincoln’s minister to St. James, finally was able to put a stop to) that preyed on American shipping as well as ironclads that went for the Union navy. As one would expect, at some point, this caused trouble for her husband, so busy raising funds and supplies for the Union army.
T.R. was immensely proud of his mother’s family’s Roswell, GA roots, saying at one point, the only life that might possibly be better than a western stockman who owned immense acres and bossed a massive labor force was that of a pre-War southern planter.
Oooh, interesting! Thanks for this tidbit about Teddy’s family.
Bulloch Hall is beautiful and fascinating to tour, along with many other historic houses in the neighborhood. The City of Roswell used to have a package tour. My favorite time to visit Bulloch Hall was during their annual quilt show, when the whole house, from attic to foyer, was bedecked in 150+ quilts. That was pre-Covid, of course.
I lived in Norfolk, VA area in the early and mid 1960s. Even though Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach were very much Navy towns back then, with residents from all ove the world, the locals were still fighting the War Between the States. In their minds it was not a civil war, and not about slavery. In their minds it was all about states rights (which comes down to slavery when closely examined) anddd they felt mightily oppressed by the North. Some were just waiting for the right time to take up arms once again against the filthy Yankees.
I was told by many a man in the South that I’d be right pretty if I weren’t such a thin lipped Yankee.
Hooray for the thin-lipped Yankees!