Fu(n)cked Fact: Martin Luther King Jr., Hattie McDaniel, and 'Gone With the Wind'

Huh. My cover's blue, like the victorious Union's uniform, but fuck it, this'll do

For the film Gone With the Wind, a young Martin Luther King Jr. appeared at the Atlanta premiere—ten years old and, to suit the tone of the film, dressed as a slave. Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammie in the film and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, was not allowed to attend due to segregation laws in the South.

This is the "ideal South" of "Lost Cause" fame: profiting off the labors of Hattie McDaniel while refusing her admission to the premiere of a film she won an award for and dressing up one of the greatest figures of the twentieth century as a slave because his skin color means, by default, he could never do anything with his life. The South as envisioned by Gone With the Wind offers nothing to nostalgically reminisce about.

But this is about the book, not the film, and Gone With the Wind, well, just about everything that needs to be said about this book already has been (and I don't find it worth all the hullaballoo, if my above commentary hasn't made it clear). With Normal Mailer's The Executioner's Song, a thousand pages zipped by in rapt fascination, even if disgust; Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind carries the same disgust, but is more like the reading equivalent of a hate fuck. It's on my list of classics and is such a cultural cornerstone I felt obligated to read it, but I could tell within a few pages I just wanted to get it done and over with so I could move onto better things

As the introduction to my edition puts it, Michell sets out to paint the South as an Eden.

That really encapsulates it. Especially what I hate about it. The South was not an Eden: "things that mattered" in a man, per the book, are, "raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman." 

So, y'know, redneck ideals we still recognize today: getting drunk, riding/driving around while drunk, being crass toward women while staggering around drunk, treating Black people as less than human, and being dangerously trigger happy. As we are reminded shortly thereafter, "the Wilkes and Hamiltons always marry their own cousins," so we have extra clarification this story is set in the South; how very high-class of Mitchell to write Jeems as beneath human dignity (shown, once more in the dialogue in this scene) compared to these high-class cousin fuckers. 

Apparently the epitome of Southern culture is getting shitfaced, finding a well-fitting 'Who Farted' t-shirt after fucking your cousin, and going to a live taping of the Jerry Springer Show. What a tragedy that the Confederates lost the Civil War, although it's no wonder the book starts with two hick twins gloating for being kicked out of college. Don't need no book learnin' in the South, where your family tree looks like Ouroboros and the toughest questions on a long dry spell are whether to dig up grandma or a rotten farm carcass for a good fuck.

The South really hasn't changed much.

Dehumanization of Black people permeates and degrades the novel; seeing characters whine about their hard work, which often boils down to yelling at their slaves to work faster, is tedious and infuriating.

Beyond this, of course, the novel follows the infamous and more culturally ubiquitous romance of Scarlett and Rhett (she sixteen and he implied to be late-twenties to mid-thirties—in the parlance of our times, he's a creep; this still is not as bad as other examples we hear of in the book: thirteen year olds being squired about by grown men and the O'Hara patriarch, nearing his mid-forties when he married fifteen year old Ellen and started popping out children. Apparently, pedophilia counts among those treasured ideals of the South that are now, thank God—er, alas, gone with the wind).

The Civil War comes and, as Michell pus it, the novel becomes about gumption and those who survive; she becomes cutthroat and well-off as her icy heart prunes off and repels those around her one-by-one. There are a few powerful moments and even arcs, of course—Ashley and Rhett's meditations on their place in life, as well as Rhett's utter heartbreak at the loss of his daughter and ultimate decision to leave Scarlett and attempt to dig up simplicity and peace of mind stand out—and these become stronger if one is able to get past some of the problematic aspects (see again: the time period appropriate age differences made bizarre by modernity which remain problematic even after all characters are adults due to the circumstances of their pasts).

These scenes, in my opinion, offer a glimpse at a story that might not have been an "American" story in the sense of Mark Twain, anti-intellectualism, apple pie, Bruce Springsteen, baseball, and mass shootings, but would have made a much more moving story of tempered passions, the unpredictable chambers of the heart, and the consequences and cost of yearning, loss, and carelessness among other things.

But again, that would be an entirely different novel altogether. As a whole, I have a few good things to offer about Gone: 1) it becomes phenomenal if read like watching an episode of Jerry Springer with a commentary track by Greg Giraldo; in that case, we're talking top ten lit of all time, 2) public domain is coming in just under a decade: a plot where Jeems decides he's sick of the Tarleton twins, goes Django style, and somehow John Brown gets alternate-history Shanghaied in there, you could have a real romp of a popcorn story (inbox is open for checks, studios), and 3) a much smarter person than me, Alice Randall, has written The Wind Done Gone, which I look forward to reading and, from the bit I've glimpsed and read of it so far, will more than make reading the original Mitchell book worth it.