Pearl Cleage

An Ode to Gone With the Wind

I want to say a few words about how weird it is to stand in the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum in Atlanta after so many years of refusing to darken its doorway out of respect for my ancestors who were held in bondage one state over, right outside of Montgomery, Alabama.  Matters of race are always complex and multilayered.  If  one is to have any hope of being understood, it is usually wise to begin at the beginning…

I read Gone With the Wind when I was 11 years old.  That was 1959, the same year Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, and Fidel Castro marched into Havana.  The book had already sold more copies than any other book except the Bible, according to people who keep track of such things, and the movie had brought the saga of Scarlett and Rhett to the screen in a way that fueled female romantic fantasies for years to come, and still does.

But not at my house.  At my house, Scarlett O’Hara was correctly identified to me as a slave owner, and therefore unworthy of the emotional investment one must make in the main character of any novel worth its salt.  “She would have owned us,” my mother said, “just like she owned her other slaves.  If you want to identify with somebody in the story, you better look at Prissy or Mammy.”

That said, she left me alone, clutching my drugstore paperback copy of the offending volume and considering my options.  Option One: I could take my thumb out of the novel where it was carefully holding my place, close the book, and never open it again.  Even as I articulated that possibility, I knew it was unacceptable.  The slave-owning Scarlett had already made the first of many attempts to confess her undying love to Ashley Wilkes, a sensitive slave owner from the nearby plantation of Twelve Oaks.

Being Ashley, he had politely declined her affections and gently confessed he was engaged to marry his cousin, the slave-owning but saintly Miss Melanie Hamilton.  Awash in the rage and humiliation, Scarlett had just been confronted by one Mr. Rhett Butler, a dashing slave owner from South Carolina, who was not, we had already been informed, received in the best homes in Charleston—not because he was a slave owner, but because he had taken a girl out for a buggy ride without a chaperone.  That was bad enough, but now he had heard everything and Scarlett was too through.  This was no place to stop the story.  Things were just getting interesting.

Option Two: I could take my mother’s admonition to heart and transfer my affections from the tempestuous, slave-owning Scarlett to the long-suffering, hard-working, middle-aged Mammy, who seemed to have no other name, or the empty-headed but excitable Prissy, whose mother had neglected to instruct her properly in the art of midwifery, much to the surprise of Miss Melanie, who was in heavy labor with Ashley’s first child.  But that was no fun!  What eleven-year-old black girl on the West Side of Detroit wants to fantasize being some white girls’ personal property for four hundred pages?

Option Three: I could finish reading the book the way I’d been reading it, open to the skill of the storyteller, but fully conscious of the evil of the system of slavery, which in Gone With the Wind is always seen as “the good old days.”  In other words, I could read the book as myself, knowing what I know, and being what I be.  I didn’t have to pretend to be the master or the slave.  I could just be a fully engaged reader who also happened to be a little black girl, on the all-black West Side of Detroit, growing up in a black nationalist household where Rhett Butler’s charms were lost on my mother, much less the more subtle charms of the aforementioned Mr. Wilkes.  It was no contest.  Option Three it is, I thought, and curled up to get in a few more pages before lights out.

I loved the book, from first page to last.  And my mother didn’t need to worry.  I identified with Scarlett and Melanie only in the sense of following their struggles and sorrows, their losses and love affairs, with great curiosity.  I wondered about the choices they made, and the consequences of those choices.  When the South lost the war and Miss Scarlett had to work her own fields, I was glad, but I still hoped she’d be able to do it and to acquire, in the process, the compassion that comes with seeing yourself as a human being connected to all the other human beings by blood and bone and sinew and stories, so that the idea of buying and selling other people would become inconceivable, even to Miss Scarlett.

But that wasn’t the story Margaret Mitchell was telling, so Scarlett never learned that lesson, just like she never learned the contents of her heart, until it was too late and Rhett Butler had already delivered his most famous line and walked his dashing, my-dear-I-don’t-give-a-damn ass out the front door and out of her life forever (bad sequels and constant speculation notwithstanding).  And even at eleven years old, as I closed the now dog-eared paperback slowly with the satisfaction we always feel at the end of a well-told tale, I knew Scarlett’s life was still tied to fantasy instead of truth, and I knew that her way of living brought her to a moment the likes of which I only wanted to know in literature and not in my own life.

I was, of course, too young then to understand the exquisitely random nature of mutually endless love.  That came later just like my presence here, after years of refusing to set foot in this house.  After years of publicly obeying my mother’s command to reject a work that humanizes, glamorizes, and rewards slave owners.  After all those years, here I stand at last, barely resisting the urge to burn sage, and cast spells, and howl my ancestors’ pain until the spirits weep—but resisting, because I realize that none of this is necessary.  All I have to do is keep on writing.  My offering is my books.  I write for a living in a state where I would have been executed for even knowing how to read, but not anymore.

So I offer my books to the memory of my ancestors, and yours, because I also know this to be true: If I tell the truth of my tribe, and you tell the truth of your tribe, what we will find is that they are the same truth.  Which is really why I’m here.  Because I don’t believe most people love Gone With the Wind because they long for a return to the days when some people owned other people like livestock.  I know that’s not what made me risk my mother’s wrath.  It was the power of the word, the seduction of the story, and the skill of a writer who could only have told it better if she had understood that Mammy and Prissy and Uncle Peter and Big Sam each had their own spark of divine fire!  And what would that book have been like then?

But Margaret Mitchell didn’t live long enough to write that book, so I’m left to take comfort in the fact that the fictional Miss Scarlett, and her slave-owning, real-life counterparts, lost the war, leaving me free to read and write and read and write and read and write some more.  And I do.  And I will.  Guided, as always, by the words of Langston Hughes, who said, “Life is a big sea full of many fish.  I let down my nets and pull.”

And that’s all I have to say about that.