Giving A Damn: Racism, Romance and Gone with the Wind

I. ‘The Battle of Love’

‘Here was the last ever to be seen of the Knights and their ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave […] it is no more than a dream remembered.’1

It was not a kind thought that flitted across my mind while I waited at the airport in Montreal. The weather was bad, my flight was late and I was having lunch on the ‘American side’ of the terminal, listening to a big, jovial man talking about his son’s wedding on a former cotton plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. The man was discussing ordinary things – the weather, the bride, the wine served, what music they played. Everyone, he said, was dressed in antebellum clothing: ‘So much fun!’ is how he summed it up.

‘Dancing on graves!’ is what went through my mind. And then, quick on its heels, a well-disciplined self-flagellation, a socialized apologia: ‘Am I being uncharitable?’

The man and his companion passed on to the vast quantities of beer consumed at the reception. How ‘rowdy, but y’know happy-rowdy’ the groom’s fraternity brothers grew as the night progressed and how certain he was that ‘nobody slept that night, heh-heh-heh’.

The second unkind thought that passed through my mind was: ‘I am so glad that neither this man nor his son nor his son’s beer-guzzling frat-bros own my body.’

I suppose a bit of explanation is in order here: The overwhelming majority of African Americans are to some degree the carnal issue of precisely that ‘heh-heh-heh’. I, for example, am only the third generation of my family whose body is not legally owned by others. My maternal great-grandmother was born a slave. My maternal great-grandfather was a white slaveholder who impregnated her sometime around 1860 in order to increase his livestock of plantation labourers, his stock of lives. It was not just sport to rape one’s slaves: the children therefrom were valuable currency, investments in their owner’s wealth by virtue of their potential for profitable divestment.

The poet Caroline Randall Williams is the great-great-granddaughter of Edmund Pettus, ‘the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named’, as she put it in an op-ed succinctly entitled: ‘You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument’ in The New York Times on June 26, 2020. Writing about the removal of Confederate monuments, she observed that ‘there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred. To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof.’

America’s history is one in which Black and white families are traumatically interconnected. But that history is repressed. The pain of it echoes across generations. Nearly all Black Americans are the thoroughly mixed progeny of white slaveholders, the violence of whose paternity is variously misperceived as a biological stain, an unfortunate mutation, a legal non-fiction, a dark political taboo.

The scars of slavery’s violence are hard to talk about. My mind drags the details into the present involuntarily, for, like any taboo, these feelings are deep in my autonomic system, as persistent reiteration, as terrible hallucination. ‘A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish,’ wrote Jean Baudrillard.2

Growing up, I was protected, insulated, cautioned and by some measures made paranoid by my grandmother’s narrative: They – the always-watchful ‘they’! – might own your body, but they can never own you. That was her sound advice, a coming to terms in the present with a very complicated past. I am safest, I learned at a very young age, when I can discipline myself to leave the body behind. It is a mystery, a kind of magic, to be raised both within and without oneself; to see and to see oneself seeing. That is the stress that W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’3 It is also a kind of madness – to dissociate from one’s deepest organs of knowing; to cut the cord to the lifeboat of the present, and trust that past and future will form the raft upon which you might purchase your own survival.

The question continues to weigh: Was I being uncharitable?

The city of Charleston is known for its beautifully preserved plantations and colonial buildings. Tourism is perhaps its major industry; destination weddings and special events underwrite the maintenance costs of plantation manors. Yet Charleston’s architectural charm rests on the extraordinary wealth generated by the slave trade. It is estimated that half of all slaves imported to the United States entered through Charleston’s port.4 Its history is marked by slave rebellions and the violent quashing thereof; the fear of insurrection was so great that the Security Act of 1739 specifically required all white men to carry guns to church. And like many other places in the southern United States, various laws prohibited slaves from earning money, growing their own food, practising religion, or learning to read. In 1860, South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union; and the first battle of the Civil War took place at Fort Sumter, in Charleston’s harbour.

The languorous romance of plantation life in the Deep South, of ladies in ruffled dresses and gentlemen in riding boots sipping mint juleps, is a fairy tale popularized by Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, and the 1939 film adaptation starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. The tropes projected from that one work alone have had disproportionate global influence in imagining the passionate seductions of the antebellum South and the ‘tragic lost cause’ of the Confederacy. Despite the influence of abolitionist narratives like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or Frances Anne Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863), it is ultimately the apologist glossing of Gone with the Wind that has had the more enduring appeal. Gone with the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937; and a Harris poll found that, as recently as 2014, it was the second favourite book among American readers, after the Bible. It was not until the global outrage at the death of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 that Americans began to rethink the book’s oversized influence in entrenching a number of racialized stereotypes: the sweep-em-off-their-feet-but-don’t-give-a-damn ideal of Rhett Butler’s bad-boy wooing, Scarlett O’Hara’s beautiful-but-spoiled white Southern belle, and also the faithful Black Mammy-who-has-no-other-name-but-Mammy, and the figuration of slaves generally as simple, docile and happy with their lot. Among the flurry of apologetic gestures performed by American corporations after the death of George Floyd, HBO took the film version of Gone with the Wind off the air, because of its ‘painful stereotypes’ and ‘racist depictions’. The film was reinstated on its streaming service a few weeks later, bracketed by an introductory ‘discussion of its historical context’ presented by the University of Chicago film scholar Jacqueline Stewart.

Part of Gone with the Wind’s popularity no doubt came from its positioning as a feel-good follow-up to the more controversial and violent defence of the Confederacy presented in Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905)5 and its film adaptation, Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith. Wrote Dixon:

Prior to the Civil War, the Capital was ruled, by an aristocracy founded on brains, culture and blood … Now a negro electorate controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets unchallenged and unmolested … A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American Democracy.6

The Clansman culminates with celebratory descriptions of