Since I know you're interested and since you're probably not scanning your usual news sources today, and since it's sorta on topic, here's something for you from today's Post.
A Love-Hate Relationship With Scarlett
By Donna Britt
Friday, July 20, 2001; Page B01
I was about 12 when my mother placed the fattest book I'd ever seen into my hands, certain that I, her romantic bookworm daughter, would enjoy it.
Over the years, I devoured the novel's passionate romance a dozen times -- on buses, between classes, over fried-baloney sandwiches. Soon Mom's hardback was as shabby as the dress that inspired the book's heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, to fashion a replacement out of green velvet curtains.
Alice Randall, 42, also received "Gone With the Wind" at age 12 from her mother.
She couldn't have been more appalled.
By the book's portrayal of Ku Klux Klansmen as heroic. By its intellectually inferior, one-dimensional black characters. By a white friend's suggestion that she ignore dimwitted Prissy and sexless Mammy in favor of Scarlett because "you're like her -- you should relate to her."
In fact, Randall related to her father, who'd castigated her at age 5 for uncritically parroting a teacher's statement that Columbus -- not the Indians who were living here -- "discovered America." She related to her grandmother, who like Mammy was "as big as two houses," says Randall, yet richly complex.
She hated the book.
That two African American sixth-graders had such different reactions to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel isn't surprising. Today, I agree with Randall's objections.
Yet my affection for the book -- or for what it meant to me -- seems hard-wired. It's that stubborn, leftover love that enfolds much of what captivated us as children.
Now comes Randall's controversial new novel, "The Wind Done Gone," a parody written in the voice of a beautiful slave who happens to be the half sister of "Other" -- read Scarlett. How irreverent is "Wind"?
Other ain't scarlet, she's black.
Randall, a Nashville-based song and script writer, recently stopped in Washington, her girlhood home. Despite her legal troubles -- an injunction briefly barred Houghton Mifflin from selling "Wind" after Mitchell's heirs sued for copyright infringement -- Randall seemed as warm and sweet as a just-baked cobbler.
Minus the syrup.
She believes Mitchell's novel is viciously racist in ways unexplained by the author's being "a product of her times." Numerous African American authors were writing complex black characters in the 1920s and '30s, she points out, as were several white writers, including Mississippian William Faulkner.
Randall has met hundreds of readers, black and white, who share her contempt; some tearfully thank her for challenging a book whose caricatures caused them considerable pain. Yet millions "don't realize there are people who despise the book," she marvels. They so adore the novel, they automatically refer to it as "beloved."
Beloved, Randall wonders, for what? Take Mitchell's much-admired character Melanie, Scarlett's sweet, self-effacing rival. Randall's similar character, Mealy Mouth, is a murderer.
"How sweet can you be if everything you own, every piece of clothing you wear, is purchased with someone else's suffering?" Randall asks. And while Mitchell's Scarlett is unquestionably white, Randall's satirical match, Other, turns out to have had a black great-great-grandmother.
Despite her book's racial taunting, Randall's goal was to "finally begin to erase the color line," she says. In Mitchell's novel, "blacks and whites were fundamentally separate." Her book suggests that "beneath the surface, there is unity, there is oneness. . . . Color lines are not inevitable, never to be erased."
Both fascinating and frustrating, "Wind" combines too-swift action and piercing, poignant prose. Though I admired Randall's insight and talent, I longed to see them applied to a story of her own.
Yet she got me to read GWTW for the first time in decades. This time, I felt the ugliness I once ignored: How two teenaged "gentlemen" castigate a slave their age, calling him "an impudent black fool." Scarlett's father saying, "Never will I let a darky on this place marry off it. It's too expensive." The offhand mention of how Ashley "tossed his bridle reins to a pickaninny."
In Mitchell's book -- and in the actual Old South -- black girls were anonymous "pickaninnies," not sought-after belles, regardless of their appeal.
Yet, entranced by GWTW's sweeping romance, I overlooked that fact.
Love can make you do that. A black friend who grew up working-class in the Bronx reacted similarly to certain 1930s musicals.
"I loved Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies on TV," she says, "the sequined gowns, the steamer trunks full of resort wear. I never felt repugnance or anger about [the movies'] obsequious porters or fat black servants -- I didn't know anybody like them.
"They weren't real to me, so I saw past them."
Yet as the years passed, she felt uncomfortable admitting her Fred-and-Ginger thing, feeling that she "should have known better than to like them."
Today, says my friend, "I understand that the sacrifices, the denial of dignity, of those invisible people made those glamorous lives possible. I'm 45. . . . "
Then she sighs.
"But part of me will always love those movies."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company |
