(If you prefer listening to the audio version, that will be out later today:)
This Week In Southern History, we go all the way back to 1939, and here’s what the world looked like then:
A caped crusader by the name of Batman makes his first appearance in DC Comics #27
In what some call the beginning of The Civil Rights movement, Billie Holiday releases the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit
And Eighteen months after she disappeared in an attempt to fly around the world, pioneering US aviator Amelia Earhart is declared dead. She would’ve been 41 years old.
Down in Atlanta, Georgia, history was also being made, but this time, on the big screen. On December 15, 1939, after a tumultuous production including several screenplay revisions and director changes, a crowd of nearly 300,000 people turned up in front of Loew’s Grand Theatre for the premiere of Gone With The Wind.
If you’ve never seen the movie, please allow me to give a brief summation based on what I remember from the many times I was forced to watch it with my mother as a child:
So there’s this hoity-toity gal named Scarlet, see? And she lives on a big ole plantation with her family and a bunch of slaves, who, even though this is not the way it comes across in the movie, absolutely did not want to be there/be slaves. Anyways Scarlett finds out that the dude she has a crush on (Ashely) is fixing to marry his cousin, and instead of being like, “oh gross… Jesus Christ, good riddance,” she gets super jealous and tries to bone him down at a family BBQ.
Well, sadly for her, he’d still rather pork his cousin, but all was not lost as while there, she ran into a feller named Rhett Butler (played by Clark Cable, who my momma always said she heard had stinky breath). Now before anything could happen between them, everyone at this mint-julep-smelling-Klan rally gets all upset by the news that Abraham Lincoln has just put out a press release asking for volunteers to take on the confederacy. What a bummer.
Scarlett apparently took the Union’s declaration of war real hard cause she went on and married her lover’s cousin’s brother Charles to make him (Ashely) jealous. Painting a realllll good picture of the south here. I’m beaming with pride just retelling it (siggghhhh)
So anyway, because this is the past and the past is a nightmare, Charles immediately went off to fight for slavery and was instantly killed. Scarlett goes into mourning which seems ceremonial at best because as sad as she was supposed to be, she still gets caught doing the jitterbug or some other such dumbass-old-timey-white-people-dance with Rhett Butler’s halitosis having ass at some fancy party.
Anywho, shit goes south for the… well, South, after the Battle of Gettysburg and a bunch of fellers from Scarlett’s hometown are killed. The Union takes over Atlanta, some kids are born, Scarlett’s momma died of something they didn’t have a vaccine for yet, her dad loses his damn mind, and Rhett goes off to fight in the war….. which does undoubtedly sound more fun than hanging around there if you ask me.
Scarlett and the rest of the remaining Ohara’s continue to work in the cotton fields; aka make their slaves do it and take credit, when all of a sudden, some no-good-Yankee-carpet-bagger comes on their land, causing Scarlett’s half-insane daddy to be flung from his horse somehow, killing him in the process. Lots of people fell off horses and died back then. So it goes.
Well, after this, Scarlett being the piece of shit that she is, swindled some other fellers out of their money, tricked her sister into marrying some dude, tried to f*ck her cousin again, and then gets into some tax problems, I think. Oh, and the guy she tricked into marrying her sister died, and I can’t remember how but I’m sure he just ate a nasty piece of fish or looked at someone’s Papaw with the wrong tone… hell, who knows. Anyways this was all enough to get Rhett a good ole Civil War-era Hard-on, and he asked Scarlett to marry him.
Rhett and Scarlett have a kid, but she still wants to be with that cousin-f*cker from earlier, and that’s a real bummer for Rhett, I’m sure, but let’s not feel too bad for the guy because later on, he quite literally rapes her. Sheeewee. Not a good look.
Scarlett gets pregnant, falls down the stairs, and has a miscarriage (classic), and then after Rhett tells her they can get divorced, she begs him to stay, causing him to utter one of Hollywood’s most famous lines “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” then he walks off into the fog and out of her life.
And oh yeah, the South lost the f*cking war. The End.
Ok, we are all caught up!
Now I don’t have to tell you that this movie was an instant classic. Everyone knows that. Everyone also probably knows that if you adjust for inflation, it is still the highest-earning movie of all time. I’m fairly confident that most people reading this also have a pretty good idea of the controversy surrounding the movie’s depiction of slavery and the glorification of the “Lost Cause Of The Confederacy” myth. Those are a few things about this movie that depending on how you vote, you either accept as the blatant fact they are or deny entirely with your head both in the sand and up your ass at the same time. I don’t think I need to explain who is who in that situation.
I think one thing that doesn’t get talked about quite enough, though, and if it does, please forgive me, but I will reiterate it regardless, is that not everyone in the film’s cast was in attendance that day in 1939.
This may come as a shock to some of you, but the laws pertaining to race were a bit backward during this time in the south, and even though Atlanta has always progressed quicker than maybe the rest of us, that was not the case on December 15th at The Loews Theatre.
Hattie McDaniel was born on June 10, 1893, and would go on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy in Gone With The Wind. She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was an acclaimed blues singer, and not only was she the first Black woman to win an Oscar, but she was also the first Black woman to ever sing on the radio.
Hattie McDaniel says she understood the character of Mammy because her grandmother had worked as a slave on a plantation much like the one depicted in the film. In her 1939 acceptance speech for The Oscar she said…”Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, fellow members of the motion picture industry and honored guests: This is one of the happiest moments of my life, and I want to thank each one of you who had a part in selecting me for one of their awards, for your kindness. It has made me feel very, very humble; and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything that I may be able to do in the future. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you”
Yeah you know, you can go back and forth all day on whether or not the depiction of the American South was accurately portrayed in the movie Gone With The Wind and I’m sure you may even make a solid point or two. You can sit blissfully during this romanticized version of what was most assuredly a living hell for a large group of human beings in this country and pretend that all these Black people were making a big fuss over nothing and that racism surely ended with the emancipation proclamation as is such a deeply held belief by those white people who desperately need to believe that they haven’t had even the slightest leg up in this world. You can sit there and believe whatever you want…
But have you ever accepted an award for a movie thats premire you weren’t allowed to attend? I’d wager to say Hattie and her grandmother knew of a different south than the one you reminsced about so fondly. I say we make sure it stays gone with the wind too.
And ok yes, the cinematography WAS amazing. lol
Later
‘Corey