My college roommate interned there! They all called it Peggy’s Place and it was the site of much scandal - it was always which security guard went on the lam and who gave whom “the herp”.
You know, I have always meant to go to Dragon Con and we never have. The weird thing is, I went to Agnes Scott so you’d think I’d have gone, but I think it must always have happened before move-in? Anyway, just for you, if I ever do go, and once Tater isn’t quite so larval surely we’ll get around to it, I’ll be Zombie Scarlett for you. Or perhaps Steampunk Rhett. Perhaps I’ll go with Young Sir Toots-alot as one of Scarlett’s forgotten children.
As long as the movie was it still left out a ton of stuff from the book.
Like Scarlett’s two other kids.
Like the racist comment Melanie made when she found out that she and Ashley wouldn’t have to move North after all(Scarlett offered him a job)
Like the backstory of Ellen O’Hara. She was quite a young woman too, not a middle aged matron. Married Gerald when she was fifteen and he was forty-one. So she was around thirty five when she died.
There were several other characters that the movie had no time to include.
GWTW could be remade, use the same book, and feel very different. Oh, Prissy wan’t the ditz in the book that she was in the movie. She was the daughter of a slave woman Gerald bought. Slaves couldn’t legally marry, but Prissy’s mother was the slave wife of Pork.
I would love to see it made into a HBO miniseries that is more faithful to the book and works in a lot more the supporting characters (particularly Grandma Fontaine and [name eludes me but- the ex-con who lives under Melanie’s house] and various county folk). I would also like to see and Ashley who it’s believable a 16 year old girl would pine over.
What was really ambitious, and an epic fail from all accounts, was the attempt to make it into a musical in London a few years ago, and they did work in the other kids and some of the other characters who weren’t in the movie. It might could make a good two or three musicals, but no way you’re going to squeeze all of that into one evening at the theater unless you skip most of the book. (It wasn’t the first musical attempt- Harve Presnell (Fargo, Paint Your Wagon) starred in one production- but I’m guessing there’s a reason it was forgotten.)
That’s always the problem, isn’t it. Nobody’s in a rush to remake classics; they should remake the turkeys.
But I love the HBO miniseries idea. And it would address some of the problems raised in this thread - we could have a sweeping epic drama about the Civil War & Reconstruction, without the 1930’s Hollywood racism; ie, there would be slaves, but they wouldn’t be shufflin’ and grinnin’. (Pork and Big Sam come to mind. And jeez, we could finally get good actors for those roles!)
No, Prissy was still a ditz. Just not QUITE such a stereotype. It was her mother who wasn’t the ditz. (She was much more dignified)
It was also implied, I believe, that Scarlett’s second child, Ella, suffered from fetal alcohol sydrome. (At one point it mentions how Scarlett is always sneaking sips from the whiskey bottle, and how her doctor never thought to mention that she shouldn’t drink anything while pregnant, because “ladies never drank”.)
That would be Ben Hecht (although I assume he didn’t have sex with Selznick, but I don’t know. But Selznick liked flowery intertitles (as per the Farewell to Arms thing). I don’t know if I’d call it puke inducing, but it is pretty purple. It does fit the theme of the movie, though, and I don’t know that it’s inappropriate from that standpoint.
Big Sam was outstanding in the film.
“Shufflin and grinnin” Christ, you don’t think that slaves acted the way their owners expected them to? If they acted Noble and Reluctant, they might have the shit beaten out of them.
You have to do that when you make a film.
Ashley’s son would not be so…touching, meaningful, sad, whatever, complaining, “It isn’t morning yet!” if you had to keep up with Scarlet’s rug rats during the film, for example.
The “shufflin’ and grinnin’” didn’t stop with the end of the Civil War, either. You could see that behavior from older black people at least through the 1960s (as depicted, accurately, in Driving Miss Daisy). I am old enough to remember the tail end of that era.
That is just an uncomfortable truth. Big Sam’s portrayal may be mystifying and awkward to modern audiences, but it is not inaccurate. (In fact, the modern movies that omit that behavior are showing a scrubbed version of the past. Maybe to good purpose, I dunno.)
Black people in powerless positions tended to adopt a deferential persona. Not just in the South, either. You can see the same sort of thing, for example, in the Rochester character on the old Jack Benny Program.
You see the same sort of thing today with some elderly Black folks, particularly the ones who came north to Chicago from Mississippi during the Great Migration. I constantly have to remind myself that their ducking their heads, grinning and avoiding eye contact is their way of showing me (the White nurse) respect, not that they’re ignoring me or think I’m an idiot. I can NOT get the hang of having an entire conversation without eye contact, although I’m trying.
It isn’t an inaccurate, stylized, or racist portrayal at all. People claiming that is exaggerated for effect don’t have the same experiences I do. I was raised by a dead ringer for Mammy from the time I was 17 months old until I went to college and beyond. She had her own apartment down the street but she was at our house from about 6 am to 8 pm every day. Her name was Lola and I have written about her here before. She had a hard life growing up and lost her husband very young, never learned to drive and her kids moved far away and hardly ever saw her. She old even when I was a baby but she was very wise and loved to read. My parents only paid her a nominal wage but they also took care of everything else for her.
So-called sensitive types would be the first to decry such an oppressive relationship today except it was the exact opposite of that. She was like a surrogate grandparent that loved us dearly but also wasn’t afraid to tell us when she thought we were screwing something up. She always called me Mr (my first name) from when I was a toddler on but she was always the real boss and I definitely wanted her approval for just about everything.
She lived well into her 90’s even after having her legs amputated at the knee in a nursing home. I made a very long trip to surprise her about 8 years ago. As soon as I gave her hugs, the first thing I noticed was various pictures of me and my brothers displayed prominently in her half of her small nursing home room. I couldn’t help but start crying and stayed as long as was allowed. I came back the next day with presents for things that she needed but that was the least that I could do. She died about 5 years ago at 94 and I was so upset by it that I had to take a day off work.
A lot of people don’t understand Southern culture and especially the race relations involved in it enough to comment on the accuracy. It is a whole lot more complex than you think. There is no reason to intellectually boycott a book or movie because you think the black characters don’t live up to modern ideals. It is just a simple fact that many black servants really did behave that way well past the Civil War and, to some extent, even today in rural areas. It is also a delusion to think that there wasn’t a give and take on both sides even for slaves.
The key point that Sampiro was eluding to earlier regarding field slaves versus house slaves is an important one that not many people appreciate. Not all slaves were equal. There was a hierarchy and a promotion path. Common field slaves were the lowest rank. They got the worst jobs like picking cotton all day long. The worst among those could literally be worked to death because they were expendable and not very valuable. However, if a field slave gained enough experience and was respected enough, he could become a foreman or supervisor. It is the same hierarchy as factory workers during that time or even today.
House slaves were the most trusted and respected slaves of all. Slaves like Mammy were at the absolute top of that hierarchy. They were the day to day boss of all of the lower house-servants and could give their owners their true opinion if they thought something needed to be said. They weren’t just entrusted with simple household chores, they were often surrogate parents and nannies for their owner’s small children including serving as wet-nurses.
In summary, the whole dynamic is much more complicated than you can see through a contemporary non-Southern political lens.
Except that it isn’t, really. I don’t mean I’m challenging any of your claims about your family and your mammy sharing mutual love and respect and having a great and mutually beneficial relationship. I totally believe you on all that.
But let’s face it, raising somebody else’s kids and looking after their house literally fourteen hours a day for over twenty years for only a “nominal wage”, even if you get your meals and some other bennies thrown in, IS at bottom oppressive.
I’m not saying that your parents or your mammy or any other individual is to blame for that. But the fact that mid-20th-century white people could obtain nearly double-shift substitute parenting as well as other domestic services from black people, every single day or nearly so for decades at a time, at such a minimal cost was a by-product of an entrenched system of racist oppression.
Part of the oppressive legacy of slavery was that many black domestic and agricultural workers, like the slaves whose work they inherited, were considered even by kind and generous employers as household dependents to be “taken care of”, as you put it, rather than as autonomous employees whose services were worth serious money.
Except it isn’t when you see it in practice. We literally lived in trailer home on the edge of my grandparents property until I was 4. My parents were schoolteachers under an emergency plan that placed them in the local all black school and they made less than $10,000 a year combined. That was a small sum even in 1975.
We went through a small string of babysitters and nannies before we found Lola. She was near retirement age even then but didn’t know how to navigate the system especially because she couldn’t drive. My mother made an arrangement in which all her needs would be taken care of if she just stayed with us most of the time and took care of whatever she could. She never had to to hard labor. Ironing two shirts and then watching The Price is Right (her favorite show ever until her death) was about as strenuous as it it got. She was charged with controlling me and my brothers and our dogs but a stern look is all it usually took to get any of us under control.
That is what you call a symbiotic and healthy relationship because we all considered her a true family member even above some of our technical ones. That type of thing is very common in the South.
Lola had a huge list of quotable statements too. Lightening hit our house during a thunderstorm once while we were all watching TV. Sparks shot out of the TV and it was destroyed as were most of the other appliances in the house. Lola just sat on the couch without saying much at all even though we were all terrified. When my mother came home and asked her about it she just replied, 'Miss Debbie, when lightening hits, I sits!". That is a true story and she had a bunch of them.
It disheartens me to think I could write a completely factual story about my childhood and have it deemed a racist work. Lola really did sound and look just like Mammy. She also filled our refrigerator with Welch’s Grape Soda (which I have an affection for). Collard greens and government cheese were a lunch staple. I used to stand in line with her for the latter at a black church once a month. However, if you put any of those things into a story today, it is deemed racist because some people refuse to believe history or they are in the terminal stages of denial. I have said it before and I will say it again. I love most black people. It is smug white liberals that don’t know what they are talking about that I despise.
Shagnasty your story is meaningful and certainly complex. What is missing from it is, of course, her take. Where are her hopes and aspirations? Her frustrations? Her fears? Her other relationships (she went to church, right?). I notice a lot in your narrative about what your family got out of her, and very little actually about her, as a person. That is fundamentally different than how you’d write about a treasured aunt or older sister.
You may not know much about her inner life. You were a kid, and you are seeing her through a particular lens. That’s fine. But you are making good some pretty broad statements about her emotions, based on essentially ypur own nostalgia. If she were writing this it may (or may not) look a little different. Your willingness to speak for her is its own kind of power situation.
Yes, it’s complex. But don’t gloss over experiences you don’t have access to based on your own childhood recollections.
And definitely don’t equate a nanny in 1975 with a household slave that may be treated well, but can also be sold, raped, beaten, separated from her family, and subject to basically any abuse without repercussion. Even if that never happens, to live with that reality is unbearable. Comfortable slavery is still slavery and still an atrocity.
