I work with a state aid organization and everyday I talk with black people who are old enough to be my parents and they call me “Mister Jonathan”. Some whites do too, especially older and-or rural whites. I can’t stand it- it makes me feel like I should be wearing a seersucker suit and a string tie- but I accept it and understand because traditional Southern culture (which is slipping away fast, which is both a good and bad thing) has class rules and rituals as strict as anything the feudal Japanese could ever dream up. (I’ve written a half-serious/half-tongue-in-cheek guide for northern friends who live down here called “Dixie Bushido” about the unwritten protocol they should know; some have said that while they understood it was meant largely in jest, it helped them tremendously.)
That right there? The part where an industrious, responsible and intelligent person who’s been working all her adult life is nearing retirement age but still doesn’t “know how to navigate the system” and consequently has to take on long-term full-time-plus employment (with people who are always addressed with honorifics, even the children, while she is addressed by her first name) just to get her “needs taken care of”? That right there is a symptom of a fundamentally oppressive system built into the economic and cultural structure of the society.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
It disheartens me to think I could write a completely factual story about my childhood and have it deemed a racist work. […] 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.
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You’re being oversensitive. Nobody is claiming that your story is racist or that you are racist just for describing the facts of your childhood. I’m simply pointing out that part of what made that particular childhood possible for you was the legacy and persistence of systematic racist oppression in the culture you grew up in.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
I have said it before and I will say it again. I love most black people.
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That’s the first thing you’ve said in this thread that actually does make you, personally, sound a little bit racist. Lumping an entire racial category of people, or even “most” of them, into a single entity that you have one prevailing emotion about, whether that emotion is positive or negative, is kinda prejudice-flavored.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
It is smug white liberals that don’t know what they are talking about that I despise.
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You can despise liberals all you please, but there is nothing smug, or ignorant, or specifically “white” about pointing out the systematic racism that helped shape the lives of African-American domestic workers.
As I said before, just because your family and Lola had a healthy and mutually supportive affectionate relationship doesn’t mean that there was nothing oppressive about the system that made it possible. You are the one misinterpreting that reasonable observation into an imaginary accusation against you personally.
I’ve thought something similar before. When you have to deal with summer heat & humidity like in Japan & the American South, it’s probably a good thing to have deeply rooted good manners & politeness. Otherwise you’d be killing your neighbors from July thru September.
“I don’t care if you is the last chicken in Atlanta…”
In the novel, Uncle Peter was with Charles & Melanie’s father when he died in the Mexican War and was charged by him to take care of the children. He raised them along with Aunt Pittypat (IIRC their mother was already dead- she’s definitely dead by the start of the novel) and is very much a father figure to Melanie. At one point he’s deliberately insulted by a northern woman who calls him a ‘pet’ and his feelings are crushed; Scarlett’s furious at the woman, but doesn’t say anything and gives a fake smile because she does business with the woman’s husband, which causes resentment by Uncle Peter.
Again, I’ve no rose colored glasses about slavery and the abuses and daily indignities and injustices of it, but relationships like the Hamiltons with Uncle Peter absolutely did exist on the individual level. A prime example is Jefferson Davis: when was on the run after the Civil War and knew his capture was probably coming he entrusted the care of his family to his (recently liberated by the war) former slave Robert Brown, who took his duty very seriously. Brown stayed with Mrs. Davis and the children for the first months after Davis’s arrest, he worked odd jobs to provide money for the family (because they were penniless) and the boys slept with him in the basement room of the hotel where their mother was under house arrest. He assaulted a white Union soldier who insulted Mrs. Davis and, amazingly, there was no retaliation (an officer who witnessed it basically said the soldier had it coming). When Mrs. Davis decided to send the children to Montreal because of death threats she sent them with her mother and her brother, both of whom were “poor relations” not known for their wise decisions or money management, so she also sent Robert to be their main guardian.
After the war he and the family parted ways a couple of times but always came back together. He remained with the Davis’s until Jefferson’s death and Varina’s moving to NYC, at which time he moved to Colorado Springs to spend the rest of his long life with the Davis’s daughter Margaret and her family who lived out there.
May.
Good points. If you’re interested in a contemporary Civil War-era drama that was published when the Civil War was still very fresh in people’s minds, try Little Women. GWTW was historical fiction, more or less the same thing as what happens when today’s writers and directors make WW2 and Vietnam movies.
Absolutely. There’s a huge difference between (1) pointing out that not every depiction of affectionate relationships between white employers and faithful deferential black servants is a dishonest racist caricature, and (2) trying to claim that such a relationship can be totally free from the effects of systematic racist oppression.
One of the horrors of slavery was that even if a slave did have an Uncle Peter/Mammy/super close relationship with their master and-or his family, they could be one estate settlement or bad harvest away from the auction block. In genealogy it’s distressingly common to see records of slave sales to settle estate debts- think of people being sold away from family/loved ones/everything that was their’s every time that happened.
Most slaves would change owners at least a few times in their life by sale or inheritance or transfer. In GWTW Mammy does: she was born the slave of Solange Robillard, was given as part of the dowry to her daughter Ellen; she spent her girlhood in a mansion in Savannah (the book says she slept on a cot in Solange’s bedroom from girlhood) and went from there to a middle-of-nowhere farm and had no choice in the matter.
There’s a great moment in the book when Scarlett gets mad with Mammy after the war and orders her to go back to Tara. Mammy, who is still completely devoted to Scarlett very much, tells her (paraphrasing, but it’s close to this), “I’m free, I don’t have to”. Even in GWTW, it’s clear that it’s not lost on Mammy what has happened.
Which was the point Harriet Beecher Stowe was making in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Twice in the novel, there was a case of slaves being sold away from a “good” master–when the Shelbys had debts to settle, and when Augustine St. Clare was suddenly killed and his selfish and shallow wife sold off the rest of the slaves. Stowe made the point that (a) no matter how well they were treated, circumstances could change all that in a heartbeat, and (b) even if slaves were treated well, their rights as people were still being denied…and their families could be broken up, which was a subject close to Stowe’s heart as a mother who’d lost children.
The scene above-
Set-up: Mammy is livid at Scarlett for becoming engaged to Rhett so soon after Frank’s funeral. So is the rest of Atlanta (except Melanie, and even she thinks Scarlett should wait), but the book is clear that Mammy’s is the only condemnation of the match Scarlett cares about. After Mammy curses out Rhett and Scarlett both as trash and tells Scarlett she’s an awful person (for many reasons, which are valid), Scarlett orders her back to Tara.
[slightly abridged]
[QUOTE=Hermione]
(b) even if slaves were treated well, their rights as people were still being denied…and their families could be broken up, which was a subject close to Stowe’s heart as a mother who’d lost children.
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Completely off topic, but a vignette I thought somehow interesting is that in her later years when she was senile Harriet Beecher Stowe used to wander into Mark Twain’s parlor. It wasn’t because she was a fan- she didn’t know him from Adam by then- but his house was in walking distance and she liked to wander whenever she could get away from her keepers. Always seemed somehow symbolic of one superstar world famous writer about U.S. race relations passing the torch to the next person in that category.
… you’re going to tell us that and not send it around? I’m picturing Emily Post eaten by Florence King.
[QUOTE=Zsofia]
I’m picturing Emily Post eaten by Florence King.
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Eww! So am I now!
I got halfway into the book as a teenager before I gave up on it. I can deal with a little discomfort in my pleasure reading. But not that much.
I’ve watched the movie, at least most of it, but I didn’t make any great impression on me. Perhaps if I were into cinematography, I could find something enjoyable out in it. But the story just isn’t thing.
Also, the theme song just makes me gag. I blame it on the three summers I spent working in the Confederate section of Six Flags over Georgia. They played that song over and over and over again over the loud speakers.
Sampiro, I would love to read your “Dixie Bushido”. I know it will be accurate and provide some context this type of thing which many people aren’t well-versed in. There are a whole lot of social rules that still apply to the South that aren’t even recognized as an idea in most parts of the country. It has its good points and bad. I grew up in it too and never liked it when Southern culture was misportrayed in the greater media (that isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of warranted criticisms of it; it is just harder to take them seriously when so many people get the fundamentals wrong).
The difference here is that if The Godfather paints a more comforting portrait of Mafia dons than was the reality, it doesn’t really matter. Very few Americans identify with the Mob.
It’s been nearly 40 years since I saw GWTW on the big screen, and read the book. So I don’t know if GWTW in either form tells a more self-justifying story about Southern white people before and after the war, but if it does, it put that story into the popular consciousness of a nation that was still working out how it felt about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow.
If, for instance, a Northern white would have come away from the movie with the sense that while Southern blacks really didn’t know what to do with their freedom, so Jim Crow made some kind of sense, but hey, we freed them so our work here is done, then that would be an unfortunate and harmful take-away.
This is not to say that that was the message that some predecessor of myself would have gotten in 1939, but the point is that the comparison you’re making with the Godfather movies doesn’t hold up.
One of the things that came through strongly enough in the book is the extent to which Scarlett is her own worst enemy. She carries that flame for Ashley across the decades, without really having much of an idea of who Ashley is. And she doesn’t understand herself any better than she understands Ashley. The only thing she is good at is surviving, and she’s willing to steal her sister’s beau if that’s what it takes. To me, the mystery is, what does Rhett see in her?
From the book, she wasn’t a flawed character because that suggests someone worthwhile once you get past the flaws. To me, Scarlett is someone I wouldn’t want to know in the first place, and wouldn’t trust with a postage stamp. I can see attributing some of that to the limitations on what women could do back then, but not all of it by a long shot.
While Margaret Mitchell wrote that she was not beautiful, she was in the movie. Perhaps Rhett liked her attitude, which was far different from women of that era. One could go buggy riding with her, and not have to fight a duel.
You’re somewhat rashly assuming that Rhett is any better at healthy relationships than Scarlett is. He despises conventionality and timidity, and he’s immensely attracted to Scarlett’s courage and initiative and the way she relishes being forthright when she thinks she can get away with it. But that doesn’t mean that his infatuation with her is sustainable or mature.
I think Rhett is shown as having a rather romantic nature under all his ostentatious cynicism, and he had probably been dreaming all his life of loving a woman with an independent reckless spirit like his own who was yet not irrevocably outside the pale of “decent society” and thus could give him legitimate children, a home life beyond the demimonde, etc. Well, he thought he’d found that combination in Scarlett, but he didn’t or wouldn’t realize that what made its contradictions possible was her fundamental lack of integrity, which eventually destroyed his love.