The movie “Gone with the Wind” premiered in Atlanta on this evening in 1939 at the Loew’s Grand Theater on what is now the site of the headquarters of Georgia-Pacific. 300,000 people, roughly the size of the city itself, were reported to have lined the streets that night for a glimpse of Hollywood in person.
The movie was an adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1939 book of the same name. In my youth as an Atlantan, the book was almost required reading, at least among those of my color. Ted Turner owned the rights to the movie and for a time played it almost nonstop at a theater in town, so exposure to it was fairly ubiquitous. Margaret Mitchel’s home in Midtown has burned and been restored several times, which is ironically fitting, since her book depicts the burning of Atlanta by General Sherman.
Both the book and film have increasingly been criticized over the years for glorifying the Antebellum South and for unflatteringly stereotypical depictions of African-Americans. Those criticisms are justified, but there are things to learn from and respond to in both. Alice Randall wrote a response to the book in 2001’s “The Wind Done Gone,” which is written from the perspective of Cynara, one of Scarlet O’Hara’s slaves. A suit by the Mitchell estate over the book was ultimately settled, but the mixed feelings that Gone With the Wind evokes still remain, even and perhaps especially here in Atlanta.
In my reading, the book is primarily about a strong, but flawed, woman in a tumultuous time. Less so than the film, the book shows some – though not nearly enough – of the darkness that was part of the culture of the times. That subtlety is one reading of the title and the book that is often lost in the duality of view that the book and film evoke.
Those thoughts are what I tried to express when I wrote this poem some time ago.
Not Yet Gone With the Wind
If Scarlet O’Hara was not beautiful
as Peggy Mitchell penned
then Hermes couldn’t play a tune
and Alice didn’t fall down a rabbit hole
Three husbands certainly disagreed
though two died before
we knew more than their names
and in the end the last
didn’t even give a damn
for that rascal Rhett
was himself no more a hero
than Scarlet was Harriet Nelson
So what is it still
about a vain and selfish
slave-owning fool
who chased the symbol
of a time that never really was –
poor whimpering Ashley –
that still has a place in a world where
slavery is banned and racism rightly wrong
I suppose in a way of sorts
we still find change disturbing
regard the future warily
and remember a past that was not
We carry on believing that
we’ll always have our Tara
and trusting that after all
tomorrow is another day
