Sasha's Reviews > Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell was a racist and in 1936, 70 years after the Civil War, she wrote a thousand-page love letter to racism. If you'd like to hear why slavery was terrific and black people are inferior to whites and they liked being slaves, here is your epic. If that sounds unpleasant, you won't like Gone With the Wind.

A non-racist book can have racist characters, and all the characters in this book are racist. Is the book itself necessarily racist? Yes. It has an omniscient narrator, and many long, racist passages that are clearly not from any character's perspective. They feel like the nonfiction interludes in War & Peace and they're racist. Is it possible Mitchell means for us to disagree with her omniscient narrator? No. There's no evidence whatsoever of that, and the omniscient passages that defend the South and slavery are written with passion and supported by racist scenes in the story. This book intends to be racist; Margaret Mitchell believes what she says; she was a racist person who wrote a hateful book. I can prove it and I'm about to.

We start off in the glory days of the Old South, as a young, callow, beautiful Scarlett O'Hara flirts with everyone's boyfriends. Happy slaves bustle around:

"The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash...they were well-fed, well-clothed and looked after in sickness and old age. They were proud of the good names of their owners and, for the most part, proud to belong to people who were quality."

We meet some of them, Scarlett's "small white hand disappearing into their huge black paws and the four capered with delight at the meeting and with pride at displaying before their comrades what a pretty Young Miss they had."

Faithful slave Mammy is introduced, with her "kind face, sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey's face" - "the mottled wise old eyes saw deeply, saw clearly, with the directness of the savage and the child, undeterred by conscience when danger threatened her pet." Mammy is one of the few morally pure characters in the book, but it's always that noble savage quality.

Luckily Scarlett stays away from the slave quarters, where "the faint niggery smell which crept from the cabin increased her nausea."

But then war comes. Here's noble and boring Ashley, the limpest point of the oncoming love triangle, describing what the war is about. Notice that his vision of the South is indivisible from slavery:

I hear the darkies coming home across the fields at dusk, tired and singing and ready for supper, and the sound of the windlass as the bucket goes down into the cool well. And there's the long view down the road to the river, across the cotton fields, and the mist rising from the bottom lands in the twilight. And that is why I'm here who have no love of death or misery or glory and no hatred for anyone. Perhaps that is what is called patriotism.

After the War and during Reconstruction, things get really dark (get it? lol) as Northerners ruin black people: "Some of the free negroes were getting quite insolent. This last [Scarlett] could hardly believe, for she had never seen an insolent negro in her life."

But "The [Freedmen's] Bureau fed them while they loafed and poisoned their minds against their former masters." And here's much more from the omniscient narrator:

[They] furthermore told the negroes they were as good as the whites in every way and soon white and negro marriages would be permitted, soon the estates of their former owners would be divided and every negro would be given forty acres and a mule for his own. They kept the negroes stirred up with tales of cruelty perpetrated by the whites and, in a section long famed for the affectionate relations between slaves and slave owners, hate and suspicion began to grow.

[Now Southerners] were looking on the state they loved, seeing it trampled by the enemy, rascals making a mock of the law, their former slaves a menace, their men disenfranchised, their women insulted.

This eventually leads to the formation of the noble Ku Klux Klan, who merely attempt to protect Southern women from being raped by uppity former slaves. Here's a Klan member now:

"'Wilkerson had gone a bit too far with his nigger-equality business. Oh yes, he talks it to those black fools by the hour. He had the gall - the - ' Tony sputtered helplessly, 'to say niggers had a right to - to - white women.'"

"The negroes were on top and behind them were the Yankee bayonets," thinks Scarlett: "She could be killed, she could be raped and, very probably, nothing would ever be done about it."

And here's the omniscient narrator summing it up:

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being.

This is all demonstrated in the action. Scarlett O'Hara's headstrong ways nearly get every man in town hung. (view spoiler)[Her foolish habit of driving alone through the worst parts of town almost gets her raped by a freed slave, forcing the Klan to take action and lynch him, and they all almost get caught. Her second husband is killed. (hide spoiler)] Divorced from its context, this is a brilliant scene. It's done entirely from Scarlett's point of view, so the actual gun fight is totally off page. What we see instead is the wives, with Northern soldiers in their living rooms waiting for the men to return - surrounded by enemies, their faces frozen into nonchalant expressions, desperately and silently scheming to save their husbands' lives. It's great stuff, as long as you can forget that you're being asked to root for the KKK to get away with lynching a man.

And here's a pretty long series of quotes. Again, they're all from the omniscient narrator - that is, from the book itself.

The South had been tilted as by a giant malicious hand, and those who had once ruled were now more helpless than their former slaves had ever been.

The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. The better class of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white masters...Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of 'trashy free issue niggers,' who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class.

In slave days, these lowly blacks had been despised by the house negroes and yard negroes as creatures of small worth...Plantation mistresses had put the pickaninnies through courses of training and elimination to select the best of them for the positions of greater responsibility. Those consigned to the fields were the ones least willing or able to learn, the least energetic, the least honest and trustworthy, the most vicious and brutish...[but now] the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild - either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.

To the credit of the negroes, including the least intelligent of them, few were actuated by malice and those few had usually been "mean niggers" even in slave days. But they were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily led and from long habit accustomed to taking orders.
...
Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles.
...
Thanks to the negro vote, the Republicans and their allies were firmly entrenched and they were riding roughshod over the powerless but still protesting minority.

Man, just read that last sentence again. Wow.

Anyway, this is all very difficult for poor Scarlett: "The more I see of emancipation the more criminal I think it is. It's just ruined the darkies. Thousands of them aren't working at all and the ones we can get to work at the mill are so lazy and shiftless they aren't worth having. and if you so much as swear at them, much less hit them a few licks for the good of their souls, the Freedmen's Bureau is down on you like a duck on a June bug."

She complains that Northerners "Did not know that negroes had to be handled gently, as though they were children, directed, praised, petted, scolded...How could anyone get any work done with free niggers quitting all the time?...[It's] too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant negroes drunk with whiskey and freedom."

And with the final word, here's a former slave himself, Big Sam, who "galloped over to the buggy,his eyes rolling with joy and his white teeth flashing, and clutched her outsretched hand with two big hands as big as hams. His watermelon-pink tongue lapped out, his whole body wiggled and his joyful contortions were as ludicrous as the gambolings of a mastiff. ... 'Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody ter eed me good vittles reg'lar, and tell me whut ter do an' whut not ter do.'"

Okay, is that enough? That was gross to type out. And don't think I'm cherry-picking the only racist passages; this book is soaked in racism. God's nightgown, it's fuckin' racist. Pat Conroy, in a despicably fawning introduction, sees fit to mention that "No black man or woman can read this book and be sorry that this particular wind is gone," and what the hell kind of thing is that to say? "White people, on the other hand...you gotta be a little bummed out, right?" Is that what you meant, Pat?

And look, yes, it's too bad that this book has destroyed itself with hatred, because it's got a lot going for it. It certainly has Scarlett O'Hara going for it. She's fuckin' terrific, a towering antiheroine, amoral, selfish and brave. Rhett Butler, her swarthy and cynical love interest, is pretty good too, although he can't stop mansplaining amorality and he might have some kind of social learning disability. (He's also a murderer, by the way: "I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”) They have sortof a proto-50 Shades thing going on, including a fairly kinky love scene that's not explicitly described but Scarlett was definitely into it. Third love triangle corner Ashley sucks, no one cares about him.

It also taught me the phrase "God's nightgown!" which is certainly a great thing to yell.

But it is totally, irredeemably ruined by its racism. Look, I'm not trying to be "politically correct" here. That's not even a thing; it's a term made up by haters to excuse hate. Gone With The Wind angered me. I don't like hearing black people described as stupid monkeys over and over again. I didn't enjoy reading the book because I was constantly pissed off by how ignorant and hateful it is. It was racist at the time it was written; it's racist now; racism is the point and the message, and to ignore it is to disrespect its author's intentions, which were racist.

Books matter. We use stories to describe and define society. If we allow this book to become part of the foundation of our past - if we call it a classic, as some people have - we're basing our past on a terrible lie. And it is a terrible lie, in case we need to say that out loud: Slavery was bad, black people didn't like it, almost everyone else didn't either, and the South were the bad guys in the Civil War.

And books are also our companions. When we choose to read, we're spending significant amounts of time - hours and hours - deep in their worlds. This companion is full of hate. These hours and hours will be spent listening to her yell about insolent niggers. It's the most racist book I've ever read. I didn't like it.