Quote:
Originally Posted by banjomike
I'm finding it heavy going. My current plan is to dig out the audiobook version and read-while-listening to see if that makes it easier.
The problem is that all of the participants are so easy to dislike. The twins are a complete waste of space and should be fed to their dogs. The only interesting character so far is Jeems.
I've been spending more time tweaking my epub to get the chapters and such more to my liking than I have reading the thing.
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As the personal slave of the Tarleton twins Jeems was a very minor character in the book, but I find his comment, “Huccome po’ w’ite trash buy any niggers? Dey ain’ never owned mo’n fo’ at de mostes’,” to be more telling about Margaret Mitchell than about Jeems. As Mitchell says elsewhere in the book of the poor white farmer Tom Slattery,
The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash, and their unconcealed scorn stung him, while their more secure position in life stirred his envy. By contrast with his own miserable existence, 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, while he was despised by all.
It is obvious that Mitchell bought in hook, line, and sinker to the Southern myth of the happy slave.
I’m not surprised. I remember reading in my Virginia History textbook in the early 1960s about how good slaves had it, and how most of the slave-owners were kind and caring. This was before schools were integrated in Virginia (schools in my hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia were among the last in the country to integrate), and these were the textbooks used in the white schools. (In keeping with the Virginia tradition of making sure that citizens of African descent were well “looked after”, as soon as the texts were worn out and replaced in the white schools with new textbooks, the old ones were given to the “colored” schools.)
I couldn’t find an actual copy online of the textbook we used, but I did find something else of interest. In his essay
"Doing the Right / Smart Thing" (pub. April 16, 2009), F.T. Rea writes:
In 1961, my seventh grade history book at Albert H. Hill was the official history of Virginia for use in public schools. It had been decreed as such by no less than the General Assembly. Here's part of what it had to say about slavery:
"Life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy. The Negroes went about in a cheerful manner making a living for themselves and for those whom they worked. They were not so unhappy as some Northerners thought they were, nor were they so happy as some Southerners claimed. The Negroes had their problems and their troubles. But they were not worried by the furious arguments going on between Northerners and Southerners over what should be done with them. In fact, they paid little attention to those arguments."
That's pretty much as I remember reading it. This was how history was taught in the Virginia of my childhood.
To her credit, the characters created by Margaret Mitchell, black and white, are for the most part fully drawn and three-dimensional. I don’t see intentional malice in her characterizations, and there are instances in the book where the slaves are shown to have better sense than their owners, but still I see a lot of bias. I’m not trying to judge her, but rather understand her and the times in which she wrote. As a veteran, I know how the ravages of war can color our political outlook, and the ravages and horrors of this war were particularly devastating to Southerners for generations after the fact.
What I
am saying is that if the slavery system was as wonderful and charming as Mrs. Mitchell and old Virginia textbooks paint it, it’s a wonder why no whites outside of minstrel shows tried passing for black.