First Love, Faded Bloom

In 2015, I took a road trip with my family from Key West to Washington, D.C. The intention, we told friends at home in San Francisco, was to explore the South. My husband is from Kentucky, and I’d seen enough of the region to know that I wanted to see more. But as I described the things I planned to do on the trip—hike the Blue Ridge Mountains, look for alligators in the Everglades, eat a lot of barbecue—there was one thing I didn’t mention to my friends: I wanted to see a plantation.

Although plantations can be educational, they are often for-profit tourist traps. I didn’t want to contribute to the whitewashing of slavery that some institutions do, where the owners are positioned as philanthropists and the experiences of enslaved people are minimized or erased. However, I also knew that my view of plantations was skewed. The only exposure I’d had to them came from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind, which I read when I was 11, and the subsequent movie. I decided that I would revisit the book during the trip, reading it as we drove through the South.

GWTW was a hit when it was published, selling a million copies in six months and winning the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Today, Americans regularly list it on surveys of their favorite books. It has been translated into dozens of languages, and more than 30 million copies have been sold. The movie has been even more successful. Adjusted for inflation, it remains the highest-grossing film ever. I knew, of course, that Gone with the Wind is racist. This has been pointed out ever since the NAACP objected to the movie in 1937. What I couldn’t have predicted before the road trip, however, was just how much this novel would shock me with its loathsomeness and dedication to white supremacy. On my travels through the South, I found that I wasn’t just interrogating a controversial book. I was interrogating its lasting hold on me.

It’s hard to overstate how much I loved Gone with the Wind as a child growing up in Humboldt County, on the northern coast of California. I was hooked from the first sentence: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm.” Scarlett, with her 17-inch waist and green eyes, possesses a magnetic power that I coveted. She might not be beautiful, as the book unconvincingly states, yet when she attends a barbecue decked out in a hoop skirt, the men surround her like June bugs. I hoped one day to develop a similar irresistible charm that would allow me to control men. I’d already gotten the message that they were the ones to impress if I wanted to succeed in life. On top of that, Scarlett’s determination appealed to me. After the devastation of the Civil War, she vows to get back everything she has lost, even if she has to “steal or kill—as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.” Then she follows through on that promise, marrying a series of men, taking over multiple businesses, and running them successfully, all while driving around in a carriage unchaperoned.

I mistakenly took a feminist message from this, that a strong-willed, smart, painfully thin woman could change her circumstances, even if people were against her, or something along those lines. Scarlett is an unlikable female protagonist, and that meant a lot to me because I felt unlikable. By fifth grade, I was always picked last for partnerships or games. During recess, no one would play with me, so I hid in the hallway and read. Scarlett, I thought, was just like me. She’s passionate, and her desires are easy to understand. I was passionate, and I had strong desires. In fact, GWTW was the first book I encountered with anything approaching sex scenes: drunken foreplay in “swirling darkness,” embraces that evoke “feelings never felt before.” When you’re 11, this is potent stuff. And unlike the other women in the novel, Scarlett doesn’t care what people think. I desperately wanted not to care what people thought. “She wasn’t going to sit down and patiently wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could.” Exactly. That was how I would be, starting next recess.