Eric's Beijing Diary

Scarlett giggled as she saw three men dragged out of the line of her charms to investigate landmarks familiar to the girls from childhood, and cut her eye sharply to see if Ashley had taken note. But he was playing with the ends of Melanie's sash and smiling up at her. Pain twisted Scarlett's heart. She felt that she could claw Melanie's ivory skin until the blood ran and take pleasure in doing it.

We don’t see it directly. But if you try to put yourself inside of Melanie’s head and look at the life they lived and the obstacles they had to face from the perspective of Melanie with all of her weakness and frailty, you can imagine that she really appreciated Scarlett, and Scarlett’s strength in crisis.

I think this is why Melanie is so loyal to Scarlett at the end of the war, and determines to be her friend, even when others are shunning her.

Melanie took her calling with her on formal afternoons, gently forcing her into parlors in which Scarlett had not sat for more than two years. And Melanie, with a fierce "love-me-love-my-dog" look on her face, made converse with astounded hostesses.

What Melanie did was no more than all Southern girls were taught to do--to make those about them feel at ease and pleased with themselves. It was this happy feminine conspiracy which made Southern society so pleasant. Women knew that a land where men were contented, uncontradicted and safe in possession of unpunctured vanity was likely to be a very pleasant place for women to live. So, from the cradle to the grave, women strove to make men pleased with themselves, and the satisfied men repaid lavishly with gallantry and adoration.

Anyway, realistic or not, that is the state of things. That’s how a poor immigrant became a wealthy plantation owner. Here is how Mitchell describes him:

Gerald was likeable, and the neighbors learned in time what the negroes, children and dogs discovered at first sight, that a kind heart, a ready and sympathetic ear and an open pocketbook lurked just behind his bawling voice and his truculent manner.

So what are we to think of Gerald? How significant is he to the story? In my opinion, Mitchell makes him weak so that she can show how strong Ellen is. He’s the nice guy who would bc nothing without her. This is not to say that he is lazy. But he is definitely not the driving force behind this enterprise.

The book does not say a lot about his past. But he had come to America to get away from a bad situation in Europe, and then won this plantation in a card game (again, only in a novel) and married a high society lady and settled down to live the life of a plantation owner. The way the story goes, when Ellen dies he loses his mind. So we would tend to conclude that he is a man of weak character. But there is an incident toward the very end of his life, where one of his daughters is trying to convince him to sign a loyalty oath to the Union. I can’t remember if the book says how much money he would get if he did that. At first he seems to be going along with it, but then he comes to and refuses. He rides home in a drunken stupor and falls from his horse and breaks his neck.

The challenge Margaret Mitchell has is that she has to make Gerald weak in order to portray his wife as the strong person. But then he has to get both of them out of the way to show the strength of their daughter, who is bull-headed, cruel, and conniving, but also strong and resilient—the person who, in the end, holds everything together.

Scarlett had never seen her mother's back touch the back of any chair on which she sat.

But after the war, the “servants” were freed. I will never forget reading a letter from the matron of the clan, the Presbyterian minister’s wife, expressing her sorrow and bewilderment about the fact that her slaves had just taken their things and left. Some of them she had cared for since they were babies. But you see, her slaves didn’t want to be taken care of. Her slaves were not pets. They were human beings, and the human spirit longs for freedom. Its amazing how human and kind you can make slavery look if you can manage to paint the right picture. Make the slave owner a cruel task master and slavery looks evil. But make the slave owner a benevolent, well mannered lady who is kind to the poor and treats the slaves with humanity (although not going so far in her humanity as to set them free), and slavery looks downright noble. The nobility with which one indulges a very ignoble custom does not somehow sanctify it. What’s wrong is wrong. But it does force us to ask if a person should be judged by the standards of the society in which she lives, or by some universal standard that transcends culture and commands obedience regardless of what is considered socially acceptable within the cultural milieu in which that person lives and was raised.

The question is a difficult one. How can a person’s actions be considered OK just because they happen in a culture where everyone around that person is doing the same thing and considers it perfectly normal? Yet, try as we will, we cannot bring ourselves to hate her, even though the politeness with which she practices slavery is, in some ways the most vile evil, because it makes evil look good. "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20)

Throughout the story, Scarlett is torn between her strong attraction to Ashley, the neighbor boy who was supposed to marry her but instead married Melanie, and Rhett Butler, whom she scorned, but was passionately drawn to. That conflict runs as a constant theme through the book. But it seems apparent that she does not deserve someone like Ashley, and that, in the end, she would not have respected him. I will have more to say about Rhett and Ashley, but for now, suffice it to say that Scarlett is not defined by the men in her life. This is partly because she is a very self-centered individual, but also because, when the chips are down, she possesses a strength that supersedes that of the men she thinks she is attracted to.

Scarlett is selfish and manipulative—qualities that seems out of place and appear as weaknesses in polite society, but which stand out as strengths in the desperate poverty of Tara (her home) in the years right after the war.

As I mentioned earlier, the book sorta drags on after the war is over. I don’t know…maybe that’s because my primary reason for reading historical novels is to get history, and when the history is over, I see no more reason for the book to continue. Whatever the case, as long as there was the crisis of war, we were torn between our frustration with Scarlett’s selfishness and the extraordinary strength she exhibits in taking care of her family through the last days of a slowly dying culture. But after the war is over, she just keeps looking more and more pathetic and disgusting. There’s no more crisis to bring out the best parts of her character, so we just keep getting more and more tired of seeing her around.

As I mentioned, Scarlett is definitely the one who is supposed to be the heroine of this novel. But the author does not make her the most virtuous. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Margaret Mitchell sees Scarlett’s strength as itself all the virtue that is needed. But that can’t be right, because then why would she create a character like Melanie?

To get a grasp of how the author deals with these contradictions, you have to read the section describing the trauma of Melanie having a baby in her frail condition in the middle of a very horrible war, with her husband in some far flung battlefield. It’s part of how a master novelist creates the innate realization in the mind of every reader that these two people somehow need each other to be themselves. There is no way Melanie would have lived through that troublesome childbirth if Scarlett had not been there. And for all her hardness, there is never any question that Scarlett will do whatever is needed to keep Melanie alive and get her through the crisis. That is what makes us admire Scarlett in spite of the shallow superficiality that seems to characterize her dealings with people so much of the time.

But was Ashley really that nice a guy？ We find out toward the end of the book after he comes back from the war that he was actually a member of the Klan, because he and Frank (one of Scarlett’s husbands) went to avenge an attack on Scarlett by criminals (one of whom is Black) and Frank gets killed.

Pat Conroy, who wrote the preface to this particular edition, relates what his mother, who read Gone with the Wind to him once a year throughout his childhood, said to him about Ashley:

No matter what girls day, they’d much rather marry a man like Ashley Wilkes than Rhett

“I hate Ashley Wilkes,” my father would say. Literary criticism was not an art form conducted at a high level in my family, and I still do not believe my father ever read my mother’s sacred text. “That guy’s a pansy if I’ve ever seen one. Of course, Rhett Butler’s a pansy compared to me.”

My mother would sniff and say, “Your father’s from Chicago. He doesn’t even know what we’re talking about.”

I do not know what the future will bring, but it cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past.

Whatever the answer to that question, Ashley is important in this book not because of some great feat of bravery that saves the day. He is important because he epitomizes the Old South, which everyone romanticizes, but which seems doomed from the very beginning, and because Scarlett is so obsessed with him. But toward the end of the book, as Scarlett’s obsession wanes, Ashley becomes largely irrelevant.

Rhett Butler epitomizes the person who lives for himself in defiance of standards and custom and honor. He stands in contrast to Ashley, who is addicted to the Old South.

Butler is perhaps the most conflicting character in this book. We have a love-hate relationship with him from the very beginning, and I suspect the author does too. He is at once shallow, unconnected, and selfish, but at the same time, practical, realistic, and helpful.

As I was reading this book, I tended to think that Margaret Mitchell used him to give the rational, real world view to the discussion at hand. But sometimes he (or Mitchell) takes this to a rather irritating extreme. I’ve not decided yet whether this is poor writing or brilliance. But one thing is clear: In terms of history, Rhett Butler is the most important character in the book, because he and he alone brings a real perspective to the events taking over the South as mentioned previously.

He is presented as the opportunist who cares not for causes, and takes advantage of events for his own benefit:

There's just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization than in the upbuilding of one. -

I cannot understand why I did not desert. It was all the purest insanity. But it's in one's blood. Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

I've always felt that women had a hardness and endurance unknown to men, despite the pretty idea taught me in childhood that women are frail, tender, sensitive creatures. But after all, according to the Continental code of etiquette, it's very bad form for husband and wife to love each other. Very bad taste, indeed. I've always felt that the Europeans had the right idea in that matter. Marry for convenience and love for pleasure. A sensible system, don't you think? You are closer to the old country than I thought.

She is loyal to a fault, and given to her role as the protector of the family. Never does she disparage her position, or indicate in any way that she would rather be something else. She does disparage two particular kinds of people: slaves whom she did not think were up to her standard,

Mammy waddled back into the hall and Scarlett heard her call softly up the stairwell to the upstairs maid.

"You, Rosa! Drap me Miss Scarlett's shawl." Then, more loudly: "Wuthless n-----! She ain' never what she does nobody no good. Now, Ah got her to climb up an' get it mahself."

"Ah has said time an' again, it doan do no good doin' nuthin' for w'ite trash. Dey is de shiftlesses, mos' ungrateful passel of no-counts livin'. An' Miss Ellen got no bizness weahin herself out waitin' on folks dat did dey be wuth shootin' dey'd have n------ ter wait on dem. An' Ah has said--"

Still, there were those who were torn between the love for their white host families and their freedom. It doesn’t seem to have been a large number—historian Eugene Genovese puts it at fifteen percent.

So there were those like Mammy who stayed, but she is not at all representative. And the interesting thing is that the house servants were the least likely to stay. So the impression created by the way the end of the war is portrayed in this book is bogus. It just didn’t happen that way in most cases. Mammy is a myth.

Reading Margaret Mitchell’s novel I sometimes got the same feeling I had in Pingyao. The effect is created, in part, by filling the novel with many, many characters who, although not important in themselves, tend to give the novel life because, well, that’s the way real life is. You meet people all the time whose lives intersect yours in ways that are not apparently significant, but collectively give you a feeling of humanity.

Anyway, I had assumed that Mrs. Tarleton was one of these tangential characters—a nervous woman who was obsessed with her horses. That is, until I read this statement after the war by Mrs Tarleton when she discovered that her beloved Thoroughbreds were gone, and a mule was living in their paddock:

It's an insult to the memory of my blooded darlings to have a mule in their paddock. Mules are misbegotten, unnatural critters and it ought to be illegal to breed them.

When I was a kid, I didn’t think anything of interracial marriage. It was very rare. I grew up as a white minority in Japanese communities. I was born in Tokyo, but the place where we lived was actually in the countryside of northern Japan, where there were very few foreigners. We actually had close relationships with Japanese people, but the idea of intermarriage never even occurred to us. Of all the MKs I knew as a kid, the only one who married a Japanese person was my brother Mark. But that was years later after we had left Japan and had lived in America for quite a few years. We were never opposed to it when I was growing up. It just didn’t happen.

But in America the issue was very different. Interracial marriage was a highly contentious issue. It was called “miscegenation,” a term I had never heard until I read an article by Jimmy Swaggart opposing it. I was floored. Why would anyone be opposed to a Black person marrying a White person? But my first introduction to the issue was earlier than that. We went to a drive-in theater in Fergus Falls a year or two after returning from Japan and saw a movie called “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,” a story about a young White woman who brings home a Black man to visit her parents. If you’re interested in the issue, you should see the film, because it was put on the National Film Registry because of it’s perceived significance.

Anyway, I remember watching the film without any feeling that it was that big a deal. You see, during that part of my childhood that occurred in America, I lived in Midwestern communities that had very few black people. I had no idea how contentious this issue had been in the South (again, until I read Jimmy Swaggart’s article, and realized that even Christians were caught up in this nonsense). I should clarify that I do not know if Jimmy Swaggart still holds this position. It could be that he, like Bob Jones University has turned from his former belief.

But getting back to my point, I had originally dismissed Mrs. Tarleton’s neurotic ramblings about her beloved Thoroughbreds as really insignificant expressions of her obsession with her pets. You see, I had been educated about Thoroughbreds. It happened shortly after we moved to the United States from Japan when I was thirteen years old. I was talking with my cousins about horses. I had never heard of the “Thoroughbred” breed. I thought the word thoroughbred meant “full-blooded” or “purebred.” It actually does mean that when you’re talking about dogs, but you can’t use it for that purpose when you’re talking about horses, because there is a breed of horse by that name. Here is now the conversation developed—remember, this is a conversation between a kid who has just come to America from Japan and had never heard of the Thoroughbred breed, and Dakota farm kids who are aware that there is a breed of horse called a “Thoroughbred.”

“What kind of horse is that?”

“Quarter Horse.”

“Is it a thoroughbred Quarter Horse?”

“No. Just plain Quarter Horse.”

“Just Quarter Horse? Nothing else?”

“Nothing else. Just Quarter Horse.”

“Well, then it is a thoroughbred Quarter Horse.”

“No. no. It’s not a Thoroughbred-Quarter Horse. It’s just a Quarter Horse.”

“But is it pure Quarter Horse?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then it is a thoroughbred.”

“Nope. It’s a Quarter Horse.”

Uncle Otto finally straightened me out. I wasn’t stupid, you see. Just completely ignorant and uncultured regarding horse breeds. I thought thoroughbred meant “full blooded” or “purebred,” which it certainly does if you’re talking about dogs. But again, you cannot use the word that way when you’re talking about horses. We did not have the Internet in those days, but fortunately for me, Dad was a sucker for encyclopedia salesmen. You can bet I did what I had to to get up to speed. Now, if you talk to the owner of an Arabian, he’ll tell you that the only pure breed is the Arabian horse. But I digress. We won’t go there.

You can understand my reaction, then, at the beginning of the book when I encountered Mrs Tarleton and her beloved Thoroughbreds.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the name of a breed, I thought. I was educated, you see. So I just blew it off. But that statement by Mrs. Tarleton at the end of the war stopped me in my tracks. Let me explain why the analogy is so hideous.

A mule is the offspring of a jackass and a mare. Horses and donkeys are fundamentally different. They have different numbers of chromosomes. So a mule has an odd number of chromosomes, and thus cannot have offspring. Every mule is a sterile female. Thus you cannot mate two mules. Every time you want to get a baby mule, you must start over with a jackass and a mare. To compare marriage between Blacks and Whites to a jackass mating with a mare is disgusting. The term “interracial marriage” is a misnomer. To have interracial marriage you need at least two races, and there is only one race. It’s called the human race. Minor differences like skin color are insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

I have three daughters. Two of them have brown hair and one of them has blonde hair. Does that mean that there are two different races in my family? Well, if you consider two people with different hair colors as being from two different races, then I suppose so. Should we really do that? Should we really start talking about the brown haired race and the blond haired race? Why not? We do it all the time with skin color, why not with hair color?

But it’s completely ridiculous. And it’s a savage, cruel insult to Black people. Come on, you guys—you know the implication. If you breed a donkey with a race horse, the offspring will be a better work animal than the jackass, but it will never be a faster race horse than the mare. And this is the thinking behind restrictions against interracial marriage and interracial dating that persisted at institutions like Bob Jones University for so many years.

“We can’t have our beautiful race horses marrying those crude….I can’t say it. Most of the people today who are always whining about “systemic racism” have never seen real racism.

What I want to do in this section is to discuss the ways in which this book seems to indicate racist attitudes among whites and also among some slaves. Racism was all but universal among the southern landed aristocracy. That is, it would be virtually impossible to find a southerner at that time in history who did not believe that Blacks were genetically inferior to whites. Here’s Robert E. Lee:

“General, you are very competent to judge the capacity of black men for acquiring knowledge,” said Senator Howard. “I want your opinion on that capacity, as compared with the capacity of white men.”

“I do not know that I am particularly qualified to speak on that subject,” Lee replied, “But I do not think that he is as capable of acquiring knowledge as the white man is.” Black people are “an amiable, social race,” Lee told the committee. They will work briefly to earn their sustenance, but they aren’t inclined to prolonged hard work: “They like their ease and comfort.” [“Robert E. Lee Faces Congress” in American History]

But running parallel to the idea that the Negroes (and again, that’s not the “N” word) were inferior, was the idea that people who treated this inferior race kindly were good people:

With unerring African instinct, the Negroes had all discovered that Gerald had a large bark and no bite at all, and they took shameless advantage of him. The air was always thick with threats of selling slaves south and of direful whippings, but there never had been a slave sold from Tara, and only one whipping, and that administered for not grooming down Gerald's pet horse after a long day's hunting.

The bronze giantess did not grin or squirm under praise like the other negroes. She turned an immobile face to Scarlett and said with dignity: "Thankee, Ma'm, but Mist’ Gerald and Miss Ellen been good to me. Mist’ Gerald buy my Prissy so I wouldn't grieve and I doan forgit it. I is part Indian and Indians doan forgit them as is good to them. I is sorry 'bout my Prissy. She mighty wuthless. Look lak she all nigger lak her pa. Her pa was mighty flighty.

How much of what Margaret Mitchell says about Black people is meant to give us a feel for how Blacks were viewed by the White majority population, and how much of what she says reflects her own view of slaves and how they thought? Is Margaret Mitchell herself a racist? Well, sometimes it can be hard to tell how much of a given novel expresses the author’s own feelings. But look at this comparison the author makes between Dilcey and Mammy:

Dilcey was tall and bore herself erectly. She might have been any age from thirty to sixty, so unlined was her immobile bronze face. Indian blood was plain in her features, overbalancing the Negroid characteristics. The red color of her skin, narrow high forehead, prominent cheekbones and the hawk-bridged nose which flattened at the end above thick Negro lips, all showed the mixture of two races. She was self-possessed and walked with a dignity that surpassed even Mammy's, for Mammy had acquired her dignity and Dilcey's was in her blood.

Racism: The belief that moral qualities are genetically derived.

The N-word. I did discuss this in my Racism podcast, but since it is an audio file, I cannot link the to a specific paragraphs, so if you don’t have time to go and listen to the whole thing, I’m going to give it to you in summary. In this segment, I am going to be talking about three words: Negro, nigra, and nigger. The last one, of course, is the infamous N-word. There is a fourth one I have heard: Nigga. Jussie Smollett used it in a tweet about Donald Trump. Yes, this racist name calling goes both ways. Jussie Smollett calling Trump a “Nigga” is not different from any White man calling any Black man a “nigger.”

But let’s get to the definitions.

• Negro Young people born after the Civil Rights period are not aware of the fact that “Negro” is the polite term that Blacks actually wanted to be called. Martin Luther King Jr. used it in his speeches. Malcolm X used it in his speeches. Some time ago on a Fox program called the Five, I heard a quote from Joe Biden where he used the word Negro. This was presented as an example of using an ethnic slur. That’s very unfair. I am not a fan of Biden, but he was using the term that was the polite term at that time. Nobody had ever heard the term “Black.”

  So why did Blacks stop using it and just start calling themselves, “Black?” It was because they couldn't get people to say it. They would either say “Nigra” or “Nigger.” Racism dies hard. When I was in middle school..eighth or ninth grade, I was in a group discussion competition. Discussion competition is something that seems to have died away as a forensic competition. I was trying to set up something like that for my students at CYU several years ago, so I searched for schools that had something like that, and the only one I could find was at university in India. Anyway, this was in the late sixties, and we were dealing with the issue of race, and one of the kids on our team who was seen as a bit of a nerd, announced in Cliff Clavin fashion that the Negroes just wanted to be called “Black” now. Those other socially conscious White boys reacted with horror at such an absurd statement. Their ridicule was merciless. How can you say that?! How would you like it if we called you “Whitey?” They were appalled that he could even think something so ridiculous. But of course, the nerd was right. So the term “Negro” passed out of common use—so much so that today’s historically challenged Americans think of it as an ethnic slur. I wonder how they would feel if someone decided that the proper name of their own ethnic background was an ethnic slur that couldn’t be mentioned in polite company? If someone tried to tell me that the term “Norwegian” was a name to be ashamed of, and than I could not say it in public, I would be insulted.

• Nigra I try to see the best in people, so I am willing to believe that the use of this word was mainly careless for some people. Rather insensitive carelessness, but not necessarily intended to hurt. Jimmy Carter, in this book Turning Point : A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age talks about when he was first elected to the State Legislature in Georgia, and a senior Black legislator was trying to teach the White newbies how to say “Negro” correctly. He would touch his knee and then put his hands together and pull them apart slowly to indicate growing. You see, Blacks at that time were not ashamed of the word “Negro” any more than you are ashamed of the proper name of your ethnic background. They just wanted people to say it properly and respectfully. Is that really too much to ask? The fact that they had to come up with a term like “Black” to avoid having the name of their ethnicity slurred (whether in contempt or just insensitively) is a sad commentary on the attitude Southern Whites had toward Blacks at that point in history. The word “Negro” isn’t that hard to say. No German vowels or Middle Eastern consonants. There was just no good reason for any native speaker of English not to say it politely and correctly.

• Nigger This, of course, is the infamous “N” word. Nobody argues about this one today. But how did it get started? And when did it become viewed as an ethnic slur?

  I was talking about this with my friend Bill. I asked him if he thought Margaret Mitchell was a racist. He said he didn’t think so. I said, “You sure see the N-word a lot in that book.”

  “It wasn’t a racist term back then.”

  He has a point. Here’s LBJ:

  In 1965, Lyndon Johnson appointed Marshall Solicitor General. When Marshall hesitated, Johnson’s closing argument was, “I want folks to walk down the hall at the Justice Department and look in the door and see a nigger sitting there.” Two years later Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court.

  So could we say on the basis of this that Johnson was a racist? I personally don’t think that. LBJ pushed through the massive civil rights legislation that changed America for Black folks. I do not think he was a racist. But I do think perhaps even at that time it was a careless way to talk.

  I grew up in Japan, but for four years in my childhood I lived in America. I went to first grade in America. I remember even at that time Mom told us we must never say that word. She told us we should call them “colored people.” We went back to Japan in 1961, so this would have been either the late fifties or very early sixties. So it has been a negative word for as long as I can remember. And it is of note that even Blacks use the term to refer to other Blacks they don’t like:

  So is this racist? No, it isn’t. Notice the audience is also Black, and they’re applauding wildly. You see, the behavior Chris Rock is describing is stuff we all deplore. The difference is that he is not attributing it to genetics. After all, Chris Rock himself is Black. It is not racism. It is culturalism. Remember my explanation of the difference between the two.

  Sometimes White people will say, “If Blacks can use that word, why can’t I?” But it’s not the same. If a White person gave this same lecture it wouldn’t go over very well, because people would assume that the White person was saying those people act that way just because they are Black. So White people definitely shouldn’t use it. If you are criticizing the behavior of a group of people, it is important to clarify that you are not attributing that behavior to race. If you are sure to do that, it is not wrong to talk about wrong behavior which has become acceptable in a given culture. Here is Paul the Apostle in the Book of Titus:

  One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." (Titus 1:12)

  This is not racism. It is a criticism of cultural norms which have become degenerate. The “prophet” Paul is referring to was Epimenides, who was basically doing the same thing as Chris Rock in the video above—criticizing his own ethnicity for behavior patterns which represent a degeneration of culture. If we we say or imply that these moral qualities are genetically derived then there is no hope—you’re just born that way. But if we emphasize that they are culturally derived, then there is hope, because these patterns of behavior can be repented of and changed. Missionaries go to other countries to spread the Christian message because missionaries are not racists. They believe that people can become different if they allow God to change their hearts.

There are two basic texts to view with regard to the rules for Biblical slavery. So let’s look at both of them, and then I will try to compile a composite list:

Exodus 21:1 Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them.
Exodus 21:2 If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.
Exodus 21:3 If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him.
Exodus 21:4 If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.
Exodus 21:5 And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free:
Exodus 21:6 Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever. (also note Deuteronomy 15)

Deuteronomy 15:12 "If your brother, a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you, he shall serve you six years, and in the seventh year you shall let him go free from you.
Deuteronomy 15:13 And when you let him go free from you, you shall not let him go empty-handed.
Deuteronomy 15:14 You shall furnish him liberally out of your flock, out of your threshing floor, and out of your winepress. As the LORD your God has blessed you, you shall give to him.
Deuteronomy 15:15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today.
Deuteronomy 15:16 But if he says to you, 'I will not go out from you,' because he loves you and your household, since he is well-off with you,
Deuteronomy 15:17 then you shall take an awl, and put it through his ear into the door, and he shall be your slave forever. And to your female slave you shall do the same.
Deuteronomy 15:18 It shall not seem hard to you when you let him go free from you, for at half the cost of a hired worker he has served you six years. So the LORD your God will bless you in all that you do.

1. The slave was required to serve for six years. During that time he was not free. He was a slave.
2. There is some disagreement about what Deuteronomy 15:18 means. Presumably, it is saying here that the slave had only his lodging and food provided, whereas a hired servant had a salary in addition to that.
3. After six years of slavery, the slave was released in the seventh year. The master was required to give him provisions so that he could spend the seventh year setting himself up in business, or whatever.
4. If the slave decided that he did not want to leave his master, he could have his ear pierced with an awl, and then he would be a slave for life, and his master would be required to provide for him for the rest of his life.

In addition to all of this, there was one more rule for Biblical slavery that would have horrified the Southern plantation owners: If, after everything was said and done, and the slave who had decided to stay with his master had had his ear pierced and voluntarily bound himself for the rest of his life—if, later, he became unhappy, he could run away, and the law strictly forbade returning him to his master:

Deuteronomy 23:15 You shall not give up to his master a slave who has escaped from his master to you.
Deuteronomy 23:16 He shall dwell with you, in your midst, in the place that he shall choose within one of your towns, wherever it suits him. You shall not wrong him.

I did find a text that seems to justify returning slaves to their masters:

If any one find runaway male or female slaves in the open country and bring them to their masters, the master of the slaves shall pay him two shekels of silver. If the slave will not give the name of the master, the finder shall bring him to judgment; a further investigation must follow, and the slave shall be returned to his master.

Yes, it is.

How can this contradiction be explained?

Very simply. This text is not from the Bible. It is from the Code of Hammurabi. You see, pagans return slaves to their masters. But Godly people do not do this.

So where does Margaret Mitchell come down on this issue. This, in my opinion, is the most important reason to read this book. Over and over again as I read through this book, I noticed implications that the Black slaves were comfortable with their lot in life. You make your own judgment, but if you are expecting this book to be a diatribe against slavery, I think you’re going to be disappointed.

Sometimes the temptation to conflict is just too great. But why do people go to war? It hurts so many people. The King James Bible says “Only by pride cometh contention.” I believe that is a slight mistranslation. The American Standard Version of 1901 puts it this way: “By pride cometh only contention.” But let’s look at the Interlinear and focus on that one phrase directly from Hebrew: “Strife comes by pride.”

Most Americans have heard about Pearl Harbor. But most Americans are not aware that Japan actually invaded the United States. My uncle was wounded fighting the Japanese in the Battle of Attu:

And there were defense placements on the west coast anticipating an attack from Japan.

The Japanese clearly bit off more than they could chew. This is the result of the hubris I mentioned. It is the one thing for which Margaret Mitchell criticizes the South in this book.

Winston Churchill contrasted the American Civil War with World War II. He believed that World War II was the most avoidable war in history and that the American Civil War was the least avoidable war in history. I think he's right. World War II could easily have been avoided if a stand had been taken against Hitler from the very beginning. The Civil War was different, because it involved a fundamental change of life for the Southern landed aristocracy. Their plantation lifestyle was dismantled. We can understand their determination to fight to protect their lifestyle. You should fight for what you hold dear. But the problem is that their lifestyle depended on keeping their fellow man in bondage.

And slavery and this bondage was intolerable to conscientious Northern people who ordinarily would have considered Southern concerns non of their business.

Sometimes in discussing the Civil War with advocates of the Southern cause, you will hear people say stuff like, “The Southerners were just getting ready to give up their slaves anyway.” Don’t you believe it. Here’s Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy in 1861:

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

So Churchill was right. I am not sure if his reasons for saying it were exactly the same as mine, but clearly the American Civil War was unavoidable. It did take a war to pry the slaves from the clutches of the Southern plantation owners.

If both sides could have allowed tempers to cool, there might have been a way to make the transition away from slavery that would not have created quite such a shock to the economy of the South. Hubris prevented that from happening, and the war came.

Winston Churchill really admired the American Civil War. He included it in this History of the English Speaking People. He thought it was a noble war, and in some ways he was right. The generals on both sides had been classmates at West Point, and had fought side by side in the Mexican War. The Mexican War was the training ground for Civil War officers, just as World War I was the training ground for World War II officers.

Churchill was born in 1874, which was not long after the Civil War ended. For his twelfth birthday, he asked his mom to give him a copy of Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs. If I remember correctly, it was originally published in two volumes, but I think you can get a one volume edition now. I read it many years ago, and I recommend it highly to anyone who wants to get an understanding of the Civil War, but it would have been quite a chore for a twelve-year-old.

Later, he studied the Civil War under G.F. Henderson at Sandhurst (British equivalent of West Point), and said that the American Civil War was "the most interesting of all the wars of which I have read."

Churchill’s sentiments lay more with the South than the North. But his sense of justice forced him to admit that injustice of slavery was insurmountable;

Of all the wars that men have fought, none was more noble than the Civil War in America. But all the heroism of the South could not redeem their cause from the stain of slavery.

The American Civil War was a “gentleman’s war” in contrast with the Vietnam War, which was savage. As I said, the officers on both sides were former classmates. They were friends and acquaintances.

“It’s so nice to see a polite war between gentlemen where bloodshed can be kept to a minimum.”

Are you kidding? Sixty thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Vietnam war. Six hundred thousand men died in the Civil War. Here me well, my friends: When gentlemen go to war, they kill each other just as dead as in any other war. War is horrible, you guys. There is no such thing as a good war.

Yes, of course we should study just war theory, and we should prosecute war crimes. And of course we should try to protect the women and children on both sides. But war is a sad and terrible curse. We try to minimize it’s effects when we cannot prevent it, but oh, for the day when we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside and study war no more!

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. (Psalm 46:9)

Strictly speaking, redemption is not a religious concept at all. Here is a dictionary definition of “redeem:”

Gain or regain possession of (something) in exchange for payment.

So how did it get to be a religious word, and what relevance does that had to anything in this story? Pretty easy to figure that out. If we believe that God has created us to have fellowship with him, and that we were stolen away by sin, and then God had to buy us back with the blood of his own Son, then we can see that the word “redemption” could be a pretty good word for describing this process.

But how does that relate to this book? Where is the redemption in this story?

That’s the problem. There isn’t any. Throughout the book, the end of the institution of slavery is viewed as a sad tragedy, and slaves are viewed as basically happy with their lot. The N-word appears a lot, of course, but most of the time spoken by slaves about other slaves they viewed as lower than themselves.

Contrast this with Harriet Elisabeth Stowe’s description of the slave warehouse in Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

A SLAVE warehouse! Perhaps some of my readers conjure up horrible visions of such a place. They fancy some foul, obscure den, some horrible Tartarus "informis, ingens, cui lumen ademptum." But no, innocent friend; in these days men have learned the art of sinning expertly and genteelly, so as not to shock the eyes and senses of respectable society. Human property is high in the market; and is, therefore, well fed, well cleaned, tended, and looked after, that it may come to sale sleek, and strong, and shining. A slave-warehouse in New Orleans is a house externally not much unlike many others, kept with neatness; and where every day you may see arranged, under a sort of shed along the outside, rows of men and women, who stand there as a sign of the property sold within.

Then you shall be courteously entreated to call and examine, and shall find an abundance of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and young children, to be "sold separately, or in lots to suit the convenience of the purchaser;" and that soul immortal, once bought with blood and anguish by the Son of God, when the earth shook, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened, can be sold, leased, mortgaged, exchanged for groceries or dry goods, to suit the phases of trade, or the fancy of the purchaser.

Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody ter feed me good vittles reg'lar, and tell me whut ter do an' whut not ter do, an' look affer me w'en Ah gits sick.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a moral sermon. It shows the evil of slavery by creating a picture of it as sad and cruel. It ends in a tragedy. Uncle Tom is beaten to death by Simon Legree (with the help of two slaves).

But the tragedy has purpose. It is redeeming. Uncle Tom breathes words of forgiveness to Legree and to the two slaves who did the dirty work, as he leads the two slaves to faith in Jesus Christ. The son of his previous master (the one who sold him to Legree) is so moved by the tragedy of Tom’s cruel death that he vows never to own slaves again:

It was on his grave, my friends, that I resolved, before God, that I would never own another slave, while it was possible to free him; that nobody, through me, should ever run the risk of being parted from home and friends, and dying on a lonely plantation, as he died. So, when you rejoice in your freedom, think that you owe it to that good old soul, and pay it back in kindness to his wife and children. Think of your freedom, every time you see Uncle Tom’s Cabin ; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was.

Gone with the Wind ends with “I don’t give a damn,” and that pretty much sums it up. No remorse. No repentance. No expression of sorrow for the terrible institution of slavery which they had perpetrated against the poor people who were kidnapped by slave traders, packed into crowded conditions on slave ships—where slaves who died were summarily tossed overboard—sold like livestock in slave markets, and forced to work without pay as the personal property of the plantation owners who did their work by the “sweat of other men’s faces,” as Lincoln put it.

To be sure, there are expressions of remorse for the stupidity of the hotheads who fired on Fort Sumpter and started a war that they could not win and that took their lifestyle away from them—a lifestyle that included the beloved institution of slavery that made their lives so much easier. But remorse for slavery itself? You won’t find it in this book. Just pathetic people living Godless lives and waiting for the Devil to take their souls.