The Look on the Face of Scarlett O’Hara She went to the dance in a makeshift ballgown. A self-made thing formed from all that is formed in the same way. Some women aren’t widows long. She tired of bearing the full weight of blue-eyed rage at Union artillery barrages undigging the fresh graves of the Confederate dead, a rage fed by the fires of loss and the absence of a populace of antebellum bachelors. The end of one world and the beginning of another is in the look on Scarlett’s face. And the fear of starvation, too. Flirting at barbecues insulated her from the reality of death. From the battle noise of a new nation creaking into existence. Now the quarrels of fanatical white men are at the heart of her needing to dance a Virginia reel in a republic soaked in blood and brokenness. War and death are the reasons she’s dancing, why she appears about to order Rhett Butler back to perdition or Charleston. All that death is why Rhett is about to comply if Scarlett will concede that life is short, a pity to squander. My mother was born into poverty in eastern Kentucky. She loved her children and the Old South. She had read Gone With the Wind as a girl growing up. Saw the movie. A sucker for the romance of plantations where the mint julep is served by a grinning, white-jacketed African-American man, she used to lecture me about the Great American Novel, saying her favorites all involved three generations and the Civil War. It would seem in the life-and-death world of Womanhood, in that uncivil Other War, the one between male and female, the fortunate learn to midwife babies to the sound of cannonfire backlit by armies setting fire to everything on their way to the sea. Before she died, I bought her a music box that played “Dixie” as Rhett held Scarlett, the doomed lovers spinning in place around the endpost of a gorgeous grand staircase as if Tara was the name of the place we go when we leave this life. Copyright (c) 2013 by Roy Bentley. All rights reserved.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Jul 2013 13:16:51 +0000
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