Hook
A Small Table Against a Far Wall
Most accounts of that night linger on the speech. I keep finding myself at the table.
On February 29, 1940, in the Cocoanut Grove ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, Hattie McDaniel crossed the room to accept the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, the first ever given to a Black performer. The Hollywood Reporter later recounted that the hotel kept a strict no-Black policy and that the producer, David O. Selznick, had to call in a favor just to have her admitted.
When the applause ended, she returned not to the table where Selznick sat with Vivien Leigh, Clark Gable, and Olivia de Havilland, but to a small table set against a far wall, where she sat with her escort, F. P. Yober, and her agent, William Meiklejohn. Those are the facts as the record gives them. The reading that follows is mine, and I will try to say where it begins.
Gone with the Wind carried off eight competitive Oscars that evening, Best Picture and Best Director among them. The film had spent nearly four hours inviting its audience to grieve a vanished world, and its most honored supporting player spent the celebration at the far edge of the room that was toasting it.
In the previous installment, we asked what it means to have enough. Scarlett O’Hara, the woman at the center of this picture, is a long and furious answer to the opposite question: what a person does when enough has been taken from her. The table against the wall asks a quieter one, and this essay will carry it to the end. Who may call a place her own, and who is admitted to that place’s memory?
Historical Case
A Defeat Retold as a Dream
Margaret Mitchell published her novel in 1936 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Her title came from a poem by Ernest Dowson about a lover’s devotion fading with the seasons. The film premiered in Atlanta on December 15, 1939, seventy-four years after Appomattox. That span is a rhetorical convenience, not a law of memory, but it is long enough for a defeat to be inherited by people who never had to suffer it.
McDaniel and the film’s other Black cast members were not at that premiere. Georgia’s segregation laws, and the producers’ judgment that it would be unsafe for her to attend, kept them away (Bernstein, 2014).
The opening card mourns a land of “Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” and the phrase carries the film’s whole argument about what was lost. The historian David Blight has traced how the Lost Cause tradition recast the Confederacy’s collapse as a noble sorrow rather than the failure of a claim on other human beings (Blight, 2001). The movie did not invent that story, but it gave the story a score, a sunset, and Technicolor.
It would be a mistake to call the picture mere propaganda. Its craft is real, and craft is exactly how a version of the past earns affection. The sunset over Tara does quiet work: it makes one region’s memory feel like the whole nation’s.
Nor did every viewer receive it as its makers intended. Within the Black community, the picture and McDaniel’s part in it were argued over, a reminder that the memory it offered was contested from the start.
The scene that holds the film together comes after Sherman’s march. Scarlett kneels in the ruined field at Tara, bites into a raw radish, retches, and then closes her hand around a fistful of red Georgia clay. She swears she will never go hungry again. She has fled a burning Atlanta, come home to a dead mother and a father whose mind has slipped, and found the fields stripped.
The vow is not greed. It is a refusal to starve, and it keeps a household alive. The vow is magnificent, and it is also a kind of hardening.
Her father had told her that land is the one thing in the world that lasts. She takes his sentence as a creed, and everything she does afterward, the marriages, the lumber mill, the coldness, is an attempt to own the one thing she was told could not be taken.
Biblical Lens
The Preacher Looks at the Same Soil
Ecclesiastes opens by looking at the very ground Scarlett grips. Its signature word, hevel, is usually translated “vanity,” though scholars such as C. L. Seow note that its root image is breath or vapor: something real that cannot be held (Seow, 1997). The word does not announce that effort is pointless. The same book later urges its reader to eat bread with gladness and to enjoy the days given.
Its argument is narrower and more unsettling: human beings keep mistaking what they can touch for what they can keep. Three verses from the first chapter set the pattern (my paraphrases):
One generation goes and another comes, while the earth stays where it is. (Ecclesiastes 1:4)
What has been done will be done again, and nothing under the sun is truly new. (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
No one remembers the people of earlier days, and those yet to come will not be remembered by the ones who follow them. (Ecclesiastes 1:11)
Nothing in Ecclesiastes teaches that every sorrow is a penalty in disguise. What it teaches, slowly, is that the habits of a people outlast their excuses, and in time show what that people had agreed to live with.
Notice what the Preacher grants and what he withholds. He grants Scarlett’s intuition, because the earth does abide. He withholds the conclusion she draws from it.
That the soil outlasts the generations does not mean any generation owns it, and it does not guarantee that a family’s claim, or its story, will survive the people who made it. If anything in that field is hevel, it is the claim and not the clay.
Pattern Insight
Who Is Admitted to the Grief
Begin with a number. In the 1860 census, nearly four million people in the United States were enslaved. In Georgia, the state where Tara stands, 462,198 of 1,057,286 residents were enslaved, about 44 percent of the population (U.S. Census Bureau, 1864).
The world the film mourns was held together by a labor system in which people were property, and the film does not hide that they were there: enslaved characters populate its plantation scenes. What it does not do is let their loss be the loss the music is written for.
That distinction is where the Preacher becomes useful, and where he has to be handled carefully. Ecclesiastes 1:11 describes forgetting as something time does. Generations pass, and names go with them. A story like this one shows forgetting as something people do.
Whose homesickness gets the score, whose face gets the close-up, whose grief is staged as the grief: these are decisions, not weather. Earlier this month, in the difference between Kings and Chronicles, we watched Scripture’s own editors face that choice. They told the fall of Judah twice, and each telling decided what the survivors would be able to bear remembering. Memory, even in the Bible, passes through hands.
The film’s tenderest mourning belongs to a house and an order. Mammy, the character McDaniel played, is given loyalty and a sharp tongue, and her devotion runs toward the O’Haras. The picture is far less curious about what she might herself have lost.
McDaniel should not be reduced to the symbol her character makes of her. She was born in Wichita, Kansas, the youngest of thirteen children, performed in her brother’s traveling show, worked in radio, and built a screen career in a Hollywood that offered Black women few parts beyond domestic service (Watts, 2005). Critics within the Black community faulted her for playing maids. She is widely reported to have answered that playing a maid for a movie salary beat working as one for a maid’s wage.
On the night of the award she reportedly set aside the remarks the studio had prepared and gave words she had written with a friend, the Black writer Ruby Berkley Goodwin. I will not guess what she felt at the small table. The record does not say, and she is owed better than my speculation. What the record shows is an artist who worked inside a narrow doorway and made the most of it.
She died of breast cancer in 1952. She had asked to be buried in Hollywood Memorial Park, today’s Hollywood Forever, which at the time admitted only white burials, and so she was laid to rest at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery instead. When a new owner took over the Hollywood grounds in 1998, he offered to move her remains there. Her family chose not to disturb them, and the cemetery raised a cenotaph in her honor the following year.
Set the two women side by side, and a distinction appears that this essay has been circling. Scarlett’s problem is ownership: she wants to keep a place that has been taken from her. McDaniel’s problem is belonging: she gave her gifts to a culture whose rooms were not built to seat her. The two situations are not morally equivalent, and I do not want them blurred.
A woman who loses a plantation and a woman turned away at a cemetery gate have not suffered the same wrong. But they speak the same grammar. Both are asking who may say mine, and both are answered by whoever holds the keys. Scaled up, it becomes a national question: who gets to define a country’s griefs, and whose go unwitnessed.
Ownership is a claim a person can write down; belonging is a welcome someone else has to extend.
Here the Preacher’s two kinds of forgetting meet. Time will blur names without any help from us. The living can hurry the blurring, and they do it by deciding in advance which names are worth keeping.
Closing
Belonging Is Settled in the Telling
The film ends with Scarlett resolving to face another day at Tara. It can be read as hope, as appetite, or as a self-deception she is not yet ready to see, and I suspect the picture wants it to be all three. Audiences have loved her for it for more than eighty years, and the love is not foolish. Endurance is a real virtue, and the radish field remains one of the great images in American film.
The Preacher does not ask us to stop gripping the soil. He asks us to notice what we have decided to trust while we do.
Then there is the small table against the far wall, which I cannot stop seeing. The award said, in public and on the record, that her work mattered. The rules of the wider world, from a ballroom’s seating to a cemetery’s gate, said how far that mattering would be allowed to reach. These were different institutions making different choices, and the pattern across them is still plain.
Last week we followed seven survivors out of Masada, people whose names Josephus never wrote down, and found that the afterlife of a great ending is carried by hands the record declines to name. McDaniel’s case is its mirror. Her name is on every list of firsts, and the small table is the part that rarely makes the list.
A society is revealed less by what it mourns than by whom its mourning leaves out.
The red clay of Tara is still where it was. It has outlasted every claim laid on it, and it has never once decided whose names the telling would keep. That decision has always been left to the living.
- Watts, Jill. Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood. New York: Amistad, 2005.
- The Hollywood Reporter account of the 1940 ceremony, as summarized in “Was ‘Gone with the Wind’ Actress Hattie McDaniel Forced to Sit in the Back at the Oscars?” Snopes.
- Bernstein, Matthew. Interview on staging the Atlanta premiere. Ransom Center Magazine, University of Texas at Austin, September 30, 2014.
- Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
- Seow, C. L. Ecclesiastes. Anchor Bible 18C. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
- U.S. Census Bureau. Population of the United States in 1860 (Eighth Census). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864.
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