Representing nothing on God's earth now

and nothing in the waters below it *

My mother’s father lost his own father very young, they were desperately poor and he worked from childhood to support his small family. He was born in Texas but his family was from the south, so back in my mother’s family tree is what some would call a real character and others a sociopath. He’s a distant cousin a few times removed.

His name was Berrien “Red” Upshaw, from a prominent family in Raleigh, North Carolina, though he was born in Monroe, Georgia. He played football at the University of Georgia and then went to Annapolis for the navy (my mother’s father, uncle, and brother all joined the navy too, it was expected in their family)…the school threw Red out (gambling? drinking? whoring? all of the above?). He joined the merchant marine and also got a taste for smuggling, bootlegging whisky and rum when Prohibition started.

He was handsome and charming, over six feet tall with brick red hair, green eyes, and a cleft chin. He married a young Atlanta society woman, Margaret Mitchell, in 1922.

Their marriage was horrific, lasting only a few months. He was a violent alcoholic and was physically abusive. Their best man, John Marsh, agreed to loan money to Red and not to help Margaret file charges for assault if Red agreed to a no contest divorce which went through in 1924. John Marsh became Margaret’s second husband.

Red Upshaw either jumped out or was thrown out the window of the upper story of a flop house during a card game and died in Galveston, Texas in 1949.

In 1926, Margaret Mitchell began writing Gone With the Wind, published ten years later. The hero of her epic novel glorifying the lost cause of the Confederacy was a drinker, a scoundrel, and bootlegger, Rhett Butler. She subsumed the experience of her first marriage into a character reconstruction of her awful first husband and created a legend. Gone With the Wind (1939) is still the highest grossing movie of all time (adjusting for inflation) and it’s not particularly close.

Gone With the Wind, if you haven’t read it, is a great epic about a plucky spoiled southern Confederate aristocrat who loses everything and recovers wealth and safety in the aftermath of the Civil War by defying social norms and taking the reins of farming and business for herself, winning (and ultimately losing) the love of a wealthy scoundrel bootlegger, Rhett Butler.

It’s also perhaps the most culturally influential apologist work for the “Lost Cause” of state’s rights, excusing the Confederacy’s core purpose as freedom for states rather than to continue a shameful and oppressive regime of chattel slavery. Gone With the Wind portrays the southern slavers as beneficial for the slaves, and the main Black characters agreed to stay with their former masters after emancipation. Hattie McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award for her portrayal of Mammy, a freed slave who stayed with her mistress, Scarlett O’Hara.

On one level, Margaret Mitchell is a terribly young society wife who overcomes an abusive relationship and uses her experience to become one of the most celebrated writers and famous women in the world. On the other hand Mitchell uses her victimization for a great evil, to glorify hundreds of years of an oppressive regime that tore apart families and victimized slaves and ruined lives for generations. The echoes of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy poisons our politics even now. And my cousin helped her do it, though one might say he got his just rewards in the end.

This weekend, the Bulwark’s Next Level podcast released an interview with Clint Smith, an author from New Orleans who has written books and poems about reconciling the shame of the south and the history of slavery with his own experiences growing up there and raising children in the United States today.

When I listened to that interview I thought about Red Upshaw and Margaret Mitchell and the agony he caused, the story she launched so high it might as well have hit the moon, and the pride and shame and slow lurching reconciliation of the South and its history, which is also, in darkness, my family history. I recommend listening to the podcast and reading How The Word is Passed.

I read Gone With the Wind when I was 10 years old. I didn’t know Rhett Butler was my cousin then (and while its been a long time I seem to recall Rhett was anti-slavery, felt the South brought the ruin upon itself, didn’t care a rat’s ass for State’s Rights, and was the only character who treated Mammy as an equal). To me now, Gone With the Wind feels like Last of the Mohicans (where the main character spends a lot of the time proclaiming how white he is without a cross of native blood)…a racist polemic with a jaunty epic adventure plot. With the eyes of a psychiatrist there is just so much repression and denial, paid for in blood by the the slaves and the soldiers of the Union and the race riots and atrocities of the 20th century and the civil rights movement.

It’s been 160 years since the Emancipation Proclamation yet still we pay in injustice and blood.

Ashley Wilkes, the milksop hero to Rhett’s exciting antihero who said this; “Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it’s no worse than it is.”

I don’t have an answer for my cousin, or my mother, or my friends, or you. I just listen, really listen, so I hear, and not just waiting for the pause in conversation where I can interject my thoughts.

That’s what substack is for.

*poem of the Confederate “Lost Cause”