Shrieking Violets

There I was, in the basement of the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta, enjoying a private tour of the place. (I was there pushing my great new book, Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons and the Search for a Room of My Own, just out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The Nation has a policy of not reviewing its columnists' books, but none against columnists doing so themselves. Hence, the gracelessness of this graceless intervention.) Anyway, Lynda Hawkins, the curator, pointed out a photo of the movie set of Gone With the Wind, taken in 1939. There was the grand, pillared facade of Tara, with Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett, standing on the porch, surrounded by all the other cast members, including a fanned assortment of black actors impersonating slaves. Sitting cross-legged at Vivien Leigh's feet is none other than Martin Luther King Jr., 10 years old then, who, with other members of the children's choir of his father's church, had been brought in to sing at the premiere of the movie.

It's one of the weirder historical conjunctions I've come across, and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. Just to round out the who'd-a-thunk-it picture, Ms. Hawkins informed me that in later years Mitchell was a supporter of the civil rights movement, personally intervening to help integrate the police department and setting up a scholarship fund for African-American medical students.

What does one make of this, these two lives so iconic in their own respective corners, yet whose paths are so criss-crossed, even intertwined, if toward distinctly oppositional cultural polarities? The ultimate Southern-belle vehicle cum minstrel show as incidental theatrical launching pad for one of history's greatest spokesmen for human dignity. The Atlanta police department desegregated at least in part because of political pressure exercised by Margaret Mitchell, daughter of a Catholic suffragette, who done birthed Mammy, Melanie, Prissy and Pa. Nothing in life is simple. Indeed, the very surprise I feel is a testament to the endlessness of irony, if not our ability to reinvent ourselves over time.

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