Rachel Brown
At age 15, the girl who would grow up to write “Gone With the Wind” noted in her journal, “I want to be famous in some way — a speaker, artist, writer, soldier, fighter, stateswoman, or anything nearly.”
“She’s willing to try anything,” Kennesaw State University assistant professor of public history Jennifer Dickey told about 40 people gathered at Dalton State College to hear a lecture on Margaret Mitchell recently.
The audience chuckled. Even as a child, Mitchell was writing, Dickey said, and she had her sights set high. Dickey is one of many speakers hosted through the Dicksie Bradley Bandy Memorial Lecture Series at the college. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Dickey took her audience through the life and childhood of Mitchell, told about the inspiration for her book, and informed the audience that the author at one time insisted she would have nothing to do with influencing David O. Selznick’s making of the movie.
She appeared to change her mind, as she sent two of her close friends to report back to her on how the set, script and other plans were progressing, Dickey said. Tara, the famous plantation in which heroine Scarlett O’Hara lives, was a more humble abode in the book, but an upscale mansion in the movie.
“I grieve to hear that Tara has columns,” Mitchell would write in 1938.
Dalton resident Jean Manly said the lecture was “a breath of something fresh to think about.”
“I didn’t realize that (Mitchell) was so averse to having anything to do with the movie production,” she said. “Of course, really in an adroit manner she did.”
Joyce Russell Terrell, who said she is the great niece of legendary Chattanooga blues singer Bessie Smith, liked the book. Its references to black slavery are reflections of 1800s Southern culture, not an endorsement of racism, she said.
“I’ve read the book about nine times in my life,” Terrell said. “I like that book because it’s the story of survival. It helped me to survive, and it helped me to write my book (‘A Blues Song of My Own’).”
Terrell said “Gone With the Wind” is about perseverance in the face of hardship. It was a comfort to her in the more trying times of her life, she said, including a period when she wanted to drop out of her recently integrated school in Virginia because of race-related problems.
Did you know?
• Margaret Mitchell wrote her sole novel from a 600-square-foot basement apartment at the corner of Peachtree and 10th streets in Atlanta. It survived two fires and is the site of a museum today.
• Martin Luther King Jr. performed with Ebenezer Baptist Church during “Gone With the Wind” movie premiere activities in Atlanta.
• Known as Peggy Mitchell before her fame, Margaret Mitchell experienced a tomboy phase during childhood in which she wore pants and called herself “Jimmy.”
• The author of “Gone With the Wind” corresponded with Dalton-born author Marian McCamy Sims.
• Mitchell obtained her first job as a writer at an Atlanta Journal magazine. She convinced the editor to hire her by lying about being a whiz typist with previous experience at a northern newspaper.
• July 4, 1925, was the day John Marsh and Margaret Mitchell married. She kept her maiden name and remarked that “Getting married is a queer way to celebrate Independence Day.”
Sources: Kennesaw State University assistant professor of public history Jennifer Dickey, Dalton State College assistant librarian and archivist Sara Stokes
