Those Damn Yankees (and I Don't Mean the Baseball Team)

When I was in seventh grade, my Social Studies teacher set up a simulation in our class, dividing us into the North and South armies as we learned about the Civil War. I've mentioned before that I was put in charge of the South thereby making me General Robert E. Lee (or so my character card said). I was pretty stoked about the whole thing.

As the weeks went on, though, I found myself saying things like, “Lincoln will rue the day he emancipated that proclamation!” and “I will lead the South to victory!”. In my farewell speech, even (which I wish the teacher would've let me read to the class), I said that it was an honor serving for my country for such a noble cause.

It's not that I felt that I was getting too far into character, but I was saying things that sort of went against everything I've been taught, mostly that the South was doing all evil during this time and the North was just trying to help.

I didn't really think a lot about after that, but my team did defeat the North in the end. It wasn't until I was in ninth grade and read Gone with the Wind, that I got a deeper insight into the South during the Civil War.

The story follows Scarlett O' Hara, the beautiful, charming, slightly crazy daughter of Gerald and Ellen. In the beginning, she tries to court Ashley (apparently a boy's name at the time) and kind of snaps when he instead marries his cousin, Melanie. Scarlett is driven to marry someone she doesn't love to get back at him, and when he dies in the war, she marries again, all while managing to scowl at the deliriously handsome Rhett Bulter, running a business, and birthing two children.

There's a lot more plot, too, in the thousand-page-long book, but what really interested me about it was, like I said, the other side of the story of the war. Those-damn-Yankees-stole-our-chickens-and-burned-our-farms-and-are-real-assholes side of the story.

It was something they'd never teach in school (even at the book's release in 1936, I'm sure some people refused to call it historical fiction). Not to say that our curriculum is incorrect or completely biased, we just like the story that the holy North was able to defeat the slave-driving South with their heads held high.

After reading GwtW, I borrowed the 1939 movie from my grandparents. When it was originally shown in theaters, they had to have an intermission because IT'S FOUR HOURS LONG. Yes. (This is why Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was split into two movies, people.) And if you're thinking that they couldn't possibly work one thousand pages of love, hate, war, rebuilding, marriage, birth, death, crying, and drinking (did I mention Scarlett liked her whiskey?) in even four hours, you're right. The movie just couldn't recreate the daring story, no matter how pretty their Scarlett (Vivien Leigh) or mustached their Rhett (Clark Gable) were. (I also could totally not get over the fact that the guy who played Ashley had the biggest forehead I have ever seen and in no way would be considered attractive by any woman with dozens of other men courting her. I expected more of a Gabriel Aubry, pre-Thanksgiving, type.)

Those years were pretty big for me. Not only did I learn how to control my mane of hair, but also two very different sides to an important story in American history. And you know what? I will never be as proud of myself as the day my troops defeated Grant at Appomattox.

[Bloggers note: So this isn't exactly true, but it seemed like a good ending, am I right?]