Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

by Kirsten Miller

The historical reality would have sickened them. Literally. After a month in the old South they would have been suffering from malaria, cholera, or yellow fever. The people they met during their travels would be dystopian versions of the characters from their favorite movies. Real-life Mammy would have spent her fertile years nursing white babies while her own were sold off to the highest bidder. Ashley Wilkes, the ideal Southern gentleman, would own a plantation designed to turn human flesh into dollars. The soldiers nursed by saintly Melanie would reek of gangrene after losing limbs to a cause whose origins eluded them. Pretty Scarlett would do her business in a chamber pot she kept under the bed. This glorious antebellum South they yearned for never featured any of the ugly realities of the past—body odor, hookworm, rape, cesspools, death, disease, and whippings, not to mention the unrelenting poverty of the folks called white trash. Anyone who tried to open their eyes was ignored or vilified. They made heroes of sadists like Augustus Wainwright. They went around waving a flag they claimed was all about heritage. The flag for which their poor ancestors had fought and died, while the rich slaveholders who’d started the war were exempted from service by Jefferson Davis himself.