From the instant the floodlights lit up for Atlanta’s 1939 world premiere of the movie, “Gone With the Wind” has been a money maker for Georgia. And nowhere has that financial impact been more heartfelt than Clayton County, which in 1969 was designated the official home of “Gone With the Wind.”
That was then. Mention the book now and many black Americans think only of the antebellum South and slavery. That gives Clayton County businesswoman Felecia Murrell pause.
“ ‘Gone With the Wind’ is important to my business,” said Murrell, a Jonesboro caterer who provides signature dishes such as Prissy’s Coleslaw, Rhett’s Sweet Potatoes, Ashley Black-eyed Peas and Plantation Peach Cobbler to Stately Oaks Plantation, a local tourist draw for “Gone With the Wind” devotees. To those calling her a sellout? Frankly, she doesn’t give a damn.
“When I hear people say, ‘Wow, you cater to a plantation?’ I say yes,” said Murrell, owner of Gina’s Bistro & Catering. “I get about $25 a head on each one of those meals and I often take home $900 on a tour group. It’s been great.”
Murrell’s sentiments aren’t universally shared in Clayton. The iconic novel, which was historically set in the county, will mark its 75th year in print in May, but you’d hardly know it.
With the exception of a small book signing reception Tuesday at the Road to Tara Museum, work on a Georgia Public Television piece about author Margaret Mitchell and a bigger collaborative celebration with the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta in June, Tara fans would be hard-pressed to find much mention of the milestone.
Therein lies a delicate dichotomy. The novel, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and movie, which won five Oscars (including the first for a black actor), are intrinsic to Clayton’s economy. Stately Oaks and the Tara museum are among the county’s top five popular attractions, major contributors to the estimated $956 million tourists spent in Clayton last year.
Yet it has little to do with most of the people who now live there.
“Historically, ‘Gone With the Wind’ is not forgotten. Everybody’s familiar with it worldwide. We’re excited we’re part of that history and being on land that’s connected to that history,” said Toney Ricks, a Gospel radio personality who also works as a bondsman at the Free at Last Bail Bond Co. on Tara Boulevard. “But it’s a new day and new administration. We moved and changed and adapted.”
The book’s diamond anniversary seems to have caught some residents — and even a few county officials — off guard. Some residents, such as Marcell “Bloc” Gouch, have never read the book, let alone seen the movie.
“Are they giving the DVD away?” Gouch joked recently while cutting a customer’s hair at Phat Headz Barber Shop on Tara Boulevard. The 40-year-old barber was surprised to learn Clayton’s main thoroughfare was named after Tara plantation, beloved home of heroine Scarlett O’Hara.
Author Herb Bridges, the local guy who Hollywood and historians go to for “Gone With the Wind” lore, admits the appeal of the novel may be waning.
“The older generation has died out and the new generation doesn’t have the affection for it,” Bridges said. “But that’s the way it is everywhere. My children and grandchildren want “Star Wars” and really have no great affection for ‘Gone With the Wind.’ I hope we can keep it alive in metro Atlanta because it’s a major tourist attraction for the state.”
Even the folks who live at the intersection of Rhett Butler Drive and Scarlet Drive seem unfazed about the street sign bearing the misspelled first name of Butler’s love interest. (It has two “t”s.)
Such indifference may be explained in the county’s logistics. Clayton, more than any other metro Atlanta county, has undergone dramatic socioeconomic changes in the past two decades. Once a rural bedroom community where the Ku Klux Klan solicited donations along Tara Boulevard, Clayton now is home to metro Atlanta’s highest percentage of black residents.
Between 1990 and 2009, the percentage of blacks in Clayton grew from 23.6 percent to more than 60 percent, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission. The shift in population was so swift that the school system once held the distinction of being the fastest resegregated school district in the nation.
Four of the five county commissioners are black. So is the county sheriff. So is the mayor of Riverdale and, for that matter, many of the elected officials in various levels of county and municipal government. Blacks have even settled comfortably into a subdivision off Tara Boulevard where the streets are named after Confederate generals and Civil War battles.
“It don’t bother me. It’s history,” said Larry Lloyd, who lives on Robert E. Lee Parkway.
This is not the Clayton County of Margaret Mitchell’s youth, where she spent summers visiting relatives and listening to stories about life in post-war Georgia.
“It’s changed,” said state Sen. Gail Davenport, D-Jonesboro, who moved to Jonesboro as a toddler, attended state-sanctioned segregated schools and remembers drinking from “colored” fountains and reading “Gone With the Wind” in school. “This was a different county when I was growing up.”
Peter Bonner grew up in Clayton County, graduating from North Clayton High School in 1975 when there were no black students. Although he and his family now live in Henry County, Bonner has built a successful business around the “Gone With the Wind” legacy. Bonner created the tours for the Road to Tara Museum and has updated school presentations to include more achievements and little known facts about blacks in the county.
He often wears period pieces to enhance his presentations. He estimates his tours have brought in about $3.5 million to metro Atlanta.
Bonner said there’s talk of “updating things at the museum,” to better reflect how the county has changed ethnically. But he doesn’t believe the gist of the story should be altered.
“Gone With the Wind is the engine that pulls the tourism train in Georgia,” he said. “So we don’t get rid of that but we add to it.”
Selling the “Gone With the Wind” legacy is a tough job.
“Its appeal isn’t for everybody but there’s a market segment who still enjoy it,” said Patrick Duncan, president and chief executive of the Clayton County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Some come for the book or the movie or both. Others come for the appeal of a culture they didn’t live in.”
Such was the case last fall when a group of Chinese delegates on a three-week tour of the U.S. made a point of stopping in Clayton to visit the Road to Tara Museum and tour other historical spots tied to the book and movie. Likewise, Alessandra Rossetto and Vittorio Villella traveled from Tuscany, Italy, recently to get their “Gone With the Wind” fix. The couple browsed the museum where they saw bales of cotton and hoop skirts before taking a walk among the tombstones at the nearby Confederate soldiers’ cemetery.
“Being in Europe, you see all of the paintings and the arts,” said Rossetto, who watches the movie at least once a year. “But that time of history was so real. My mother will be jealous that I visited here.”
That kind of zeal is what Barbara Emert of Historical Jonesboro/Clayton County, which runs Stately Oaks Plantation, and other tourism and county officials are counting on.
“There probably wouldn’t be much tourism in Clayton at all if it weren’t for ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” Emert said last week during a break from laying engraved bricks in downtown Jonesboro. Several bricks bear the names of Butler, O’Hara and their creator, Mitchell.
“We think as the anniversary approaches, we’ll see a lot more people, particularly foreigners.”
In the meantime, the county continues to try to come to terms with its past and the “Gone With the Wind” legacy, juxtaposed against shifting cultural winds. “We can’t change history,” said Commissioner Sonna Singleton. “And I’m not trying to glorify the book at all. It is what it is. It brings a lot of money to Clayton County and that’s what I’m concerned about.”
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