Not Your Mother’s Gone With the Wind

I just finished reading the horror book When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen.  It is a horror novel set in modern times on a plantation that has been refurbished to an amusement park that reenacts Antebellum times through the eyes of white people, but what they don’t know is that it is haunted by the ghosts of the slaves that worked the plantation.  While I was reading this book it made me think of other media that are more honest in their representation of the Antebellum South than Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

If science fiction is more your thing, I highly recommend Octavia Butler’s  Kindred.  It is the story of a black woman who moves into a new place with her white husband.  While they are unpacking she starts to be sent back in time to rescue a white boy from near-death experiences but is thought to be a slave every time she goes back.

For a great TV show, I recommend Underground.  This is exciting series had 2 seasons.  It tells the stories of slaves that have escaped from the plantation and how they survived while they are on the run. Jubilee by Margaret Walker is a classic novel that is hailed as a truer account of the civil war than Gone with the Wind.  It is told from the perspective of the daughter of the plantation owner and his black mistress.  Margaret Walker used her own family research to tell this story.

     ~ posted by Pam H.