The New Yorker:

This week marks the eighty-sixth anniversary of the publication of “Gone with the Wind.” In 2011, on the novel’s seventy-fifth anniversary, Hilton Als recalled his first encounter with Scarlett, Mammy, and the lost Old South.

By Hilton Als 

Summer, some time in the nineteen-seventies. The world was different. School was out, and my mother—the head of our household—worked part time in a nursery school as a teacher’s aid. Early in the morning—she woke up hours before the world woke up—she’d hitch her trousers up and face the world. After she left for work, we were on our own, which never felt like being left alone; we knew what she had to do to survive, which included having to trust her children during the hours she was away, hours when she was not seen but felt.

We were her first boys. Before giving birth to me and my little brother, my parents had had four girls. Now her daughters were in the world with children of their own, lives they described to our mother over the telephone. The little apartment in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn was hot, next door to a gas station; the fumes were part of our atmosphere, like the sound of kids playing ringolevio in the streets below, and the air that did not move. I was about to be a teen-ager, and prized the idea of home; my brother was several years younger, bespectacled, and silent. I loved him, but couldn’t be loving: I was his older brother, and responsible for him, which meant being irritated by him, and feeling burdened by him, and sometimes treating him as our visiting father treated me: as a source of pride and incomprehension and scorn.

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