Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett and Other Latter-day Saints
Miss Scarlett, Mr. Rhett and Other Latter-day Saints - meaning Summary
Racialized Southern Myth
The poem satirically dismantles Southern romantic mythmaking by casting Gone With the Wind figures (Scarlett, Rhett) as objects of a violent, ritualized white worship. Angelou links plantation religion, minstrel sacrality and the eroticized control of Black bodies, portraying clergy and congregations complicit in sacrificial brutality. Refrains and liturgical diction turn nostalgia into blasphemy, exposing how racist reverence preserves oppression and erases Black suffering.
Read Complete AnalysesNovitiates sing Ave Before the whipping posts, Crisscrossing their breasts and tearstained robes in the yielding dark. Animated by the human sacrifice (Golgotha in blackface) Priests glow purely white on the bas-relief of a plantation shrine. (O Sing) You are gone but not forgotten. Hail, Scarlett. Requiescat in pace. God-Makers smear brushes in blood/gall to etch frescoes on your ceilinged tomb. (O Sing) Hosanna, King Kotton. Shadowed couplings of infidels tempt stigmata from the nipples of your true believers. (Chant Maternoster) Hallowed Little Eva. Ministers make novena with the charred bones of four very smallvery black very young children (Intone DIXIE) And guard the relics of your intact hymen, daily putting to death, into eternity, The stud, his seed, His seed His seed. (O Sing) Hallelujah, pure Scarlett, Blessed Rhett, the Martyr.
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