Miss Scarlett Mr Rhett And Other Latter Day Saints - Analysis

A blasphemous liturgy for the Old South

The poem’s central move is to show how white supremacy turns itself into a religion: it borrows the language of Catholic and Protestant devotion—Ave, Hosanna, Maternoster, novena—and uses it to sanctify a plantation world. Angelou stages this as a grotesque mass where the congregation are Novitiates singing not in a church but Before the whipping posts. The holiness here is inseparable from punishment. The poem isn’t simply condemning cruelty; it is exposing the way cruelty becomes ceremony, the way a culture can make itself feel pure while it practices violence.

Whipping posts and crossed breasts: devotion as choreography

The opening image is carefully choreographed: bodies Crisscrossing their breasts in a gesture of prayer while standing at the instruments of torture. Their tearstained robes suggest penitence, but the poem refuses to tell us whose tears these are—victims, accomplices, or both. That ambiguity matters because it mirrors a social system that trained people to participate in their own myth. The setting, the yielding dark, doesn’t just hide; it seems to cooperate, as if the night itself bends around the ritual. The tension is immediate: prayer should be a language of mercy, yet here it frames a world built on domination.

“Golgotha in blackface”: the cross repurposed as spectacle

Angelou’s most charged collision comes when she names the system’s engine as human sacrifice and then, in parentheses, brands it Golgotha in blackface. Golgotha is the hill of crucifixion; blackface makes that sacrifice into a racist performance, an entertainment that feeds on Black suffering while pretending to be sacred drama. Against this backdrop the priests glow purely white, a phrase that doubles: it describes color and also claims innocence. They shine on the bas-relief of a plantation shrine, which turns the plantation into an altar and suggests history literally carved in raised stone—official, durable, and hard to challenge.

The poem’s repeated stage-directions—(O Sing), (Chant Maternoster), (Intone DIXIE)—make the reader hear how tradition is produced: not through argument but through repeated sound. You are meant to join in, to be carried along. Angelou keeps interrupting with these cues to show how easily violence becomes communal music.

Scarlett and Eva: saints manufactured from fiction and innocence

The title’s Miss Scarlett and Mr. Rhett point to Gone with the Wind—not simply as a story but as a cultural shrine. The poem canonizes Scarlett with mock-solemnity: You are gone but not forgotten, Hail, Scarlett, Requiescat in pace. A funeral blessing becomes a political one: even when the Old South is “gone,” its romance remains active. The prayer doesn’t mourn a person; it mourns a worldview.

The canon expands: Hallowed Little Eva invokes another iconic white child, the emblem of innocence from abolition-era fiction. The poem suggests that white culture uses certain figures—beautiful woman, angelic child—as protective icons. They are not merely loved; they are used as moral shields. Through them, the system can feel tender while it remains lethal.

Paint mixed with blood: art as the beautification of harm

One of the poem’s darkest insights is that the myth is made by artists as much as by ministers. God-Makers smear brushes not in paint but in blood/gall to etch frescoes on Scarlett’s ceilinged tomb. Frescoes belong to churches and palaces; they are public glory. But a tomb suggests the romance is already dead—kept impressive, curated, preserved. The slash in blood/gall forces two fluids together: life and bitterness, sacrifice and nausea. The poem insists that what looks like tasteful heritage is actually pigment made from suffering.

This is where the poem’s satire sharpens into accusation: a culture can commit violence once, but it must keep repainting that violence as beauty in order to live with itself. The “God-Makers” are those who create the sacred story that explains everything else.

“King Kotton”: the true deity named out loud

When the poem declares Hosanna, King Kotton, it finally says the god’s name. The spelling makes cotton both commodity and monarch. In this liturgy, cotton is not just an economic crop; it is the object of praise, the reason for sacrifice, the center of meaning. The poem’s contradiction becomes stark: the worship vocabulary is Christian, but the devotion is to profit. That is why priests can glow purely white—their purity is the ideological effect of serving a god that rewards them materially.

Sexual purity as a violent relic

The poem repeatedly ties racial power to sexual mythology. Shadowed couplings of infidels are imagined as threats that can tempt stigmata from believers’ nipples—a startling image that turns desire, fear, and religious self-wounding into one. Stigmata are supposed to be holy marks received from Christ’s suffering; here they are produced by obsession with policing sex. The body becomes a site where ideology tries to prove itself righteous through pain.

That obsession culminates in the relic of your intact hymen. The poem treats Scarlett’s virginity like a saint’s bone, something to be guarded and displayed. The violence is not only against Black people; it is also the violence of purity culture—an entire social order built on controlling women’s bodies to guarantee white lineage. The ritual is endless: daily putting to death someone—The stud, his seed, repeated three times as His seed, His seed, His seed. The repetition sounds like a chant and like a fixation: the “seed” is both literal reproduction and the feared mixing of bloodlines. The system kills possibility in order to keep the icon clean.

Four children and “DIXIE”: the hymnbook beside the ashes

The poem’s moral center drops into view when it names charred bones of four very smallvery black very young children. The compressed, almost breathless phrasing—smallvery—refuses the calm spacing of reverence; it sounds like someone trying not to break apart while speaking. These children are turned into objects for ministers who make novena with their remains, which is to say: even atrocity becomes raw material for sanctimonious performance.

Then comes the most chilling juxtaposition: (Intone DIXIE). A nostalgic anthem is instructed at the moment of the burned bones, as if sentimentality is the choir that rises whenever reality threatens to accuse. The poem’s tone here is bitterly ceremonial: it doesn’t shout; it stages the calm voice that can sing through smoke.

What kind of faith needs martyrs like Rhett?

The closing line—Hallelujah, pure Scarlett, Blessed Rhett, the Martyr—finishes the canonization. Calling Rhett a Martyr is deliberately perverse: it suggests a culture that experiences the loss of its dominance as persecution. If the system is challenged, it declares itself wounded and saintly. The poem’s final tension is that the language of holiness is still beautiful in the mouth, even when it is serving ugliness; the reader can hear the grandeur while being asked to reject it.

If this is a religion, its sacraments are whipping posts, its relics are women’s purity, its incense is burning flesh, and its hymn is DIXIE. Angelou’s achievement is to make that logic visible—so the romance cannot hide behind velvet prayers again.