I Wish I was in the Land of Cotton

by Paul H. Yarbrough (May 2025)

Recently someone posted on Facebook that they had recently purchased a DVD copy of the 1948 picture-show (“picture show” being Southern for the Yankee appellation “movie”) Song of the South. SOTS being the award-winning partial animation of tales written in the 19th Century by Joel Chandler Harris about animal characters and their personification of Southerners.

Probably Southerners from Georgia, since Harris was Georgian (God bless ‘em). I feel their pain. Those phony pony-soldiers Grant and Sherman came a-marching through my birthright home, Mississippi, as well, with their kerosene and sulfur matches, and looters and stampeding European socialist mercenaries.

But that’s in the past.

I read in an obscure anthology I have, The Literature of the South that: “That taken as a whole, his (Harris’) writing did much to reduce the sectional hostility that lingered after the Civil War.”

Harris’s stories were of some attempt to marginalize hostilities and soothe old wounds with warm stories about a good people, the South. Make that a Great people.

The stories centered on an elderly black man who told stories about such story headline grabbers as Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Brer Bear (Bar). The black man was styled as Uncle Remus whose title as “Uncle” was affixed to many male black men in the South (before and after the 13th Amendment) as a sign of love and devotion. This is true despite what many Yankee claimants scribble in their past and present histrionic history books.

From these stories, a once beloved man, Walt Disney, gave viewers, especially Southern ones, Song of the South.

Today, such Southern stories make the screen, theatre or T.V., about as often and about as promoted as the Small Pox.

That’s not in the past.

The contemporary varmints who denigrate the South are mostly up North, though not the full blood line of New Englanders (the pride of Yankee slave traders). These same varmints have spread throughout the midwest and west and have infected the South ever so.

No?

The celebrities of cable-news and talk radio are afire with Southerners (modern-day scalawags) who will apologize for some nonsense called and akin to “The original sin” before they will play Dixie or stand for The Bonnie Blue Flag.

Instead of listening to their Mamas and Daddies they listen to the (especially one) so-called “shining city on a hill” wags.

These cringing modern-day scalawags believe they can get emotional transfusions from the fat elephant Republican war-mongers and national bankers of the Yankee federal banking arm while charging up the political profit hill singing the nom de plume “National Anthem” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner”; at the same time marching in Yankee lockstep with the power structure march seeking the blood of Southerners, the vicious Battle Hymn of the Republic! As damnable a tune as ever took note(s), treble or bass.

“Trampling out the vintage where the graphs of wrath are stored”?

Go away you Yankee monsters and take your step-brother scalawags with you!

But if Harris did much to reduce hostility, the present hostility toward all things Southern has taken root for other reasons.

A few years ago the Memphis’ Orpheum Theatre Group banned Gone With the Wind. No surprise really. Like self-important Pharisees the “powers-to-be” raise their self-righteousness beyond levels that angels can reach. These crabbing, pitiful, unlaborious protestors (or just as unlaborious—politicians) must show their care for some group of mankind’s maligned people of some special group of color or trait or position or, whatever, though these same modern Pharisees-claimants insist on the people of the world’s equality.

One day recently, in a coffee shop with friends we were coffee-talking about this and that. During the gathering some of the above-mentioned observations had come up. One of the group, a friend, and a nice guy from New York noted that the reason Gone with the Wind had fallen in the eyes of the nation was because of the crazy political correctness that had permeated society. In general, group agreement followed his comments.

But I asked the following: “What could be more P.C. than GWTW? Read the book. Watch the movie. The wisest character in the story was a black woman—Mammie. The shrewdest business-person in the story was a woman—Scarlett O’Hara. The All-South aristocrat, Ashley Wilkes stated that he was going to free his inherited slaves after his father died. The sweetest, kindest most honorable character in the story was a woman—Melanie Wilkes. And the rogue, the scoundrel, was a white man—Rhett Butler.”

So, what do these PC fools want?

Do they want Uncle Remus? The kindest and wisest character in Song of the South.

 I doubt it.

A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself. —Proverbs 18;2

Look away, look away…

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Paul H. Yarbrough has written for The Blue State Conservative, NOQ, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, The Abbeville Institute, Lew Rockwell, and more. He is the author of 4 novels: Mississippi Cotton, A Mississippi Whisper, Thy Brother’s Blood, and The Yeller Rose of Texas, in addition to many short stories and poems.

Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast