Word: cotton
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What happened after Reconstruction was worse--the cruel first cousins left the region (militarily) but stayed on in spirit to plunder it by proxy, eventually coming to make easy money through the South's cheap raw materials--oil, timber, coal, cotton--and cheap, uneducated labor. And the people who had fought the war, the dirt farmers, were ruled over by their own brothers. The rich planters on the land and the merchant lackeys in the towns did the bidding of their New York and Chicago masters. Poor white people stood up for their rights, in the North Carolina, Tennessee...
...until the point where even Cotton Mather would be urging them on that Barrault and Lanoux bed down. We are then treated to the much touted "healthy sensuality." I confess to being moved by much of this. There is a child-like and playful tenor to the sexuality here that is refreshing and just as real as the pathologies so often paraded before us. Rarely has lovemaking on the screen been so suffused with intimacy. Yet there wasn't one moment anyone could really call erotic. Lanoux and Barrault seemed at times almost de sexed, one with his roly-poly...
...strapping giant of a man, but he conspicuously avoids throwing his weight around. His background might well have produced a dyed-in-the-cot-ton supporter of the status quo instead of a reformer. Heflins have been in the state for six generations; the judge's late uncle, Cotton Tom Heflin, a populist turned black-baiting U.S. Senator (1920-31), was drummed out of the Democratic Party in 1928 for attacking Presidential Nominee Al Smith as "the Roman candidate." Young Howell went to Birmingham Southern College, served as a Marine officer in World War II and still...
...boondocks of the Cotton South, that stretch of rich soil spreading from Georgia west to the Mississippi River, every black knew one unwritten law: you did not mess with the county sheriff. Oldtime courthouse minstrels in Alabama still guffaw at the memory of P.C. ("Lummie") Jenkins, sheriff of Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971. "Old Lummie had blacks so scared," one such regular recalls, that "all he had to do was pass the word he wanted some nigger in his office in the morning. Sure enough, that nigger'd be there-or he'd fled the county...
...patent medicines hawked during the yellow fever epidemic of the period-a plague that will undoubtedly provide some of the melodrama for GWTW II. Plotting possible ways for Scarlett and Rhett "to get richer and richer," she leafs through the financial pages to see what was happening on the cotton and sugar exchanges...