Butterfly McQueen

From Philosopedia

McQueen, Thelma (Butterfly) (7 Jan 1911 - 22 Dec 1995)

McQueen, the personable African American actress who played Prissy in Gone With The Wind (which Margaret Mitchell originally had intended to entitle Pansy), is remembered for her distinctively high voice (and the confession to her mistress that “Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthing babies”).

In that movie, she performed the part of a dim-witted maid prone to outbursts of hysteria, being bitterly criticized for playing such a racial stereotype. She, however, retorted that she had refused to eat watermelon in the movie and had particularly objected to being slapped by Scarlett.

It became increasingly difficult for McQueen to find work in film or the theater following “Gone With The Wind,” partly because the audience associated her voice with that of Prissy. "It was not a pleasant part to play," McQueen said. "I didn't want to be that little slave. But I did my best, my very best."

Raised a Christian, she began questioning organized religions as a child. Although at first hoping to become a nurse, she went into showbusiness and possibly received her nickname because her fluttering hands reminded many of the Butterfly Ballet sequence of Harlem Theater group's 1935 Midsummer Night's Dream.

At the age of sixty-four, McQueen, who had never completed college, graduated with a degree in political science from the City College of New York. She worked with antipoverty groups, taking a job as a waitress in a soul food restaurant, and she gave tap dance and ballet lessons at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park Recreation Center in order, in her words, to help her “black family.”

“I’m an atheist,” she once declared, “and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I’m puzzled that so many people can’t see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry.” In 1989, the Freedom from Religion Foundation honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award.

She told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (8 October 1989),

• As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.

She also lamented that humans had not put the energy on earth and on people that had been put on mythology and on Jesus Christ, for if we had there would be less hunger and homelessness. “They say the streets are going to be beautiful in Heaven. Well, I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. . . . When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.”

Burned over 70% of her body in a 1995 accident at her home, she died after telling firefighters how her clothes had caught fire from a faulty kerosene heater. When a Christian neighbor observed the incident, however, she told the Atlanta Constitution, “I believe she [Thelma] made it into Heaven. She threw up both her hands as she was coming out of that burning house, and made it in with Jesus.” On the contrary, the atheistic McQueen had been a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation since 1981 and had included the foundation in her will.

{Freethought Today, January-February 1996; TYD; WAS, conversation; WWS}