Hattie McDaniel (1892-1952) "Why should I complain about making seven thousand dollars a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week actually being one!" In their roles as maids and mammies, cooks and man Fridays, some fine Black actors got to play characters who were altogether smarter, wiser and kinder than the White folks who were supposed to be their betters. A classic example is Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Selznick's 1939 Gone With the Wind. She is the only sensible and likable person in the entire epic film. It's pure old-fashioned mammy nostalgia, pulled straight from the plantation literature of the nineteenth century. And it's played with enormous wit by McDaniel, who steals the film and who received the first Oscar given to a Black performer. After work...