Alice Randall’s Literary Rejoinder

For the moment, at least, Alice Randall stands in the quiet eye of a literary storm.

Her new novel--”The Wind Done Gone,” “the unauthorized parody” of Margaret Mitchell’s sprawling Civil War-era period classic “Gone With the Wind”--was knocked about and left for dead even before it had reached the light of day.

Randall, however, has not only weathered attempts to block her book’s publication, but ridden the resulting publicity wave to the bestseller lists.

Not quite trusting that all this will last, she is traveling from city to city, using this pause to speak her piece. She has transformed herself into a force of nature, kicking up her own gusts. On this evening at EsoWon Books at the base of Baldwin Hills, however, she does not begin by reading from the text or lecturing about plot points drawn from it. Instead, she asks the assembly to join her in song, a particularly resonant one: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Without hesitation, the room swells with 100 startlingly sweet voices that, though they belong to strangers, weave themselves together like those of a tightly bound church choir.

As the last notes float out the open door, Randall, whose round face is framed by a toss of springy curls, flashes a triumphant smile. “My readers. I like to think of them as my ‘band of angels,”’ Randall tells the crowd, echoing a line from the song. She opens her arms in a gesture of embrace.

A woman midway back whispers to her seatmate: “Oh, she’s gonna sell some books tonight.”

The singing isn’t a gesture intended to bless the place, or exorcise the unpleasantness that has tailed her since spring, when the heirs of “Gone With the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell--the Mitchell Trusts--attempted to block the publication of her book. The trusts alleged that publishing “The Wind Done Gone” would violate copyright and unfair competition laws. (A preliminary injunction to suspend publication was overturned May 25 in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, and the court’s comprehensive opinion is expected shortly.)

Rather, Randall, who is also a songwriter--she co-wrote Trisha Yearwood’s No. 1 Country song “s and OOOs (An American Girl)”--uses the song as a teaching tool. It’s not enough simply to read texts carefully, she says. Equally important is reading between the lines. “One person’s parody,” she explains, “is another person’s narrative. Parodies are meant to be absurd, and the most absurd thing to emerge from that world, the world of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ would be an intelligent black woman.”

Told in journal form, “The Wind Done Gone” unfolds in the intelligent voice of Cynara, the black slave and half-sister of Scarlett You-Know-Who (known simply, between the covers of Cynara’s diary, as “Other.”) It is Cynara who has captured the attention and affections of Scarlett’s man, known only as “R,” and it is Cynara who ultimately understands the power of words enough, says Randall, to “write herself into being.” Silence--or being silenced--both Randall and Cynara know, is far worse than a death sentence. It’s the equivalent of never being born.

Takes Readers on a Tour

of Character’s Life

On this evening, Randall reads some. Explicates more. She takes the audience on a guided tour through Cynara’s life on--and eventually off--the plantation. Randall has been heartened by having the chance finally to connect with her readers and talk about the book. To get out of the abstracts of reviews and legalese and find out what memories of “Gone With the Wind” people have carried or buried.

Her ambitions in “The Wind Done Gone” were anything but modest. Her themes--”the misappropriation of the black mother, black intellectual inferiority, black incompetence, particularly among black politicians”--all existed, she says, in Mitchell’s beloved (and never out-of-print) book. “I’m trying to murder that stereotype that Margaret Mitchell purported that blacks assert competence where they have none.”

If Randall’s verbal annotations and footnotes, at face and out of context, feel like overkill, she has her reasons.

There have been finger-wagging reviews: “Merely witnessing Randall’s sheer desire to settle the score of every wrong ever inflected upon every African American becomes almost unbearable. And it doesn’t make for good literature,” wrote Teresa Weaver in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And headlines--this one also from Atlanta--such as “Parody or Theft?”

After a long season of feeling misinterpreted, or miscast, she’s become hellbent on being sure that her audiences focus on the meaning of the words that were, briefly, taken away from her.

Dipping into the book for a moment, Randall sets up the scene at what the slaves call “Tata” (a.k.a.: Tara): “Now Tata means ‘thank you’ and ‘you’re welcome,’ so it’s a world of thank you or you’re welcome. And tata also means breast. So they are living in Mammy’s breast.”

She turns to a section in which Cynara is mulling over her relationship with R, and her decision to “extricate herself from her Oedipal drama,” then stops and scans the room. “I should find some more of the political passages because we have a lot of men out in the room. And the book also takes place in Washington and ... the swirl of Reconstruction!” she says, fast-forwarding to those entries.

When she stops, the room is electric with questions: “Why make Cynara mulatto and privileged?” one woman carefully teases out her inquiry.

“Do you think that even some black women today suffer from Miss Scarlett Syndrome? That they identify with Scarlett?” asks one man standing at the rear of the assembly.

No answer is simple. Within this antique story Randall has found a fresh nerve.

“People think that they know what’s in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ that it is a sweet love story,” says Randall. “But this is really a racist text. I’m trying to get people to accept that there are certain texts they think they know, but they really don’t.”

The Themes and Messages

Have Recurred in Her Life

Some bad dreams unscroll in black and white. Others rage on in Technicolor, hyper-real and larger than life. Randall’s nightmares have emerged both ways-in the black and white of the pages of “Gone With the Wind” and in an enduring movie classic of the same name. Its themes and embroidered messages have been recurring motifs in her life for decades.

“It seared my brain,” she says. “I didn’t know how many other people were damaged by this book,” she continues. “I get people saying, I read ‘Gone With the Wind’ and it didn’t affect me like that, and I say, ‘Good for you! I wish it hadn’t happened to me!”’

On the afternoon following the signing, Randall has kicked off her black platform slides and is sprawled out on a blush-pink couch in the lobby of her Beverly Hills hotel, sipping a cup of hot tea and holding court as if she were in her sunny parlor or the orchid-dotted sitting room of her home in Nashville, where she lives with her husband, David Ewing, and daughter (from a first marriage) Caroline Randall Williams.

“Let me give you a little background, I’m afraid I’m not the most direct woman the world,” says Randall, in a variation on a favorite refrain. Context is important to her. So are back story, layers and nuance.

Though born in Detroit during its humming Motown heyday, Randall was 12 and living in “hippie liberal integrated” Washington, D.C, when she first made her acquaintance with “Gone With the Wind.”

She and her mother were planning to see the film, but Randall, a book-a-day reader, wanted to experience the novel first. “I still remember the day and night it took to read it,” she recalls as if it were the first time she was telling her story.

“It was a short period of time, but short and intense. I had no idea--in terms of my personal, emotional knowledge--that there were people who thought the Klan was a positive organization until I read that book. So part of me was confused,” she says. “‘Did I misread that sentence?’ ‘What does this mean?’ And then I’m starting to like some of these characters, and then they started treating these black characters badly. It was just very confusing, irritating, infuriating and upsetting to me.”

Hefty Mammy in her head wrap; molasses-paced bucks; all manner of saucer-eyed incompetents were images that rattled inside Randall’s brain--and sank down deeper than she at first expected.

“But,” after a long pause she continues, “it was almost like something traumatic had happened that you kept to yourself because other people were not noticing it.”

In the silence and the avoidance of the issues raised by the story--race, gender and power--the book and its images transmogrified, she says.

“My mother let herself be shamed by Mammy and Prissy and didn’t want to have any association with them,” says Randall.

“But I refused to turn on Mammy and Prissy. I felt injured by the association but unwilling to let it go. I felt my mother felt injured by the association and wanted to distance herself from any possible way that she should be confused with either one of them. Whereas me, I’ve always gone, in some complex way, the other way.”

She talks passionately about the way Mitchell’s book resonates through her past, but steps gingerly around any conversation about the current controversy surrounding her novel.

She Explored Life

in Broad Strokes

An English and American lit major at Harvard, Randall graduated with honors but without clear direction. She explored in broad strokes: Freelance journalism. Some screenwriting. Songwriting was just another train of thought, though country music became a rewarding career, with Randall scoring two top 10 hits.

Then, “Gone With the Wind” reasserted itself.

“I was approaching 40, and my daughter, Caroline, was approaching the age I was when I had first read ‘Gone With the Wind.’ Here was my daughter, growing up in the South in an integrated environment being exposed more intimately to racism than I had been,” she says.

“Her friends were beginning to read ‘Gone With the Wind.’ But you can’t read it unexamined. I didn’t want her to come of age with that book sitting on the shelf and feel undefended .... What has really radicalized me again is having a black child.”

Her daughter’s experience is filled with acquaintances floating off to Southern belle schools and deeply entrenched codes, “things I’d never heard about before like porch manners--an unspoken rule that you don’t invite black people in the house. You talk through the screen door,” says Randall with a shake of her head.

The irony of the court tangle and Randall’s limited ability to talk about matters around the case directly isn’t lost on her. “The Wind Done Gone” is all about creating durable, alternative images, and giving shape and form to figures in history who have often been in danger of being silenced.

Readers should come to Randall’s work thinking of it as an extended poem: long, lyric lines embedded with multiple meanings and nuances. It’s a serious book.

“One of the things I didn’t want my book to be was ‘entertaining.’ I often say to people, don’t read my book. It’s not enjoyable. I hope that it is illuminating,” she explains.

“One of the things that offends me most about ‘Gone With the Wind’ is that it is entertaining, and it’s offensive to entertain people with the suffering of my ancestors. I find that deeply offensive.... I did not want my book to be easy.”