Cashing in on GWTW

Wish I'd said that!

[Reprinted from Issues & Views December 2, 2002]

Remember the flap over the supposed sequel to Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone With the Wind? If you recall, a black author, Alice Randall, and the Mitchell estate fought in the courts over Randall's right to publish her sardonic take on what happened at Tara after Rhett left the scene for good. Her novel, The Wind Done Gone, was finally published last year. Black journalist Amy Alexander found much of the book furor ridiculous, especially the claim by Randall and her publisher that the original Gone With the Wind " . . .inspired decades worth of heartache, shame and injury to black American readers."

In an article, "Reading Between the Lines," on Africana.com, Alexander offers her observations on the controversy, especially on the claim by Randall's publishers that their author's book "corrects the historical record in regard to Mitchell's racist portrayals of blacks. . ." Here are some of her thoughts:

But what I find really unsettling is Randall's and Houghton Mifflin's line that The Wind Done Gone is an attempt to "explode myths," vis a vis Mitchell's blockbuster, as if Mitchell's portrayal of the antebellum south was ever supposed to be anything more than the writer's imaginings mingled with Civil War history. . . .

"Once upon a time in America," Randall says in a lengthy press release from April 5, "African Americans were forbidden by law to learn to read and write. It saddens me and breaks my heart that there are those who would try to set up obstacles for a black woman to tell her story, and the story of her people, with words in writing. Gone With the Wind has enshrined a limited version of American history that continues to exert its power over the popular imagination. I felt I had to take on Mitchell's novel directly. My book is an antidote to a text that has hurt generations of African Americans."

In my mind, this is the same kind of goofy reasoning that led the black jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial to acquit a man who was clearly guilty of double murder--because of all the past wrongs suffered by blacks at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department, this one deserves to walk. . . .

To say that The Wind Done Gone will somehow make black people feel better about how blacks are portrayed in Gone With the Wind is wildly presumptuous. Just how many black people, I wondered, actually harbor bad feelings or suffer from identity crises because of GWTW? Who, I wondered, actually takes Mitchell's book as anything more than what it is--a snappily written love story about a strong-willed white Southern gal whose personal development coincides with the war between the states? And why would anyone (particularly any black person interested in factually accurate history) receive as gospel Mitchell's take on the antebellum period? . . .

I too read GWTW as a hormonal adolescent and liked it instantly. Unlike Randall, however, I have never once felt "injured" by the book's portrayal of blacks. It was for me then, and remains so, an extremely well-constructed romance novel, the first of the epic, history-based "bodice rippers" and in no way to be taken as a great triumph of serious literature. . . .

Alexander describes the convoluted plot of The Wind Done Gone, citing the use of inappropriate modern language and even some feminist-oriented expressions, and concludes:

No doubt there are millions of untold truths yet to be revealed about the real slaves in the Deep South. In fact, in the Library of Congress you can read the Slave Narratives, or dozens of other factual histories that go a long way toward "setting the record straight" about the antebellum period. Why anyone would want to attempt such a feat by glomming onto Mitchell's book is a mystery to me. (Oh yeah--there might be a few dollars yet to be wrung out of old GWTW).

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